On the anniversary of the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Reporters Without Borders staged a ceremony at the Trocadero human rights plaza in Paris. The press rights group displayed photos of Vladimir Putin and Politkovskaya alongside 18 coffins representing the 18 journalists killed in connection with their work in Russia since Putin became president…
Global television, part of the CanWest conglomerate, is laying off a total of 200 people, the company said Thursday. It’s part of the broadcaster’s plan to update the technology in four centres, in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto. A Canadian Press report said news-gathering staff is being cut in the Maritimes and in Quebec. A…
“Stop the presses!” leads a Canadian Press story, uncharacteristically. An excerpt:Stephen Harper sat down for a news conference with the national media on Wednesday. The prime minister temporarily put aside his well-documented disdain for the Ottawa press corps and fielded a variety of questions in a wide-ranging news conference on Parliament Hill. That wouldn’t normally…
Some time soon, I think, we’re all going to have to scrap the term “online” and agree on a new way to describe news presented on the Internet instead of through what we used to call print, audio and video formats. Meanwhile, the force of the change from traditional to Internet media formats is evident…
I’ve encountered no more brutal assignments than those about suicide. Nobody seems to have found a way to entirely reconcile the gap between private grief and public information, and it’s interesting — and a little disturbing — that Britain’s Press Complaints Commission is attempting to restrict coverage of suicide. The Guardian this week has a…
This week the U.S. will preview five stamps featuring 20th Century journalists. A press notice of an Oct. 5 press conference names them: war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998); John Hersey (1914-1993), whose most famous work, was Hiroshima; CBS correspondent George Polk (1913-1948), killed while reporting on corruption involving U.S. aid in Greece after WW II;…
The official name is ‘Union of Myanmar’, but media outlets appear split on what to call the Southeast Asian nation once known as Burma. The BBC and the Bangkok Post steadfastly stick to Burma, while the Globe and Mail uses Myanmar, stating the name better reflects pre-colonial terminology. There’s power in the act of naming,…
Buried in the despair of a U.S. media-industry roundup — to which it devotes an extraordinarily long and justifiably depressing introduction — the Columbia Journalism Review presents some interesting ideas about non-profit journalism. Excerpts: “Never has there been a greater need for independent, original, credible information about our complex society and the world at large.…
American journalist Seymour Hersh has much to say In a Q&A interview about the Internet’s impact on journalism: “There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we…
“Paying an Author and Putting Her Down” is a report in the New York Times about Naomi Klein’s odd appearance in the National Post. The Post paid for the rights to run excerpts of Klein’s recent book and thus aided her success. Then, it ran those excerpts beside commentary trashing Klein (example: at worst, “her…