As Microsoft kicked off the global launch Tuesday of its long-awaited Windows Vista, the software giant’s new operating system also hit the streets of China - in pirated form. In an electronic market in Shenzhen, scores of sellers were offering the brand new software for as little as CNY 10 (EUR 1.00), along with Microsoft Office, anti-virus software, and others. The sellers said Vista was available even several weeks before its launch, although they would not say how they got hold of the version. Described as the ‘official version of the new generation operating system’ on its cover, the pirated copy offered an identification code at the back of the disc for downloading the software. Vista, an operating system that took five years and $6 billion to develop, hit the shops in 70 countries around the world Tuesday. Counterfeiting remains widespread in China, despite government efforts to control the problem, writes Middle East Times.
Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday. Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets. Asked whether he regretted the decision, Brin admitted yesterday: ‘On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.’ Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe. (Media Guardian,January 30, 2007)
More US teachers are using national and international online news sites in the classroom, leaving behind newspapers that fail to grasp the internet’s importance in trying to reach students, a study found. Fifty-seven percent of teachers use internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, said the study released on Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education. That compares with 31 percent for national television news, and 28 percent for daily papers. Local television news, at 13 percent, was at the bottom of the list, the study found. ‘Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records,’ one teacher said in the study. (Reuters,January 30, 2007)
China has reacted angrily to plans by Japanese nationalists to make a documentary describing as a myth the massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937. The film, entitled The Truth About Nanjing, will insist that the massacre never took place, despite evidence presented at the postwar Tokyo war crimes tribunals that Japanese troops slaughtered at least 142,000 people when they invaded Nanjing, then the capital of nationalist China. Tokyo’s rightwing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, is one of several leading politicians to have come out in support of the film, directed by Satoru Mizushima, who heads a nationalist satellite TV channel. The film will be funded by public donations and should appear before the end of this year, the 70th anniversary of what many historians have described as an orgy of rape, pillage and murder by Japanese imperial army troops. It is one of several films about the Nanjing massacre set for release this year. Nanking, a US production featuring Woody Harrelson, won critical acclaim earlier this month at the Sundance film festival for its first-person accounts of the massacre. In addition, Chinese authorities reportedly plan to make their own version based on Iris Chang’s bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking. (The Guardian,January 26, 2007)
Google Inc. said on Monday it would expand testing of its much-anticipated video advertising system by working with two major music labels to embed video ads on websites that make money running them. Google said it would distribute advertising alongside videos from Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group over its AdSense online ad system to website publishers in a four-week test now underway. The test with the two music labels follows an earlier public trial of Google’s video advertising system with Viacom’s MTV Networks, which provided music videos to run on a select number of websites running Google ads. As part of the test, advertisements would be billed on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model, the traditional billing method for mass market advertising as opposed to the pay-per-click billing model Google popularised with text ads. Google has been pushing ahead in recent months to expand beyond its hugely successful text-advertising system into new advertising formats including video, radio and mobile phones. (Reuters,January 24, 2007)
A 17-year-old suspect was being held Sunday under heavy security in the shooting death of Hrant Dink, a Turkish journalist of Armenian descent, a killing that has intensified the debate in Turkey on the sensitive topics of national identity and freedom of expression during an important election year. The suspect, Ogun Samast, was captured Saturday night after his father recognised him from a surveillance camera photo shown by the media and alerted the authorities. According to the state-run Anatolia news agency, the chief prosecutor, said Sunday that Samast had been caught in possession of the gun used to kill Dink and had confessed to the brazen daylight attack. Dink, 52, the editor of the weekly bilingual newspaper Agos, was shot three times in the neck and head as he left work on a busy commercial avenue Friday. In his confession, according to the Dogan News Agency, Samast told the police that he had been reading Dink’s columns via the internet from Trabzon and did not like what he was reading and so ‘decided to kill him.’ (International Herald Tribune,January 22, 2007)
The number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger percentage of overall traffic to those sites, according to data released on Wednesday.
Unique visitors to blog sites affiliated with the largest Internet newspapers rose to 3.8 million in December 2006 from 1.2 million viewers a year earlier, tracking firm Nielsen//NetRatings said. Link
The co-founders of internet telephone service Skype Tuesday unveiled their new project, which they hope will transform the broadcasting industry. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype for USD 2.6bn (EUR 2bn)) to eBay in 2005, have been developing the new service, to deliver high-quality live television over the internet. Previously codenamed the Venice Project, the new service called Joost will evolve from its beta testing phase to a full launch within six months. Chief executive Fredrik de Wahl said Joost would combine the best features of broadcast television - a near-DVD quality and full-screen picture - with the strengths of the internet, such as the ability to create personalised channels, chat to like-minded viewers and reschedule programmes on the move. Initially, Joost will concentrate on licensed shows from content partners rather than user-generated content and unofficial uploads. Most of its revenues will come from advertising, with viewers forced to watch targeted spots. Joost users will be able to watch established channels or choose something from a large content library, using special search and filtering software, reports Media Guardian.
