News

NEW YORK: The Internet has allowed consumers to trade stocks without using high-priced brokers and let travelers book flights directly from airlines. Now it may free advertisers to make their own television commercials without going through a traditional ad agency. Several companies are offering automated ad creation over the Internet and, in some cases, ad placement services that all advertisers...

LONDON - The Daily Mirror has relaunched its website to feature increased video and user generated content and a greater emphasis on its sport, news and entertainment coverage. Publisher Trinity Mirror said the redesigned Daily Mirror website, which was created by MGN Digital, would feature embedded video players containing coverage of the website's three core areas of news, showbiz information...

The Supreme Court has issued notices to Zee News and its reporter Vijay Shekhar for carrying out a sting operation purportedly to expose corruption in lower judiciary, news agencies have reported. Zee News and Shekhar were issued notices Tuesday for carrying out sting operation in 2004 showing how non-bailable warrants can be procured against any person by paying a hefty amount in a court. A three...

Monthly unique visitors to newspaper websites in the US averaged more than 57.6 million in the fourth quarter 2006, a record number and the largest in any quarter since the US-based Newspaper Association of America (NAA) began tracking online usage in January 2004. These numbers come on the heels of a separate study from Nielsen//NetRatings indicating that traffic to blog pages at the top 10...

An Italian judge ordered Wednesday a US soldier to stand trial on homicide charges for shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent in Iraq in 2005 as he was escorting a freed journalist to safety, Reuters has reported. Mario Lozano of the US Army's 69th Infantry Regiment was charged with voluntary homicide for shooting Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint near Baghdad airport. Italian journalist...

(CPJ/IFEX) - New York, February 8, 2007 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is troubled by the overnight arrest of an opposition television station director by Tunisian police in the capital Tunis. Tahar Ben Hassine, director of Italy-based satellite channel Al-Hiwar Tunisi, was detained by Tunisian police in the al-Manar neighborhood after leaving Tunisian dissident journalist Taoufik Ben Brik...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Television on the wane? Not according to a forecast released Wednesday by Nielsen Media Research, which projects that the nation's TV households will grow 47 percent to 163.7 million by 2050. Nielsen pegged the number of television households in January at 111.4 million using Claritas demographic estimates. But armed with U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for...

Two French Muslim organisations are suing magazine Charlie Hebdo for printing cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed. The trial began in Paris today in a civil lawsuit by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France. Charlie Hebdo’s decision to reprint the Danish cartoons was taken at an especially fraught moment. Some 10 news media had been banned or suspended in...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the closure of the conservative daily Siassat Rouz since 3 February on the orders of the Press Monitoring Commission because of an article deemed to be an insult to Iran’s Sunni minority. “There was no justification for closing this newspaper,” the press freedom organisation said, calling for the immediate lifting of the ban. “In Iran, censorship is...

Advertising forecasters predict double-digit growth for online media outlets in the new year. Traditional media, including television and newspapers, are slated for flat growth, at best, during 2007. We all know what this means. The big media companies are migrating to the Internet as fast as possible, simultaneously laying off workers and cutting budgets in their traditional broadcast and print...