Some freedom of press news via Bloomberg:

President Vladimir Putin tightened his grip on Russia’s news media by abolishing the RIA Novosti wire service and handing control of its successor to a controversial televison anchor.

[….]

Putin has been criticized for rolling back press freedoms and increasing state ownership of the country’s mass media. The decision to eliminate RIA, which was founded days after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, comes two weeks after billionaire Vladimir Potanin sold his media business to a group backed by OAO Gazprombank.

“There’s been a consolidation in the media that’s involved in outwardly directed propaganda,” Boris Makarenko, deputy director of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, said today by phone. “The holding’s new boss wasn’t an accidental choice. They’ve taken a person with the ethos of a Soviet-era propagandist, not a journalist.”

Russia was ranked 148th among 179 countries in a 2013 Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, a monitoring group based in Paris.