News

Knight Ridder, under pressure from three major shareholders to sell the San Jose company, has begun soliciting preliminary bids from potential purchasers in an attempt to determine who might be interested in buying it, and how much they'd be willing to pay, according to sources familiar with the process. The move does not mean the nation's second-largest newspaper group and owner of The Monterey...

The fog surrounding Time Warner (TWX:NYSE - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) continues to thicken. Just as the media giant and its peers were uniting Tuesday against the threat of regulatory action, activist shareholder Carl Icahn dropped his own bombshell, naming as his new brother-in-arms the hard-hitting Lazard banker Bruce Wasserstein. Icahn's group, which controls 2.5% of Time Warner...

In my youth in the 1930s and in World War II, back in the days when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States, when it was announced he would be speaking on the radio, throughout this nation families gathered around the radio and listened to what he had to say. The New York Times printed what he said IN FULL in its next edition. Yet, it is almost impossible, it seems...

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...

Knight Ridder Inc., under pressure from its biggest shareholders to sell itself, has begun soliciting preliminary bids from potential buyers to determine who might be interested in buying it, according to people familiar with the process. The move does not mean the nation's second-largest newspaper group and owner of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News has committed to a sale. Instead, the...

A trio of private-equity firms has formed an alliance to examine purchasing newspaper publisher Knight Ridder Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. The alliance -- consisting of the Blackstone Group, Providence Equity Partners Inc. and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. -- is in early stages of preparation, these people say. But the buyout firms remain wary that the $4 billion market...

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...