International

The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) has been awarded by the Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) for its role in defending media freedoms in the occupied Palestinian territories. The Geneva-based Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) has announced on June 4 the selection of MADA and the Ambassador of Mexico to the United Nations in Geneva for the first prize. It has confirmed in its...

Despite the global financial crisis, newspaper circulation grew 1.3 per cent worldwide in 2008, the President of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said Wednesday in a speech that contradicted “misleading” reports predicting the imminent death of newspapers. “The simple fact is that, as a global industry, our printed audience continues to grow,” said Gavin O’Reilly, WAN President and CEO of...

Balibo, a powerful film that tells of the events surrounding the brutal killing of five journalists by Indonesian soldiers in East Timor in 1975, will be showcased at the upcoming IPI World Congress in Helsinki. The political thriller is told through the eyes of Roger East (played by Emmy Award-winning actor Anthony LaPaglia), an Australian who went to East Timor to investigate the earlier...

A Belarusian journalist who is frequently detained and subjected to all-night interrogations by police, a Cameroonian radio journalist whose broadcasts on human rights and press freedom have put her life at risk and an Iranian journalist whose reports about sensitive social and political issues have led to multiple arrests are recipients of this year’s International Women’s Media Foundation’s...

With a military government that severely restricts Internet access and imprisons people for years for posting critical material, Burma is the worst place in the world to be a blogger, the Committee to Protect Journalists says in a new report. CPJ’s “10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger” also identifies a number of countries in the Middle East and Asia where Internet penetration has blossomed and

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel peace laureate, have been chosen as the winners of this year’s Roland Berger Human Dignity Award. This prize is awarded by the Munich-based Roland Berger Foundation (Roland Berger Stiftung), which was founded in 2008 by Roland Berger, emeritus professor of business administration and management consulting also...

The already murderous conditions for the press in Sri Lanka and Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has found in its newly updated Impunity Index, a list of countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes. Colombia, historically one of the world’s deadliest nations for the press, improved as the rate

Six of the world’s leading newspapers dedicated to sports have come together to form the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN), to defend and promote the interests and freedom of the sports press. The founding members of the IASN are the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo Deportivo and Marca in Spain, L’Equipe in France, Olé in Argentina, and Lance in Brazil...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has confirmed the new dates for its World Newspaper Congress, World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo, the global meetings of the world’s press, which will now be held in Hyderabad, from November 30 to December 2, 2009. WAN announced last month that the events, originally scheduled for March, would be postponed until later in the year due to the impact...

Asia replaced the Middle-East as the deadliest region for journalists last year, with 26 reporters, photographers and editors losing their lives in retaliation for their work or in civil conflicts, according to the International Press Institute's annual World Press Freedom Review. Though more journalists were killed in Iraq than in any other country in 2008 for the sixth year in a row, Pakistan