News

Newspapers will have to change the way they approach blogging if they are going to be a force in increasing public dialogue on political issues, says a joint study from American universities Ball State University and the University of Nevada, Reno. A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 US elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a...

The daily Berliner Zeitung has announced that the overwhelming majority of editorial staff has voted to access their official records at the government's archive, after two senior journalists at the newspaper admitted they were former East German secret police, Stasi, informants. On Monday, the left-leaning paper's 50-year-old political editor admitted to having been a Stasi informant for a decade...

An appeal court in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica Wednesday ordered a new trial with different judges in the murder of Dusko Jovanovic, the owner and editor of the opposition daily Dan, who was gunned down outside his newspaper in Podgorica on May 28, 2004. The original trial ended in December 2006 with the acquittal of the sole defendant, Damic Mandic, a former karate champion and alleged...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is saddened and angered at news of the brutal death of Asomiya Pratidin correspondent and Morajhar Press Club president Md Muslimuddin on April 1. According to the Indian Journalists’ Union (IJU), an IFJ affiliate, Muslimuddin was attacked about 10pm while returning home on a bicycle near in Jagirod in India’s north-eastern state of Assam. An...

The secretary-general of the National Union of the Moroccan Press (SNPM) has been injured in an attack, SNPM said Wednesday. Mohammed Eddou Serraj was struck on the head with an iron bar by two people when leaving a meeting of the trade union in Rabat on Tuesday. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Thursday called on Moroccan authorities to investigate the attack on Serraj . “We...

An Iraqi reporter was seriously injured Wednesday in a landmine explosion in east Baghdad, while another was injured by a sniper in the southern city of Basra, according to the Iraqi Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO). Haitham Ibrahim, a cameraman working for Iraqi al-Dayar satellite channel, had his leg amputated after suffering serious injuries in a landmine explosion in Talabiyah district...

The Zimbabwean police has arrested two unaccredited foreign journalists at a hotel in the capital Harare. The police issued a statement Thursday saying that the reporters had been covering the country's election without any accreditation. Pulitzer Prize-winner Barry Bearak, a New York Times correspondent based in Johannesburg was arrested Thursday evening. The identity of the other journalist has...

Russian journalist Yelena Tregubova, who wrote a book criticizing President Vladimir Putin for abusing freedom of speech, said she's been granted political asylum in the UK, according to Bloomberg News. The former Kremlin correspondent for Russia's Kommersant newspaper, who asked for asylum in London last year, said she's "very pleased'' with the decision in comments broadcast on Ekho Moskvy radio...

A reporter and a correspondent of China Mining News, a newspaper supervised by the Ministry of Land and Resources, were sentenced to seven and six years in jail for taking bribes when covering news in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua has eported. The man, surnamed Liu, 32, a reporter in the Shanxi provincial bureau of China Mining News, was...

Egypt has ordered the confiscation of a special edition of German magazine Der Spiegel about Islam that the government said insults the Muslim prophet Mohammed, Egypt's state news agency MENA said. Information Minister Anas el-Feki said the decision "comes in the context of defending Islamic values and standing firmly against those who try to insult the prophet, the Islamic faith, and religions...