News

Prompted by rising delivery costs and pressure to grow profits, leading magazine wholesalers are making unprecedented steep distribution cuts across all magazines, with a sharp focus on their least-profitable ones, those with a $2.50-and-under cover price. The News Group and Source Interlink Cos. have made significant cuts since May 1, following a similar move by Anderson News Corp., which sources...

An officer of a private telecom company on Monday failed to produce call details of the husband of slain journalist Shivani Bhatnagar before a court trying the murder case involving suspended IPS officer RK Sharma, the Times of India has reported. Some details: Gulshan Kumar Arora, witness produced by Sharma to defend himself, said that the records are maintained upto a particular period of time...

A judge is expected to decide this week whether to proceed with a lawsuit that claims Facebook's founder stole source code, trade secrets, and intellectual property from people who hired him to work on a social networking site. U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock is expected to hold a hearing in Boston Tuesday to decide whether to the defendants' motion to dismiss the case. The lawsuit...

On Friday, journalists at the Glasgow-based Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times newspapers walked out, launching the first Scottish newspaper strike since the bitter Aberdeen Journals dispute of 1989-90. Officially, owner Newsquest's desire for compulsory redundancies provided the grounds for action, but supporters of the strike say this is a battle for the soul of The Herald and part of a...

Today's news world is a political junkie's oyster. Cable TV offers CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-SPAN. The Washington Post, BBC online, The Note and many, many more news Web sites are only a click away. But that's where they remain for many Americans. Decades into the "information age," the public is as uninformed as before the rise of cable television and the Internet. Greater access to media...

HARARE - A media watchdog in Zimbabwe says the coverage of the alleged adultery case involving Archbishop Pius Ncube of the Bulawayo Archdiocese by the State media is an affront to ethical journalism. The Zimbabwe Chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) said the reportage was unfair and unbalanced. "The coverage of the purported revelations and 'scoop' by the Zimbabwe Broadcasting...

The hype about MySpace, YouTube, and Internet campaigning is turning out to be just that — hype. Social networking, blogs and political parties' websites are affecting voter opinion in the United States far less than the recent buzz would suggest. Few people use them for political information, and even fewer trust them. According to a recent Nucleus survey, traditional print media is far more...

As Azerbaijan prepares to marks National Press Day on 22 July 2007, Reporters Without Borders today condemned its repeated violations of the opposition media’s rights, especially the use of jail terms to silence journalists, of whom a total of seven are currently in prison. “Four criminal code articles with provision for long sentences are above all being used to imprison journalists - articles...

(MFWA/IFEX) - On 14 July 2007, the Chief of Defence Staff of Niger's Armed Forces (FAN), General Moumouni Boureima, threatened to kill Moussa Kaka, a correspondent for Radio France International (RFI) in Niger, over his coverage of the rebellion in the Northern part of the country. The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) correspondent reported that General Boureima threatened the journalist...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has hailed the 19 July 2007 release of Abdirahman Mohammed Habane of "Jamhuuriya", a daily based in Hargeisa, the capital of the breakaway state of Somaliland. He had been held since 12 July because of a controversial article about the swearing-in of a traditional leader. He was freed after the Somaliland Journalists Association (SOLJA), "Jamhuuriya"'s...