News

27 July 2006

Photographers face danger, limited mobility in Lebanon

As Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon have escalated in the past two weeks, photographers flocking to cover the conflict have encountered particularly difficult and dangerous conditions. A Lebanese freelance photographer, 23-year-old Layal Nagib, died July 24 when a bomb exploded near her car during an Israeli attack on Cana, near the coastal city of Tyre in southern Lebanon. Nagib...

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27 July 2006

Journalist flees to Thailand after death threats

Reporters Without Borders today deplored "harassment and death threats" that have forced editor-in-chief You Saravuth to flee to neighbouring Thailand after printing an article criticising a nephew of prime minister Hun Sen. It called on the government to arrest those who made the threats and for the immediate dropping of legal action concerning the article, as well as protection for the editor’s...

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27 July 2006

Research group: Newspapers should create alliances online

NEW YORK: A white paper relased by the Kelsey Group suggests that newspapers would be well advised to form online partnerships in order to stay competitive. The report notes that this strategy has worked in the past. The report suggests that newspapers adapt their Web sites to attract customers who research products on the Web but then buy the items at a store. It suggested that newspapers take...

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27 July 2006

Searching for order in the blogosphere

I was all ears when a man named Tony Conrad sat down next to me at a recent dinner party and introduced himself as the founder of a new blog search engine called Sphere. Oh, how I long for such a thing. With nearly 50 million blogs online, slogging through their gazillion entries makes me feel like one of the minions at the National Security Agency assigned to monitor billions of phone calls...

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26 July 2006

In Russia, reporter found slain in apartment

New York, July 26, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the murder of Yevgeny Gerasimenko, a correspondent for the independent weekly Saratovsky Rasklad, who was found dead this morning in his apartment in Saratov in southeastern Russia, according to local press reports. Saratov Department of Interior Spokesman Denis Zheltov said forensic evidence indicated that Gerasimenko had...

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26 July 2006

Korea: Beauty queen or journalist?

A female TV anchor's participation in this year's Miss Universe competition has triggered a debate over the role of anchors. Kim Joo-hee, a SBS anchor and Miss Korea 2005, took part in the pageant that opened in Los Angeles last week. Although she failed to make it to the final 20, her participation attracted great attention in Korea with photos of her in a bikini displayed on the Internet...

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26 July 2006

Azerbaijan: Former police official confesses to journalist's murder

PRAGUE, July 26, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Haci Mammadov, former head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry, confessed on July 25 to having murdered opposition journalist Elmar Huseynov last year at the behest of then Economic Development Minister Farhad Aliyev. Huseynov, editor of the journal "Monitor" that systematically investigated alleged corruption, was gunned...

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26 July 2006

Specialized titles attracting readers as wider-interest publications falter

The 300 feet of magazine shelves at Liberty Books & News offers more than a few odd titles. The bimonthly Fire Apparatus Journal is dedicated to all things fire-related. Cook’s Illustrated, a print spinoff of the PBS series America’s Test Kitchen, focuses on cooking techniques. And the do-it-yourself Make targets the techie set. "We cannot seem to keep enough copies in stock," said John Gaylord...

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25 July 2006

Indian TV hits nadir with Prince saga

The wall-to-wall coverage of the dramatic rescue of five-year-old Prince from a 60-ft deep pit in Haryana’s Kurukshetra town has taken television coverage to a new and disturbing low. Sure, it was a poignant story that merited coverage with the boy falling into a shaft and lying trapped there for 50 hours with soldiers from an engineering regiment working overnight, scooping out drums of mud and...

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25 July 2006

Indian govt gives in to media owners, defers Broadcast Bill

The controversial Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill 2006 will not be tabled in the ongoing Parliament session after all. The Union ministry of parliamentary affairs has listed ten Bills for introduction during the sesion; the Broadcast Bill is not among them. The government's decision to pull the Bill off the list comes in the wake of the representations made by media owners to the information...

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