News

Ten years ago, at the first ?New News? seminar held at the Poynter Institute, a group of digital pioneers brainstormed what would be new about online news. They listed what it was that newspapers were not providing that the new digital news space would enable and how the new medium might change news reporting and writing. Many of the predictions were based on the idea of the ?limitless newshole...

A Division Bench of the Kerala High Court has decided not to initiate contempt of court proceedings against V.R. Krishna Iyer and V. Balakrishna Eradi, both former Supreme Court Judges, N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu; Kuldip Nayyar, eminent journalist, K. Gopalakrishnan, Editor, Mathrubhoomi; and other respondents for issuing a statement on the incident in which Mr. Gopalakrishnan had to be...

Last Thursday AFP, a French based news service and the oldest news service in the world, sued Google, the biggest search engine in the world for copyright infringement. An amount around 17 million was asked for in damages. This story will give you an overview of the situation and the damage it has done. AFP is saying Google presents AFP headlines and summaries on the search engine news aggregator...

(RSF/IFEX) - In a letter to the head of the Times of India press group, RSF has expressed concern over the harassment of journalist Pradyuman Maheshwari by the group's lawyers. Maheshwari, who operates the weblog http://www.mediaah.com, felt compelled to close the blog as a result of the harassment. "At a time when bloggers are being harassed and imprisoned in all four corners of the world, such a...

There's something inherently like the "Odd Couple" about the pairing of citizen media with a traditional newsroom. If citizen media is about being all-inclusive, with news as a conversation, old-line media has been about news coming from the mouths and pens of journalists, with the readers left to fend for themselves in the "Letters to the Editor." But when those old-line news organizations go...

Google's stated mission is "to make all the world's information available online." Agence France Presse (AFP) calls that copyright infringement. The French counterpart to the Associated Press or Reuters sued Internet search leader Google on Thursday, claiming that Google News cuts into its subscription business. Google News is a beta service launched in September 2002 that aggregates news by topic...

The internet investment firm headed by US media mogul Barry Diller is to buy web search engine Ask Jeeves for $1.85bn (£970m). Ask Jeeves is the fifth most-queried search engine in the US and has a market value of $1.43bn, one tenth the size of Mr Diller's IAC/InterActive. Mr Diller said Ask Jeeves "has the potential to become one of the great brands on the internet". The deal reflects rising...

Stung by the sting. A group of Mumbai reporters found out much to their dismay that in the age of exposes, some operations can backfire. Early on Saturday morning, two journalists from BAG Films, a TV news agency, entered the premises of the Mulund fire station, hoping to catch firemen sleeping on duty. But they found the marshals were not only up but alert enough to spot trespassers. The...

In the world’s second most populous country, 12 senior U.S. editors and producers met with a wide cross-section of Indians, from the country’s prime minister to AIDS-infected commercial sex workers, from a billionaire CEO of a high-tech company to vendors in a low-income New Delhi market. The two-week trip to India in March 2005 sought to provide the editors with a broad view of the diversity of...

Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati on Friday sent legal notices to 16 channels, including NDTV, Aaj Tak, ESPN-Star Sports and CNBC, for "violating copyright law" while showing footage of the India-Pakistan cricket series. As per the figures released by the public broadcaster, which has exclusive terrestrial and satellite rights for the high profile series, the dues run to about Rs 1.16 crore. "We...