The NYT blurb: "Drug dealers and corrupt police officers regularly kill those who write about them, leading most reporters to censor themselves, (Mexican) journalists say."

An excerpt:

René Martínez had just sat down to edit a batch of articles at 7:50 Monday evening when he heard the heavy tread of military boots just outside the newsroom and then, suddenly, like a scream on a quiet night, blasts of machine-gun fire.
 
The newsroom of El Mañana descended into panic. Reporters dived to the floor and crawled under desks. Bullets from high-powered weapons tore through glass and walls. One of the two heavily armed gunmen screamed a threat. Then a grenade went off and the air filled with dust and smoke, Mr. Martínez recalled.

As the two gunmen fled, Mr. Martínez crawled toward the newsroom door. There he saw the night rewrite man, Jaime Orozco Tey, a 40-year-old father of three, lying in blood. He had been hit at least three times, and was critically wounded.

"The guy who shot him never saw him," Mr. Martínez said. "This is a dark place to work. We know there is danger in the streets, but we continue to work."

On Wednesday, President Vicente Fox appointed a special federal prosecutor to investigate crimes against journalists, and federal investigators began to look for clues in the shooting here, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Tex.

But the brazen attack on El Mañana, the biggest newspaper here, underscored an ugly truth: Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places to practice journalism, outside of Iraq. Drug dealers and corrupt police officers regularly kill those who write about them, leading most reporters to censor themselves, journalists say.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization, says that at least four journalists have been killed in the last six years in direct reprisals for their reporting on drug dealers, and that one young investigative reporter from Hermosillo, Alfredo Jiménez Mota, is missing and presumed dead after writing about a drug gang called Los Numeros.

"That's a very alarming number," said Joel Simon, the committee's deputy director. "The situation is very comparable to Colombia in terms of self-censorship and the level of violence."