News

On the website for last week's Blogging, Journalism & Credibility Conference at Harvard, many articles, comments and links are posted. Here are a few points emphasizing the distinctions between traditional journalism and online news that the Editors' Weblog considers valuable: Organic news vs. Investigative reporting: Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia says of his Wikinews experiment that...

Taysir Alluni could never have suspected that the 9/11 attacks and the US war against Afghanistan in its hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders would dramatically change his life. Alluni, who began his career as an Arabic translator for a news agency in Granada, Spain, is credited as being the only journalist based in Afghanistan in October 2001 to show the world what the US war machine was doing...

America Online on Tuesday confirmed that it will stop supporting access to newsgroups, a once-popular feature on the Internet that has since become overshadowed by message boards and blogs. The Internet giant has begun informing users that its AOL Newsgroup interface will be discontinued as early as February, according to a notice posted on the site. AOL users will still be able to access...

Global opinion leaders’ trust in established institutions (business, government, media) and figures of authority (CEOs, heads of state) is being supplanted by a personal web of trust that includes "colleagues," "friends and family," "a person like yourself" as well as independent experts such as doctors and academics, according to the sixth annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of 1,500...

Some rights reserved. That's the watchword of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to building an alternative framework for copyright protection. A Creative Commons license, which allows the creator of original work to specify how it can be used, is both more faithful to the purpose of copyright than current law and better suited to the realities of a digital age. Creative Commons...

The re-arrest of correspondent Taysir Alluni has once again highlighted the issue of press freedom, in particular the hostile treatment of Aljazeera's journalists. In the past three years alone, Aljazeera has come under repeated pressure for its uncompromising reporting. This has ranged from physical - sometimes fatal - attacks, intolerable working conditions, and accusations of irresponsible and...

The journalist Taysir Alluni is possibly best known for securing an exclusive interview with Usama bin Ladin after the 9/11 attacks on America. Sadly this success possibly lead to the second cause of his recognition. Alluni is now known the world over as the Aljazeera journalist arrested by Spanish authorities on alleged links to terrorism. Below is a brief outline of the life of Alluni. Born in...

Since 1896, four generations of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have guided The New York Times through wars, recessions, strikes, and innumerable family crises. In 2003, though, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the current proprietor, faced what seemed to be a publisher's ultimate test after a loosely supervised young reporter named Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated dozens of stories. The...

The Right to Information Act is showing results in Maharashtra. So far, 32 officers in various departments have been fined aggregating to Rs 1.43 lakh for not providing information to the public or for giving incorrect or false information. In an instance, 19 officers attached to the Thane Municipal Corporation have been fined Rs 60,500 for violating the provisions of the Act, while five officers...

The Delhi High Court on Thursday allowed an appeal by the Indian Express challenging a trial court order restoring a criminal defamation complaint filed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan leader, Medha Patkar, against the daily in 2000. Justice B.D. Ahmed dismissed the order passed by the Metropolitan Magistrate, Bimla Kumari, in April 2003, restoring the complaint after dismissing it earlier due to...