Bharti Airtel, VSNL and seven other global telecoms have agreed to build a submarine fiber optic cable that will stretch from India to France, through the Middle East, The Times of India reported Thursday.

The 14,000 km cable is hoped to be completed by late 2009, and will meet the growing needs of Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Bharti would not disclose the cost of the project.

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Andris Tiltnieks has filed a £3.7 million libel claim against the publishers of the Guardian newspaper.

Tiltnieks is the head of The Baltic Work Team, a company that employs Bulgarian workers to do manual labour. A Guardian article, published in August 2007, claimed the company illegally employed and exploited the workers, not paying them for 34 days and forcing them to live on scraps and by scavenging vegetables from fields where they worked, and housing them in dirty caravans. The story also stated that Tiltnieks had his gangmaster licence revoked for abuses of employment law, Press Gazette reported Thursday.

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A third session of strike action at the Milton Keynes Citizen scheduled to start Tuesday was postponed, with the chapel choosing to instead go on strike within the next few weeks, HoldtheFrontPage reported Wednesday.

The row between the National Union of Journalists and the paper, owned by Johnston Press Plc, is over a pay dispute.

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Attempting to benefit from cost-per-click or cost-per-action online advertising, News Digital Media has launched a performance-based network of advertising spots on its Web sites, The Australian reported Thursday.

The New Performance Network is hoped to give NDM access to about 40 percent of the online display advertising market.

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Madison, Wisconsin's afternoon daily newspaper will become a free weekly beginning in the spring, The Business Journal of Milwaukee reported Thursday.

The Capital Times will also revamp its Web site to give online readers more daily news and features.

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2007 was a tough year for U.S. newspaper companies, as 10 out of 11 saw their stock prices drop, while nearly 80 percent of the companies saw declines of more than 30 percent.

Journal Register and McClatchy experienced the downturn most seriously – their stock price plunged 75 percent and 71 percent, respectively.

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AOL's U.S. dial-up access and advertising businesses will finally be divided, announced Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's recently appointed CEO, Media Post reported Thursday.

During the fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday, Bewkes said his vision for the future of the company includes the possibility of spinning off its cable division.

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The Conference Board, which measures print help-wanted ad volumes in 51 major U.S. papers, reported that although the Help-Wanted Advertising Index was up one point to 22 in December 2007 compared to the previous month, it dropped 33 percent compared with December 2006.

The organisation pointed out print recruitment advertising dropped in eight of the nine regions in the United States, where the steepest declines occurred in the Pacific (down 18.9 percent) and South Atlantic (down 16.3 percent). The East North Central region, on the contrary, grew 2.5 percent, Editor & Publisher reported earlier this month.

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