From the NYT:

It seems that even Rupert Murdoch isn’t immune to the downturn battering media companies.

The News Corporation, the media empire controlled by Mr. Murdoch, said Thursday that it lost $6.4 billion in its second quarter as profit fell sharply at its television and movie units. The company also took a large write-down of $8.4 billion, about $3 billion of which reflected a decline in the value of the company’s newspaper unit, which includes Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

From the NYT:

Condé Nast Publications named a new publisher for The New Yorker on Thursday and put the magazine’s previous publisher in charge of Internet ad sales for the entire company. The move is part of a continuing reorganization as the company grapples with the magazine industry’s plunging ad revenue.

Last week, Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev was all "I feel your pain"-ish over the latest murder of a Russian journalist. Czech-based journalist Robert Coalson, a writer for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, says don't be fooled.

From CBC.ca:

Five of Britain's top financial journalists appeared at a government hearing in London on Wednesday, rejecting accusations that their reporting caused panic and helped escalate the financial crisis in the U.K.

An independent committee comprising members of the British parliament have been investigating the U.K.'s banking crisis and questioning different players in the industry.

Journalists from the BBC, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, Sky News and the Guardian said that even if they had held back their stories about failing banks, the problems at the institutions would have existed.

From CBC.ca:

The tough times in the Montreal media continued on Wednesday with an announcement by Corus Québec about layoffs at Info 690 radio.

The company says the French-language news station will undergo a reorganization to help make the station more profitable.

The move will result in 12 layoffs.

According to the company, Info 690 has been losing money for years.

The International Federation of Journalists puts the media worker death toll at 109 for 2008 -- down from 2007's all-time record of 175, but that's mainly due to fewer Iraqi journos being lost to sectarian violence.

At a key point in his life, Maher Arar was called a terrorist in various newspaper articles. Journalists doing so quoted shadowy people from within the Canadian intelligence security establishment. The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui thinks such sources should be outed.

I note this observation from the Globe and Mail's Andrew Willis (from Tuesday):

With the most junior of CanWest's notes trading in the 25-cents-on-the dollar neighbourhood, the bond market is signalling that a full-scale financial restructuring may be coming. It's difficult to imagine how CanWest's dual share ownership structure would survive a creditor-driven restructuring - the Asper family is in danger of losing control of the company.