Americas

The Lima-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) has filed a complaint before the District Magistracy Control Office (Oficina Distrital de Control de la Magistratura, ODICMA) against judge Teresa Cabrera, who sentenced journalist Magaly Medina and television producer Ney Guerrero to serve prison terms in a defamation case brought against them by football player Paolo Guerrero. The sentence, which...

The Iinternet has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news in the US, says a new report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Currently, 40 per cent say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from just 24 per cent in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more...

The biggest news industry story of 2008 in the US, expectedly, is about job cuts, says leading industry magzine Editor & Publisher. The US Department of Labour estimates that around 21,000 newspaper industry jobs disappeared this year. E&P's 'Top Ten Newspaper Industry Stories of the Year', listed by Senior Editor Joe Strupp are as follows: [ Link] Record Job Cuts: Three years ago, this was the...

The American Society of Newspaper Editors is planning to remove "paper" from its name and expand its membership to include editors of online-only news websites and journalism educators. The society’s board of directors unanimously recommended these and other changes that will be considered by ASNE members at a meeting during the group’s convention in Chicago next April, ASNE President Charlotte...

The New York Times will launch an 'Instant Op-Ed' feature next month that will allow the paper's website to post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news. "Our Op-Ed now is very rapid response, but it is at the most the next day," Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal told Editor & Publisher. "We are looking at a way to take advantage of the expandability of the Internet, the back and forth...

Students at Georgetown University in the US are suing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other government agencies for information in the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the project began in a investigative journalism class at Georgetown in 2007. The students were supposed to find out...

A court in the southeastern Haitian town of Jacmel has convicted police officer Bastien Novembre for assaulting Radio Express reporter Fritzer Philogène and ordered him to pay Philogène 100,000 gourdes (approx US$2,500) in damages. If Novembre, a member of the elite Departmental Unit for Maintaining Order (UDMO), fails to pay he could go to prison for one year. A report by his superiors also...

The Mexican special federal prosecutor for dealing with attacks on the media, Octavio Alberto Orellana Wiarco, has ruled out that two young women community journalists in Oaxaca State were killed because of their work. His public statement that the radio journalists of the Triqui indigenous community were shot in an attack aimed at the driver of their vehicle showed yet again the special...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has wlcomed the progress being made in the investigation into the abduction and torture of two journalists employed by Brazilian newspaper, O Dia, and their driver in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Batan on May 14. Three military police officers wanted in connection with the case—Fabio Gonçalves Soares (also known as 'Fabinho Catiri'), Marcos Antonio Alves da Silva...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the immediate release of Milton Chacaguasay Flores, owner and editor of the weekly La Verdad, based in Machala, south-western Ecuador. The journalist, who had been acquitted in a lower court, was sentenced on appeal on November 15 to 10 months in prison for “insulting” a judge and imprisoned two weeks later. This came one month after Freddy Aponte...