News

NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Times said Thursday that it has appointed Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman Clark Hoyt as its new public editor. Hoyt, 64, is a veteran journalist who spent much of his career at Knight Ridder newspapers, where his coverage of Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas F. Eagleton during the 1972 election won a Pulitzer. He was Washington editor for the chain until...

The board of Dow Jones & Co. announced late Wednesday that it would not move on Rupert Murdoch's audacious $5-billion buyout offer after the company's controlling Bancroft family rejected the media baron's proposal for the second time in two days. But analysts viewed the company's newly robust stock price and the somewhat muted rejection as signs that Murdoch, or a competitor, would eventually buy...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Belgian French-language newspapers were back on Google on Thursday after agreeing that the search engine can link to their Web sites, the first signs of a thaw in a bitter copyright dispute. But neither has so far settled on a key part of the dispute: the use of newspaper story links used on Google News. In February, Google Inc. lost a lawsuit filed by the newspapers that...

The amount of traffic leaving news and media sites for multimedia sites has risen 196% from April 2006 to April 2007, according to an online competitive intelligence service. Major events, like the execution of Saddam Hussein and the death of crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, have driven the increase, according to a Hitwise analysis released Tuesday. The amount of news traffic going to video Web sites...

Cablevision Systems Corp. and the Tribune Co., which owns Newsday, are moving to take their businesses private. And Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp., is looking for a little respect, some say, with his $5 billion bid for Dow Jones & Co. and its Wall Street Journal. Analysts and media experts describe it as the transition and turmoil that has become a reality for media...

Reporters Without Borders today called for an end to the political and legal harassment of two journalists - Arezki Aït-Larbi, the correspondent of the French dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, and Saad Lounès, the former editor of the daily El Ouma - that has been going on for years. “We are no longer surprised by the Algerian judicial system’s grotesque decisions,” the press freedom...

COLOMBO, May 2 (IPS) - "Press and freedom? In Sri Lanka?" was the incredulous response of one journalist when asked what he thought of celebrating World Press Freedom Day, May 3. "Keep my name out of this," was all he would further venture to say. That response summed up the near-petrified state of the media in this island country where a fierce ethnic civil war between Tamil rebels led by the...

BBC Worldwide has launched two pay-TV channels, CBeebies and BBC Entertainment, in India. The CBeebies channel will offer shows such as Tweenies, Tikkabilla and Big Cook Little Cook. BBC Entertainment will air dramas including Doctor Who, Waking the Dead, Cutting It, Hotel Babylon, Spooks and comedies such as Extras. The channels will each be available 12 hours a day to Indian viewers via the Tata...

May 2, 2007 · The California Supreme Court ruled last week that it is constitutional for courts to issue limited injunctions prohibiting defendants from repeating statements that were determined at trial to be defamatory. The ruling arose from a case where the defendant, Anne Lemen, vocally criticized and protested the noise and activities occurring at a bar, the Balboa Island Village Inn, close...

WASHINGTON, May 2, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Once again, the slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has served as a symbol of the kind of danger journalists around the world live with every day. "Journalists like Anna are on the frontline of human freedom," U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes told a conference in Washington on May 1. "Yet while her story...