The World Association of Newspapers has provided a “reality check” to investors who have heard nothing but negative news about newspaper companies in recent months, providing a rare insight into what is really happening in the newspaper industry and in the broader media matrix and “dispelling the rather tired, conventional wisdom that our industry is a deadwood industry”.
- Over 1 billion people read a newspaper every day.
- Newspaper circulations worldwide continue to grow
- Newspaper advertising continues to grow — and remains more effective than TV.
- Newspapers are competing far more effectively against the rise of digital media than broadcast.
-In the last 24 months, more new, innovative newspaper products have been launched than over the prior 30 years.
-Newspaper companies continue to invest heavily in their businesses.
-Contrary to conventional wisdom, increasing broadband penetration is not adversely impacting underlying circulation volumes or advertising. “Yet one still hears continually the unfounded suggestion that the Internet is damaging newspaper circulations — yet the one irony is that where newspapers are strong, so too is the Internet.”
Danish-Swedish dairy giant Arla Foods, targeted by boycotts in Muslim countries because of the publication in Denmark of cartoons deemed offensive to Islam, said Monday it had temporarily shut down production in Saudi Arabia. Arla Foods is Europe’s second-largest dairy company and the leading Danish exporter to Saudi Arabia, where it sells an estimated DKK 2bn (EUR 268m) worth of products every year. Muslim anger over the cartoons, which depicted the Prophet Mohammed and were published in a Danish newspaper in September and reprinted in a Norwegian magazine in January, has snowballed into a diplomatic crisis threatening trade relations with Europe. The row has taken a new dimension over the past days, with Danish flags being burnt, products being boycotted and Copenhagen starting to take measures to protect its citizens living in Muslim countries.
The boycott of Danish products, including Arla Foods, that began last week in Saudi Arabia has now spread to Algeria, Bahrein, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, Arla Foods said.
(AFP, The Local,February 01, 2006)
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The European Commission is poised to propose creating an EU press agency to boost communication channels to and from citizens, a report said Tuesday. The plan, which website EUobserver said would be announced today, also would establish a code of conduct for European Union institutions and journalists. The idea was sparked by Dutch and French citizen rejection of the commission’s new constitution, which the commission blamed in part on a lack of information. The plan lists five areas of action by EU member countries: ‘Defining common principles, empowering citizens, working with the media and new technologies, understanding European public opinion and doing the job together.’ Among the recommendations is expanding the 24-hour Euronews TV channel by creating an EU press agency, the independent website reported, announcing further that the commission will launch a special website on the white paper, through which citizens and stakeholders will be able send comments on the tabled proposals until July. (UPI, EUobserver.com,February 01, 2006)
DANISH Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed alarm today at the wave of anger in the Muslim world prompted by caricatures in a Danish newspapper depicting the prophet Mahommed.
“Our diplomats are currently attempting to repair the misunderstandings that have surfaced,” he said.
Meanwhile, Muslim leaders in Denmark called for a more conciliatory tone from the Muslim world, saying the row had gone too far.He said his government considered the growing dispute “extremely serious”.
“We have from the beginning said that these drawings are making Muslims angry and hurt. But we honestly never thought that this case would develop to the point where Danish products in the Middle East are being threatened to this extent,” Ahmed Abu Laban, a prominent imam in Denmark’s Muslim community, said in a statement.
Update:
The Danish defence ministry says a fatwa appears to have been issued against Danish soldiers stationed in Iraq.
“I can confirm that we’ve heard about the fatwa from a reliable source in Iraq … so we believe it’s true,” Defence Minister Soeren Gade’s spokesman Jacob Winther said. The fatwa comes as the offices of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that have caused uproar across the Muslim world, had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat.
German publisher Zendot has announced plans to distribute the German-language print version of the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The amount of information is so large that it is expected to fill 8,000 pages printed in a hundred volumes. Each volume is expected to cost EUR 14 and will be published at the rate of two a month, spread over a release period of four years. Zendot will use 25 workers and 15 editors for the project and an independent scientific adviser will be appointed to examine the content before it reaches a printed form. But observers believe the public contribution nature of the Wikipedia database, where updates and additions occur daily, makes it outdated as a printed version as soon as it comes out. Despite this criticism Zendot has already successfully marketed DVD versions of the website and published several paperback excerpts from the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia recently attracted criticism for the ease in which contributors can add information that is not checked for accuracy. And recent revelations of the addition of copyrighted text have damaged the website’s reputation. (Media Guardian,January 31, 2006)
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Broadcaster Mediaset, controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s family, is being probed by Italy’s anti-trust agency for its acquisition of frequencies to broadcast TV to mobile phones, the watchdog said on Friday. The investigation is the third to be opened in barely a month involving Berlusconi and his empire and returns to the public glare accusations about the media tycoon prime minister’s potential conflict of interest just as he faces an election in April. It also throws into doubt Mediaset’s plans to broadcast cutting-edge Digital Video Broadband Handheld (DVBH) television to mobile phones in the second half of this year. Mediaset is Italy’s biggest private broadcaster and the anti-trust said its December purchase of broadcast frequencies from Europa TV could have pushed it above its antitrust limit. The authority said it would conclude the investigation by March 13, less than a month before the April 9 vote. (Reuters,January 30, 2006)
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The Al Jazeera TV network has announced the launch a new channel, Al Jazeera Urdu, targeting over 110m Urdu speakers globally. ‘Initially we are targeting the Urdu-speaking population in Pakistan, then the dubbed service will spread to the Indian subcontinent as well as Urdu speakers in the United States and Europe’, said Hamad Yehya Al Nuaimi, Al Jazeera’s Marketing Director. The Urdu service in a joint venture with Dubai based ARY Digital Network, the world’s largest Urdu Television Network that has 11 channels covering the Sub Continent, Europe, North America and the Middle East. The channel will provide Urdu-speaking viewers with hourly news bulletins, breaking news, exclusive programmes and interviews in addition to other contents dubbed into Urdu. (AME News,January 30, 2006)
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Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Sunday his government could not act against satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after Libya closed its embassy in Copenhagen amid growing Muslim anger over the dispute. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten had not intended to insult Muslims when it published the drawings, Rasmussen said, referring to an editorial on the paper’s website in Danish and Arabic. Since Jyllands-Posten published the drawings in September, the Danish government has repeatedly defended the right of free speech. The newspaper has not apologised for publishing the drawings, which have caused widespread anger among Muslims around the world. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark and Saudi religious leaders have urged a boycott of Danish products. In a demonstration on the West Bank, members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened Danes in the area and told them to leave immediately, the Danish news agency Ritzau reported on Sunday. The demonstrators burnt the Danish flag and called on the Palestinian authorities to cut diplomatic ties with Denmark, Ritzau said. The Danish government has broad public backing for it stance on the cartoons. An opinion poll showed that 79 per cent of Danes think Fogh Rasmussen should not issue an apology and 62 per cent say the newspaper should not apologise. (Reuters,January 30, 2006)
The chief editor at the danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has written an open letter to the Saudi public. The action came after several days of boycott of danish goods in the Middleeast. The boycott was started because Jyllands-Posten published 12 caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in the fall 2005.
