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Journalist Assassinated in Violent Russian Republic

July 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The journalist, Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev, 53, a deputy editor of the independent daily newspaper Novoye Delo, had already survived a January assassination attempt at the same spot just outside the capital, Makhachkala.

“They were waiting for him at an intersection just 50 meters from his house,” said Fatina Ubaidatova, a spokeswoman for the local police, adding that they did not have any suspects. “They fired several shots into the car and he was hit in the head. He died there.”

The killing is the latest in a steady tide of attacks on journalists in Dagestan, which is facing a low-level Islamic insurgency. According to data from the Russian Union of Journalists, Mr. Akhmednabiyev is the 17th journalist to be killed or die under suspicious circumstances in Dagestan since 1993.

The police say most of the killings have been carried out by “members of the criminal underground,” though it is rarely, if ever, clear what their allegiances are. In the majority of the assassinations, journalists are shot in their cars, and the cases are rarely solved.

Mr. Akhmednabiyev saw few topics as off limits, writing about what he described as extrajudicial kidnappings by local security forces, human rights violations during counterterrorism operations, and pressure against Muslim organizations.

He regularly received threatening phone calls and text messages from unidentified sources, said Khadzhimurad Sagitov, editor in chief of Novoye Delo.

“We expected this,” Mr. Sagitov said by telephone while waiting for a funeral procession for Mr. Akhmednabiyev to arrive at a cemetery on the outskirts of Makhachkala. “We knew that if not today, then it would happen tomorrow, or the next day.”

In December 2011, Khadzhimurad Kamalov, the founder of the independent Chernovik newspaper, was gunned down outside the newspaper’s offices in Makhachkala.

Mr. Kamalov’s name had been included on a so-called kill list of people whom the unknown authors accused of supporting local Islamist militants and bearing the blame for the death of police officers and civilians in the conflict.

Mr. Akhmednabiyev’s name was also on the list, though it was not clear why.

Deadly attacks, which are rarely solved by the local police, have become a common way of silencing journalists in Dagestan in recent years. The police spokeswoman said that while the attack was probably linked to Mr. Akhmednabiyev’s professional activities, she could not name any particular articles or a specific motive in the killing. Mr. Sagitov similarly said he could not name a particular article of Mr. Akhmednabiyev’s as a likely trigger behind the attack, adding that he “never made it personal” in articles that accused local authorities of crimes.

“He was a religious man,” said Mr. Sagitov. “That helped him deal with the threats.”

On Tuesday, several hundred mourners carried Mr. Akhmednabiyev’s body from a downtown mosque down a main avenue in Makhachkala to a local cemetery.

Some also held signs, one that read: “Who’s next?”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/journalist-assassinated-in-violent-russian-republic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Top Editors Abruptly Leave Village Voice

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The tumult that has characterized The Village Voice in recent years resurfaced on Thursday when the top two editors said they were leaving the weekly newspaper.

Will Bourne, who became editor last November, and Jessica Lustig, the deputy editor since January, met with the staff at 11 a.m. on Thursday to announce their departure. In a phone interview, Mr. Bourne said that Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, had told them to lay off, or drastically reduce the roles of, five employees on the 20-person staff. Rather than carry out the cuts, he and Ms. Lustig resigned and left immediately, in the middle of closing next week’s paper.

The turnover at The Village Voice has become something of a pattern as the weekly and its owners have struggled to come to grips with declining revenue and increased competition for readers and advertisers on the Web. When Mr. Bourne took over, he became the sixth editor in chief of the paper since 2005.

“We are both leaving because I was summoned to a meeting and asked to get rid of five people, and we are on a short string already,” said Mr. Bourne, who worked at Fast Company and Inc. magazine before coming to the Voice. “When I was brought in here, I was explicitly told that the bloodletting had come to an end. I have enormous respect for the staff here and the work they have been doing, and I am not going to preside over further layoffs.”

In a statement issued on Thursday afternoon, the Voice Media Group said it would be “instituting further structural and staffing changes at the publication.” It said the changes would include “minimal staff reductions” but denied that five employees would be laid off. The changes, it said, “will ultimately support the ongoing sustainability of The Village Voice.”

The company said Pete Kotz would temporarily lead The Village Voice staff while managers searched for a new editor. Mr. Kotz has been Voice Media Group’s national blogs editor and the assigning editor for its national features program.

Ms. Lustig said she was leaving at the same time as Mr. Bourne because she shared his belief that the paper could not absorb further cuts.

In 2012, Village Voice Media ran into objections from law enforcement officials and civic groups over Backpage.com, a classified Web site that has hosted escort ads. The company split, separating its classified service and selling its chain of 13 weekly newspapers to a group of its former editors and publishers last September. The Village Voice, founded in 1955, has won three Pulitzer Prizes and published the work of Henry Miller, Tom Stoppard and Nat Hentoff.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 9, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the time of a staff meeting at the Village Voice. It was 11 a.m. Thursday, not p.m.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/business/media/top-editors-abruptly-leave-village-voice.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Italy’s Borrowing Costs Fall, but Pressures Remain High

December 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Last week, Mr. Monti won final approval of a $40 billion spending package that includes tax increases and a pension change aimed at eliminating Italy’s budget deficit by 2013. But with Italians starting to feel the pain and dissent growing in Parliament, he must act swiftly to stimulate Italy’s economy, which is already in recession and is expected by some forecasters to shrink in 2012.

