Daily Express owner Richard Desmond paid himself £40.6 million in 2006, more than four times the £9.1 million pre-tax profits of Northern & Shell Network, the holding company for all of his media assets, according to account documents to be published this week.

The payment will show up in Northern & Shell's annual results, and will also reveal the media boss gave himself quite a pay increase from the £27.3 he received in 2005, which followed a bumper 2004 payout of £51.7 million.

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The World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum have renewed the call to Russian President Vladimir Putin for a thorough and impartial investigation of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist killed a year ago.

"We are seriously concerned that those who order or carry out violence against journalists in Russia enjoy almost total impunity from prosecution. It is estimated that 21 journalists have been killed since you came to power in March 2000," the WAN and WEF stated in a letter to Putin on the one-year anniversary of Politkovskaya's death.

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Polskapresse will launch new daily newspaper Polska Oct. 15, six days before Poland votes in parliamentary elections, the publisher announced Monday.

Polska (Poland) will compete in a tightly competitive news market alongside other dailies, namely Agora's Gazeta Wyborcza, Axel Springer's Dziennik and Presspublica's Rzeczpospolita.

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Egyptian independent and opposition newspapers began striking Sunday to protest a government clampdown that had several journalists hit with lengthy jail terms.

The journalists' union said 23 newspapers joined the strike. Dailies did not publish their Sunday editions, while independent and opposition weeklies would not be appearing on newsstands either.

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Facebook’s independent developer’s forum, a pioneering call for innovation transformed into a capitalistic free-for-all, will have great universal impact, according to Diane Mermigas, editor-at-large of MediaPost.

Very few companies are willing to lower its walls and make an at-large appeal for future growth ideas. Facebook’s founding chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who keeps a tight rein on his private little enterprise, has not strayed from his launching vision three years ago, and totally understands that individual talent and intelligence are a company's most valuable assets.

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U.S. News & World Reported is launching a “best of” Web site, which will rank many products, beginning with cars and trucks last week, Media Post reported Monday.

Could this be an online idea newspapers should take note of?

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