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MELBOURNE: Hedley Thomas, the journalist who wrote a series of stories about the Australian government's handling of Indian doctor Mohammed Haneef's arrest on suspected terror charge, has won the country's most coveted journalism award. Thomas, who is associated with The Australian newspaper, won the "Gold Walkley" award for covering and highlighting the mistakes made by the government in the...

Aboard the crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we'll call Ms CJ, a k a Citizen Journalist. A rant directed at us, Mr MSM, a k a Mainstream Media, for all our perceived faults. "It's not you, the journalist, it's the institution," Ms CJ tells Mr MSM. "You're not telling the whole story. ... You've lost...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook is good for keeping up with high-flying buddies, MySpace is for teenage offspring and the BlackBerry is a full-time addiction, according to top media executives who were quizzed on their personal media habits at this week's Reuters Media Summit. "I may be the only human being on earth who's on MySpace under his own name and I am on Facebook," said Strauss Zelnick...

Reporters Without Borders has greeted with relief the news that Riaz Mengal, a reporter with the newspaper "Intikhab", succeeded in escaping from kidnappers who abducted him on 4 October 2007 in the Khuzdar district of Baluchistan province. The journalist told a press conference in Quetta on 26 November, a day after his escape from his captors, that his "kidnapping was linked to articles about...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrests of several dozen journalists to prevent them from covering a failed coup attempt at a Manila hotel where around 30 soldiers had demanded the ouster of President Gloria Arroyo on 29 November 2007. The journalists were taken, their hands bound, to the National Capital Region Police Office in Bicutan, south-east of the capital. Police said they had...

MELBOURNE: Hedley Thomas, the journalist who wrote a series of stories about the Australian government’s handling of Indian doctor Mohammed Haneef’s arrest on suspected terror charge, has won the country’s most coveted journalism award. Thomas, who is associated with The Australian newspaper, won the “Gold Walkley” award for covering and highlighting the mistakes made by the government in the...

(RSF/IFEX) - New draconian restrictions on the coverage of fighting between government forces and rebels by the few media still operating in the capital are "unacceptable," RSF said on 28 November 2007. The restrictions were ordered on 26 November by Mogadishu mayor Mohamed Omar Habeb, a former warlord and governor of the central city of Jowhar who is also known by the nom de guerre of "Mohamed...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 28 November 2007, the police captured Nazario Coronel Ramírez, a.k.a. "Chamaya", the alleged perpetrator of the murder of journalist Miguel Pérez Julca, which took place in March 2007 in the city of Jaén, northeastern Peru. Coronel Ramírez was detained in Saposoa, a town in the province of Huallaga, San Martín region. After a week of surveillance, 10 policemen sent from Jaén...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned a 29 November 2007 search at the home of journalist and blogger Zhai Minglei, who was due the following day to answer an official summons linked to an investigation into the "illegal publication" of the magazine "Minjian" (Civil Society). Zhai posted on his blog, Yaobao, nominated for the international Best of the Blogs (BoB) awards, an account...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 27 November 2007, supporters of a regional prefect who oppose the national government threatened journalists of the radio stations Digital and Pando for reporting negatively about the regional strike they organized, which began that day in the town of Cobija, northern Bolivia, according to information provided by the Governmental News Agency (Agencia Gubernamental de Noticia, ABI)...