2005-2014

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Playboy (PLA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) is in talks to launch a men’s magazine in India, but one that does not include its trademark nudes or even its name, Chief Executive Christie Hefner said on Thursday. The top-selling men’s magazine in the world, which is rolling out an edition in Argentina soon, also wants to return to Italy and Australia, and is discussing joint...

This nation of roughly 15 million – the largest and wealthiest of Central Asia’s five republics – struggles daily to balance its booming economy with a still tentative democracy. Caught in the middle is Kazakh journalism. Watched closely by the government, plagued by self-censorship and its own, widespread corruption, the news business in Kazakhstan is "probably the best of the ’stans and the most...

PARIS--Karim Baïla unlocks the door of his silver VW Beetle and we cram in. We pull out of chic central Paris, headed for the low-income suburbs and public housing districts where thousands of cars had burned since the youth uprising began two weeks earlier. Karim is something of an anomaly. Born to illiterate Algerian parents, he is now one of few French Algerian reporters who make regular...

I have lost count of the number of accusations levelled against al-Jazeera and the incidents of harassment to which it has been subjected since it was founded in 1996. It was rumoured to have been set up by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency with the purpose of improving Israel's standing in the Arab world. It has also been accused of being a CIA mouthpiece designed to disseminate western culture...

(November 30, 2005) -- The sequence and scenario are increasingly familiar at newspapers from Los Angeles to New York. The script: newspaper revenue lags and the stock price dips, so expenses -- travel, training, newsprint and people -- are cut. All of these belt-tightening measures exact a toll on a newspaper's quality, but none more so than reduced staff. The observation by veteran editor Gene...

The world's media has been criticised for being too negative in its reporting of environmental issues. Continual coverage of destruction was making people switch off, delegates at the International Media and Environment Summit (Imes) in Kuching, Malaysia, were told. "We keep crying wolf and we keep overstating the doomsday scenario," said Ong Keng Yong, the Secretary General of the Association of...

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Continuing its efforts to convince ad buyers that newspapers are undervalued, the Newspaper Association of America has formed an executive advisory council composed of top media agency executives and high-power advertisers. As soon as the council was assembled, however, the riptides pulling at a newspaper industry with stagnant paid circulation again became clear. Where the...

BERKELEY, Calif.--When the knock came at the door, Zhao Ling knew what to do. She shoved her notes into an envelope and threw them out the window of her 12th floor hotel room. She shut off her cell phone. Then she held her breath. Zhao was working undercover, reporting on Chinese farmers in the Sichuan Province city of Zigong who had been left homeless and jobless after the government took their...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top media executives on Wednesday raised fresh doubts about the U.S. newspaper industry's future, saying the advertising climate remains depressed and publishers may be forced to look at sales. "There's a real question about what the sustainable model is in the newspaper business," David Sanderson, head of the global media practice at consulting firm Bain & Co., told the...

Bankers liken a potential acquisition of newspaper publisher Knight Ridder to buying beachfront property: It's a valuable, hard-to-come-by asset, but it's eroding. The question for private-equity firms, which typically like to exit their investments after about five years, is whether the San Jose, Calif., company's business will suffer more damage before they cash out. Like most newspaper...