News

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Thursday launched Women in News (WIN), an initiative to help women in middle management in southern African news media to advance their careers. Eighteen media professionals from Botswana, Namibia and Zambia were meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa Thursday and Friday for the start of a six-month programme of events that include...

Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen. From July 1 every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection, says a BBC report. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015. In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but...

China's biggest national news agency launched its global, English-language television news network on Thursday as part of efforts to expand the communist government's influence abroad, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Experts say China's media expansion also results from unhappiness with much of the international coverage of sensitive events in China such as Tibet and human rights. The...

Husband-and-wife journalists Juan Francisco Rodríguez Ríos and María Elvira Hernández Galena were gunned down Monday in the Internet café they owned near their home in Coyuca de Benítez, in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Their deaths bring the number of journalists murdered since the start of the year in Mexico to seven. Rodríguez was the local correspondent for two dailies, El Sol de...

A former deputy director of the national Colombian intelligence agency has been ordered held for masterminding the 1999 murder of journalist Jaime Garzón. José Miguel Narváez is currently behind bars awaiting trial in a separate case. The attorney-general’s office issued the order on Tuesday after three former paramilitary leaders implicated Narváez in Garzón’s murder, the national daily El Tiempo...

A 70-year-old Panamanian journalist was arrested and jailed Saturday on a 2008 defamation conviction, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. The charges against Carlos Núñez López, stemmed from a 2005 story in the now-defunct weekly newspaper La Crónica about environmental damage in the province of Bocas del Toro, his lawyer, Luis Ferreyra, told CPJ. A landowner alleged his...

Press freedom groups have expressed concern over the Romanian National Defence Strategy which has been adopted by the Romanian Supreme Defence Council (CSAT) and passed on to the Romanian Parliament. The President of Romania initiated a National Defence Strategy which contained, among other things, serious allegations against the media - which is described as a security threat and vulnerability...

A controversial law curbing wiretaps and imposing heavy fines on journalists who publish leaked ‘wiretap’ material was passed recently by the Italian Senate. The president of the Italian Senate announced that the much-debated wiretap law had been approved by the Senate with 164 votes in favour. Of a total 323 senators, only 189 were in the room when the bill was voted on. Representatives of the...

Slightly more than 90 per cent of people in Japan polled last year about their use of five major kinds of media, including newspapers, television and the Internet, said they read newspapers every day, according to the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association. A survey conducted in October on some 4,100 people nationwide "confirmed that newspapers are a key medium indispensable in daily...

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from"Web site" to "website" (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow, according to Mashable.com Among the more interesting changes -- at least from a grammar and style standpoint -- are separating out "smart phone" as two words...