Companies

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Most media stocks have bounced back sharply this year after a brutal 2005 as investors began to realize that entertainment firms are positioning themselves for growth in the new world of digital media. And executives from several big media companies expressed even more optimism about the business and how they were adapting at an industry presentation Tuesday. News Corp...

DETAILS on the scrapping of Australia's cross-media and foreign media ownership rules, the allocation of new digital spectrum and increased regulatory powers for the Australian Communication and Media Authority will be unveiled this week. Fierce lobbying is still taking place on the thorny issue of anti-siphoning regulations covering broadcast rights to major events, as media lobbyists gather in...

Ukrainian public opinion could come even more under the influence of official views from Moscow following the announcement of a recent multi-million-dollar media purchase in the Russian capital. Moscow-based Kommersant Publishing House, which publishes one of Ukraine’s leading business dailies, Kommersant Ukraine, has been sold to Kremlin-connected tycoon Alisher Usmanov for about $300 million...

The Telegraph Group is believed to be looking to axe about 70 journalists as part of its project to create a digital newsroom. Production staff such as subeditors and designers are expected to bear the brunt of the cull, designed to streamline the Telegraph's print and online operations. However, reporters and commissioning editors are likely to emerge virtually unscathed, once the Daily Telegraph...

WITH the fall comes the harvest. Or at least that’s what Richard D. Parsons and his top dogs at Time Warner have hoped for in autumns past. But regardless of how much the chief executive and his allies regroup, retool and reorganize their sprawling media empire, the stock market just yawns. Every morning when they look at Time Warner’s ticker, it’s Groundhog Day. Carl C. Icahn seems to be the only...

JOHN Fairfax is a company which is a long way from being in the sweet spot. It's caught in an unenviable pincer - a squeeze from the structural migration of classified advertising online, where it is pitched against numerous and canny competitors and a cyclical downturn in advertising. And this explains why its underlying profit fell 3.8 per cent. The only reason its share price has not reflected...

The woman thrusting free newspapers into the hands of London commuters did not look as though she was on the frontline of a media revolution and a bitter battle between rival newspaper moguls. But yesterday's launch of London Lite, a new free evening paper for the capital, threatens to have repercussions across the country, where venerable evening titles are battling falling sales as younger...

When P. Anthony Ridder met with Wall Street analysts in June last year for a routine financial review, he was the chief executive of the nation's second-largest newspaper company. And he could not have sounded more upbeat about the prospects for his corporate namesake, Knight Ridder. "The newspaper industry generally, and Knight Ridder specifically, are strong, healthy businesses with a bright...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hearst Corp. on Friday said it will stop publishing its magazines SHOP Etc. and Weekend, saying that they failed to meet performance metrics the company set for them. Hearst, one of the largest U.S. magazine publishers, said that SHOP Etc. will cease after its October issue and Weekend after its September issue. The company also cited challenging economic conditions, a tough...

It is a tough summer to be a UK media chief executive: in the past month SMG's Andrew Flanagan and ITV's Charles Allen have both departed stage left, pursued by shareholders. Flanagan and Allen, as their singing namesakes once put it, were forced to "run rabbit run" after failing to reverse their companies' share price decline. Now investors, dissatisfied by lamentable share price performance...