News

The world witnessed a series of democratic milestones in postwar Afghanistan in 2004, from a newly ratified constitution in January to the first direct presidential election in October. Conditions for the blossoming Afghan press improved in many areas, with a significant expansion of news media outlets and fortified constitutional protections for freedom of expression and the press. Yet...

What do the managing editors of America’s newspapers talk about when they get together? Readers, and why there are fewer of them than there used to be. At the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in Louisville this fall, Topic A was declining readership. Stuart Wilk, the past APME president and associate editor of The Dallas Morning News, delivered a keynote speech that spoke of various...

The Pune-headquartered Sakal Group of Newspapers, which publishes Sakal, Gomantak, The Maharashtra Herald and Gomantak Times, believes that catering to "focused needs" is where the future really lies for the publisher. The rural farming community in Maharashtra is one such focused group that the newspaper house would like to target. In the next six months, the company will launch a 16-page...

Opera Software ASA unveiled Thursday a beta test version of its next Web browser release that features speech recognition, discovery of news feeds and automatic Web-page resizing. While the next release had been on track to be Version 7.60, the Oslo, Norway, company announced a change in plans. It is retooling the version to be more than an update, which will include a yet-to-be-determined name...

The European Union is sponsoring a new project aimed at improving news coverage of HIV and AIDS in India. The U.K.-based Thomson Foundation is organizing the project, set to begin in the first half of 2005. The new project offers training to improve the skills of print, radio and television journalists, while raising the quality of their coverage of critical issues. Thomson says its trainers will...

There's something inherently fun about playing God. How else to explain the popularity of the third-person "God games" that have ruled the videogame charts? And when I got my two-year-old son the Little People farm scene and garage, he would play for hours, choosing the fates of those cute little plastic figures. For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God with the...

Independent News & Media, the publishing empire headed by Irish businessman Tony O'Reilly, is trying to buy a stake in one of India's leading newspaper groups. The owner of the Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers, along with the Belfast Telegraph, is in talks with the family that owns Jagran - which publishes the world's most widely read Hindi newspaper, the Dainik Jagran, as well as...

From the Congress committee meeting at Wardha in 1939 to arm-deal scandal of 2001 and Godhra riot taking toll of hundreds of lives to India winning the world title in cricket – The Hindu has opened the door to a vast repertoire of images collected over the decades, launching www.thehinduimages.com. The online library is a treasure trove of more than 40,000 images drawn from the 125-year-old The...

TV channel/programme promotions have become commonplace on radio these days. While newspapers continue to be the favourite advertising platform for television channels, radio has emerged as an important destination. The Radio AdEX study reveals that TV broadcasters prefer newspapers and radio channels to magazines because of their frequency as most television programmes also run on a daily or a...

The Maharashtra Herald, the oldest English-language newspaper in Pune, which was acquired and subsequently relaunched by the Sakal group in April this year, has kicked off the second phase of its revamp process spanning editorial, sales and marketing. The process was flagged-off on December 9 with an "upgraded product” that included more number of pages, namely 20 from the regular 16, as well as...