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What is expected is for Daily News to be allowed to operate in the New Year. No one is expecting another media house to be closed again.The executive is in full control of the state media and could respond to any thing broadcast or printed by other media houses. The authorities who are dissatisfied with anything written or broadcast should exercise their right to reply.

The media is nothing but an instrument for the amplification of the voices of different sectors of society. Anybody who is threatened by the media is not committed to the principle of accountability and transparency.

The ultimate role of the media is to give outlet to the right of every person to freedom of expression. There could be no freedom of expression without freedom of the media.

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Gambia: We Hope Closing Media Houses Is History

Madonna: Obviously there is a person, or a group of people, behind this that were essentially terrorising me. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Madonna is the original queen of pop media. Naturally she reigned on the radio, but, as she made her name, her print and TV interviews were also incendiary. Then, as the MTV generations breakout star, she helped define the concept of the modern pop video.

Even when the internet was becoming popular she found a way to own it and have fun with it. Her 2000 webcast from the Brixton Academy in London during which she namechecked the white hot online forum Popbitch broke viewing records at a point when most fans were still on dialup. In 2003, when her American Life album was being shared on peer-to-peer networks, she uploaded a fake file asking pirates: What the fuck do you think youre doing?

Media training is a part of any sensible new popstars pre-launch fitness regime, but Madonna didnt need it. She wrote the bloody book on it.

Then about eight years ago, social media came along. For some time, Madonna was conspicuous by absence. Her reluctance to get involved was, in its own way, incredible. But one still wondered: how amazing would be if Madonna one day simply appeared on Twitter?

One day in 2012 she did just that. By the following year, her Instagram account was also in full flow. At times, her updates have been brilliant. One picture, from May 2013, came with the caption: Cleaning up before the Met Ball, and showed a fully glammed-up Madonna wielding a vacuum cleaner in her bathroom.

More recently, though, with a new album on the horizon, Madonnas social accounts have become a hashtag-strewn, meme-littered jamboree of misfires through which the image Madonna spent three decades refining has begun to unravel.

She called herself ratchet (a term for someone who is, as Urban Dictionary puts it, out of hand, out of control), but spelt it ratchit, just as she misspelled the name of Avicii, the young producer with whom she was working. These attempts to be down with the kids have instead hinted that, actually, at 56, she might be completely out of touch. One spoof account, @madonnafanfic, imagines Madonnas daughter Lourdes constantly disconnecting the home internet in the hope of saving her mums career. That may not be too far from the truth: Madonna has admitted that her kids are effectively A&Ring the sonic direction of her new album.

All eyes were on Madonna just before Christmas when more than 20 demos for her next album, Rebel Heart, were leaked online. Most were works in progress; the release of Rebel Heart hadnt even been announced. It was an unprecedented security breach for an artist of Madonnas stature. But when she used social media to liken it all to rape and terrorism, she began to test even fans patience.

Suddenly, the pop icon who, little more than a decade earlier, faced leaked music in a way that was funny, smart and aggressive, was uploading a picture of a broken iPod as a symbol of my broken heart. Madonna, pops most brilliant control freak, was no longer in control. Rather than asking, What the fuck do you think youre doing? and windmilling her way into a fight, she was assuming the role of victim.

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Madonna: How the control queen lost her touch when media went social

#39;Mainstream Media Control #39;~49-Ch7C-Rise of the NWO/Culling of Man
"Mind control, in fact, is the only way the proponents of the Great Plan can manipulate 7 billion people without them rising up and hanging them all. By some...

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'Mainstream Media Control'~49-Ch7C-Rise of the NWO/Culling of Man - Video

Watch it Sony Randall Park plays North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in The Interview. Photograph: Ed Araquel/AP

Who would have thought that 2014 would end with the North Korean government allegedly dumping (says the FBI, not so sure say others convinced it was an inside job) Sonys dirty cyber laundry and corporate communications onto the internet because it didnt like a James Franco film? We live in strange convergent times which will only get stranger in the year ahead.

That Sony either never saw the cyber hack coming, or did, but had no defence against it, is emblematic of a problem that one might usefully turn into a prediction. In general the media industry doesnt know enough about the communications infrastructure which it relies on, and the new communications world order is a bit at sea when it comes to non-technical issues such as societal impact, ethics and the like.

For many years now the media has been dancing around the problem of what it likes to call disruption, but might more practically be labelled the internet. Everyone who works in the businesses of shovelling atoms or bits and bytes around for the sake of communication and entertainment knows that the internet changes everything. Yet accepting exactly how it changes everything has been a slow process for most media organisations.

