Features & Analysis

“He hit me with a gun butt,” Premium Times newspaper reporter Yakubu Mohammed told the Committee to Protect Journalists, recalling how he was struck by a police officer while reporting on cost-of-living protests in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja on August 1. Two other officers beat him, seized his phone, and threw him in a police…

Russia’s months-long jailing of journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva —released on August 1 as part of a prisoner exchange — was one of the most blatant illustrations of Russia’s muzzling of the press in the wake of its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has precipitated what a representative of the now-shuttered Russian Journalists’ and Media Workers’…

The arrest and detention of Segun Olatunji, the then-editor of the privately owned First News site, by Nigeria’s military in March triggered on outcry from local and international civil society, highlighting an uptick in the unlawful detention of journalists in the West African nation.  Olatunji was taken from his Alagbado home in southwestern Lagos state by more…

When exiled Russian news website Meduza was hit with a flood of internet traffic in mid-April, it set off alarm bells among the staff as the deluge blocked publishing for more than four hours and briefly rendered the site inaccessible for some readers. It was the largest distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack in…

Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s oldest independent daily newspaper, has been around for 126 years, and the outlet’s owners are proud to have maintained its operations through the country’s intensifying challenges — from foreign occupation and devastating earthquakes to coups. But now Le Nouvelliste’s survival — and that of more independent media outlets in the country —…

The Israel-Gaza war has been devastating for civilians, including journalists covering the conflict. While a few conflicts have taken the lives of hundreds of journalists over a period of years, no other war has taken so many journalists’ lives in such a short time span, according to CPJ data that has been gathered since 1992. Here…

Antonio Di Giampaolo has hosted his popular radio news program En el Aire, Spanish for “On the Air,” for nearly 40 years. On May 17, Di Giampaolo planned to broadcast an interview with opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, but executives at the station Éxitos 93.1 FM in the western city of Maracay nixed the plan with no explanation, according to the journalist. “I had…

After serving a 14-month prison sentence on various charges, Algerian journalist Mustapha Bendjama assumed his life would return to normal as the editor-in-chief of Le Provincial, a local independent newspaper in the northeastern city of Annaba.  “I was wrong,” said Bendjama, who was released April 2024.  In a phone interview with CPJ, Bendjama revealed that his contract at…

When Belete Kassa’s friend and news show co-host Belaye Manaye was arrested in November 2023 and taken to the remote Awash Arba military camp known as the “Guantanamo of the desert,” Belete feared that he might be next. The two men co-founded the YouTube-based channel Ethio News in 2020, which had reported extensively on a conflict that…

On the only radio station in the remote Ecuadorian town of Baeza, morning show host Juan Carlos Tito updates listeners on the weather, recent power outages, and repairs to a bridge spanning a nearby river. For the last 24 years, Tito, 53, has been the trusted voice of Radio Selva, broadcasting important community news to…