On Wednesday, the day his cabinet met to discuss measures to spur economic growth, Mr. Monti appeared to receive some breathing room when interest rates on six-month Treasury bills, a barometer of investor worry about Italy’s creditworthiness, dropped in half to 3.2 percent and rates on 10-year Treasury bonds dropped to 6.91 percent from above 7 percent, which was near the level at which other euro-zone countries like Ireland and Greece needed bailouts.

“Of course it’s an important and comforting signal,” said Massimo Giannini, the business editor and deputy editor of the center-left daily La Repubblica, adding that the government had been concerned that the borrowing rates remained high even after it passed the austerity measures.

“But the pot is still boiling,” Mr. Giannini said, meaning that Italy’s economic travails remain acute and a challenge for the Monti government. “The problem is that we need to relaunch economic growth, but there isn’t a lot of money to do this. It’s a huge problem, and they don’t know how to do it.”

Market analysts said the drop in borrowing rates on Wednesday partly reflected Italian bond purchases by the European Central Bank and other European banks, which received a large infusion of low-interest capital from the European Central Bank this month.

Analysts said a bigger test for Italy will come in a larger bond auction on Thursday. Italy, the euro zone’s third-largest economy, must refinance almost 200 billion euros in government debt by April, and if borrowing rates remain high, the country could face a solvency crisis that could threaten the stability of the euro.

In many ways, the fluctuations in Italy’s borrowing rate only compound the country’s political complexities. Analysts doubted that the lower rates seen on Wednesday would buy Mr. Monti more time. Moreover, they said, his government needs a certain amount of market pressure to help push through politically unpopular structural changes in the economy that the parties nominally backing him in Parliament are not eager to carry out.

Yet if the market pressure becomes too high and the borrowing rates remain too onerous, Italy risks a default.

“A part of the political class thinks that if the market pressure lets up, we can also lessen the sting of cleaning up the economy, to do weaker economic measures,” Mr. Giannini said. “But by now I think there’s a broad awareness, at least on the part of the government, that we have to do these measures regardless of the euro and regardless of the commitment we made with Europe.”

In August, Italy agreed to eliminate its budget deficit by 2013 and enact structural changes to its pension system and labor markets in exchange for purchases of Italian government debt by the European Central Bank.

The People of Liberty, the largest party supporting Mr. Monti’s government in Parliament, believes that its former leader, Silvio Berlusconi, was swept out of office by market forces, not traditional democratic processes, and in recent weeks has attempted to gain political ground by capturing Italian discontent at the austerity measures.

“There’s no clear link between the decisions taken by the government and the markets,” Angelino Alfano, the leader of the People of Liberty and Mr. Berlusconi’s political heir, told a group of reporters last week. Calling on Europe to take broader action, he asked: “No matter how illuminated the choices are of the Italian government, can they change the course of the euro crisis or the destiny of Europe?”

In recent weeks, Mr. Monti, too, has been calling on Europe — which is to say Germany, the euro zone’s biggest and strongest economy — to help provide more institutional support for the euro.

Germany has adamantly opposed what it sees as rewarding the bad behavior of southern rim countries like Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, which amassed high public debts and where tax evasion is rampant. But it has also been vehemently opposed to changes that many economists and the Obama administration say are necessary to ensure the stability of the euro, such as allowing the European Central Bank to become a lender of last resort like the Federal Reserve in the United States.

The troubled backdrop to Italy’s economic challenge is neighboring Greece, where nearly two years of austerity measures — tax increases and wage cuts — demanded by the country’s foreign lenders have pushed the country into a deep recession and led to deep cuts in basic services like health care.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6e875b54aad605415c534bcc14b03a3e

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For New Yorker on iPad, Words Are the Thing

August 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But some consumers, it turns out, just want to read.

Offering the first detailed glimpse into iPad magazine sales since subscriptions became available in the spring, The New Yorker said that it now had 100,000 iPad readers, including about 20,000 people who bought subscriptions at $59.99 a year.

Additionally, more than 75,000 people have taken advantage of the magazine’s offer to allow print subscribers to download the app free. Several thousand more people, on average, buy single issues for $4.99 each week.

Magazines are still in the early stages of app experimentation, and the number of buyers is small in the context of The New Yorker’s one million print subscribers. But the figures are the highest of any iPad edition sold by Condé Nast, which also publishes Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and others on the Apple tablet.

“Those, to me, sound like strong numbers,” said Andrew Lipsman, vice president for industry analysis at comScore. Mr. Lipsman said the figure was even more impressive because people paid a premium price to subscribe.

The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.

“That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading,” said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor. “There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go.”

It is surprising that Condé Nast’s biggest success has been The New Yorker and not, say, a magazine that has a more technologically stimulating app and a younger, more Web-oriented readership like Wired.

