Category Archives: Newspapers & magazines

Thousands to march in Moscow in support of Russian journalist

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Ivan Golunov who reports on corruption was arrested on controversial drug dealing charges

Thousands of protesters are to march in Moscow in support of Ivan Golunov, an investigative journalist arrested on controversial drug-dealing charges that are widely seen as an attempt to silence his reports on corruption.

More than 20,000 people have so far expressed an interest on Facebook in attending the march on Wednesday, which has not been sanctioned by the authorities. The protest will pass by the headquarters of the FSB state security service, before ending outside the interior ministry, which oversees the work of the police. Protests were also expected to take place in a number of other towns and cities across Russia, as calls grew for the charges against Golunov to be dropped.

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Google made $4.7bn from news sites in 2018, study claims

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News Media Alliance says revenue was almost as much as that of entire online news industry, although some question methodology

Google made $4.7bn in advertising from news content last year, almost as much as the revenue of the entire online news industry, according to a study released on Monday.

According to the News Media Alliance, between 16% and 40% of Google search results are news content. Google’s revenue from its distribution of news content is only $400m less than the $5.1bn brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising last year.

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Russian journalist Ivan Golunov ‘beaten by police in custody’

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Doctor says investigative reporter may have suffered concussion and broken ribs

A Russian investigative journalist arrested on controversial drug charges has been severely beaten in custody, his lawyer has said.

A doctor who inspected Ivan Golunov said he may have suffered broken ribs, concussion and a haematoma.

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Chinese government blocks Guardian website

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Censorship comes after bans on Washington Post, NBC, HuffPost and Wikipedia

The Guardian’s website has been blocked in China, amid a crackdown by the country’s authorities on international news websites to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Chinese government has regularly restricted coverage of the incident, where the military turned on protesters in Beijing who were taking part in nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations.

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Nigeria accused of ‘scurrilous’ attempt to gag press

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Access to country’s law-making National Assembly will be restricted, says Guild of Editors

Strict new conditions for covering government proceedings and the re-arrest of a prominent journalist on terrorism charges have raised concerns about deteriorating press freedom in Nigeria.

To be permitted to report on the country’s National Assembly, the highest law-making authority, journalists will now have to prove that their media outlet has a daily circulation of 40,000 copies or online media 5,000 daily views.

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Guardian spurs media outlets to consider stronger climate language

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Use of terms ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’ prompts reviews in other newsrooms

The Guardian’s decision to alter its style guide to better convey the environmental crises unfolding around the world has prompted some other media outlets to reconsider the terms they use in their own coverage.

After the Guardian announced it would now routinely use the words “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” instead of “climate change”, a memo was sent by the standards editor of CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, to staff acknowledging that a “recent shift in style at the British newspaper the Guardian has prompted requests to review the language we use in global warming coverage”.

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Northern Cyprus judge acquits two journalists of insulting Erdoğan

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Press freedom watchdog hails ruling by court in Turkish-occupied territory

Press freedom defenders have reacted with jubilation after a judge in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus acquitted two journalists accused of insulting Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

A court threw out charges of defamation against Şener Levent and Ali Osman Tabak brought after the small-circulation daily Afrika published a cartoon depicting a Greek statue urinating on Erdoğan’s head.

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Financial Times pulls out of gala honouring Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

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Corporate boycott of New York event grows after campaign by LGBT rights activists

The Financial Times has pulled its involvement in an event honouring Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, after a campaign by LGBT rights activists against the celebration of the self-declared homophobe.

The recently elected South American leader is due to be honoured at the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce’s person of the year gala dinner, which is scheduled to take place in New York later this month.

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Jeremy Hunt: Russian TV station a ‘weapon of disinformation’

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Foreign secretary’s press freedom day speech ramps up British assault on RT

Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt will on Thursday declare the Russian government-owned TV station RT to be a “weapon of disinformation” in a speech to mark World Press Freedom Day.

The comments, to an audience in Ethiopia, mark an escalation of a British ministerial assault on the standards of the Russian broadcaster, originally known as Russia Today, which had faced repeated investigations into its output by the media regulator Ofcom.

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Halima Aden becomes first model to wear a burkini in Sports Illustrated

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Born in a Kenyan refugee camp, the Muslim Somali-American model returned to her birth country for historic photoshoot

Somali-American model Halima Aden has become the first Muslim model to appear in Sports Illustrated magazine wearing a hijab and burkini. She appeared in the swimsuit edition, out in May, wearing a number of different colourful burkinis.

The model told the BBC: “Young girls who wear a hijab should have women they look up to in any and every industry.

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Trump one chapter of bad fiction in America’s true history, White House correspondents’ dinner told

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‘When you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy’, Pultitzer-winning historian Ron Chernow tells Trump-free event

As Donald Trump flailed his arms and railed against the media at a raucous campaign rally on Saturday night, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian delivered an elegantly scathing rebuke at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner.

