News

Knight Ridder, the newspaper giant that put itself up for sale last month, received several preliminary bids yesterday from both rivals and private equity firms, according to people involved in the auction. Among the rival newspaper chains that submitted what is known as indications of interest were the Gannett Company, the McClatchy Company and the MediaNews Group, these people said. Several...

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- If Microsoft Corp. trumps Google in the battle to be Time Warner’s AOL business partner, no one in Web world will be surprised. Most observers agree Microsoft needs the gig way more than Google does. Although both Google and Microsoft can give AOL the two things Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons said it needs -- a wider audience and better technology -- the stakes are higher...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is often referred to as an "open-source" project because it is written, edited and policed by a global group of volunteers. However, the open-source label doesn't really fit Wikipedia. "Free-for-all," in fact, may be a better match. "Open source," at least the way it's been used in tech circles over the years, usually connotes successful, volunteer projects like...

A Beijing-based correspondent for the respected German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was detained for five hours Friday near so-called cancer villages along a severely polluted river in central China. Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from the hotel room where he was being held in Shenqiu, Henan province, and was accused of conducting 'illegal interviews'. He was cross-examined until he was...

Every now and then, there is talk within the media that a certain nationality dominates within the establishments of Arab satellite news channels. Some believe that the employees of that nationality form a mafia like group that rejects employees of other nationalities or undermines them to the extent that they do not achieve either success or popularity in the same way that those of the dominant...

Hortense Nouvion wants love stories. Black love stories. She is the founder and editor of Cite Black, a magazine based in Paris that reflects the rich and flourishing, though largely unrecognized, African culture of France. She started the publication as a response to the absence of black faces and voices in French media, from movies to the newsstand. "You never see a love story between two black...

LOS ANGELES -- An explosive article in January's Vanity Fair details the sundry adventures of Judith Miller and the New York Times surrounding the controversial reporter’s decision to be jailed for refusing to identify her source to a grand jury investigating the case of who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The magazine is out on newsstands in Los Angeles. The story, by Seth Mnookin, splashes...

Lee Sang-ho, a reporter from local television station MBC, is likely to face criminal charges over the disclosure of wiretapped conversations by the nation’s spy agency. The prosecution summoned Lee Thursday to question him about the details of his report. He was summoned as a witness in August after his company revealed the eavesdropping story to the public. A prosecutor said that Lee was...

VISAKHAPATNAM: A gag order served by the Visakhapatnam district administration on two Telugu dailies seeking to screen before publication news reports pertaining to public servants created a furore in the media on Thursday. Journalist unions described it as an attempt to curtail the freedom of the press. On learning about the implications of the order, the Government intervened and got the order...

Dec 8, 2005 (KHARTOUM) – The media conference that ended on Tuesday 6 December in Khartoum urged the government of Sudan to dissolve the media council which was formed by the government to regulate independent newspapers in the Sudan. The media council came under fire from the media conference on freedom of expression in Khartoum that ended yesterday, the Sudan Radio Service reported. The media...