It is a reasonable assumption that in 2015 we will see a further convergence between social media platforms and media practice. As the owners of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram accept that they are not just neutral platforms, but actually shaping and controlling media, as well as owning and supporting a great deal of it, we can expect to see them become more active in this area. I always assumed that the arduous, financially risky business of creating media or employing journalists would be deeply unappealing to anyone sitting on top of a multibillion-dollar social platform. However, this might be about to change.

The Googles and Facebooks of this world could liberate a billion dollars from the glovebox of their Teslas and change the dynamics of media investment overnight. Will they do it? Not overnight, but maybe over time. Netflix has been a powerful exemplar of how to both be taken seriously by venture capitalists and get a seat at the Emmys. Jeff Bezos had so much money from founding Amazon, he actually bought a newspaper (the Washington Post). Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, is so earnestly serious about creating a new type of news organisation that his various setbacks with First Look Media will not stop him. There will be a lot more Silicon Valley money put into media in the future, although these investments are bound to create further disruption for the existing industry.

We are already at a point where what we think of as mainstream media brands simply cannot compete with the scale and funding of the new platforms. We will see more proof of this in 2015, as network television in the US and maybe even broadcast in the UK continues to come under pressure from changing media consumption habits. There is plenty of life in legacy media, like broadcast television, but it will only ever play an ancillary role now to social and distributed media. Facebook is valued at over $220bn, CBS at $27bn, this is not just a bubble or a rounding error but a reflection of how the world and advertisers behave. To remain relevant, existing media brands will have to understand technology and perpetual change in the context of cultural institutions.

Media companies will have to grasp how to work within this new world. We saw in 2014 the fetishisation of fragmentation, with many recent industry entrants, from BuzzFeed to Vice Media, lauded for their ability to address younger audiences by surfing the growth in social media. In media pundit corner, the pressure has always been to second guess the success or failure of these enterprises.

But somehow prediction of existing markets seems oddly inadequate for the time. Take, for instance, the perennial domestic issue of royal charter renewal. In the UK there will be a fierce debate about the funding of the BBC, but will it be conducted within a narrow UK political framework, or with an eye to what part Britain wishes to play in the global information economy? I havent seen much evidence to suggest that executives or regulators are ready for these questions, let alone in possession of the answers.

We are used to seeing a landscape which is divided between the big, global institutions and the small entrepreneurial start-ups. But we are still unused to the idea of true convergence: technology-driven markets that are fast-moving and fluid.

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Whos taking control this year? Google, BBC, Facebook, or even North Korea?

A man cries as he prays for victims of a stampede in Shanghai, China, Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. Authorities were still investigating the cause of the stampede late Wednesday night, but street vendors, residents, taxi drivers and other witnesses say the city failed to prepare for the massive turnout. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)(The Associated Press)

Residents lay flowers for victims of a deadly stampede in Shanghai, China, Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. Authorities were still investigating the cause of the stampede late Wednesday night, but street vendors, residents, taxi drivers and other witnesses say the city failed to prepare for the massive turnout. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)(The Associated Press)

A man arrives to lay flowers for victims of a stampede in Shanghai, China, Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. Authorities were still investigating the cause of the stampede late Wednesday night, but street vendors, residents, taxi drivers and other witnesses say the city failed to prepare for the massive turnout. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)(The Associated Press)

SHANGHAI On New Year's Eve of 2013, Shanghai authorities sent about 6,000 city police officers and requested help from military police to manage a 300,000-strong crowd that filled the city's famed riverfront for the annual midnight light show. According to state media, police choked off access to an elevated viewing platform reachable through staircases and closed the nearest subway station to rein in the crowd.

On Wednesday night, just as many revelers showed up to ring in 2015, but the venue was guarded by only 700 police officers with no traffic control, state media reported. People were free to walk up and down the staircases, and the closest subway station was left open.

The city had already canceled the light show on the Bund, as the riverfront area is known, and apparently downgraded police deployment and crowd control measures. When the authorities became alarmed by the huge crowd, they called in another 500 police officers but it was too late.

Three dozen people ended up trampled or asphyxiated to death in a stampede at the bottom of a 17-step, 5-meter-wide (16-foot-wide) concrete staircase, shocking a city proud of its professional urban management and a country eager to show off its most cosmopolitan city.

While investigations continue into the New Year's Eve tragedy, eyewitness accounts and state media reports point to a sequence of miscalculations by city officials that helped create the out-of-control conditions leading to the stampede.

"You canceled the light show, but did you properly notify the public?" asked a father who lost his daughter in the stampede but declined to give his name for fear of offending the authorities. "Once people started to show up in the hundreds of thousands, did you have backup measures to ensure safety? What were you doing during the time the crowds were growing?"

"The government has been seriously derelict of its duties," he said sternly.

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Witnesses, state media: Sequence of errors led to Shanghai stampede that killed 36