America the split screen nation – so evident in polarised reactions to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference – was on vivid display again in two speeches.

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The Observer view on extraditing Julian Assange | Observer editorial

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Sending the WikiLeaks founder to face charges in the US would be a disaster for press freedom

It’s not difficult to despise Julian Assange. For seven years, he has attempted to evade rape and sexual assault charges in Sweden by seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has dismissed the charges as a “radical feminist conspiracy” and tried to smear the complainants as acting on behalf of the CIA. His excuse for refusing to face trial in Sweden – that he would then face extradition to the US – has always been hogwash. He is no safer from extradition in Britain than he would have been in Sweden, as he may soon discover.

There are questions to be asked about WikiLeaks, too. The organisation has been invaluable in allowing whistleblowers to safely publish documents that the authorities would rather have kept hushed up, from the truth about the commodity trader Trafigura’s devastating dumping of chemical waste in Ivory Coast to videos of US helicopter attacks on Iraqi civilians. It is, or certainly was in its early days, an important tool in cutting down to size those in power who would abuse their power.

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Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar

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Murdoch-owned paper published front page that Yemeni American Merchants Association says ‘provoked hatred’

A group of New York corner-store owners has announced a boycott on the sale of the New York Post, arguing that the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s attacks on the congresswoman Ilhan Omar are making Muslim Americans less safe.

On Thursday, the Post published a front page featuring an image of the World Trade Center towers in flames on 11 September 2001 and a quote suggesting that Omar, a Somali American congresswoman from Minnesota who wears a hijab, had minimized the seriousness of the terror attacks in a speech last month.

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Saudis hacked Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’s phone, says company’s security adviser

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Chief executive allegedly targeted because he owns Washington Post, where Jamal Khashoggi was columnist

The security chief for Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, says the Saudi government had access to Bezos’s phone and gained private information from it.

Gavin de Becker, Bezos’s longtime security consultant, said he had concluded his investigation into the publication in January of leaked text messages between Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a former television anchor whom the US National Enquirer tabloid newspaper said Bezos was dating.

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Bolsonaro under fire for smearing reporter who covered scandal involving his son

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‘Bolsonaro is Fake News’ became a top hashtag in Brazil after president shared ‘false information’ to attack a journalist

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has provoked a storm of protest after sharing fake news to attack a journalist who has covered a scandal involving a former aide of his son Flávio, a senator who is also under investigation for money laundering.

Leading newspapers, the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association and the Brazilian Bar Association, criticised the far-right president for sharing a “misrepresentation” and “false information”.

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Kylie Jenner’s makeup makes her the world’s youngest billionaire

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Youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner reality TV family tops Mark Zuckerberg by two years

Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of just 21.

Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23 in 2008.

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Freed photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid reunited with family – video

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The Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, was jailed in 2013 for reporting on anti-government protests. Today, after almost six years, he was finally released. 'I feel like I am flying,' he said as he was reunited with family and friends

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‘Centuries of entitlement’: Emma Thompson on why she quit Lasseter film

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In her resignation letter from the film Luck, the actor questions whether any company should work with disgraced film executive John Lasseter

When the actor Emma Thompson left the forthcoming animated film Luck last month while it was still in production, it was done without public fanfare, and was only confirmed when film-industry publications such as Variety magazine picked up on it. Now Thompson has put herself firmly above the MeToo parapet with the publication publishing her incendiary letter of resignation addressed to the film’s backers, Skydance Media, one of Hollywood’s most prestigious studios.

It was known that Thompson was unhappy with the arrival in January of former head of Pixar John Lasseter as the new head of Skydance Animation. But the letter goes into extraordinary detail about her disquiet over the appointment of a studio executive whose downfall had been one of the key landmarks of the Me Too and Times Up campaigns.

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Univision’s Jorge Ramos detained in Venezuela after Maduro interview, network says

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Anchor, who has reportedly been released, asked question embattled leader did not approve of, according to Univision executive

The Univision anchor Jorge Ramos has been detained in the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, the network announced on Monday evening.

The Mexican-born journalist was interviewing Venezuela’s embattled president Nicolás Maduro when he and his crew were detained after asking a question the combative Maduro did not approve of, according to a tweet by the network’s US president, Daniel Coronell. The team’s equipment had also been confiscated, Coronell said.

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Serena Williams cartoon not racist, Australian media watchdog rules

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Herald Sun newspaper’s depiction of player ‘spitting the dummy’ at US Open had been widely condemned

A Herald Sun cartoon that depicted Serena Williams jumping in the air and “spitting the dummy” after losing a match to Naomi Osaka was not racist, the Press Council has found.

The News Corp cartoon came under global condemnation in September last year for publishing what some saw as a racist, sexist cartoon.

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