Wednesday, 7 August 2013

Australia’s Richest Person Loses Media Source Case

Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart. (Bloomberg Photo)
By Agence France-Presse on 10:55 am August 7, 2013.
Sydney. Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart has lost a long-running legal bid to force a media group to hand over their source material in a messy dispute over her family’s mining fortune.

Rinehart had been trying to force West Australian Newspapers to surrender all letters, faxes, emails, legal advice, memos, text messages and recordings between their journalist Steve Pennells and her son, John Hancock.

Tuesday, 6 August 2013

As Newspapers and Magazines Struggle, Companies in Other Industries Are Hiring Journalists, Getting Into the Media Business. Why?

By Dan Lyons (Marketing fellow, HubSpot)
Not long ago the idea of a journalist going to work inside a company to do anything other than PR was pretty much unheard of. But lately every time you turn around you hear about another reporter take a job with a title like "director of content" and a role that involves leading some company's publishing efforts and/or becoming a writer of record for their brand.

IBM hired a reporter from BusinessWeek. Qualcomm hired one from USA Today. GE and LinkedIn hired journalists from Forbes. In the past few months Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, two big venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, hired journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Wired, respectively. Full disclosure: I'm the former technology editor at Newsweek, and now I'm a "marketing fellow" at HubSpot, a software company in Cambridge, Mass.

The Journalist and the Creative: An Unlikely Marriage

By Macaela Mackenzie
As a (very) recent college grad I was happy to land such a good gig at Ketchum, especially in such a tough economy for job seekers with little to no experience. But as a trained journalist, I was a little hesitant about crossing over to the "dark side", a.k.a. the world of public relations.

In the tight-knit circle of journalists, the world of PR and media relations is often dismissed as the place where the importance of writing skills, development of creative voice, real reporting gumption and compelling content production go to die. You’d be hard pressed to find a journalist who doesn’t roll his or her eyes each time a new press release rolls across their desk, and I’ve heard countless media relations professionals complain about how hard it is to find a member of the media who they can partner with easily. Even as a student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I was surprised to find so little overlap between journalism and marketing programs. The battle lines had been drawn. Journalist or Marketer: choose your sides, kids.

Saturday, 6 July 2013

VIEW : Electronic media and journalism as a career — Syed Kamran Hashmi

Ordinary Pakistanis started taking interest in talk shows as it provided them a place where the ‘untouchables’ were made answerable to people

Genuinely, my heart goes out
to traditional journalists in Pakistan. Notwithstanding the presence of some powerful news editors, the young graduates, unfortunately, choose one of the most neglected professions in the country, a profession that is regarded as an important pillar of democracy and the ‘fourth estate’. As Pakistan is repeatedly ranked on top of the list of the most dangerous countries for journalists, their job situation, to be honest, is extremely precarious, besides being discomfiting and demoralising for most of them.

NAJAM SETHI COMES BACK TO GEO TV

ISLAMABAD: After a stint away from the television screen, senior journalist and analyst Najam Sethi was back on air on Geo TV Friday.

His popular program Aapas Ki Baat was aired at 8.05 pm with Muneeb Farooq as the program host. On the show Sethi spoke mainly of his experiences as the caretaker Chief Minister of Punjab,a charge he assumed in the run-up to the May 11 elections. He also talked about the civil-military imbalance and drones.

Last month Sethi was named the interim chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB).

Thursday, 21 February 2013

Indo-Pak journalists want special visas


Chandigarh, Feb 20, 2013, (PTI):
Journalists from India and Pakistan today urged upon their respective governments to introduce special visas for scribes, allowing them to travel freely in either country with minimum visa restrictions.
At a conference here, it was agreed between Lahore and Chandigarh Press Clubs that contact between the journalistic fraternity of the two neighbours must continue and regular exchange of media delegations must ensue.

The fifth Panj Darya Media Conference hosted by the Chandigarh Press Club here, in which 32 journalists from Pakistan under the banner of Lahore Press Club participated, appealed to both governments to liberalise travel rules for journalists by issuing special visas and ensuring free flow of information and ideas between scribes of the two nations.

Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Burma offers visas to journalists


Reporters will be able to work in Burma for up to a year under new regulations aimed at ensuring wider press freedom
Kate Hodal in Rangoon

guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 February 2013 18.29 GMT



President Thein Sein has initiated extensive political and economic reforms in a country formerly ruled for five decades by a military junta. Photograph: AP

Foreign reporters will soon be able to work for up to a year in Burma on short and long-term journalist visas after new regulations were introduced aimed at ensuring wider press freedom.

The new rules are intended to give local and foreign reporters greater access to government officials and will come into effect around mid-April, deputy minister for information and presidential spokesman U Ye Htut said told the Guardian.

Not “Them Versus Us” For Americans And Pakistanis – OpEd


By CGNews -- (February 20, 2013)
By Daud Malik

A Gallup Pakistan poll released on 15 February 2013 shows 92 per cent of Pakistanis disapprove of US leadership. Similarly, a recent report by the Pew Research Centre said roughly three out of four Pakistanis consider the United States an enemy — up from 69 per cent last year and 64 per cent three years ago.

If polls and perceptions are to be believed, Pakistan and the United States seem worlds apart when it comes to how to tackle the question of war and peace because a trust deficit dominates their tense bilateral ties. However, when ordinary Pakistanis and Americans meet, they bring down many stereotypes about each other, narrating stories that are different than the popular perceptions. This is also the story of Arasalan Asad, a senior producer and reporter with Pakistan Television (PTV).

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Women journalists make a mark

Against all odds, feisty women journalists continue to be undeterred by threats of persecution
Accepting the challenge: Sabba and Shumaima Rehman.


Women journalists routinely face harassment and threats, including death threats while covering conflict zones everywhere, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet these feisty women continue to swim against the tide and create space for themselves in journalism.
Farida Nekzad, 40, is a role model for many girls keen on pursuing journalism in Afghanistan today. She has faced threats of kidnapping, acid attacks and even an attempt to blow up her apartment ever since she set up her own news agency eight years ago in Kabul. Despite the fact that the Taliban routinely bombards her with threatening e-mails and phone calls warning her of horrendous consequences if she continues her work, Nekzad remains undeterred.

How journalists can use petition site Change.org to source stories

A look at how Change.org, which carries petitions from individuals across the world, can be used by journalists to find the first-person stories driving the campaigns
Posted: 15 February 2013 By: 

The campaigns featured on petition site Change.org cover issues from across the globe, ranging from petitions about local services to subjects on more of a national scale.

Contained within those campaigns are often the stories of the individuals who have initiated the petition, and so for journalists, the campaigns can help highlight the human impact behind the headlines.

In this feature senior campaigner at Change.org Katherine Sladden, outlines the different ways the site can be used by journalists. This follows last week's Journalism.co.uk podcast on campaigning journalism last week which Sladden contributed to.