I got this email today on the closing of Internews Russia.. read on

The Educated Media Foundation (EMF – formerly known as Internews Russia) has been forced to suspend operations following the opening of a criminal investigation into its president, Manana Aslamazyan, related to a customs
violation, and a subsequent eleven-hour raid on its Moscow headquarters on April 18, 2007 by Russian police, who confiscated all of the EMF’s servers and financial documentation.

The EMF is an independent, Russian non-governmental organization, and has been a leading source of professional training and support for Russian media for many years. Over 2,000 Russian journalists from every part of the country have signed an open letter to President Putin in support of Manana
Aslamazyan and the Educated Media Foundation. The Russian original with more than 2,000 signatures is online, and an English translation is also
available.

The Global Forum for Media Development, which Internews Russia helped launch and on whose Steering Committee Ms. Aslamazyan serves, has composed the letter below in solidarity with fellow media professionals in Russia and in support of Ms. Aslamazyan and the EMF. This letter is also supported by the
members of the GFMD Steering Committee.

The letter, below, is available online at www.gfmd.info with a link to the petition site. We hope that you will add your name to the list in support of your Russian colleagues and will encourage journalists and media professionals in your country to sign as well.

“As professionals working in, for and with the mass media in countries around the world, we are deeply concerned that the Russian non-governmental media support organization, the Educated Media Foundation (EMF), legal successor to Internews Russia, has been forced to suspend its activities, which focus on training journalists and other media professionals. By signing here, we express our solidarity with our Russian colleagues who have initiated a protest, and express our support for the Educated Media Foundation/Internews Russia and its president Manana Aslamazyan. Like us, our Russian colleagues are part of an international professional media community that believes its audiences and readers deserve access to complete, diverse and independent sources of information. We support them in their efforts to stop the harassment of the EMF and all other impediments to the work of Russian journalists.”

Please note that in keeping with the policy of its Russian colleagues, GFMD is seeking only signatures from people directly involved with media, though with a fairly broad definition: journalists, media managers, owners, technical people, media advertising professionals, journalism educators/academics and media development implementers. We will probably not
list people from private foundations or government funding agencies, even those specializing in media.

Links to additional information on the raid of EMF and the criminal case against Manana Aslamazyan in English are available at:
http://www.internews.org
Any additional questions about the case or the petition may be addressed to russiapetition@gfmd.info

Thank you for your support.

David Hoffman
Chair, GFMD Steering Committee
and President, Internews Network
—-
Yesterday, i read this from Wired.

read on:

“Grade the News reports that MediaNews, the parent company of the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily paper San Jose Mercury News, will be laying off 60 reporters from Silicon Valley’s premiere news source. That’s nearly a quarter of the news staff. Like many newspapers across the country, MediaNews blames the internet for its financial failures.

Though the cuts haven’t been announced officially yet, the leak came from a reputable source: John Bowman, executive editor of San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews:

The staff reductions were discussed at an April meeting [Bowman] attended at the Mercury News along with top editors of MediaNews, which now owns every paid daily newspaper around the San Francisco Bay but the San Francisco Chronicle. The proposed cuts would affect 24% of the 250 member Mercury News

Mr. Bowman said he disclosed the layoff plan and resigned as executive editor of the Times because he was fed up with MediaNews’ policies of trying to run newspapers short-handed.

San Jose Mercury News executive editor Susan Goldberg also quit two weeks ago to begin a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is owned by Wired parent company Advance Publications. She has not said whether this move was related to the threat of job cuts.

Grade the News reporter John McManus contextualizes the Merc layoffs:

Reductions in staff have been common at newspapers across the country in recent years. The San Francisco Chronicle announced May 18 that it would trim 100 newsroom jobs from its 400-member staff in coming months. Newspapers have been losing both subscribers and advertisers to the Internet, according to figures compiled by the Newspaper Association of America. Their most recent data shows those losses are accelerating.

Unleashing all those highly trained journalists on the world can hardly be a bad thing: I predict there will be more well-researched news blogs and podcasts in coming months, created by traditional reporters who’ve gone over to the Web side. The Merc’s loss is our gain.”

Journalists are being let go left and right. Even the best ones were given nice packet and shoved out the door. At the knight fellowships, 5 of 12 US journalists were let go while doing their studies at stanford.

depressing…