womensnewsnetwork.net Syria detains, reportedly tortures videographer New York, April 2, 2012--A prominent Syrian videographer who ran the media center in Baba Amr where two foreign journalists were killed in February has been detained since Wednesday, according to news reports. Ali Mahmoud Othman was initially held at a military intelligence unit in Aleppo and is believed to have been tortured, Paul Conroy, a photographer for The Sunday Times, said in an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4. Activists were cited in news reports giving the same information. Conroy and other reports said Othman was transferred to Damascus over the weekend. Conroy, who was injured in the attack that killed Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, said Othman was instrumental in getting journalists in and out of the besieged neighborhood Baba Amr. "We call on authorities to immediately release Othman and all journalists detained for their work," CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney said. Syrian authorities continue their campaign against the local and international press.
Benetech It was at Caltech during the 1970s when the idea hit like lightning. An engineering student named Jim Fruchterman had just learned, in a modern optics class, about how pattern recognition technology could guide a missile to its target. “If you could use this technology to recognize tanks or bridges,” Jim thought, “perhaps you could also recognize letters and words. Then we could use software to read those words aloud to people who are blind.” Benetech’s founder and CEO, Jim Fruchterman, sharing our story. It was years later, after a stint as a rocket engineer, that Jim cofounded a venture capital–backed tech company called Calera Recognition Systems. When the machine was presented to Calera’s investors, they were impressed that it worked. In 1989, Benetech was born with a business model intended to keep costs low for users, and the organization quickly became the largest maker of affordable reading systems for the blind.
CheapChicDaily - fabu-less finds under $100 The Dawn Chorus Google spent $70M on U.S. TV ads in 2011 A company that makes 96 percent of its revenue from advertising is becoming a massive media buyer itself — and in a far more traditional sense than one might at first anticipate. In 2011, Google spent nearly $70 million on U.S. television spots to advertise products including its social-networking site Google+ and the Chrome web browser, according to the firm Kantar Media. The television-ad spend figure ballooned from just $6 million in 2010 when the search giant ran its first-ever Super Bowl commercial. In 2008, Google spent no money at all on television advertisements, according to the media firm. Altogether, Google quadrupled its 2010 ad spending to $213 million last year, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The more mainstream-audience-focused strategy has been evident to anyone with a television set. Photo credit: minhimalism/Flickr
Collectif Liberté, Egalité, Justice (CLEJ) Hoyden About Town: a mixed bag of uppity women blogging from Australia Germany's top female journalists call for women quotas in media | World news Hundreds of top female journalists in Germany are demanding the introduction of a quota to ensure at least 30% of all executive positions across the whole German media industry are filled by women. In a letter sent to around 250 editors and publishers across the country, the signatories from the Pro Quote campaign claimed that at present only 2% of all editor-in-chiefs of 360 German daily and weekly newspapers are women. Just three of the 12 bosses of the public service broadcasters are women, said the letter, with the highest echelons of news magazines are "almost exclusively" filled by men. "It's time to change that," said the group. Anne Will, one of Germany's foremost political chat show hosts, said the paucity of women in top editorial jobs demonstrated a "catastrophic failure". The letter was prompted in part by the introduction last year of a 30% quota of women at Handelsblatt, a well-respected financial daily. "Don't be afraid of quotas.
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