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PARIS – Restrictions on civil liberties due to the 'war on terrorism' have undermined media freedom in the United States and Russia over the past year, journalists' rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said. RSF's 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index released on Tuesday, a survey of censorship, intimidation and violence against journalists, found Finland, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands...

LAST week The New Yorker named Rupert Murdoch as "arguably the world's most powerful media executive". After lunching with the "king maker" and interviewing his senior courtiers, reporter John Cassidy described how Murdoch secures political access and disseminates strong, but not always predictable, political views through his global media network. Murdoch tends to support the Iraq war, tax cuts...

A new report seeks to debunk the conventional wisdom that print, as an ad medium, is on the decline. The study, by Marketing Evolution, El Dorado Hills, Calif., and commissioned by the Magazine Publishers of America, looks at 19 marketers, including Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola and Target, and measures the efficacy of their ad buys in magazines, on the Internet and TV from late 2004 through...

"What kind of business are we in?" is the rather plaintive title of a panel at this year's American Magazine Conference, which began Sunday in Phoenix. And that is exactly the question that magazine executives are asking themselves these days. Publishers of even the best-known and most successful American magazines are finding both the present and the future challenging and confusing. They know...

Reuters has launched a new round of cost cutting, this time with travel and expenses in the spotlight. The chief executive, Tom Glocer, has imposed 30% cuts to travel and entertainment budgets on the global news organisation's 15,300 staff. The news was delivered to staff in an intranet posting in which Mr Glocer said that "tough measures" were needed to achieve "greatness". He also said that the...

Reuters has launched a new round of cost cutting, this time with travel and expenses in the spotlight. The chief executive, Tom Glocer, has imposed 30% cuts to travel and entertainment budgets on the global news organisation’s 15,300 staff. The news was delivered to staff in an intranet posting in which Mr Glocer said that “tough measures” were needed to achieve “greatness”. He also said that the...

HANOI - Vietnam has suspended a business magazine and is considering revoking the press credentials of all its reporters and editors in an ongoing crackdown on state-controlled media’s critical reporting, local news outlets reported on Sunday. The Ministry of Culture and Information signed the decision to suspend Kinh Doanh & San Pham magazine on Sunday, according to the online newspaper VNExpress...

NEW YORK: The tragically backward, sometimes absurdist hallmarks of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea and in particular its leader, Kim Jong Il, are well known. There's Kim's Elton John eyeglasses and cotton-candy hairdo, for instance. A newer, more dangerous sort of North Korean eccentricity registered around 4.0 on the Richter scale earlier this month - a nuclear weapon test broadcast on...

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaia was murdered shortly after she entered her apartment building in central Moscow on Oct. 7. The building's security system was in working order, and she pushed the right buttons to open the door. The assassin was waiting inside. His slim figure was caught on security video. Politkovskaia's murder was one of many. On Oct. 16, Anatoly Voronin, financial director...

Islamabad - Newspaper hawkers in Pakistan are up in arms against the newspaper owners' decision to observe one holiday instead of the usual two for the forthcoming end-of-Ramadan Eid festivities. The All Pakistan Newspapers Society on Saturday accused the hawkers, who have refused to distribute the newspaper published the day after Eid, of reneging on an agreement reached between them 10 years ago...