Rupert Murdoch isn't the only newspaper baron spreading his influence across the globe. In Ireland, a knighted former U.S. executive, known to some as "bean baron" or "ketchup king," has been expanding his own newspaper empire, not only in cosmopolitan centers like New York and London, but in out-of-the-way places where readership is growing and advertisers are throwing their budgets at a growing middle class focused on education, real estate, and nice cars.

But now, Sir Anthony O'Reilly, former C.E.O. of H.J. Heinz, could lose control of his company, Independent News & Media, and his strategy of global diversity. Going into I.N.M.'s annual shareholder meeting tomorrow, he faces a significant threat by nemesis and fellow Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien, who holds a 25.04 percent blocking stake in the company and has been clamoring for change at the top, where he has charged cronyism on the board. O'Brien is expected to release a critical report of the company, propose it drop the money-losing Independent, published in London, and possibly even make an outright bid for the company.

From all appearances, O'Reilly is nonplussed.

As he speaks from his castle in Normandy, France, two weeks before the meeting, he says of O'Brien's moves, "We don't know, we have only conjecture. We'll have to watch things unfold."

Since 1973, O'Reilly has been driving Independent News & Media, the company he formed around the purchase of the Irish Independent that year, when the European Common Market was formed. He has since expanded the company beyond Britain, finding better growth margins in emerging markets such as India, South Africa, and, most recently, Indonesia, which has been a revenue supernova.

"Our view is that we are language indifferent, platform indifferent, and geography indifferent. We'll go anywhere an ad dollar can use a platform we have," says O'Reilly.

That strategy is paying off for the $2.6 billion Dublin-based company, where O'Reilly is C.E.O. Nearly half its revenue comes from emerging markets, and they're expected to account for up to 63 percent of advertising growth over the next three years, according to a report by media-buying firm Zenith Media.

"What they've been good at is going into new markets and building up on their own, or in partnership," says Barry Dixon, an analyst at Davy Stockbrokers in Dublin. "They are a very efficient low-cost publisher, and that's evidenced by very high margins."

Under O'Reilly's leadership, I.N.M. began moving into emerging markets in 1993, with the acquisition of South Africa's Independent Newspaper Holdings, a group with 16 dailies and weeklies, including the popular tabloid Daily Voice, where circulation revenue rose 8 percent last year and the company claims ownership of almost half of all newspaper ad dollars in the country. In 1998, it purchased papers in Australia (including one that competes with Murdoch in Queensland). And his expansion into such countries is having a resurgence: In May, I.N.M. acquired a 20 percent stake in Indonesian newspaper publisher P.T. Abdi Bangsa, publisher of leading Muslim newspaper Republika, for $7.5 million. In the fall, he plans to make a move on China, where total newspaper circulation is 107 million a day.