The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof reports on the two Swedish journalists serving and 11-year prison sentence in Ethiopia.

PBS Media Shift has published a guide to crowdfunding public media projects.

Gavin Aronsen describes being one of the six journalists arrested at the Occupy Oakland protests.

A former editor of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown, has given $30 million on behalf of her late husband to establish an institute for media innovation at Standford and Columbia, reports Poynter.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service

by Hannah Vinter

Twitter has announced that it will begin selectively blocking Tweets in some countries.

"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country -- while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."

Twitter writes that it will withhold access to Tweets in certain countries "if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity". As an example of illegal material it names pro-Nazi content, which is outlawed in France and Germany.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Starting from the current issue The Economist will have a weekly section devoted to China, the paper's leader announced.

This is the first time since 1942, when the a US section was introduced, that the news magazine is dedicating an entire section to a single country, the article explained. Thematic sections and blogs as well as specific columns are usually focused on a geographical area, as Banyan, the blog dedicated to Asia, which takes its name from the Banyan tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment and Gujarati merchants used to conduct business.

The name for China blog has not yet been decided and the paper invited readers to send suggestions. It will ideally need to agree with the style and 19th-century origins of the other sections and columns names, from Bagehot, the column dedicated to Britain, which takes its name from Walter Bagehot, British constitutional expert and early editor of The Economist, to Baobab, the section focused on Africa and Middle East which owes its name to the African tree.

The reason for dedicating a whole section to just one country lies in the role of global superpower that China is gaining on economic as well as political level, The Economist explained.

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Why human filters are the future of the web: the importance of role of real editors rather than algorithms online.

Latest numbers indicate New York Times traffic is flat since the paywall was implemented, says BuzzFeed (via Poynter).

Reporters Without Borders reported that blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad, who had been detained for 10 months on a charge of insulting the armed forces, was released on 24 January. His release was reported on Twitter by his brother Mark.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

"It's impossible to have editorial freedom without financial independence," said Aboubakr Jamai, founder and editor of Moroccan weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire, opening the business-focused session of the 5th Arab Free Press Forum, which also included Jacek Utko of Bonnier Business Press.

Many obstacles to successful news publication in the Arab World are receding, said Mohammed Alayyan, founder and publisher of Al-Ghad Daily, the first independent paper in Jordan, and the Alwasweet Weekly Newspaper.

In Tunisia, for example, it used to be very hard to get a licence to publish from the Ministry of Information. It was also difficult to find investors because many businessmen were put off by the tight controls on media properties, and the government favoured some institutions when it came to advertising and subscriptions. Since the uprisings, these problems are clearly less relevant.

So far, the Arab uprisings have not had a particularly positive effect on the financial side of the industry, said Alayyan, pointing out that advertising was down in Egypt in 2011. But in the long term, he believes that the situation will improve, as long as that governments do not own media companies. Ministries of Information should not exist, he said, as they are only a hindrance.

by Larry Kilman

First Woman to Head Global Organisation of World's Editors

Cherilyn Ireton, a South African editor and successful senior manager at some of the country's top newspapers, has been appointed Executive Director of the World Editors Forum, the global organisation for editors within the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

Ms Ireton is the first woman to head the organisation, which was created in 1994 as a unique global network for exchanging ideas on newsroom management, editorial quality, online strategies and press freedom issues. More on the World Editors Forum can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/microsites/world-editors-forum.

Ms Ireton is a seasoned newspaper professional with more than twenty years experience on South Africa's top newspapers, including the Sunday Times and Business Day, where she worked as a journalist, editorial manager and chief operations officer. For the past six years she has been based in London, consulting on media matters to a variety of international organizations and governments.

The future of the newspaper is in magazines, believes Jacek Utko, design director for Bonnier Business Press, which publishes newspapers in eight Central European countries. This is a trend that news organisations should embrace rather than fight, he added, speaking at the 5th Arab Free Press Forum in Tunis.

Print is still a highly relevant medium, Utko said, and publishers are increasingly realizing this as they have been disappointed by tablets as audience- and revenue-generators.

However, the print model at many news organisations - publishing website content the following day and charging for it - does not make sense, Utko claims. It is necessary to offer more than that if you want people to willingly pay for the product.
Newspapers have a lot to learn from magazines, Utko said, starting with how to structure the information they provide. Magazines are small, with abundant spreads: when they deal with a long text, they make it as easy as possible to understand the content.

He called for news organisations to take a more creative approach to presenting news, rather than to be reactive, like "barking dogs."

Press freedom and freedom of expression remain under serious threat in the Middle East, despite the democracy revolutions and reforms that are sweeping the region, a panel of experts said Tuesday at the Arab Free Press Forum in Tunisia.

"The problem today is that you might not be afraid of the secret police, but you might fear the moral police," said Ghias al-Jundi, the Syrian Director of the PEN International Writers in Prison Committee and a member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange's (IFEX) Tunisia Monitoring Group.

While the dramatic democratic upheavals "have made steps in overcoming power and overcoming the kingdom of fear," the Islamist groups who were long barred from politics and are now emerging do not have a tradition of political interaction with other groups.

"We respect the elections, but is the victory of Islamists a consolidation of freedom of expression?" he asked. "My feeling is it weakens freedom of expression because the Islamists have not practiced politics for so long. ... The common people are repeatedly convinced that journalists are not on the side of religion, that they are infidels."

by Larry Kilman

With repression of Arab media lifted in some countries following the 'Arab Spring' revolutions and reforms, what needs to be done to develop a professional independent press in the region?

That was the question posed during a panel discussion Monday at the Arab Free Press Forum in Tunis, and the answer is - quite a lot of things.

Of course there is journalism training, but the needs go far beyond reporting. The challenge is how to turn media into commercial ventures.

"Journalists often don't have proper management experience or marketing experience," said Hafez al-Bukhari, President of the Yemen Polling Centre.

"A challenge in Yemen and equally in some other Arab countries, is how can media activity become a business activity? We need real, appropriate training for media production and management, it is different from traditional training workshops for journalists," he said.

Investment is another challenge, the panellists agreed. And advertising is not regulated by market conditions but by relationships and interests.

No matter how Arab media develops, they must have patience, because development doesn't happen overnight, said Tatiana Repkova, Founder and Director of the Media Managers Club.