Joost are looking for beta-testers. Sign up here
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the bans imposed since the start of the month by Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey on the latest issue of the French bimonthly magazine Historia Thématique, which is about fundamentalism and has as its subhead, ‘The major religions confront their old demons.’ The Tunisian authorities announced their ban on 10 January, saying it was due to a picture showing the Prophet Mohammed, which is ‘formally forbidden in Islam.’ The picture in fact comes from an illustrated copy of the Koran dating from 1583 that is in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. The January issue of Historia, a monthly produced by the same publishing house, has been on sale without any problem although it has an illustration showing Mohammed in partially animal form (with feathers and the tail of a fish). Historia editor Pierre Baron said that the reaction to the Historia Thématique issue was indicative of the current climate of intolerance. He pointed out that the issue was also about Christian and Jewish fundamentalism. (Reporters Without Borders,January 15, 2007)
YouTube is considering creating a linear TV channel compiled from the video clips submitted by its users. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, the vice-president of content, Kevin Donahue, said the company had been considering the idea of a creating TV shows and might even extend that into a full channel. Donahue also said the firm had been contacted by companies interested in a YouTube show, though he said the idea was not a priority. US broadcaster CBS has already set up a video competition that will be hosted by YouTube. The 15 Seconds campaign asks users to submit video of ‘whatever they want to say to the world’. The five best entries will be chosen every two weeks to run on CBS.com, and will later be broadcast on national TV. (Media Guardian,January 15, 2007)
Two newspaper editors were fined for publishing a letter that said violence against Jews was justified and that the Holocaust was acceptable. State Prosecutor Mika Illman said Uusimaa, a small regional newspaper, and the Kansan Uutiset left-wing paper broke the law in July by publishing the letter by Usko Takkumaki, which criticised Jews and Israel. A regional court found the two editors guilty of inciting racial hatred. The editor of Uusimaa was fined USD 1,300 (EUR 998) on Monday, and the editor of Kansan Uutiset, who had not seen the letter before it was published, was fined USD 500 (EUR 384). Takkumaki also was fined USD 740 (EUR 568). (AP, ABC News,January 10, 2007)
The major shareholder in the French daily Libération has presented a reorganisation plan to rescue it from bankruptcy. Millionaire banker Edouard de Rothschild’s plan has succeeded in attracting new investors to the celebrated newspaper. They include the Italian media magnate Carlo Caracciolo, who will take a large stake, and the French philosopher and writer Bernhard-Henri Levy among smaller investors. Libération has a circulation of about 140,000 copies and was set up in 1973 by a group of Maoists including the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. A total of 15 million euros will be injected into the ailing paper, which looks set to make a loss of some 13 million euros in 2006. The reorganisation involves the loss of a quarter of the 276 jobs at Libération but it is hoped the cutbacks will enable the paper to break even in 2007. (Radio Netherlands,January 08, 2007)
Today’s French Frontpages
 Sixty years ago on Thursday, Germany’s top newsmagazine Der Spiegel went on sale at newsstands around the country. For decades, the weekly Der Spiegel has been the leader in investigative journalism in Germany. As one of Germany’s most influential news sources - it held almost a monopoly on forming German public opinion in the postwar decades - the magazine has revealed numerous scandals and shaped politics like no other German media outlet. Keeping up with changing times, it was in 1994 the first magazine in the world to go online. But the magazine also came under criticism, especially for breaking one of the publications long-standing cardinal rules: never fraternize with the powerful. Besides the critique about pandering to politicians, there are also accusations about more sensationalism and increasing amounts of fluff. Still, the magazine manages to both mesmerize and polarize German society. Smart marketing seduces readers into wanting ‘the whole truth’ each Monday when they can find the new issue on newsstands, even if it’s been years since Der Spiegel actually uncovered a big scandal.
www.spiegel.de
Fifteen years after he stood down as the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev is to return to the international arena as a journalist. The 75-year-old statesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner will write a monthly column that will be reprinted in newspapers around the world. His first article will appear later this month under the terms of a deal he has struck with The New York Times Syndicate. Since leaving public office, Gorbachev has created a Moscow-based think tank, the Gorbachev Foundation, which promotes study and debate on international issues such as globalisation, climate change, weapons of mass destruction, and poverty. The former Communist leader is likely to take up those issues in his columns. Gorbachev first showed a public interest in journalism in 1993 when he used some of his 1990 Nobel award to help set up a bi-weekly investigative newspaper called Novaya Gazeta, the publication that employed Anna Politkovskaya, the reporter who was murdered last October. Last year Gorbachev purchased a 49 per cent stake in Novaya Gazeta.
