News

Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, tried to run but found that he could not hide last week. He fled to the sun for a fortnight's respite and in his absence Beeb insiders queued up to criticise the way their boss had handled the phone-in crisis that has left the corporation reeling. It was gloves off against Mr Thompson in the house journal Ariel. BBC staffers were dismayed at the way...

Agence France-Presse (AFP) will syndicate its video service, AFPTV, to thousands of vertical websites. This follows a partnership deal with ClipSyndicate, a next-generation ad-supported video syndication network. ClipSyndicate’s website publishers search and publish fully licensed, authoritative video clips from respected providers, and receive a portion of advertising revenue. AFPTV, a major...

Shahid Ahmed Khan, a senior journalist who made his mark as the PTI correspondent in Pakistan in the 1990s, passed away in Kolkata on Saturday after battling cancer for about two years. Khan, who was 48, was present at the Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief's residence on October 12, 1999, when Gen Pervez Musharraf's troops encircled it and seized power. In fact, he was the first to report the...

CAIRO: When Egyptian officials denied reports of a disturbance in downtown Cairo last year, Wael Abbas showed the truth: A political protest had turned ugly, and a group of young men had gone on a rampage. Amid widespread allegations of police abuse, Abbas turned up a video of a police beating. He applied his sleuthing to stories about government-paid thugs beating up demonstrators. Abbas...

On Thursday, the Supreme Court finally took a stand on the contentious and controversial issue of television sting operations. The judges asked for an unconditional apology from a Zee News reporter who had conducted a sting operation seeking to reveal corruption in the lower judiciary. Asked the Chief Justice of India, “What public good has the reporter done? Prime facie, he has committed a...

NEW DELHI: The Rajasthan police, which bore the brunt of the violent Gujjar agitation to press for ST status in May this year, has said that the unrestrained coverage of the unfortunate incidents by local and national electronic media fanned the violence. Director-general of police A S Gill, in his affidavit before the Supreme Court, did a comparison of the behaviour of the domestic media with its...

July 27, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Two Central Asian republics are scheduled for elections in the coming months, with parliamentary elections set for mid-August in Kazakhstan and legislation calling for a presidential poll in Uzbekistan in December. Few people expect either event to provide much surprise, with ruling elites likely to stay in power. But authorities in both places appear to have strengthened...

News and information group Reuters said today its takeover by Canadian rival Thomson was on track and could be completed later this year. Reporting a 11% rise in pre-tax profits to £136m in the first half, Reuters said discussions with regulators over the £8.7bn Thomson deal were progressing and that customers were supportive of the tie-up. The deal with Thomson, announced in mid-May, ends 156...

NEW YORK: The Associated Press will be ending its highly-touted “asap” service in October, E&P has learned. Staffers were notified this morning about its October 31 demise as a stand alone. It’s not known if any layoffs will come. About 200 newspapers subscribed to the service. It was launched in 2005 as a response to the growth of blogs and so-called youth tabs, and had 24 staff members. It...

News and information group Reuters said today its takeover by Canadian rival Thomson was on track and could be completed later this year. Reporting a 11% rise in pre-tax profits to £136m in the first half, Reuters said discussions with regulators over the £8.7bn Thomson deal were progressing and that customers were supportive of the tie-up. The deal with Thomson, announced in mid-May, ends 156...