News

The World Press Institute (WPI), which trained journalists from around the world about the role and responsibilities of a free press for 46 years, is shutting down, the victim of dwindling financial support from American news organisations. "This is a sad development," the institute's board chairman, Howard Tyner, said in a statement on the institute's website. "But in the short term at least...

The majority of students (87%) who upload copyrighted material to user-generated video sites likeYouTube, Facebook or MySpace don't get permission from copyright owners, even though most (74%) believe it is fair to pay people for their use. That's according to a new, albeit limited, study of college students who upload video to Web sites conducted by a pair of professors at American University and...

April 10, 2007 | It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its...

NEW YORK: For several years now, the Chicago Tribune has published numerous articles -- many of them award-winning -- exposing the many faults in the administration of capital punishment in its home state and the nation. Some of them helped inspire a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. All the while, the paper's editorial page continued to support capital punishment. That changed three...

New York, April 9, 2007-The Committee to Protect Journalists is disturbed by an attack and threats against several provincial journalists amid escalating political tension between Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and opposition leaders calling for his resignation. “It's the responsibility of journalists to report on political demonstrations and we are deeply concerned that journalists in...

A staff photographer for The Blade who digitally altered a front-page photo has resigned, the newspaper said Monday. Allan Detrich had told Blade editors that he altered a photo of a college baseball team for his personal files and mistakenly sent it to the newspaper. The photo showed Bluffton University players kneeling March 30 at their first game after a bus crash killed five players in Atlanta...

Reporters Without Borders welcomed the release from prison of eight journalists after the federal high court cleared them today of subversion. The organisation called for 13 others held since November 2005 to be freed at once. “The Ethiopian judiciary has begun to realise the extravagant and dangerous side to this drawn-out episode,” it said. “We are especially glad that Serkalem Fasil and...

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0...

BAGHDAD, 9 April 2007 (IRIN) - BAGHDAD, 9 April 2007 (IRIN) - The arrests, abductions and murders of journalists in Iraq are severely limiting the ability of media outlets to effectively report the escalating humanitarian crises in the war-torn country, specialists say. In the run-up to the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, on 9 April, media associations are calling on the government and...

Ask how many journalists have been murdered because of their reporting since Vladimir Putin assumed power, and you might be surprised. The Committee to Protect Journalists puts the number at 13. Reporters Without Borders says it is 21. The Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, however, says it has only been able to confirm five. This discrepancy casts a long shadow over the reliability of...