Press freedom appears to be shrinking in eastern Europe, as evidenced by a series of recent laws constraining free speech rights.

The latest repressive legislation comes out of Slovakia, where a new media law, set to come into practice on June 1, will give anyone named in an article "sweeping rights to an equally prominent rebuttal," reports the Economist. Media watchdogs have condemned the law and Slovakian newspapers are protesting by publishing issues with blank, black-framed front pages.

Right-of-reply rules are common in some European nations, but Slovakia's is the most punitive. While the Slovakian government insists the law will make the media more responsible, the concern is the potential exploitation of the law by Slovakia's Prime Minister, Robert Fico, who has a tumultuous relationship with the media.

Bulgaria and Romania as well have laws on the books that criminalize defamation of public figures. In 2007, 100 cases went to court in Bulgaria for attacks against "honor and dignity," up from 60 the year before. And as of last year, Romania's constitutional court restored legislation making "insult" illegal, although press freedom is also curtailed by the ownership of mainstream media by politically active tycoons.

Moreover, the annual report of Freedom House, a New York-based lobby group, shows the sharpest decline in media freedom in the world in eastern Europe, behind Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Northcliffe-owned daily newspapers in the East Midlands are pooling together resources to publish a new regional business website, thisisbusiness-eastmidlands.co.uk.

Participating papers The Evening Telegraph in Derby, Leicester Mercury, Lincolnshire Echo, Nottingham Evening Post and The Sentinel in Stoke will all provide business stories to the site in an effort to give readers a complete picture of the business events across the region.

The main focus is local, allowing users to search stories by region and providing access to a special commercial property section. The site, however, plans to balance out frequent updates on East Midland business news with a dose of national and international news, which is in line with the recent caution by a Washington Post business columnist that too much local news can be unsophisticated.

Source: HoldtheFrontPage

Last week, Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age wrote that the ombudsman's time may be up, but Guardian journalist Siobhain Butterworth challenges his view. She argues that Dumenco "misses the fact that the ombudsman's role is about self-regulation," thus the issue should be "whether self-regulation is worthwhile" instead of whether the newspaper ombudsman's role is redundant in the digital age.

In the UK, newspaper ombudsmen were "thin on the ground" in March, with several front-page apologies, such as Express to the McCanns and Daily Mail to Sheldon Adelson.

"Because newspapers are also web publishers," writes Butterworth, "discussions about the possibility of regulating the press have to take into account the impracticability of regulating the internet."

Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, told the European parliament in 2006, "We believe that [a] combination of self-regulation and media literacy is the most effective way to regulate content in the new media environment."

The Wall Street Journal's front page has become very political in the four months since Rupert Murdoch took over. Though it isn't news that the WSJ is moving toward a "general news model", the paper is becoming a high-profile paper in the presidential campaign, according to Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, a step in their goal of challenging the New York Times "for national supremacy."

In his first public comments as WSJ publisher, Robert Thomson, former Editor of Murdoch's Times of London, said, "I think American journalism has some soul-searching to do. American newspapers generally have kept up poorly with change... If there's a presumption that what you might call New York Times journalism is the pinnacle of our profession, the profession is in some difficulty." He adds that Murdoch is "clearly interested in challenging the journalistic establishment."

It's been about two years since Cultural Editor of Jyllands-Posten Flemming Rose commissioned and published satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. The cartoons sparked a global debate on Islam and free speech, as well as violence in some countries. In a recent interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Correspondent Jeremy Bransten, Rose believes that there have been positive changes at least inside of Denmark. with 17 papers reprinting the cartoon of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban.

A new opinion poll taken two weeks ago showed that 2/3 of the Danish population now think it was right to publish the cartoons back in 2005. The problem, according to Rose, is that Denmark, including its Muslim population, is ahead in the debate compared to several other countries

"It is between those who support the values embedded in the constitutions of the liberal democracies and those who don't," said Rose, as opposed to the Muslim community and "us."

Rose believes that the change in Denmark is "a combination of several factors" and "definitely the strong stand by the government [to protect freedom of speech] is very important."

Through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, people can keep updated with their friends by posting messages back and forth or by checking status updates. But imagine if the social networking world became 3-D. Based in Menlo Park, California, Vivaty has been creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that people can add to sites where they spend most of their Internet time.

Users will choose pre-existing avatars to represent themselves as they do on services such as Second Life, and navigate through a gothic urban warehouse, seaside villa, or another of the dozen environments. Users will also be able to create their own environment wherever HTML code can be imbedded. Vivaty plans on allowing companies to construct their own virtual rooms with their own décor and messages.

