Mail.com Media Corp, the owner of Nikki Finke’s Deadline.com and other portals, has finally closed and announced its JV deal in India, after working on it for a year: it has tied up with Indian media conglom Zee Entertainment, and will launch a local Indian portal later this year, the…

SinglePoint is acquiring India-based M2Junction, which has developed a text-messaging mobile advertising platform. The purchase comes just a week after the Bellevue, Wash. company sold off off a piece of its business to Ericsson and announced a new CEO. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SinglePoint said the acquisition…

SMS GupShup has raised $12 million to help build out its texting-based mobile-phone communities in India. The company, which has operations in both Santa Clara, Calif. and Mumbai, India, claims to serve 26 million users in roughly two million topics, ranging from religious groups to sports teams. The fourth round…

DB Corp., publisher of Dainik Bhaskar and Divya Bhaskar, and joint venture partner in DNA, opened its initial public issue of shares and was subscribed 0.62 times on day one. The price band of the issue is Rs185-212. Competitor Jagran Prakashan is trading at Rs125.40. The company plans to raise…

Peter Bhatia, executive editor at The Oregonian, will succeed Sandra Mims Rowe as editor at the 159-year old publication. Rowe announced yesterday that she will be leaving the paper at the end of this year. Rowe has been editor since 1993. Bhatia, who has been a journalist for more than…

The answer (from this NYT story): due to a “troubling nexus” of business, politics and publishing that proved to be “draining on body and soul”. Raju Narisetti came to India in 2006 to set up a business newspaper for HT Media, leaving The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for…

Veteran media executive Sunil Lulla, group CEO at Alva Brothers Entertainment, has stepped down. He confirmed the development. Lulla joined the company as a director in February 2008 and also sat on the boards of group companies Miditech and Real Global Broadcasting. He set up Real under a joint venture…

The results of the latest round of Indian Readership Survey is out and here’s a compilation of how some of the most popular English newspapers and magazines fared. All figures in this story are all-India average issue readership. Of the 25 English newspapers covered by this round, 12 registered an…

Prominent Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi, winner of the World Association of Newspapers’ 2009 Golden Pen Award, has resigned from the editorship of Daily Times and the paper’s sister publication in Urdu, Daily AajKal, according to the Cafe Pyala blog. The blog quotes a mail from Sethi, in which he says…

Sun TV Network Ltd today said it was raising ad rates on its flagship Tamil channel by 9-33% w.e.f 1 January 2010. It has also raised ad rates and broadcast fee (received from content creators who essentially lease air time) across all of the company’s Tamil channels. Revised ad rates…

President Pratibha Patil last week nominated senior journalist H.K. Dua and former Hindustan Unilever chairman Ashok Ganguly to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s Parliament. Ganguly is also the chairman of ABP Ltd, the Kolkata-headquartered company that owns Ananda Bazar Patrika and Star News, among other media properties. …

Television Eighteen is laying off 12% of its permanent staffers (about 200 people, according to a company source) as part of a major restructuring exercise which will see the operations of the company’s Hindi and English business news channels getting merged. In a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange, the…

In September, India had 35.8 million Internet users (excluding visits from net cafes and handhelds), up 17% year-on-year, according to web metrics firm comScore. India’s growth rate is the third highest in the Asia Pacific region, China and Japan surpassing the country both in absolute number of users and in…

South Korea’s GS Home Shopping, the world’s third largest home shopping network (as per this release), will invest $18.5 million in HomeShop18, a Network18 subsidiary. GS will hold 15% stake in the company post the investment. Parent Network18 will invest $5 million and will continue to be a majority shareholder…

Multiplex chain PVR Ltd is buying realty major DLF Ltd’s cinema chain DT Cinemas, which currently runs 26 screens in Delhi, Gurgaon and Chandigarh. PVR will also get exclusive rights to be the key multiplex partner in all future developments by DLF.

Rohit Bansal, COO at Independent News Service Pvt. Ltd, which runs India TV, has stepped down. Bansal, who has worked at the firm for five years since 2004, has been active in the broadcast policy circles and was a familiar face at industry gatherings. Bansal confirmed the development. August 31…

Essel Group chairman Subhash Chandra, part-owner of Mumbai-headquartered broadsheet Daily News and Analysis, or DNA, has assumed an “active role” in the day-to-day operations of the paper, a person close to the developments said. Chandra, through an investment arm, controls a 49% stake in DNA’s publisher Diligent Media Corp., with…

The Union Cabinet today approved information and broadcasting ministry’s guidelines on Headend In The Sky (HITS), a technology that enables satellite transmission of digital broadcasting signals. Unlike DTH, or direct-to-home technology, HITS requires last mile cable operators to receive signals and transmit it via cable to the consumer’s home. However,…

Veteran journalist Prabhash Joshi died of cardiac arrest yesterday. He was 72. Joshi was the founder editor of Hindi daily Jansatta, a publication of The Indian Express Group. He retired in 1995, but continued as an editorial advisor. Joshi, who also wrote on cricket, suffered a heart attack after watching…