Citizen Journalism

Two Afghan journalists were seized by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in early-morning raids at their homes this week, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Rahmatullah Nekzad, a freelancer who contributes to Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press,was arrested just after midnight Monday in Ghazni, according to local and international media reports...

Media giants Network 18 Media & Investments and Sun Network Ltd have announced a strategic alliance to launch one of the country's biggest distribution entities by name Sun18. The alliance also marks the entry of Network 18 Group into the Indian television distribution space. Sun18 was the first pan-India distribution company and aims to become one of the dominant players in the around Rs 16,000...

Even the top 60 citizen websites and bloggers are not filling the information shortfall that has resulted from cutbacks in traditional media, say US researchers. "While many of the blogs and citizen journalism sites have done very interesting and positive things, they are not even close to providing the level of coverage that even financially stressed news organizations do today," said Margaret...

Spain's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reopening of a probe into the death of a Spanish journalist who was hit by US tank fire in Iraq in 2003, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. A spokeswoman said the Supreme Court had accepted an appeal by the family of cameraman Jose Couso and ordered the lower National Court to reopen the investigation into his death. Couso was one of two...

The Russian prosecutor-general’s office has filed an appeal before the supreme court against the acquittal of three men who were accused in connection with the 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya. A jury found the three men not guilty on February 19 at the end of a trial before a Moscow military court. “We point out that the Politkovskaya murder has not been solved,” Reporters...

NowPublic has declared "crowd-powered" news reports of terrorist attacks in Mumbai as a climactic moment in a year in which citizen journalism proved its mettle. The India tragedy heads a list of 'Top 10 Moments In User-Generated News' determined by editors at the Vancouver-based startup. NowPublic's '2008: A Year in User-Generated News' serves as a snapshot and analysis of the seismic shift in...

The struggling US News & World Report is getting out of print and will gradually shift operations to the Web, according to reports. While it will publish one print edition each month, according to staffers briefed on the decision, these will be entirely devoted to consumer guides—such as its annual rankings of colleges and hospitals—and contain no other news, the Washington Post reported. Some...

Authoritarian regimes around the world are dealing with troublesome citizen bloggers by arresting them, and they're doing it more often. "Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big," says Phil

An Iraqi television station accused US troops Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home. The body of a second journalist, Haidar Hashim al-Husseini, a reporter for Al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said. A spokeswoman for the Afaq television channel, according to a Reuters report...

The US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp is the worst prison ever, Sudanese al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj who was released from the prison days ago said Monday, according to a Xinhua report. In a speech broadcast live on Sudanese television, ai-Haj, who returned to Sudan on Friday, said he spent 2,340 days in the "most heinous prison mankind has ever known," and that jailers there insulted...