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GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Alan Johnston's kidnappers have threatened to "slaughter" him if Hamas tries to rescue him, but Hamas sources say the comments are little more than bluster ahead of an imminent handover of the long-held BBC correspondent. A senior source within the office of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told The Washington Times that in the actual negotiations, the kidnappers have...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - NBC News is reaching into the world of print journalism to help it cover the 2008 presidential election. The network's new division is teaming up with the National Journal Group for reporters who will provide in-depth coverage of the candidates on the campaign trail, beginning late this summer. The staff will be a mix of new hires and existing employees from NBC...

Efforts to win the release of the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston were set back last night when the militants holding him threatened to kill him and said he would not be freed until their demands were met. The warning, from a spokesman for a group calling itself the Army of Islam, came on a day when Hamas officials had suggested Johnston's release was only hours away. "Freeing this detainee...

The extended drama surrounding Rupert Murdoch's unsolicited $5 billion bid to take over family-owned Dow Jones media empire, along with the pending $8.2 billion sale of the Tribune Co. has brought renewed attention to the longstanding debate over media consolidation. While these two high-profile transactions have grabbed the spotlight, they are mere flashpoints in a much larger battle between free...

Despite 200 years of service to Spanish-speaking communities, Spanish-language newspapers' contributions to U.S. journalism have been overlooked. Juan Gonzales is founder/editor of El Tecolote newspaper in San Francisco and he is department chair of journalism at City College of San Francisco. This article is adapted from an earlier contribution to the Journalism History Journal. Historians in the...

Yellow journalism in Brasil is a waste of time because reality is already yellow. The facts themselves provide scandalous newscasts, with no need to add anything. On the contrary, if the press were to dig deeper, an even uglier country would surface. Every day we have a new episode of somebody telling on somebody else. Who remembers Operation Hurricane, replaced on all first pages by Operation...

ISLAMABAD • The chief cleric at a radical mosque in Pakistan's capital Islamabad has issued a death decree against staff at a magazine for publishing a fashion-shoot advertisement entitled "Adam and Eve". Pakistani authorities have been locked in a confrontation with clerics at Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, for months, and the radicals have threatened suicide bomb reprisals if force were used to...

(FLIP/IFEX) - On 14 June 2007, Garrid Muñoz Tello, owner of La Voz del Cinaruco radio station, based in Arauca, the capital of the department of the same name, was murdered in strange circumstances in the city of Villavicencio, capital of the department of Meta. The murder took place in a hotel located on the highway connecting Villavicencio with Bogotá, the national capital. According to a press...

(Media Institute/IFEX) - The Rwanda government on 6 June 2007 ordered the closure of the privately owned "Weekly Post" for unknown reasons. A letter explaining the deregistration on the week-old newspaper by Information Minister Laurent Nkusi said: "After circumspect investigations of the information you had provided when you applied for the registration of an English newspaper, 'The Weekly Post'...

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear has called for "less prevarication and more action" after the Government admitted it had not taken any action to prosecute soldiers responsible for the death of NUJ member Terry Lloyd in Iraq in 2003. Solicitor General Mike O'Brien, responding to a Parliamentary Question tabled by the NUJ's cross-party group of MPs said the case was "still under active review" but...