Americas

Cuba's state-run television broadcaster will launch a 24-hour channel with mostly foreign content in a move to provide Cuban audiences with more variety, says a Reuters report. The Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, ICRT, made the announcement Wednesday last at a conference of the Cuban writers and artists guild, where intellectuals criticised the poor quality of television programming in...

From increased responsibilities to growing competition, the constantly evolving media landscape has created both challenges and opportunities for today's journalists in the US. Many journalists are having to expand their skill set and add "blogger" to their resumes. Moreover, reporters at newspapers across the country are finding that they have to fill an online news hole, as well as the

The revenue picture for Canada’s daily newspapers remained stable through 2007, with robust growth in online ad sales offsetting a mild decline in print advertising. This is in sharp contrast to the US, where a contracting economy helped drive print ad revenues to the biggest year over year fall in more than half a century. According to new data released by the Canadian Newspaper Association (CNA)...

The Seattle Times Co will eliminate about 190 positions by next month because of continuing revenue declines. In a memo to employees, which was posted on the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild website, Times Publisher Frank Blethen and Times Co President Carolyn Kelly said the changes will be part of about $15 million in budget reductions during the next two months. "We had hoped the expense...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the killing of Carlos Quispe, a journalist working for Radio Municipal in the city of Pucarani, about 40 km west of La Paz, Bolivia, and called for the government to act quickly to find those responsible. A group that opposes the mayor attacked the city’s municipal building on March 27. The mob then moved onto the municipal radio...

The editor of a New York-based weekly has received a death threat. Majeed Babar, executive editor of the Weekly Asia Tribune, said a man called him on March 29 and told him, “We will cut you to pieces” in Urdu. Babar told the Committee to Protct Journalists (CPJ) that the threat was linked to opinion columns and paid advertisements promoting a beauty pageant in his print and online newspaper, the...

Four men have been convicted and sentenced to 11 years each in the November 2004 murder of Mexican photographer Gregorio Rodríguez Hernández. Judge Daniel Armenta Rentería convicted former Escuinapa Police Chief Abel Enríquez Zavala on charges that he acted as an intermediary between the mastermind and the perpetrators, court secretary Juan Carlos López told the New York-based Committee to Protect...

Newspapers will have to change the way they approach blogging if they are going to be a force in increasing public dialogue on political issues, says a joint study from American universities Ball State University and the University of Nevada, Reno. A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 US elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a...

Attacks on journalists and media outlets have intensified in the Americas over the past six months. If court cases and judicial rulings against the media are anything to go by, apart increasing violence against journalists, the times are bad for journalists in the region. Journalists, in fact, continue to be killed in high numbers in the Americas and the vast majority of these murders go

Advertising expenditures for newspaper websites in the United States increased by 18.8 per cent to $3.2 billion in 2007, according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). Spending on newspaper websites has now grown to account for 7.5 per cent of all newspaper ad spending last year (up from 5.7 per cent in 2006). For last year’s fourth quarter, advertising...