media - No bon voyage for Mark Kitto

Kitto in 2002

Richard McGregor of the Financial Iimes gave earlier this week an overview of the tribulations of former media mogul Mark Kitto (but it took a few days for the internet ants to get over the FT-firewall). I followed his story till the end of last year, when Mark started his travel magazine Voyage China after being ousted from "That's Shanghai".
Things have not gone well and Mark has returned to the UK, we learn from the article. The murky legal waters for media in China caused also this venture to run into problems and things have been played in the rough way:

In April this year, however, his partners in Voyage had rung up "inhysterics", saying they had been asked by the authorities in Beijing toexplain why they were working with a supporter of "Muslim separatists".

You wonder why anybody would like to burn their fingers on the media in China. Well, first there is a lot of money to be made when you play it right. That might explain why the number of English-language media projects is growing rather than decreasing. More about those later.
(For those interested in the full FT-article, I can email you a copy).

On travel in China