"Radio hostess found dead in deputy mayor's bed" and "Female students ordered to dance with officials" are not the headlines Chinese Communist Party officials like to see.
Now, it seems, they won't have to, after a sweeping change of editors ordered by the Communist Party propaganda department at two of the country's raciest newspapers.
The replacement of top editors at the China Youth Daily and the new tabloid (New Weekly) comes as the party begins a crackdown that has included the arrest of several writers and internet activists as recently as this week.
In the first case, Li Xueqian, editor-in-chief and president of the China Youth Daily - which is controlled by the Communist Party Youth League, the stepping stone to power for current President and party chief Hu Jintao - resigned earlier this month and now has a routine job in the youth league.
His replacement, Li Erliang, previously edited a drab trade newspaper belonging to the main party organ, the People's Daily.
The Youth Daily had been daring in exposing cases of corruption by government and party officials, most recently revealing how the deputy party secretary in the southern industrial city of Shenzhen had required local university students to buy tickets for a movie that his daughter directed, produced and starred in.
The party official, Li Yizhen, was forced to make a humiliating public apology.
In the second case, Xin Zhou Bao suddenly announced a three-week shutdown after only seven weeks in publication because of "office relocation" while its president, Feng Xiaoping, and editor-in-chief, Zhao Shilong, both resigned.
It was not clear which articles were the cause of the closure, which could become permanent. The two headlines quoted above are examples of the stories that attracted national attention, but the moves signal a widening campaign by the powerful party propaganda department against dissent.
On Monday, police arrested at least three leading writers and social critics - Yu Jie, Liu Xiaobo, and Zhang Zhuhua - and questioned them about their recent internet postings. They were later released.
Another writer, Shi Tao, was arrested several weeks ago. According to the website secretchina.com, Mr Yu underwent 14 hours of continuous interrogation and was made to sign copies of his articles that had appeared on various websites, including one sponsored by the banned Falun Gong spiritual group.
Police said the articles attacked the party leadership and were thus illegal. The website quoted Wang Yi, an intellectual recently included in a media ban issued by the propaganda department, as saying the arrests showed the "authoritarian anti-rightist ideology emerging after Hu Jintao's ascension".
In the southern province of Guangdong, next to Hong Kong, the Pyongyang-educated party secretary Zhang Dejiang continued a tough approach to the region's innovative media, with the sacking in October of Xiao Weibin, editor-in-chief of the magazine Tong Zhou Gong, which had run an interview with a retired provincial party secretary who advocated political liberalisation matching economic freedoms.
Earlier this year the editor of the popular newspaper Southern Metropolis News, Cheng Yizhong, spent five months in jail under investigation for embezzlement. His offence was "revealing attempts to cover-up blame at high levels for a death in custody".
By Hamish McDonald China Correspondent Beijing December 16, 2004
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