NEW YORK: They read like items one might post on Legacy.com or some other such memorial to the dead. "Used witty or acerbic lines of prose," "had deep affection for his colleagues," or " I've never seen anyone work as hard as he did." But these words of praise and stories of success are not for the recent passing of a news colleague or someone cut down in a work-related death. These paragraphs of...
You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and today The Audit will spell out where the economic interests of business-side and news-side executives at Dow Jones & Co. and its prized asset, The Wall Street Journal, stand in regard to the News Corp. bid. Basically, the interests of key figures both at DJ and, unusually, at the WSJ are geared toward a sale, and not just a sale, but a sale to...
The decision by General Electric Co. and Pearson PLC to abandon their efforts to bid for Dow Jones & Co. aids Rupert Murdoch in his quest to acquire the publisher of The Wall Street Journal but raises questions about the strategies of the other three going forward. Pearson must now determine the best course for its Financial Times newspaper, which the publishing company was considering hiving off...
The Mercury News will reduce its newsroom staff by 40 positions through layoffs that will take place in July, the company announced Tuesday. The reduction - a nearly 17 percent cut - will leave the paper with 200 newsroom positions, down from a peak seven years ago of about 400. The cuts are in response to declining advertising revenues, said Executive Editor Carole Leigh Hutton. "Revenue is not...
June 19 (Bloomberg) -- Josh Rushing has gone from Marine Corps spokesman (the role in which he appeared in the 2004 documentary ``Control Room'') to Washington-based reporter for Al Jazeera, known in some quarters as Osama bin Laden's favorite TV network. A profound conversion by most standards, though in his memoir ``Mission Al Jazeera'' Rushing argues it was a natural progression. A Texan who...
General Electric Co. and Pearson Plc, weighing a bid for Dow Jones & Co., may struggle both to top a $5 billion offer from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and to agree on a proposed structure for the combined business. Murdoch’s $60-a-share bid values the publisher of the Wall Street Journal at 65 percent more than its price before Dow Jones disclosed the offer. GE and Pearson envision an entity that...
THE Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones & Co. — publisher of the Wall Street Journal — on Thursday rejected a plan designed to preserve the paper's independence and integrity if the company is sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born head of News Corp. has long coveted the Journal and recently offered $60 a share for its publicly traded parent company, which the sprawling Bancroft clan...
The detention of Al-Jazeera assistant cameraman Sami Al-Haj, who tomorrow begins his sixth year without charge or trial in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is “unconstitutional and contrary to international law,” Reporters Without Borders said today, describing the detention centre as “one the biggest legal and humanitarian scandals of recent years” and reiterating its call for its...
Sami al-Haj spends his days alone, thinking of his wife and the son he barely knows. He spends his time thinking of the world beyond the razor wire, of the world away from the walls and bars, the orange jumpsuit he is forced to wear and the military guards that oversee him. He thinks too of his fellow prisoners incarcerated along with him at Guantanamo Bay and the anguish they endure. And when he...
It seemed like a good idea at the time. With blogging flourishing and citizen journalism just budding, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife thought they had a winning formula for a new kind of journalistic enterprise. One evening in the summer of 2004, they sketched out their common vision: A series of hyperlocal, news-oriented Web sites whose tone and content--news, commentary, blogs, photos, calendar...
