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(CPJ/IFEX) - NEW YORK, October 12, 2007 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is increasingly concerned about the fate of missing journalist Birendra Shah as political pressure mounts in Nepal to find him. CPJ called for the release of Shah, who reports for Nepal FM, Dristi Weekly, and Avenues TV, on Wednesday. He was abducted by local Maoist cadres in Bara district in central Nepal, according to...

The son of the murdered ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and a journalist colleague were convicted yesterday of insulting Turkish identity for publishing remarks that had also landed Dink in court. Aram Dink, and Serkis Seropyan, both editors at the Turkish-Armenian daily Agos, were each given a one-year suspended sentence under Turkey's controversial law on insulting "Turkishness", their...

The BBC has defended the director-general Mark Thompson's decision to attend a cocktail party in India as he finalises plans to cut up to 2,800 jobs. Mr Thompson and three executives have jetted off to Mumbai for a lavish bash to celebrate the BBC's success in India. The trip is costing a reported £12,000. Next week, BBC employees will be given details of swingeing job cuts to be made as part of...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Companies will spend a record $31 billion this year to advertise everything from toothpaste to home loans on the Internet, supporting countless news sites, social networks, video exchanges and blogs. But some media veterans worry that expectations for online advertising may be getting out-sized. Increasingly, they say, too much media depends on advertising as the only source...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An alliance between hundreds of newspaper sites and Yahoo Inc has helped publishers increase advertising, but it will saddle them with unproven technology and costs them some independence and flexibility. Billed as crucial to U.S. newspapers whose print editions are steadily losing ads and readers, results of the program are hard to come by nearly a year after it began. Some...

NEW YORK (AFP) — News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch is opening a new front in his drive for media supremacy with a launch set for Monday of his Fox Business Network in the US market. The new business news channel takes square aim at market leader CNBC, part of the General Electric Co., in th effort to capture American cable and satellite subscribers seeking financial news. The move by the 76-year...

MOGADISHU (AFP) — Somali government forces on Thursday raided and shut a radio station that interviewed a top Islamist insurgent commander who claimed responsibility for an assassination bid on the prime minister. The forces ordered Mogadishu-based Simba Radio off the air and arrested its chief Abdullahi Ali Farah and a journalist, according to a reporter who works there. "The forces came this...

Reporters Without Borders today expressed its “astonishment” at “hostile statements” made by information minister, Madobe Numow Mohamed, towards its partner organisation in Somalia, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), on 3 and 6 October 2007. Madobe Numow Mohamed said in a letter on 3 October addressed to all international and local non-governmental organisations that his ministry...

Reporters Without Borders condemns the kidnapping of Moussa Gueye, the editor of the privately-owned daily L’Exclusif, who was arrested, beaten and taken off to an unknown location by plain-clothes police on 8 October after being lured into a trap. His abduction came just hours after he published a story headlined “President’s nighttime escapade.” “Such archaic methods do no honour to Senegal,”...

Reporters Without Borders calls for the release of Abdullahi Ali Farah, the manager of privately-owned Mogadishu-based Radio Simba, and Mohamed Farah, one of his journalists, who were arrested today after broadcasting an interview with the head of the military wing of the Islamic Courts. “The absolute power accorded to the troops in Mogadishu logically leads to arbitrary rule, to which journalists...