News

(MFWA/IFEX) - On 25 May 2006, Joyce Danso, a female reporter for the state-owned wire service Ghana News Agency (GNA), was slapped by Michael Gberbie, a 46-year old official of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana (ICAG), for arriving late to report on their function. She was also insulted by the official. Danso told MFWA that she had gone to the Accra International Conference Centre, the...

(MISA/IFEX) - On 19 May 2006, a day after Information Minister Patricia Kaliati lambasted him in the presence of his junior staff and reporters from other media houses, the acting managing editor of the Malawi News Agency (MANA), Don Napuwa, was transferred to the Information Ministry headquarters. Kaliati told the media that Napuwa was transferred to the Department of Research and Planning, a...

(MFWA/IFEX) - Lamin Fatty, a reporter for the Banjul-based bi-weekly "Independent" newspaper, who has been in police detention for the past seven weeks, was charged with publishing false information on 21 May 2006 by the Gambian Police Force's Crime Management Squad. While Fatty is yet to be arraigned before a court of law, Musa Saidykhan, the newspaper's editor, has gone into hiding for fear of...

(RSF/IFEX) - The German Parliament (Bundestag) has posted on its website ( http://www.bundestag.de/aktuell/pkg/index.html ) part of a report by a former judge revealing that the country's external intelligence service, the BND, has been spying on journalists. Some passages were censored and names replaced by initials at the request of the journalists. The report was posted on 26 May 2006. BND...

High-level media and advertising executives are to meet for a brainstorming session aimed at capitalising on the surging popularity of social networking websites. McKinsey, the management consultancy, is understood to have asked senior executives from old and new media groups alike – from Yahoo to YouTube – to a session with advertising agencies to discuss ways of turning the hugely popular...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Google Inc. first gained notice early in the decade, as a small and quirky start-up with a disarmingly simple Internet search engine and an idealistic slogan, ``Don't Be Evil." Today the maverick company, adored by online shoppers and Internet surfers, has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces in the business world. Its secret sauce: a technology that lets business...

TOLEDO, Ohio -- A newspaper fired a reporter who wrote an anonymous letter to the Pulitzer Prize board critical of the newspaper's entry for its work in uncovering the state's coin investment scandal. George Tanber, a reporter for The Blade for 14 years, was fired Thursday for "displaying a pattern of conduct which was dishonest, inappropriate, or both," the newspaper reported in Sunday's editions...

EDINBURGH (AFP) - Global press chiefs gathered to thrash out how best to wrestle with the rise of the Internet, stay on top of technology, and beat countless bloggers and citizen journalists to the story. Media professionals, huddled in the Scottish capital for the International Press Institute's World Congress, debated the long-term challenges and opportunities that the new media age would throw...

The newspaper of Tuanjie, which means unity, celebrated its 50th anniversary on Friday. It was founded by China's non-communist party the Revolutionary Committee of Chinese Kuomintang. First published in 1956, the Tuanjie newspaper was shut down during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). It resumed publishing in 1980 and is sold overseas. The paper, which later developed into the voice of non...

Jim McClatchy bore many titles during his six-decade career: pilot, Army officer, business manager, publisher, philanthropist, chairman of the board. But in a conversation not long before his death, he made a succinct request as to how he wanted to be remembered: "Put down that I was a newspaperman." He was that. James Briggs McClatchy, senior member of one of California's pioneering newspaper...