RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS are digesting an appalling attack on one of their own, the latest crime against a profession that is one of the worst paid and most dangerous in Russia. Unknown assailants attacked Mikhail Beketov, the editor of a small campaign newspaper that circulates on Moscow's grim northern outskirts, in front of his home on November 13.

They beat him with metal poles or baseball bats and left him for dead in a pool of blood. Hidden from view by a high fence, he lay on the ground for more than 24 hours before a neighbour raised the alarm. He is now in a coma and there are reports that his wife has gone missing. A bear of a man, Beketov had irritated authorities in the suburban town of Khimki with a series of articles protesting at lucrative plans to drive a motorway through a local forest. Khimki, on Moscow's northern edge, is a Soviet-era concrete jungle on the way to the international airport that has been turned into an out of town shopping destination.

Beketov was well known in the town. He had styled himself as a powerful critic of the local mayor, who was in the process of suing him for defamation. Apparently unfazed, Beketov continued to delve into alleged official corruption and publish his newspaper despite receiving numerous threats. The Khimki authorities deny any involvement in his beating, while making no secret of their disdain for the journalist.

The "Beketov case" has refocused attention on the risks of reporting in Russia, where large swathes of officialdom regard the media as little more than a pliant mouthpiece for their own self-aggrandisement. Journalists are routinely assaulted, sued or threatened, and offered money to pull stories, write flattering profiles, or compose hatchet jobs. Sometimes they are simply killed.

Journalists and environmental campaigners have demanded that president Dmitry Medvedev take the Beketov investigation under his personal control, something he has so far not done. They fear that local police are in the pocket of local officials and will not investigate properly. That fear has already been partially borne out: investigators say the attack may have just been a random, everyday assault and in no way connected with his work.

The brutality of the attack on Beketov and the offhand way the authorities have so far reacted to it has caused shock, even in a country inured to bloody contract killings and casual everyday violence.

Meanwhile, members of the Kremlin-controlled Public Chamber, an advisory body made up of people prime minister Vladimir Putin considers to be the great and the good, have urged the creation of a new body that would support journalists in trouble, both legally and financially. But in a country where the gap between rhetoric and deed is yawning, few believe that the lot of Russian journalists will get better anytime soon.

A further reminder of the dangers they face came last week when the trial of three men accused of murdering investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya began. Her killing, in 2006, caused international uproar and became a symbol of the profession's precarious plight.

Politkovskaya specialised in reporting on Chechnya and the repressive Kremlin-backed regime that has brought stability to what used to be a war-zone using terror and violence. She was a fierce critic of Putin, on whose birthday she was mysteriously murdered. Putin would later play down her significance and was visibly annoyed to be asked about her murder.

The men on trial for Politkovskaya's killing - which saw her shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block after being followed for weeks - are accused of being part of a Chechen hit squad. Yet the person who ordered the hit - the zakazchik - has not been identified and the investigation has been repeatedly disrupted by damaging official leaks to the media.

The trial, too, has quickly become bogged down in controversy after the judge said the jury didn't want it to be open to the media because of fears for its own safety. That claim was swiftly punctured by a juror who phoned into a Moscow radio station, saying a majority of jurors had in fact been happy to allow print media. The judge has also postponed proceedings, claiming that some of the lawyers involved are too busy to take part, a charge the lawyers themselves strongly deny.

Beketov was not as well known as Politkovskaya but his story, two years on from her death, is equally terrifying.

At the time of writing, he is on a life-support machine. He has had his right leg amputated after gangrene set in and doctors say they are preparing to amputate some of his fingers too. Doctors say the terrible injuries he sustained - to his skull and upper body - mean he should already be dead. It is not clear whether he will survive and he has already had to be moved from one hospital after an anonymous caller told relatives he would finish the journalist off.

Nor was the attack the first of its kind. In 2007, his car was set on fire and last summer besuited men beat his dog to death with metal poles in front of his neighbours. He told friends before the latest attack that a local criminal had called him a week-and-a-half ago and told him that a hit had been taken out on him by a senior official in the local administration. The criminal told him that the order was to leave him alive - but only just.

People who know him say Beketov's journalism had upset people in powerful places and strayed into the dangerous and murky intersection between politics and business that is so common in Russia, where bribe-taking and kickbacks are rife. In particular, he had written on three subjects that cast the local authorities in a dubious light. The first was a proposed new road between Moscow and St Petersburg that has been routed through a local forest regarded as the last green space in an area choked with pollution, busy roads and crumbling factories. Beketov was a vociferous opponent of the project and part of an active grassroots campaign that lobbied local residents to oppose it. He and others argued for an alternative route, a suggestion so far rejected by the authorities.

Last year, he also incurred the authorities' wrath by publicising the bulldozing of a poignant war monument near a busy road. The authorities had hurriedly ordered the monument's removal and the bodies of two Soviet pilots and four Red Army soldiers were exhumed and reburied elsewhere. There were allegations that body parts went missing in the relocation.

The authorities said the monument had become a hang-out for the area's prostitutes and that the graves therefore needed to be moved. Local Communists said the prostitutes, not the graves, should have been moved. The relocation appears to have been part of a scheme to widen a road to ease congestion.

The scandal caused embarrassment for the local authorities and for the Kremlin, since it coincided with a dispute between Russia and Estonia over the relocation of a Soviet war monument in Tallinn, the Estonian capital. The Kremlin had accused the Estonians of sacrilege but the scandal in Moscow - brought to light by Beketov - made the Russians look petty and hypocritical.

Finally, days before he was attacked Beketov published a new issue of his newspaper that alleged that the local authorities had secured a large loan from a Moscow bank without holding a competitive tender. That, people who know him say, may have been the final straw for the authorities.

Reporters' advocacy groups have condemned the incident. "Russia's record of attacks on independent and critical reporters is appalling and the authorities should not let impunity prevail in yet another case," said Nina Ognianova of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The CPJ ranks Russia as the world's third most dangerous place for reporters after Iraq and Algeria. Meanwhile, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it was "shocked and angry" by the attack. "This cycle of violence must stop," it urged in a statement.

According to the Glasnost Defence Foundation, 2008 has been another grim years for Russian journalists. It says there have been five attacks on newspaper offices, that 49 journalists have been attacked, and that two journalists have simply disappeared without trace. In the last 15 years, according to various official and unofficial sources, between 201 and 211 journalists have been killed.

One of the most shocking killings of recent times occurred in August in the Russian republic of Ingushetia where the editor of an opposition website was detained by police and shot in the head in what the authorities initially insisted was an accident. His killing sparked uproar.

Foreign journalists working in Russia have traditionally been safer but not always. The last time a foreign journalist was murdered here was in 2004 when Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was gunned down.

Critics say that the overwhelming majority of journalist murders and attacks remain unsolved. It is rare, they say, for anyone to stand trial let alone be convicted.

Pursuing corruption in the provinces can be particularly lonely and dangerous. Two editors of a local newspaper in Togliatti, a city on the Volga east of Moscow, were murdered in succession in 2002 and 2003. So was the director of the local TV station. Nor is death the only occupational hazard for reporters who show too much investigative zeal. Around 50 court cases are pursued against journalists every year in an attempt to muzzle them.

Friends say Mikhail Beketov knew the risks but was unafraid. Now he is fighting for his life.