News

Despite the global financial crisis, newspaper circulation grew 1.3 per cent worldwide in 2008, the President of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said Wednesday in a speech that contradicted “misleading” reports predicting the imminent death of newspapers. “The simple fact is that, as a global industry, our printed audience continues to grow,” said Gavin O’Reilly, WAN President and CEO of...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is launching an emergency appeal to provide emergency financial support to more than 100 journalists and their families who were forced to flee the intense conflict in northern Pakistan in late May 2009. The specific objectives of this internal appeal are to enable the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and the Khyber Union of Journalists...

A hand grenade attack was carried out on opposition television station Maestro TV in the early hours of Monday in Tbilisi as the political debate programme “Camera 5” was being broadcast live. The explosion damaged the entrance and blew out windows but caused no injuries, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “Any use of such methods to intimidate news media is deplorable and...

Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America ( http://www.naa.org/), will soon cease to be in print. Presstime, its staff already much reduced, will continue on the association’s website, the New York Times has reported. The NYT report said: [ Link] “No one wanted to close down Presstime,” John F. Sturm, president and chief executive of the association, said in an e-mail...

Balibo, a powerful film that tells of the events surrounding the brutal killing of five journalists by Indonesian soldiers in East Timor in 1975, will be showcased at the upcoming IPI World Congress in Helsinki. The political thriller is told through the eyes of Roger East (played by Emmy Award-winning actor Anthony LaPaglia), an Australian who went to East Timor to investigate the earlier...

Journalists have launched a Europewide campaign to confront a growing economic and professional crisis in media which they say threatens to weaken democracy across the region. The annual meeting of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), bringing together leaders of unions and associations from 25 European countries, ended their meeting in Varna, Bulgaria on May 17 with the adoption of a...

Leaders of journalists unions from around the world travelled to Baghdad at the weekend for a conference on support for media in Iraq— the first international meeting of any kind in the city since the war began six years ago. The Iraqi Journalism Summit 2009 was organised by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate and was warmly welcomed by Iraqi Prime...

Spanish investigating judge Santiago Pedraz has decided to reinstate murder charges against the three US soldiers responsible for shelling the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, killing two cameramen, one of them the Spanish. The order came on Thursday. Spain’s National Court had ordered the withdrawal of the charges for lack of evidence in May 2008. José Couso, a Spanish cameraman...

Radio Mada reporter Evariste Ramanantsoavina has been released in Madagascar after being held since May 5, when soldiers arrested him in order to force him to reveal the location from which the station was broadcasting in defiance of a closure order. “We are relieved to learn that Ramanantsoavina is free at last,” Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. “It is nonetheless deplorable that...

Radio Shabelle journalist Abdirisak Mohamed Warsame on Friday became the third Somali journalist to be killed in the line of duty this year. Warsame, 24, was shot in crossfire as government forces launched an assault against Islamist guerrilla fighters in Somalia's war-ravaged capital, Mogadishu. Warsame, a producer for the leading independent broadcaster Shabelle Media Network, was scheduled to...