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Newspaper publisher Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) beat forecasts with an 8 per cent rise in annual profit, but said it was contemplating the possibility of selling its regional newspaper business. Pre-tax profit before amortisation and impairment of intangible assets and exceptional items was �253.4 million for the year to October 2, up from �234.1 million the year before, a DMGT statement...

The Orlando Sentinel on Tuesday laid off 21 employees throughout the company as it joined other U.S. newspapers struggling to cope with declining circulation and rising costs. The cuts came less than two weeks after the paper announced that it would need to eliminate jobs to improve its financial performance and adapt to market changes. In addition to the layoffs, 33 vacant positions won't be...

The number of registered blogs in China has more than doubled since the beginning of this year, according to a market research firm in Beijing. China had 33.4 million registered blogs at the end of the third quarter, up more than 100 per cent since January, when it had 14.5 million blogs, said research company Analysys International. Blogs, or Web logs, are personal Web sites that are similar to...

The Australian and British governments colluded to cover up the killing of five Australian-based journalists in East Timor in 1975, new documents have revealed. Five television journalists – Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters – were killed while covering Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. LAST SHOT: The word "Australia" and an Australian flag painted...

More than 140 civil society organisations, including 13 IFEX members, have urged UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to launch an investigation into attacks on freedom of expression and other human rights during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which ended more than a week ago in Tunisia. The groups, in a letter to Annan, said that in the run-up to, and during, the summit, attacks...

Nepal's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the government not to close a radio station after police raided its premises to prevent it from relaying a BBC interview with Maoist leader Prachanda. More than 500 journalists organised a public meeting to express their solidarity for Radio Sagarmatha in nepal capital Kathmandu on Monday. © Dinesh Wagle/United We Blog A single-bench of justice Badri Kumar...

WASHINGTON -- As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor...

The US department of justice has approved New Times Media's purchase of Village Voice Media. The new company, to be called Village Voice Media, will publish free weekly papers in 17 of the largest US markets, the companies said Monday in a statement. The merger is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006. In a routine notice on the website of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the merger...

The story is this: Yahoo vs. The New York Times . . . or any major newspaper, for that matter. The most visited Web site has steadily morphed from an online directory/search service into a newspaperlike content provider. Eventually, the story line likely also will be Yahoo vs. broadcast media, but for now word content carries the day online. Yahoo has hired its own exclusive columnists and writers...

NEW YORK, Nov 29, 2005 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Lazard Ltd. (LAZ) and the Icahn Group announced today that the Icahn Group has retained Lazard to further analyze various strategic alternatives to maximize the value of all Time Warner Inc. (TWX) shareholders' interests. The Icahn Group is comprised of Icahn Partners, Icahn Partners Master Fund, certain other affiliates of Carl C. Icahn, Franklin...