United States

The 1000-strong Boston Globe employees union is now being backed by labour unions and local labour in their protest against outsourcing of jobs to India by the New York Times Company. The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, had recently announced the elimination of over 120 jobs at the newspaper. Of these, 55 jobs in advertising and finance would be outsourced to India. The New...

NEW YORK (AP) - The Village Voice, which has had four editors in just over a year, has fired its most recent one after a staff meeting on concerns about racial diversity, a spokeswoman said Saturday. David Blum was fired Friday after just six months as editor in chief of the alternative weekly, Maggie Shnayerson said. His termination followed a Wednesday meeting in which staffers discussed a lack...

Just when newspapers are talking local, here’s a research study which should make newspapers think again – 67 per cent of the respondents of the study never visited their local daily newspaper’s website in 2006. The number is down from 70 per cent in 2003, but up 3 percentage points from 2005. The authors, however, cautioned newspapers about interpreting users’ behaviour on these sites – “some of...

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Few adults in the United States agree with the use of anonymous sources in journalism, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. Only 28 per cent of respondents think the practice is ethical. In the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied on an anonymous source—known as "Deep Throat"—to provide information and context on a series...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has backed new calls from Sudanese and Arab world journalists for the release of Sami al-Haj, a cameraman working for Al-Jazeera, who has been held for five years, tortured and accused of terrorism offences at the notorious Guantanamo detention centre in Cuba. He has never been charged or brought to trial. According to Reporters sans Frontières...

Feb. 16, 2007 · Testimony ended this week in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, signaling the forthcoming conclusion of a trial that has subjected both the White House and the Washington journalism community to uncomfortable scrutiny. In the end, three journalists testified for the prosecution and seven testified for the defense...

US newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will be able to make more money, according to a study released Wednesday, which also questioned the wisdom of the media industry's trend of cutting jobs to save costs. A woman exits the New York Times building in Manhattan in 2006. The Internet is causing something of an earthquake in the US media industry, which last year reported a nearly...

IBM has warned of a looming crisis with old and new media on a collision course over how and where content such as TV, news and user-created will be carried, and says billions of dollars in revenue are at risk. The report, to be released later today in New York, warns that the conflict between traditional and new media is seeing the emergence of a media divide that could erase hundreds of billions...

WASHINGTON — New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson testified briefly in the CIA leak trial today as defense attorneys tried to undercut the credibility of another witness, former Times reporter Judith Miller. Abramson was the Washington bureau chief in 2003 when Miller says White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby told her that the wife of a former ambassador and prominent war critic...

The financially-ailing Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has reached tentative contracts with bargaining units from its 11 different labour unions, lifting a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the future of the 220-year-old daily, the newspaper reported. Votes on the three-year contracts, which would run from January 2007 to March 2010, will take place in the next two weeks, said Newspaper Guild President...