United Kingdom

The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK is reorganising its ABC print and ABCe digital elements into a single organisational strand to better reflect the changing shape of the publishing industry, the Press Gazette has reported. The change won't affect the way figures are presented. The national press will continue to have separate auditing of print and online audience figures for instance...

The ongoing newspaper phone-hacking scandal intensified Monday after the BBC's Panorama programme accused a former senior journalist of hiring a private eye to illegally obtain army secrets, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. The BBC current affairs show claimed that Alex Marunchak, former senior executive editor of the News of the World tabloid, employed a private detective to intercept...

A Welsh councillor has been ordered to pay what is believed to be the first libel damages to a political rival as a result of comments posted to Twitter, says a Press Gazette report. Caerphilly county councillor Colin Elsbury was ordered to pay £3,000 damages plus costs after using the social network to wrongly claim Eddie Talbot had been removed from a polling station by police during a by...

Investigative journalist Suzanne Breen has won libel damages from UK's National Union of Journalists over an article about her which appeared in union magazine – The Journalist. Union member Breen was backed by the NUJ in a legal battle with the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2009 which had sought to force her to disclose information which could lead to exposing the identity of sources in...

Three quarters of all news journalists are men while women make up just a third of journalists covering business and politics, according to new research conducted by Echo Research on behalf of Women in Journalism. The report also found that male journalists make up 49 per cent of lifestyle reporters and 70 per cent of arts reporters, while just four per cent of sports journalists are women...

The BBC's Albanian Service has made its last broadcast after nearly 20 years serving audiences in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia. It is one of five language services closing after cuts announced by the BBC World Service in January. The details: [ Link] The Albanian Service first operated in 1940-1967, then resumed broadcasts in 1993 as Albania emerged from communism. The service came into its own...

ARTICLE 19 has welcomed the High Court decision Thursday to dismiss the defamation claim brought by the Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash against the Kyiv Post, an independent Ukrainian newspaper. Firtash complained about an article published in the Kyiv Post in which the outcome of an international arbitrage concerning a dispute between RosUKrEnergo, of which Firtash is a major shareholder...

Tweeting will be allowed from hearings in the UK Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, it was announced Thurday last week. Supreme Court justices are "content" for journalists, members of the public and legal teams to use "live text based communications" to let the outside world know what is happening in the courtroom, according to Press Gazette. The move came in guidance published by the...

The BBC has confirmed plans to close five of its 32 World Service language services. Staff have been informed that up to 650 jobs will be lost from a workforce of 2,400 over the next three years. The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year. The BBC estimates audiences will fall by more than 30...

Britain's ITV News was on Wednesday banned from a police press conference after running a report criticising the police's handling of an investigation into the murder of Joanna Yeates, a landscape architect whose body was found on the outskirts of Bristol last month, the Guardian newspaper reported. Avon & Somerset police have complained to Britain's broadcast media regulator, Ofcom, about what...