UK Journalists’ Union Calls For Yahoo Boycott Over China Actions; Our Disclosures

We don’t cover political issues often but this could have some impact on Yahoo’s business — and it hits close to home with one of our contributing journalists being involved (more on that below): The National Union of Journalists (UK, Ireland) is urging its 40,000 members to boycott Yahoo in protest over the company’s reported cooperation in identifying dissidents — most notably journalists — for the Chinese government. The NUJ also said it will stop using Yahoo services and sent a letter to a Yahoo Europe exec denouncing the company’s policies.
Chairman and CEO Terry Semel was hammered for Yahoo’s policy at the D4 conference this week. You can listen to his comments and the full line of questioning in this audio recording I made for notes … the sound quality is not the best, but it will give you a better picture than piecemeal reports about the questions being asked and his comments.
mp3logo1.gif You can download the audio (49 min., 11 MB) here
Or you can stream it here … click on the arrow:
Now the disclosure part: The chairman of the NUJ new media council, quoted in this Reuters story about the boycott, is Jemima Kiss, a contributing writer to paidContent.org and MocoNews.net; she also wrote the letter sent to Yahoo. As part of our ongoing commitment to fair coverage, she no longer will write about Yahoo for our sites. This statement continues our policy of transparency.
Related: @ D Conference: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel: China Controversy; Yahoo Search; Music Subscriptions

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