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11 April 2012 | CNN

US: Latino producer group to address representation in mass media

When film documentarian Maria Agui Carter and other Latino producers banded together 13 years ago to address their underrepresentation in mass media, the mission seemed daunting and desperate, Carter said. The National Association of Latino Independent Producers now touts a newsletter of industry trends with 10,000 subscribers, and this week the group will address how the nation's second-largest group watches more television, buys more movie tickets and consumes more media than any other ethnicity - and yet comprises less than 1 percent of executives in Hollywood. The group's efforts have taken on urgency as the latest U.S. census shows that Hispanics have exceeded the 50 million mark and are officially the country's second-largest population group, surpassing African-Americans. At its annual conference beginning Friday in Universal City, California, the group will honor actress Rita Moreno, who has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy Award, and will feature a keynote speech by director Robert Rodriguez, who will be launching a new cable network called El Rey for Latino and general audiences. NALIP describes itself as the nation's pre-eminent association for Latino independent film and video makers. The NALIP 2012 conference, called "Diverse Voices, Universal Content," is chiefly sponsored by Time Warner (the parent company of CNN) and the National Latino Media Council.

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11 April 2012 | Press Gazette

UK: Guardian moves into journalism training business

Guardian News and Media is set to diversify into journalism training. The newspaper group, which made losses before tax of GBP 33m last year, is understood to be set to launch a course offering training in digital journalism at a cost of GBP 9,000 a head in 2013 at the earliest. GNM is understood to have looked into becoming a stand-alone journalism school but ruled this out for the present, working instead with a partner university. Richard Lindsay, interim head of PR and internal communications at Guardian News and Media, told XCity - the alumni magazine of City University journalism department - that the newspaper had been speaking to “a range of schools across the country about contributing to the courses they run”. He said the partnership would be up and running in “reasonable time” and that it hoped to enrol students for the next academic year. A meeting was held between representatives from City University in London and The Guardian in February to establish a partnership but the conversations ended without an agreement.

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11 April 2012 | San Francisco Gate

Internet freedom becomes German political catalyst

Germany's Pirate Party, an insurgent political force devoted to Internet freedom, gained backing in a weekly poll that showed it siphoning off support from opposition parties. The Pirates climbed 1 percentage point to 13 percent, displacing the Green Party, which slid 2 points to 11 percent, as the most popular force after the two main parties, according to a Forsa poll commissioned by Stern-RTL. The Pirates, whose platform focuses on web privacy and copyright issues, are gaining support from young voters disenchanted with the more established parties. The emergence of the party, which won its first seats in a state parliament in Berlin last year, threatens to shuffle Germany's Social Democrat-led opposition as two more regional votes loom next month. Polls show the Pirates may win seats in both elections. "For many young people, the Greens have become stale and old," Forsa director Manfred Guellner said in a statement. "The antinuclear issue doesn't pull them in anymore."

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11 April 2012 | AFP

S.African newspaper launches tabloid aimed at blacks

South Africa's historic The Star newspaper launched an edition targeting blacks on Monday, hoping to cash in on the country's growing middle class. Star Africa is the latest offering of the 125-year-old Star, part of the Irish Independent newspaper group. It is "an intelligent approach to tabloid journalism", editor Makhudu Sefara said. "Our approach is one that says Africa is not about the texture of your hair, it's about your approach and relation to the content," Sefara told AFP. In the paper's first editorial Makhudu wrote his team believed "there's a market for this kind of newspaper." Star Africa targets black South Africans living in working-class townships on the outskirts of cities, including news and culture from their area, together with content from its broadsheet mother paper. The majority of South Africa's urban blacks still live in townships, where they were forced to stay during white-minority rule, which ended in 1994. Star Africa expands on a previous newspaper, The Star's Soweto edition, which had been published in the country's most famous township in Johannesburg.

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11 April 2012 | AFP

Flemish far-right party creates anti-immigrant website

A Flemish far-right party in Belgium launched a website Tuesday inviting people to report crimes committed by illegal immigrants, mirroring a controversial initiative in the Netherlands. The website created by Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) allows people to file anonymous tip-offs of social security fraud, work on the black market and more serious crimes, a move anti-racism activists compared to Nazi tactics. Vlaams Belang leader Filip Dewinter said the website was needed because of the presence of "tens of thousands of illegal immigrants" in Belgian cities and problems he said stemmed from them. The acts reported to the website will be transferred to the police, said Dewinter, whose Flemish nationalist party often courts controversy with its anti-Islam and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The Dutch far-right Freedom Party created a similar website, titled "Report Middle and Eastern Europeans," asking people whether they have been annoyed by noise, drunkenness or squalor associated with migrant workers or lost jobs to them. The European Parliament has called the website "deplorable" and pressed Prime Minister Mark Rutte to distance himself from it. The Dutch parliament voted last month to denounce the website, but Rutte, whose majority in the 150-seat lower house requires support from the PVV's 23 lawmakers, has declined to condemn it. A European Commission spokesman said such websites "do not correspond to the values that we defend," but the EU's executive arm said it was up to national authorities to decide whether to take action against them.

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11 April 2012 | V3.co.uk

Iran denies plans to cut country’s internet

Iranian officials have laughed off speculation that the country plans to replace its internet services with a state-run and monitored intranet, calling the reports a hoax. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the country's ministry of communication and information technology has issued a formal statement clarifying it will not shut down the internet in August. Reports that Iran was planning to shut down its internet surfaced earlier in January, and resurfaced this week when the International Business Times claimed to have received confirmation that Iran would close its internet services in August. The Iranian communication ministry's statement described those reports as "completely baseless", dismissing the claims as part of a wider smear campaign against the country and its regime. The statement was published on the ministry's website, which is not viewable outside of Iran. Despite denying the intranet plans, the country is still set to instigate several new controversial cyber policies. Chief among them is the country's new "national information network", which aims to make Iran's internet a closed system - officials have not clarified what exact measures this entails. The network adds to the country's ongoing censorship campaign, which has seen it block access to a number of popular internet services including Gmail and Hotmail.

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