News

14 August 2000

CPJ condemns journalist's murder in Srinagar

In an 11 August 2000 letter to Syed Salahuddin, Supreme Commander of the Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, CPJ condemned the 10 August bomb attack in Srinagar, which killed one journalist and seriously injured at least six others. Pradeep Bhatia, a photographer for the Indian newspaper "The Hindustan Times", was one of twelve people killed in the attack, police told reporters. Hezb-ul Mujahedeen spokesman Salim...

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3 August 2000

Journalist murdered in Tamil Nadu

In a letter to the head minister of Tamil Nadu, Dr. Karunanidhi, RSF expressed its concern after the murder of V. Selvaraj, a journalist with the biweekly "Nakkeeran". Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary general, urged him to do everything possible to establish "the exact motives for the murder." RSF asked the head minister to inform it of progress in the inquiry. According to information...

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11 July 2000

Magistrate assaults journalist in Assam

In a letter to the governor of Assam State, S. K. Sinha, RSF protested the assault on a journalist by a magistrate. RSF asked the governor to sanction the magistrate. "Your duty as a governor is to protect journalists who are merely trying to do their work," Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary-general, reminded him. According to the information collected by RSF, Parag Saikia, a journalist...

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1 July 2000

Risky Business

ONE BY ONE, THE COUPS were carried out swiftly, often without warning. By May, more than a dozen editors from around the country had left their offices in the past year, mostly under duress, virtually all without new jobs, replaced by other managers eager to get into the game. Press reports painted pictures of brutal departures: In Oklahoma City, Daily Oklahoman Executive Editor Stan Tiner walked...

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1 July 2000

Enjot the ride while it lasts

If the Web can be considered in cosmological terms, then right about now we're in the infinite nanosecond after the Big Bang, an inflationary moment when all that matter spreads itself out. Now things start to coalesce. New technologies and faster connectivity are at work, as is the gravity of financial pressure. In five years thousands of media jobs have come into existence. Headlines that once...

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1 July 2000

When the infinite becomes finite

A long, long time ago -- the spring of 1999 -- it seemed as if the Internet had sprinkled financial pixie dust upon the publishing industry. Publications that had only been around for a couple of years, like TheStreet.com and CBSMarket Watch.com, were entering the stock market with smashing success. The market transformed mere Webzines into "Internet content companies" worth as much as a billion...

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1 July 2000

New media may be old media's savior

In the last few years the conventional wisdom has been that the advent of the new media will hasten the demise of print. That newspapers will die as readers get more information from the Internet; magazines will be overwhelmed by the proliferation of inexpensively-produced, niche-oriented sites and Webzines; bound books will be replaced by digitalized e-books. That the culture of print, in short...

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1 July 2000

Defining the blurry line between commerce and content

When Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher spoke at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism last year, she called online journalists "linkalists" -- a joke, she insists, though some didn't find it funny. That may be because "linkalism" creates not only opportunities for new kinds of journalism but new challenges in setting and holding to journalistic standards, challenges that the world of...

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1 July 2000

The AP now

Whatever else Lou Boccardi is doing as head of the world's largest newsgathering organization, he reads the wire. Obsessively. He reads it on his computer at his New Rochelle home in the mornings before work. All day, an old-style wire printer buzzes and whines in a tiny closet in his corner office on the seventh floor of the Associated Press headquarters at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, spitting out the...

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1 July 2000

The risks and rewards of celebrity tragedy coverage

This spring, when much of the national news media had become all Elián, all the time, their audience was very familiar. Fully 61 percent of the core audience for the Elián González story were the same dedicated viewers, readers, and listeners who followed news of the plane crash last July that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. The links don't stop there. No less than 73 percent of those drawn to news...

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