Chinese officials are denying reports they’re keeping dossiers on foreign journalists who are planning on covering the Beijing Olympics, reported the Associated Press. The the Beijing Games open in less than nine months. Chinese officials are attempting to back away from widely published comments (Such as Agence France-Presse story) that the communist government is assembling…
Media in the Arab world are “suffering from four major defects”, the director-general of Al Jazeera warned at a Media & Marketing conference in Dubai, reported Arabian Business. Wadah Khanfar said that 24-hour news was “obsessed by breaking news”, suffering from a “severe lack of historical context”, was “betraying” the masses, and should focus on…
Unions are starting to speak up against the latest CanWest newsroom cutbacks, which they argue will erode local news coverage. But where are the people who read/watch the news, and use it to help make decisions? When threats were perceived to California newspapers in recent years, in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, politicians, businesspeople and…
Hello? Hello! Is anybody reading this stuff? Does anybody care? Or are Canadians — and the Canadian journalists who ought to be especially concerned here — really a bunch of sheep? Comment, already. If you won’t/can’t scream, picket or write to your MPs, for Pete’s sake at least comment — just click the mouse and…
Canada’s federal broadcast regulator will consider the issue of a subscriber fee to fund the operations of conventional over-the-air broadcasters, reported CBC. The decision to consider such a fee, to be paid by cable and satellite firms to carry the signals of conventional broadcasters, is a reversal of a position the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications…
Deb Jones tracks the story of a New Brunswick newspaper family’s legal struggle against an ex-employee who allegedly stole their publishing secrets and now wants to start a competing newspaper.
As it continues to lose operations money and to cut journalism jobs, media conglomerate CanWest Global reported a Q4 rise in its net profits, to $197 million from $155 million, said a Canadian Press report. The company — which in some Canadian markets such as on British Columbia’s south coast enjoys a near-monopoly on print…
There are reports that Iran’s supreme court will soon rule in the case of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photographer , who died in a Tehran prison in June 2003. An Agence France-Presse report from Tehran cites the Kazemi family lawyer as a source, quoting from a news agency in Iran. The lawyer, Mohammad Seifzadeh,, is…
A coalition of 18 artist and business groups from across Canada has asked Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner to rein in the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC, under chairman Konrad von Finckenstein, has made a series of market-oriented decisions that marks a drift toward deregulation, the groups said. — From a story on…
“What do you think when you hear someone like Naomi Wolf comparing America to a fascist state? If you were reporting about her arguments and claims, how would you proceed?” Those questions are from a must-read column by Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark. Good questions. Better yet is the sage advice he offers in response to…