See my post “Gorbachev buys stake in Russian newspaper”
Today’s Russian Frontpages:
France’s National Space Studies Centre (CNES) is to put its UFO archive online this spring. A group within the organisation known as the Rare Aerospace Phenomena Study Department (SEPRA) has been collecting reports of UFO sightings and now has over 6,000 documents relating to ’strange sightings’. Jacques Arnould, project leader at CNES, said that the organisation will put its whole archives online for world viewing by mid-February. The reports cover some 1,200 UFO sightings within French national borders, and represent 30 years of investigations. All names will be excised from the records before they go online to protect the privacy of the reporters. (VNU Net,January 04, 2007)
On New Year’s Day an era came to a close as the world’s oldest newspaper went out of print. The Swedish Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (Post and Domestic Newspapers) has been churning out announcements since 1645. But from now on, following a parliamentary decree, the newspaper will only be available online. In 1645 Queen Kristina and her advisor, Axel Oxenstierna, were urged by the state to ward off rumour-mongers by starting a newspaper to cover foreign events from a Swedish perspective. At the end of the eighteenth century Gustaf III awarded the Swedish Academy the right to publish the newspaper. This principle still holds firm today, with the Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl currently holding the position of editor. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar is the official organ of Sweden. It is also unique in that it is the country’s only source of nationwide public announcements, such as bankruptcies, debt rescheduling and executive auctions, according to the newspaper’s home page. As of January 1 the newspaper is published on the Swedish Companies Registration Office website, writes the local. In Denmark we still have Berlingske Tidende: Click here to read the full version of the first edition from 1749.
Yesterday new regulations made it easier to be correspondent in China. Reuters was the first foreign media to report in other Chinese cities besides Beijing and Shanghai without application to authorities.
The Reuters report said “foreign journalists had needed government permission to report outside their home base — usually Beijing or Shanghai - but under the new rules, which came into force on Monday, they need only the agreement of the person they are interviewing.”
Foreign media reacted instantly to the new regulations. The National Broadcasting Co. (NBC) of the United States decided to send journalists to China; The Associated Press planned to hire Chinese to enhance its China reports; The number of New York Times journalists in China rose to five, making its Chinese office the biggest one in Asia.
As of 2007, Arabic will be the 29th language in which the international all-music MTV television will broadcast its musical repertoire. The Dubai-based al-Arabiya Television network has just signed an accord with MTV Networks International to launch MTV Arabiya in 2007. The announcement of an Arabic channel had been made last summer but MTV reportedly lacked a local partner until now. The new MTV Arabiya, a free-to-air channel, will broadcast 24 hours a day entertainment and music programmes for young viewers in the Middle East - a significant audience considering that approximately half of the area’s population is under 25. Atn producers in Dubai have said that the channel will also broadcast local programmes. The network should be launched in the second half of 2007 and will challenge two Middle Eastern music and entertainment giants - Rotana TV and Melody Music. (AKI News,January 02, 2007)
At least 81 reporters were killed in 2006, the highest toll in more than a decade, with Iraq once again proving the deadliest place for journalists, media watchdog Reporters without Borders (RSF) said on Sunday. In its annual report, RSF said 32 media assistants were also killed this year, at least 871 reporters arrested and at least 1,472 attacks or threats against the media registered around the world - a new record. RSF said it was the worst year for journalists since 1994, when 103 reporters died as a direct result of their work, almost half of them during the genocide in Rwanda. In 2005, 63 reporters were killed against 53 in 2004 and 40 in 2003. A separate report by the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists said earlier this month that 55 journalists were killed as a result of their work during 2006, against 47 in 2005. Another 27 deaths were possibly work-related, it said. Media organisations produce different death tolls partly because they use different criteria to classify reporters. (Reuters Alert Net,January 02, 2007)
Iraq to launch investigation into clandestine execution video
The Iraqi government has announced it will launch an investigation into the guards who taunted and filmed Saddam Hussein during his execution. The authorities say the video has turned his execution into a TV show which will only serve to increase sectarian violence in Iraq. The clandestine recording, which was made with a mobile phone, was posted on the internet this weekend. While Saddam Hussein was standing on the trapdoor with the noose being fastened around his neck, guards insulted him and told him he was going to hell. The Iraqi government is especially eager to find out how someone managed to smuggle in a mobile phone while this was specifically forbidden. (Radio Netherlands, January 02, 2007)
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