Companies

The 1000-strong Boston Globe employees union is now being backed by labour unions and local labour in their protest against outsourcing of jobs to India by the New York Times Company. The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, had recently announced the elimination of over 120 jobs at the newspaper. Of these, 55 jobs in advertising and finance would be outsourced to India. The New...

NEW YORK (AP) - The Village Voice, which has had four editors in just over a year, has fired its most recent one after a staff meeting on concerns about racial diversity, a spokeswoman said Saturday. David Blum was fired Friday after just six months as editor in chief of the alternative weekly, Maggie Shnayerson said. His termination followed a Wednesday meeting in which staffers discussed a lack...

NEW YORK: Tribune Co. has agreed to sell its two smallest newspapers, both in Connecticut, to Gannett for more than $65 million, The Washington Post reports today. But what does this signal about the company's desire to sell off the entire company? . The Post relates that Tribune offered the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate to two prospective buyers, Gannett and MediaNews Group, "according to...

The Associated Press (AP) has entered into an agreement with Voxant Inc to distribute a selection of its news stories, videos and photographs to blogs and other websites through Voxant's advertising-supported syndication network. Voxant, a startup company based in Reston, US, has deals in place to syndicate news from a number of major outlets including Reuters, Agence France-Press, the Canadian...

MAGAZINES AND OTHER PERIODICALS DISTRIBUTED via mail are facing higher costs and potentially thinner margins as a result of new postal rate increases, but the hike is not nearly as bad as some publisher industry executives might have feared. "As postal rate cases go, this has been a tough one, with even more varying points of view than in recent cases," Gordon Hughes, president-CEO of American...

Rupert Murdoch is facing a government review of his UK media assets, after ministers decided to intervene in last year's acquisition by BSkyB, the satellite group he chairs, of a stake in ITV, the country's largest commercial broadcaster. Alastair Darling, the UK trade and industry secretary, called yesterday for a review of whether the £940m ($1.84bn, €1.4bn) investment, "raises public interest...

Last year, almost 18,000 media employees lost their jobs—the biggest group of layoffs since the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. Some of the world's biggest “old-media” companies—including MTV Networks (MTVN), NBC Universal, Disney and Discovery Communications—are axing staffers in handfuls and hundreds. In one of the biggest reductions, Time Warner's AOL began cutting 5,000 employees in December...

Time Warner is the world’s largest media owner, generating almost twice the revenue than its nearest rival News Corp in 2005 and making $30bn which makes up 13 per cent of the total worldwide media spend, a new report by media agency ZenithOptimedia has said. Time Warner headquarters in New York. Time Warner said its annual earnings more than doubled to $6.55 billion in 2006 after the world's...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. reached agreements in February to pay $405 million to settle lawsuits brought by shareholders related to past accounting problems at AOL, according to a regulatory filing on Friday. The owners of the Warner Bros. movie studios, AOL Internet service and HBO cable network said the agreement was to settle suits from shareholders who opted out...

The Financial Times has abandoned controversial plans for a new staff appraisal system. The proposal would have seen all staff categorised as outperformers, steady performers or underperformers. "After a healthy debate around the office about the suggested idea of people being fitted into categories, it was decided that it would no longer be pursued," said the National Union of Journalists' father...