United States

The US blogger whose record 226 days in federal prison stirred debate about who qualified as a journalist and what legal protections journalists should receive, was freed Tuesday after releasing video footage sought by prosecutors about an anarchist protest. Freelance videographer Joshua Wolf speaks to the members of the media after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in...

Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell won the bidding for newspaper publisher and broadcaster Tribune Co. Tribune, owner of leading US newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Ch icago Tribune, Newsday and the Baltimore Sun, had been pushing Zell to raise his bid, which had been close to $34 a share, Reuters reported. Zell is supporting the transaction with a $315 million investment. Tribune...

NEW YORK: Eight former staffers of the Santa Barbara News-Press, who claim they were illegally fired in the latest dispute at the embattled paper, have launched a new Web site of their own, where they plan to cover local stories until they get their jobs back. Dubbed "Santa Barbara Newsroom," the ad-free site, at www.santabarbaranewsroom.com, launched Monday with stories about local issues such as...

Demand for training is overwhelming as midcareer journalists and news executives face the digital revolution, but the news industry response in the US is fractured, says a new survey. The survey, conducted for the John S and James L Knight Foundation , shows training is failing to keep pace with the urgent and significant demands of industry transformation. This is Knight’s second major study of...

For newspapers, February was the cruelest month. So far. Revenue from advertising was in striking decline last month, compared with February a year ago, and were generally weaker than analysts had expected. And while there was one piece of good news for the industry — ad spending on newspaper Web sites rose — many industry watchers were wondering whether the February declines were part of a short...

NYU professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired News have launched an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero, as the project is called, is to develop a working model of an open newsroom. “An...

US news organisations are under tremendous pressure to find radical new ways to make money as their financial outlooks worsen despite embracing new technology. One way to do it may be to charge Web users for news in a way they cannot avoid -- their Internet access bill, the “State of the News Media 2007” has said. A taxi drives by the New York Times building in Times Square, New York. News outlets...

Journalists have reported extensively on information technology and financial services work migrating offshore. Now it’s their own jobs they can see disappearing over the horizon. In Britain and the US, the so-called outsourced newspaper is becoming a reality. Last Thursday, Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media announced plans to hive off the downtable sub-editing of three of its Irish...

The CIA leak trial and I Lewis Libby’s conviction has not been good news for US journalists. There is widespread apprehension that reporters and their editors must now more than ever balance their pursuit of news with an increased risk of landing in court. Journalist Matthew Cooper, right, and his attorney, Richard Sauber leave federal court in Washington, in this Jan. 31, 2007 file photo. Ten out...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the mistreatment of Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Haj of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera by the US authorities at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre after he began a hunger strike on 7 January on completing his fifth year in US custody without trial. “Al-Haj has been held by the Americans for five years without being charged, in disgraceful conditions and...