2005-2014

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Dow Jones & Co. (DJ) said Friday it agreed to sell six of its community newspapers to Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. for $282.5 million in cash, subject to a working capital adjustment. Dow Jones, publisher of this newswire and The Wall Street Journal, said it expects proceeds of about $268 million, which it will use to fund its recently disclosed agreement to acquire...

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 26 — Dean Baquet, the Los Angeles Times editor who publicly opposed staff cuts at his paper last month, encouraged other editors Thursday to push back more against newspaper owners when they propose such cuts. “Sometimes when I sit down with editors and managing editors, I find them all too willing to buy the argument for cuts,” he said. “We need to be a feistier bunch.” He said...

The head of news at the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been accused of acting arbitrarily in unofficially blacklisting eight journalists and commentators. Among the banned journalists is Israel-based freelancer Paula Slier, a Jerusalem Post contributor, who has been barred from reporting because she is a Jew. SABC management set up a commission under former SABC head...

GABORONE, 26 October (IRIN) - Media watchdogs have criticised attempts by the Botswana government to control state media coverage of a controversial programme to relocate the San community from their ancestral land in a game reserve. The San were relocated to settlements outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in 1997 as a result of government plans to set aside the protected area for...

NEW ORLEANS - Online journalists warned a meeting of newspaper editors Thursday that their industry's survival depends on how well they can engage and excite the masses of readers on the Web. While delving into the digital age may seem daunting, "it's not nearly as frightening as what will happen to journalism if we don't embrace it," Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said during...

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is brushing off a request for more information and a decision on an Associated Press photographer held for six months in Iraq without formal charges. In a letter to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, does not provide details about why Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein remains at a U.S. run prison camp. The letter repeats the military...

MOSCOW -- Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who had exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

China's leaders have hauled in 450 of the nation's media chiefs to order them to more closely toe the government line and step up their allegiance to the Communist Party, state press said on Wednesday. Chinese President Hu Jintao and other party leaders, including propaganda czar Li Changchun, met with the media chiefs at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday to reinforce the message...

MOSCOW: Investigators are focusing their inquiry into the killing of a Russian investigative reporter on former police officers linked to crimes against civilians in Chechnya, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday. Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building Oct. 7. The...

MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Prosecutor's Office has sent Sweden additional evidence in support of its extradition request for Mahomed Uspaev, suspected of killing Itar-Tass photojournalist Vladimir Yatsina in Chechnya, the office's Web site reported Wednesday. Yatsina was abducted while on assignment in the troubled North Caucasus republic in the summer of 1999, and murdered on...