News

February 18, 2007 -- A war between old and new media has begun. After peaceably co-existing for years, the analog and digital media worlds have swapped the first salvos over content in what could be a very messy - and costly - battle. Earlier this month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs squeezed off a shot over the bow of the music industry by posting a 1,800-word missive seeking to abolish copyright...

On a mid-November day in 2006, a cleaning lady found the bloodied, lifeless corpse of journalist José Manuel Nava in his Mexico City flat located on Warsaw Street in the Juarez district of the capital. He died, according to police reports, from a savage knife attack by an unknown assailant. This occurred a week after he published a book very critical of the outgoing president, Vicente Fox, and...

When I think back on the most momentous events of my professional life, they include scenes of both devastation and deliverance. The boulevards of Manila, flooded with peaceful demonstrators chanting for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to abandon power. The slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where a joyful, gyrating mob of slum-dwellers is celebrating the election of populist priest Jean...

European publishers have offered an olive branch to Google in a bid to end copycat copyright challenges to the internet search engine's news service. Google lost a court battle with a Belgian newspaper association Copiepresse in a landmark ruling on Monday and was ordered was ordered to remove content or face daily fines. Belgium's ruling came as other lawsuits loom for the popular search engine...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has backed new calls from Sudanese and Arab world journalists for the release of Sami al-Haj, a cameraman working for Al-Jazeera, who has been held for five years, tortured and accused of terrorism offences at the notorious Guantanamo detention centre in Cuba. He has never been charged or brought to trial. According to Reporters sans Frontières...

The Mail & Guardian Online launched The News in Photos earlier this week, a new service which leverages what new media pundits term Web 2.0 technologies. Allowing readers to submit their own photographs and comment and interact with each other, the website organises news photographs into galleries accessible via a multimedia interface. “This is our most visible step so far to embracing audience...

NEW YORK, Feb 16 (Reuters) - The AtlantaJournal-Constitution plans to eliminate about 80 newsroom jobs and cut its circulation 5 percent, it said on Friday, in the latest restructuring to hit the struggling newspaper industry. The AJC, which is owned by privately-held Cox Enterprises, is restructuring the newsroom to balance its resources between its print paper and its Web site, following similar...

Lauren Rich Fine, Merrill Lynch & Co.'s top-ranked newspaper industry analyst and a voracious newspaper reader, is optimistic about the future of newspapers - even if her teenage children won't pick up the print editions. "Interest in news is greater today than it's ever been," she said. And while interest in newspapers themselves has declined, the companies likely to survive view the Internet as...

Reporters Without Borders voiced deep concern today about the disappearance last night of Subramaniam Ramachandran, the correspondent of the Tamil dailies Thinakural and Valampuri in the Vadamaradchi region north of Jaffna. The organisation said it was worried about the cruel lack of protection for media personnel in this region. “Alarming acts of violence against journalists and human rights...

Feb. 16, 2007 · Testimony ended this week in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, signaling the forthcoming conclusion of a trial that has subjected both the White House and the Washington journalism community to uncomfortable scrutiny. In the end, three journalists testified for the prosecution and seven testified for the defense...