"What is public diplomacy?" was the first question that Ted Koppel posed at the recent Media as a Global Diplomat conference attended largely by public diplomacy professionals. I was surprised that the panelists, including the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affair...

"When it comes to a monarchy, all reason goes away," according to a Thai reporter quoted in a Reporters Without Borders report on free expression in Thailand published this week. He was commenting on the multiple charges of lese majeste -- injury or insult to the king -- brought against journalists ...

Last summer, the British cell phone carrier Vodafone announced it would be offering a new filtering service for its Czech customers. "Child pornography and promotion of racism [are] such socially dangerous content that we have access to it automatically blocked for all of our customers," said Philip...

Bloggers have always been timely in their response to local, regional and international crises and Kenyan bloggers were no different when violence broke out following the December 2007 elections. Within nine days Ushahidi, "a platform that crowdsources crisis information," was born. But that open so...

Mr. Powers: How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today? Johnny Jones: Give me an expense account and I'll cover anything. There has always been a touch of glamour associated with foreign correspondents, able to live in far-away lands and report on wars and strife, as in the Alf...

In Vietnam, speaking out against the government can come with a hefty price. Blogger Dieu Cay ("the Peasant Water Pipe") -- or Nguyen Van Haias in real life -- is learning this the hard way. The 56-year-old man is serving a 30-month jail sentence on a trumped-up charge of tax fraud, a poor excuse fo...

On October 19, U.S. -based Nigerian blogger and journalist Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports was arrested by the Nigerian State Security Services (SSS) upon his arrival at Abuja airport. It was some days before the SSS announced that Elendu had been charged, first with money laundering and then sedi...

I thought I was going to a breakfast where people actually ate food. But food is hardly the top priority at a Jeff Pulver breakfast, where people are too busy pitching their latest ideas to investors, scoping out the competition, or scoping out the eligible singles on the market. Jeff is known for b...