Up Yours-ski!

The Kremlin should be the perfect place for Newsquest managers to hang out - after all, they combine the worst tendencies of the Tsars, pilfering from the serfs while keeping them in poverty, with the outrageous back-stabbing of previously loyal underlings for which the leaders of the USSR were associated.

But even in the cloistered environs of the World Newspaper Congress in Moscow, it looks like Newsquest's top brass can't bet away from the bain of the lives - those pesky journalists.

Witness this exchange from The Guardian's Media Monkey diary, reproduced below:

So much for glasnost
One final anecdote from the World Newspaper Congress in Moscow to demonstrate that the desire for secrecy and state control of the media is alive and kicking in, er, the UK. During lunch in the Kremlin State Palace, Monkey tried and failed to strike up a conversation with a neighbouring British newspaper executive. When asked over the entr ée for his views on regional newspapers turning into freesheets, Paul Hunter, finance director of the Newsquest Media Group, responded: "I don't give interviews." How very Soviet.