RUSSIA: Question of the week in Moscow: What does a gas company want with a newspaper? The answer has to do with the gas company: state-controlled Gazprom, whose chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, is also President Vladimir Putin's chief-of-staff.
Izvestia is one of only three independent newspapers in Moscow and has long been a thorn in the side of the government. Now Gazprom, a behemoth which pumps a quarter of the world's gas, has used its small change to buy a controlling stake.
The move comes amid what some are calling a media blitz by the Kremlin, which is also downsizing regional television stations and spending $30 million on a satellite TV channel designed to boost the image of Russia.
This is not the first time the Kremlin has had a crack at the media. Insider accounts of the Kremlin say Putin has twin obsessions - television and tycoons, Russia's super-rich billionaires whose power extends into politics.
After coming to power in 2000, the president took aim at two tycoons who each controlled a television channel, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. His weapon was the law - like most tycoons, both men had questions about how they made their fortunes. Putin set prosecutors on their tails.
Both men fled abroad - Gusinsky to Israel, Berezovsky to Britain which, while turning away thousands of asylum-seekers, was happy to give him refugee status.
For Putin, their flight was a double success. The government took control of their TV stations - it now controls all national TV networks - and Russia's remaining tycoons got the message and kept out of politics. Only Mikhail Khodorkovsky broke ranks to dabble in funding political parties; last week he was jailed for nine years for fraud and corruption.
But while television is compliant, newspapers are another matter. The Kremlin was stung last September by Izvestia's reports from Beslan. While reporting on the slaughter of 300 children and bravery of Russia's special forces, the newspaper also highlighted chaotic organisation by officials.
Then there was Ukraine. Putin spent a lot of political capital supporting his favoured candidate, only to see the man dumped in the Orange Revolution and a pro-western president elected instead.
When Russia's pensioners staged nationwide protests earlier this year against cuts in state benefits, Izvestia was there.
There is nothing illegal in the Gazprom takeover or about downsizing regional TV stations which are overstaffed anyway or in creating a TV station to give a positive spin on events in this great country. But taken together, it looks like the Kremlin is further tightening the media screw.
Putin's Kremlin is staffed by his former KGB colleagues and it now controls parliament, regional governors, oil and gas and most of the broadcast media.
Such control, goes the argument, is needed to implement the kind of reforms Russia needs to become strong again. The idea is deeply seductive, especially to those who remember the chaos of wildcat democracy in the 1990s.
History though seems to show that most such regimes, however noble their motives, come to grief when control becomes too strong and checks and balances are abandoned. Whether Putin is successful in building a strong Russia remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: whatever happens, ordinary Russians will find it increasingly difficult to read all about it.