Jyllands-Posten has in the last couple of days been under pressure from industry organizations and politicians. Here is the newspapers response: Link to pdf
More about the cartoon affair from Newspaper Index:
Danish goods boycotted in Saudi
New Mohammed drawings published in book
UN to investigate Jyllands-Posten racism (here you can see the drawings)
Newspaper threatened after Mohammed cartoons
Mohammed cartoons on the agenda of Mecca Summit
Price on the head of the men who drew Mohammed
Danish Muslims denounce newspaper
Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark on Thursday in a row about cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by a best-selling newspaper. A Saudi government spokesman said the ambassador had been recalled for talks following Denmark’s failure to deal with the insults to the Prophet. Some of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten last September depicted him as a stereotype of an Islamic terrorist. Ambassadors from several Muslim countries complained to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had earlier said he could not tell papers what to print, or not to. Danish food producers Arla Foods said the anger sparked by the cartoons had prompted a boycott of its dairy products in Saudi Arabia. Arla director Finn Hansen said there had been calls for boycotting Danish products in Friday prayers and on Saudi television and in newspapers. (BBC News,January 27, 2006)
Chinese journalists have been ordered to stay away from a media seminar, organised by the British Embassy in Beijing, marking a new extension of the campaign against freedom of expression. The embassy had invited more than 40 guests, including journalists, broadcasters and ministry officials, to a workshop on media regulation in Britain. Diplomats saw it as a low-key and uncontroversial way of encouraging debate on media reform, which until recently the authorities had seemed to want to encourage. But the embassy has now been told by some of those invited that they have been refused permission to attend, with the Communist Party Propaganda Department apparently behind the ban. Reports in Hong Kong also say newspapers have been ordered not to cover the event. Sources said the embassy and the Thomson Foundation, the media training organisation, intended to press ahead with the workshop. (The Telegraph,January 27, 2006)
Amnesty International UK is to send spoof weapons catalogues through the post and email inboxes to highlight the shocking ease with which weapons can be bought. The pressure group is launching a campaign to raise awareness of the need for an international arms trade treaty to create legally binding arms controls and to regulate the sale of guns. The UK campaign includes a glossy mail order ’small arms catalogue’ from the fictitious Teleshop company featuring models posing with machine guns and automatic pistols. An email campaign will surprise internet users with fake special offers for weapons, while a roadshow tour of shopping centres across the UK will be manned by fake salespeople demonstrating the ease with which an AK47 machine gun can be assembled and fired.
(more…)
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Unesco collaborated with the Thomson Foundation and Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a handbook for journalists of developing countries on the use of internet for journalistic purposes. The ‘Net for Journalists’, which is written by a journalist and trainer Martin Huckerby, is a resource (with a printed manual and a CD) designed for both print and broadcast journalists and journalism students in developing countries around the globe. The accompanying CD contains some software, other extra resources and lesson plans for trainers. The handbook aims to provide journalists, especially from developing countries, with some practical skills in exploring and exploiting the internet for day-to-day journalistic assignments. It teaches how to search the net more effectively and efficiently, not only for facts and figures, but also for images, audio and video. An important feature of the handbook is that it does not only tell where and how to get the information one needs, but also how to evaluate and verify the information gathered. (UNESCO,January 25, 2006)
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The Mohammed drawing story began when a danish children book writer, was trying to find artist to illustrate his new book about Mohammed. It was not possible for him to find any artists who dared to do the job. Journalists at Jyllands-Posten heard about this and asked a dozen artists to draw Mohammed support the artist.
(more…)
A Turkish court on Monday dropped charges against the country’s best-known novelist for insulting ‘Turkishness,’ ending a high-profile trial that outraged Western observers and cast doubt on Turkey’s commitment to free speech. Orhan Pamuk went on trial for telling a Swiss newspaper in February that Turkey is unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey’s overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast. Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner in charge of expansion, said the decision to drop the case against Pamuk was ‘good news for freedom of expression in Turkey,’ but said that ‘Pamuk is not the only case of a person prosecuted for having expressed a non-violent opinion in Turkey’, noting that ’several journalists, editors, writers and academics still face similar charges today.’ (AP, ABC News,January 24, 2006)
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