Plans to create a new regional state-owned social and political newspaper will be introduced at the next legislative assembly session in Russia's Krasnoyarsk Territory, the area's assembly deputy announced Friday.

Yevgeni Tsvetkov told reporters a system of issuing, distribution and financing for the newspaper will be worked out during the session. Tsvetkov also said the popular regional newspaper Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy, with a circulation of 100,000, was sold to private entrepreneurs illegally, and should become state owned again.

Tsvetkov said Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy was renamed into a limited liability company in 1998, and has since been illegally and inefficiently managed, thus “the region's oldest and most famous newspaper is falling into decay,” according to the Russian state-run news site NewsLab. He described the privitisation of the newspaper as “large-scale swindling.”

According to Reporters Without Borders' 2007 annual report on Russia, the media subsidiary of the country's natural gas conglomerate Gazprom, whose main shareholder is the Kremlin, has gained control of many of Russia's media outlets. This includes the daily Kommersant, “one of the last bastions of the independent media,” which was bought last August by mining and metals titan Alisher Usmanov, who also owns a subsidiary of Gazprom.

“Pressure on the media in the provinces, where political and economic power is most narrowly concentrated, means that journalists' room for manoeuvre is even less than in Moscow,” Reporters Without Borders stated in the report.

In addition to the July murder and apparent torture of Yevgeny Gerasimenko, who worked for the regional weekly Saratovski Rasklad, at least five other journalists have been physically attacked, and one, Elina Ersenoyeva, “vanished in Chechnya, which remained a 'black hole' for news, even though (Russian president Vladimir) Putin said the rebellious province was 'completely back under control of the Russian constitution.'”

The journalism advocacy organisation reported that 21 journalists have been killed in Russia since Putin came to power in March 2000.