Features & Analysis

  
Li Xin talks to the AP over Skype in November. The journalist, who says he worked as an informant for Chinese authorities, went missing on January 10. (AP/Saurabh Das)

As editor-informant Li Xin disappears, journalists share their experiences with China’s security services

The case of Li Xin, a journalist who disappeared in Thailand in January after telling the international press in November he had fled China after being forced to work for years as a government informant, has shed light on the pressures some journalists face to provide information to the authorities.

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How U.S. copyright law is being used to take down Correa’s critics in Ecuador

On December 30, César Ricaurte, the executive director of Fundamedios, received a copyright complaint with the potential to close his entire website. The complaint, filed on behalf of Ecuador’s communications regulator SECOM by a company called Ares Rights, ordered the independent press freedom group to remove an image of President Rafael Correa from its website,…

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Tsai Ing-wen, center, declares victory in the presidential election in Taipei on January 16, 2016. (AP/Wally Santana)

We’re live from Taipei! Please don’t tell China’s censors

Typically, news organizations like to promote original reporting. When an outlet covers a breaking news event at the time and from the place where the event is happening, they want their audience to know. However, for Chinese commercial media that covered this weekend’s presidential election in Taiwan, this was apparently not the case.

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Pictures of filmmaker Naji Jerf are held up at his funeral in Gaziantep in December. Syrian media activists based in Turkey say the murder of Jerf and two other journalists makes the country feels less secure. (STR/AFP)

For journalists fleeing Islamic State, Turkey ‘is as dangerous as Syria’

For the past two years, activists and journalists seeking refuge from Islamic State repression in Raqqa would take sanctuary across the border in southern Turkey, setting up safe houses and offices, and darting back to Syria regularly with camera equipment and other vital supplies. But that sanctuary is now under threat.

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Reeyot Alemu embraces Al-Jazeera journalist Mohamed Fahmy at CPJ's 2015 International Press Freedom Awards. Both were freed from prison last year. (Getty Images/Michael Nagle)

‘They wanted me to say I was wrong’: Freed Ethiopian journalist on why 1,500 days in jail failed to silence her

Reeyot Alemu, an Ethiopian journalist who worked for the independent weekly Feteh, spent almost 1,500 days in prison after being arrested in June 2011 and charged with terrorism in 2012. She was released unexpectedly in July.

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The headquarters of TVP in Warsaw. Poland's new media law moves toward giving the government greater powers over the public broadcaster. (Reuters/Slawomir Kaminski)

Will the EU’s actions speak louder than its words on Poland’s new media law?

On January 13, the European Commission–the so-called guardian of EU treaties–will meet in Brussels to debate a troubling law passed in Poland today that, according to reports, paves the way for the government to take control of public service TV and radio.

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Satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo releases an anniversary edition to mark the deadly attack on its staff last January. Government responses to the killings have threatened press freedom. (Jacques Demarthon/AFP)

One year after Charlie Hebdo, will press freedom become victim of war on terror?

Who would have thought that France would top the list of most deadly countries for the press in 2015, second only to Syria? The massacre of eight cartoonists and journalists by Islamic militants at the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last January was one of the deadliest attacks against the press since…

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From Charlie Hebdo in Paris to bloggers in Bangladesh, extremists target press

Thursday marks one year since two gunmen burst into the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire. Over the following year, CPJ documented the deaths of 28 journalists who were killed for their work by Islamic militant groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. This StoryMap charts the deadly attacks that took…

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A young Syrian journalist carries a camera and a gun on February 9, 2014, in Aleppo. (AFP/Aleppo Media Center/Mohammed Wesam)

The militarization of the press in Syria

Ahmed Abu al-Hamza, “Software” as he was known by his friends, stood behind the camera on November 6 as a gunman explained how rebel forces took Tel Sukayk, a strategic hilltop north of Hama, from government forces. Suddenly the camera’s sound recorder picked up the faint thud of a mortar shell firing in the distance.…

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Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, President Widodo's right-hand man, discusses conditions for journalists with the press freedom delegation in Jakarta. (Sumit Galhotra/CPJ)

One year on, challenges remain for press in Indonesia

“Change does not come overnight,” President Joko Widodo’s right-hand man, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, told an international delegation of 10 media and freedom of expression groups that visited Indonesia last month.

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