News

An unidentified gunman shot and killed Honduran journalist Gabriel Fino Noriega on Friday in the town of San Juan Pueblo, according to local press reports. Noriega, who worked for local radio station Estelar, TV Channel 9, and as a correspondent for national station Radio América in San Juan Pueblo, 217 miles (350 km) north of the capital Tegucigalpa, was gunned down after leaving the radio...

Gannett Co, the largest US newspaper owner, will slash about 1,400 publishing jobs by July 9 as it copes with declining advertising and circulation, Bloomberg News has reported. Some details: [ Link] “We must take these steps because the advertising environment remains challenged,” Bob Dickey, president of Gannett’s US Community Publishing unit, said today in a memo to employees. The division has...

Google has eliminated an experimental feature that allowed people quoted in articles in Google News to post comments on those articles, the New York Times has reported. [ Link] People in the news media were intrigued by the idea of giving article subjects the power to comment, and the idea drew considerable coverage. But the feature never got a lot of use — the company declined to provide numbers...

A journalist at an independent Kazakh newspaper says death threats have been rolling in since the publication of an article she wrote exposing a prostitution ring in western Kazakhstan, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports. [ Link] Zhanara Davletova, a reporter for the regional Oral Weekly based in the city of Oral, told RFE/RL that she has been getting several phone calls daily from unknown people who...

Several journalists have been harassed in Madagascar in recent weeks, a website was mysteriously blocked and a radio journalist was held for two weeks after being the victim of a heavy-handed arrest. “We are alarmed by the current climate of mistrust towards journalists,” Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. “The political tension does not justify the often shocking methods used by the police and...

The hostility of those who staged the coup against President Manuel Zelaya on June 28 and Zelaya’s announced return could further aggravate the press freedom situation. The military’s already significant level of censorship of the international media and national media that oppose the coup has been compounded by the excesses of the media that back it, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. “We...

Adnan Hassanpour, a Kurdish journalist whose death sentence was quashed in August 2008, was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison by the court in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj that retried his case, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has learnt from his family. The death sentence was passed on Hassanpour on July 16, 2007 by a revolutionary tribunal in Marivan, in Iran’s Kurdish northwestern region...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called for reforms of the press law in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to ensure press freedom. The call followed a judgment of the Federal High Court in Abu Dhabi, on June 29, which upheld the suspension of the Emarat Al Youm newspaper in a libel suit brought by race horses owners based in UAE. The judgment of the Federal High Court cannot be...

The Debate newspaper, based in the town of Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, in São Paulo state, was ordered to pay R$593,000 (approx. US$306,000) as a result of a lawsuit for defamation filed against it in 1995 by Judge Antônio José Magdalena. According to a delayed report by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, the order was passed on June 25. According to the newspaper's owner, Sérgio Fleury Moraes, the...

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) has recommended that the government should "decriminalise" offences relating to the accreditation and the practice of journalism in Zimbabwe, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has reported. The commission ruled in favour of MISA-Zimbabwe, Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe (IJAZ) and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human...