In this virtual space, users may see Facebook photos hanging from walls or a YouTube video playing on a TV. A maximum of 15 users can enter the same room at the same time for "text-based live socializing." This technology does not require downloading any programs.

"We want to take all your content on the Web and move it to a more visually immersive, immediate experience," said Keith McCurdy, Chief Executive at Vivaty and a former Vice President at the big game maker Electronic Arts.

Vivaty has been working on its technology for three years, and this week it will launch a private test period on Facebook.

Recently appointed Executive Editor of Mercury News Dave Butler sent the following memo to the newsroom describing his vision for the newspaper. He states that their mission remains largely focused on "technology and diversity". Some important points that he made:

- The newspaper should not only be the leader for Bay area sister publications, but also the leader of "news experimentation on the Web - trying new ways to satisfy the varying needs of our readers."

- From timeliness of local stories to decision-making, there is a need to pick up the pace. If one story is finished in a day, start working on second or third.

- While making the paper the "most-compelling, interesting, lively and helpful that anyone can get", embrace the "Web-first" distribution philosophy and approach. In other words, create a unified staff instead of separating them into separate print and online groups.

- Readers want " lots of useful information quickly and they want to pick what is most important." It doesn't matter if they read the articles online, just as long as they read it from Mercury News. Consequently, a wide assortment is necessary, "in terms of subject matter, tone, emotional appeal, length and appearance."

- Evolve with the industry, meaning more useful service material, as many higher quality stories with "energy and flair" that can be produced, talking to people more for stories, better organization and planning, telling more stories in Q & A's, more graphics.

Russian investigators have said they have identified - but not caught - the killer of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, whose murder in October 2006 became a symbol of Russian repression against journalists critical of the government.

"The person who directly carried out the crime, the killing of Politkovskaya, has been identified. All measures are being taken to find and detain the person in question," said Vyacheslav Smirnov, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, according to Interfax news agency.

However, in October 2007, the investigator of the case had already mentioned that the presumed killer had been identified.

This news comes in the wake of two TV journalists being murdered in Russia, supposedly in relation to the work they were doing.

Russia and the Kremlin have regularly been criticized for muzzling the free press, as was the case during the last parliamentary elections.

Source: AFP Mail

After several months of public beta testing, the new BBC homepage, with improvements based on viewers' feedback, was recently relaunched.

The feedback, which included suggestions for improvements and reports of bugs, was gathered from a form and comments on blog posts. BBC also created a program of user and marketing research to evaluate the new site with new and regular users of the site.

BBC Future Media and Technology Acting Creative Director Bronwyn van der Merwe notes the changes:

- Visually, font size was reduced, colors were toned down to create a "more compact, space-efficient No-More-Hotel-Bathtubs design."
- Editorially, there are new topics in the "customize your page" panel including Music, iPlayer and Business & Money.
- Improvements on the old site, for example, a "listen again" link to the radio module and national sports feeds to the sports module.
- More customization: choose the color of the page or leave it to pick up the color of the main feature image.

She also says that BBC plans to launch the new visual language to the rest of the site.

Source: Cyberjournalist.net

The 2008 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey found that the job requirements for journalists has changed with the shift from print to online, raising awareness to the commercial side of the business. 1,231 journalists of a variety of media were polled with these findings:

- 57% believe they are being asked to work more today than in the past few years.

Must-read. AJR's Senior Editor Carl Sessions Stepp has noted that while news remains as valuable as ever, journalism is certainly changing as daily newspaper circulation has declined every year since 1987.

Is it time for newspapers to panic? It could be, had Stepp not come up with an expansive list of very good editorial and business ideas for newspapers.

Instead of cutting everything, from staff to newspaper sections, Stepp argues that newspapers should be creating a product that is high quality and indispensable. Journalists need to embrace arriving technologies and make their articles more exciting. But how?

Here's a list of Stepp's ideas, more or less in his words, that could help newspapers recapture "domination of the overall information market":

- A four section daily paper with journalists and readers sharing and discussing news together.
Section 1: a "dynamic, definitive guide" to local news featuring digests, analysis, listings, links, columns and audience contributions; excerpts and synopses of top content appearing elsewhere; and an annotated guide to the top material concerning international, national, regional and local news, sports, business and arts.

Section 2, the most important local, national, and foreign news, fully updated and differentiated from earlier Web copy.

Section 3, an in-depth package that changes everyday, which would present serious, investigative, quality journalism, not available anywhere else.