Making money from digital content has frustrated publishers since the dawn of the Internet. And for Condé Nast, a publisher whose digital history is full of fits and false starts, the issue has been particularly perplexing.

Condé Nast has tried with limited success to shift toward a business model that relies more heavily on revenue from consumers, like magazine subscriptions, branded products and events, than advertising, which is more dependent on the ups and downs of the economy. The success of The New Yorker app is a small step in that direction.

Among the app’s interactive features are audio of poets reading their work. For articles that involve complicated legal cases or rely on documentation, readers can access the files through the app.

The magazine’s aggressive iPad strategy is part of its embrace of the Web, a change that did not come easily or quickly. The New Yorker still leaves much of its content on NewYorker.com behind a pay wall.

“When we started this Web site, it wasn’t something executives were dying to do because, quite frankly, they looked around and saw a lot of lost money,” said David Remnick, the magazine’s editor.

But Mr. Remnick has shifted more resources toward The New Yorker’s digital enterprise. Nine months ago he hired the magazine’s first news editor, who helps engage its writers on big breaking news like the killing of Osama bin Laden and assigns them to write for the Web site. That was the magazine’s biggest mobilization of resources to put articles online. And Mr. Remnick said he envisioned more of that happening.

“The big trick as an editor is adjusting the culture enough so writers are willing to see this entire different format as part of what they do and as part of what The New Yorker does,” he said.

For the iPad to be a truly successful medium for publishers, it cannot exist on circulation revenue alone. “You’d need a lot higher volume if all you were doing was selling ads against it,” said Mr. Lipsman. “But when you’re getting subscription revenue, tens of thousands of subscribers are meaningful.”

Advertisers must be convinced that they are getting their money’s worth. Many are awaiting better proof that readers are actually engaged.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8693386d46ab7955e3792c1cb3618e2e

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An Arrest and Scotland Yard Resignation Roil Britain

July 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The official, Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as the Met or Scotland Yard, said that he had decided to step down because “the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met’s links with News International at a senior level” had made it difficult for him to do his job.

But he said that he had done nothing wrong and that he would not “lose sleep over my personal integrity.” He also said that because he had not been involved in the original phone-hacking investigation, he had had no idea that Neil Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor who had become a public-relations consultant for the police after leaving the paper, was himself suspected of phone hacking.

Mr. Wallis, 60, was arrested last Thursday.

The commissioner’s resignation came as the London political establishment was still digesting the stunning news about the arrest of Ms. Brooks — who apparently was surprised herself. A consummate networker who has always been assiduously courted by politicians and whose friends include Prime Minister David Cameron, Ms. Brooks, 43, is the 10th and by far the most powerful person to be arrested so far in the phone-hacking scandal.

Her arrest is bound to be particularly wounding to Mr. Murdoch, who, asked early last week to identify his chief priority in the affair, pointed to Ms. Brooks and said, “This one.”

Ms. Brooks has not yet been formally charged, but it is significant that she is being questioned in connection with two separate investigations. One, called Operation Weeting, is examining allegations of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World, the tabloid at the center of the scandal, where Ms. Brooks was editor from 2000 to 2003. The other is Operation Elveden, which is looking into more serious charges that News International editors paid police officers for information.

Ms. Brooks has always maintained that she was unaware of wrongdoing at The News of the World, which was summarily closed by Mr. Murdoch a week ago in an unsuccessful damage-control exercise. But the tide rose against her, and on Friday she resigned, saying in a statement that her presence was “detracting attention” from the company.

The arrest was a shock to the News Corporation, the parent company of News International, and the other properties in Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which is reeling from the traumas of last week: the forced withdrawal of its cherished $12 billion takeover bid for British Sky Broadcasting and the resignations not only of Ms. Brooks but also of Les Hinton, a longtime Murdoch ally and friend who was the chairman of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Speaking of Ms. Brooks, an official at News International said: “When she resigned on Friday, we were not aware that she would be arrested by the police.” Another person briefed on the News Corporation’s plans said that on Friday, when the company was preparing to announce her exit and the departure in New York of Mr. Hinton, the possibility of her arrest was not discussed.

Investor unease about the scandal appeared to be affecting News Corporation shares, which were down nearly 6 percent in early Monday trading on the Australian exchange in Sydney.

Until Ms. Brooks arrived at a London police station by prearranged appointment on Sunday, she believed she would merely be helping the police as a witness, her spokesman said.

“She was very surprised, I think, to then be arrested,” said the spokesman, David Wilson, chairman of the Bell Pottinger public relations firm. Mr. Wilson said it all happened so quickly that both her lawyer and he were brought in to handle her case over the weekend.

Ms. Brooks was arrested “under caution,” he said, meaning that she was read her rights and treated as a suspect. “She maintains her innocence, absolutely,” he said. She was released on bail after about 12 hours in police custody, news services reported.For months, Ms. Brooks had been willing to talk to the police but had been rebuffed, Mr. Wilson said. “As recently as last week, she was told she wasn’t required to do so and she wasn’t on their radar.”

Jo Becker and Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from London, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8f2359aac8c61bb25c121ab7d8ffcc41

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