Companies

Knight Ridder, the 32-year-old national newspaper company that publishes the Times and the San Jose Mercury News, will fade into history by the end of this week. Corporate chiefs plan to lock up a sale of all 32 Knight Ridder newspapers to McClatchy Co. for $4.5 billion on Tuesday. McClatchy will then unload 12 of them, including the Times and the Mercury News, to help finance the deal. Although...

The group representing several newspapers in Canada has strong concerns about any further moves toward the regulation of media ownership. The Canadian Newspaper Association was reacting to a Senate report released Wednesday that recommends increased scrutiny on some media deals. The Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications, under Senator Joan Fraser, spent three years studying the...

OTTAWA—The newspaper industry has reacted negatively to a Senate committee recommendation that the Competition Act should be changed so that media mergers are reviewed and then approved by the government. Calling the recommendation "troubling," Anna Kothawala of the Canadian Newspaper Association said yesterday that the committee was being inconsistent. "In one breath they say that they are not...

The newspaper industry will continue to be plagued by an unstable advertising market, despite huge potential revenue growth online, according to UBS analyst Brian Shipman in a report on Thursday. The analyst released the report following the Newspaper Association of America's Mid Year Media Review conference in New York. “While interactive revenues remain a large potential growth opportunity for...

TORONTO, OTTAWA -- The federal government should automatically review any media merger that gives one company too much market share, possibly setting a threshold in the neighbourhood of 35 per cent, a Senate report says. Canada's major media companies should also regularly state who their major shareholders are, either during broadcasts or in print, as a public service, said the report released...

The information and broadcasting ministry, since the beginning of this year, has cleared 13 proposals for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in media and is examining another 22 proposals. There have been eight proposals for FDI in the news and current affairs media including Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd, Business India Publications Ltd, Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd, Dhara Prakashan Pvt Ltd, Writers &...

WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday will embark on a new attempt to revamp media ownership restrictions and the battle lines over whether to allow more consolidation are already being drawn. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has long advocated lifting a 1975 restriction preventing a company from owning a newspaper as well as a radio or television station...

More than two-thirds of the newspaper companies worldwide expect to remain a predominantly newspaper publisher in the near future, according to a just released report by Ifra, the world's leading association for newspaper and media publishing. HERE AND NOW: The three-year "Where News?" project is being funded with more than a million Euro, signalling how serious the association's more than 3000...

In a major restructuring exercise, Times Internet Ltd (TIL) has promoted some of its key senior executives as well as reshuffled some responsibilities. Informed sources aver that Dinesh Wadhawan, who joined as CEO a few months ago, effected these changes to check the high attrition rate that TIL has been facing in recent times. Mohit Hira, previously VP-Marketing, has been promoted as Director...

The recent breakup of the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper chain has helped spark interest around the country in returning papers to local or private ownership after decades of expansion by corporate media conglomerates. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer left Knight Ridder for local ownership, and local groups in Los Angeles and Baltimore are mounting efforts to provoke sales of those cities'...