Companies

NYU professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired News have launched an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero, as the project is called, is to develop a working model of an open newsroom. “An...

Hindustan Times group Editorial Director Vir Sanghvi is joining the INX Media group that has planned a bouquet of news and entertainment channels in different languages. Sanghvi would be the chief executive of the new company and editorial head of the news channels, promoted by Indrani Mukerjea, the chairperson of the venture and the wife of former chief of STAR TV’s India operations Peter...

Yahoo Inc. did not violate Hong Kong’s privacy laws when it provided prosecutors with information about a Chinese reporter accused of leaking state secrets, authorities said Wednesday. Shi Tao, a former journalist for the Dangdai Shangbao or Contemporary Business Newspaper in the central province of Hunan, was sentenced last year to 10 years on charges of leaking state secrets. Shi was alleged to...

US news organisations are under tremendous pressure to find radical new ways to make money as their financial outlooks worsen despite embracing new technology. One way to do it may be to charge Web users for news in a way they cannot avoid -- their Internet access bill, the “State of the News Media 2007” has said. A taxi drives by the New York Times building in Times Square, New York. News outlets...

Journalists have reported extensively on information technology and financial services work migrating offshore. Now it’s their own jobs they can see disappearing over the horizon. In Britain and the US, the so-called outsourced newspaper is becoming a reality. Last Thursday, Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media announced plans to hive off the downtable sub-editing of three of its Irish...

LONDON: In one corner, media titan Rupert Murdoch with his tight grip on pay-TV in Britain. In the other, airline and music entrepreneur Richard Branson, keen to expand his empire by taking some of Murdoch's territory. In the middle are millions of pay-TV viewers who have been deprived of some of the most popular programs on TV. The battle between British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC — 39 percent...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) says it will pay the costs of a Bhutanese newspaper after the paper appealed for international financial aid to allow it to continue publishing. The Bhutan Reporter has been produced and financed since 2004 by a handful of journalists living in seven refugee camps in Nepal who work for no pay. The journalists said they could no longer afford the 2,000...

The Village Voice named its fifth editor in chief in a little over a year yesterday after abruptly firing David Blum from the position on Friday afternoon. Tony Ortega, 43, the editor of The Broward-Palm Beach New Times, an alternative weekly, will take over as editor in chief this week, said Maggie Shnayerson, a spokeswoman for The Village Voice. “I’m just very excited about going to The Voice,”...

Kathmandu, March 6 A unique initiative in Nepal is dying for lack of funds. The Bhutan Reporter is one of the most uncommon media ventures in South Asia. It's a monthly paper brought out by Bhutanese refugees who have been struggling to survive for nearly two decades in seven camps in eastern Nepal. The monthly, a source of sustenance for the over 100,000 refugees and their only voice, is produced...

The newsprint industry is going through a world-wide churn with different trends taking hold in different parts of the world. These trends largely mirror that of the newspaper industry, where Asia is experiencing a new golden age whereas North America and western Europe are at saturation levels. Newsprint capacity in North America has declined from 13.6 million tonnes in 2004 to 12.6 MT in 2006...