May 2008 Archives

Independent News & Media has spent $7.5 million on a 20 percent stake in Indonesian newspaper publisher Abdi Bangsa TBK, the Independent reported Friday.

Abdi Bangsa, which publishes Indonesia's highest circulated daily papers, also has online publishing, magazines, books, radio and outdoor advertising interests.

The Wentworth Courier's 15 year hold on real estate advertising in Sydney's eastern suburbs is over, after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on Thursday revoked the paper's exclusive dealing notification it has held since 1993, The Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday

The complaint that the deal was anti-competitive was placed by Fairfax Media, which reported the deal gave the Courier “immunity from court action.”

A question has arisen again and again for a long time: How will old and new media converge? According to Karin von Abrams, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Web Television in Europe: An Expanding Scene, "Broadcasters have no choice but to embrace new technology and delivery channels, but they are desperate to ensure they can still monetise their content, even when they are no longer monopoly distributors."

By January 2007, about one-half of all broadband users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK were already watching TV online over high-speed connections, according to a study by Motorola.

In 2006, Western and Eastern Europe had the highest mobile density in the world, according to research firm IDATE.

In 2002, the leading regions with highest density were Western Europe and advanced Asian economies, with 79 percent and 68 percent penetration, respectively. Eastern Europe and North America, on the other hand, followed behind, both with mobile reach of about 50 percent.

Spanish free daily Qué! was down €3.235 million EBITA in the first quarter, Newspaper Innovation reported Thursday.

The Vocento-owned title launched in January 2005.

The Times is set to launch the first phase of its full-colour redesign Monday, the Guardian reported Friday.

The paper's redesign will include an expanded times2 features section, as well as offer more full page spreads, and will focus on weekly editions, not the Saturday edition.

The only national Catholic paper in Scotland, Scottish Catholic Observer, is planning to relaunch next month, allmediascotland.com reported Thursday.

The relaunch of the 1885-founded paper will start on June 13, with a reception taking place in Edinburgh.

Tribune Company is looking sell another one of its businesses, this time its Tribune Media Services unit, in an attempt to increase its short-term liquidity, in order to increase its short-term liquidity, the Financial Times reported Thursday.

TMS is a Tribune subsidiary, and distributes syndicated content, such as columns and comic strips, as well as providing movie and TV listings.

The Herald and Sunday Herald will launch a joint Web site later this year as part of a £1 million makeover for Newsquest's three Glasgow titles, including the Evening Times, as they prepare to operate a 24/7 online operation, HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reported Thursday.

The site's content will come from all three newspapers, but print versions will stay the same, carrying content only from current staffers.

The global mobile customer base has grown from 945 million in 2001 to 2.6 billion in 2006, according to consulting and research firm IDATE.

In 2001, more than 60 percent of the base, or 576 million, came from industrialised countries, while 369 million were from developing countries. In 2006, however, those in developing countries have surpassed those in industrialised countries, with 1.7 billion, or 66 percent, versus the 886 million in industrialised countries.

The Newspaper Association of America, which represents U.S. newspaper publishers, has called off its annual Mid-Year Media Review, a presentation for financial analysts, due to low attendance numbers, Reuters reported Wednesday.

The conference usually takes place in June, but as investors become less interested in the newspaper sector, many publicly traded newspaper owners are opting for the Deutsche Bank Media & Telecommunications Conference in New York, June 9 and 10.

One of the Netherlands' wealthiest people and owner of the free daily De Pers, Marcel Boekhoorn, bought a five percent stake in Telegraaf Media Group (TMG), Newspaper Innovation reported Wednesday.

TMG publishes De Telegraaf, local newspapers, free daily Spits and free local weekly papers. The group also publishes magazines and has a large stake in Sky Radio in the Netherlands.

The online gaming market in Asia Pacific region is expected to bring in US$21.1 billion in 2013, according to a new report by In-Stat, "Online Gaming in Asia: Strong Potential for Growth".

According to the study, increased household Internet penetration and new content for online games are two of the key drivers.

Hollinger Inc. will no longer have control of the Sun-Times Media Group (STMG), after a Canadian court approved a deal allowing the two to go their separate ways, Editor & Publisher reported Tuesday.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Colin Campbell on Monday passed the settlement agreement that states all the litigation and disputes between STMG, Hollinger Inc. and Hollinger's largest secured creditor, Toronto firm Davidson Kempner Capital Management LLC are resolved.

UK Newspapers upped their share of display advertising revenue to 14 percent in 2007, up from 13.7 percent in 2006, new research from the Newspaper Marketing Agency has found, Marketing Week reported Tuesday.

The Nielsen Media Research figures show that newspapers are ahead of the Internet, at 5.3 percent, as well as outdoor (7.4 percent) and radio (5.7 percent).

The Irish telecommunications billionaire Denis O’Brien, is increasing his Independent News and Media (INM) stake within to 22.7 percent, closing in on a level in which he will have more of a say on the media group’s policy, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

O’Brien has been expanding his stake in the Dublin-based media group throughout the past year, and has been a critic of the company's corporate governance and performance.

A group of Belgian newspapers are seeking up to €49.1 million from Google, in a lawsuit over the right to feature links to the publishers' content online, Bloomberg reported.

Copiepresse, a copyright group for newspaper publishers in Belgium, is asking a Brussels court to charge between €32.8 and €49.1 million, according to the group’s secretary-general Margaret Boribon Monday.

Trinity Mirror's latest title to revamp its Web site is the Hounslow & Heston Chronicle, which now offers breaking news and photos, and also serves as a portal to its hyperlocal sites, HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reported Tuesday.

Hounslowchronicle.co.uk also features tools to search for homes, cars and jobs, and its hyperlocal sections are for users to reverse publish material they care about.

Telegraph Media Group’s editor-in-chief told the Google Zeitgeist conference that the arrival of multimedia reporting means he now sees CNN and the BBC as the Telegraph's main competition, Journalism.co.uk reported Friday.

Will Lewis, who spoke at the event last week, told delegates that when it comes to online, the Telegraph is looking past traditional competition on Fleet Street and concentrating on consumers’ needs.

Media ownership rules in the United Kingdom are unfairly heavy-handed on traditional players like newspapers, while the digital companies they have to compete with, especially Google, are free to do – and grow – as they please, Trinity Mirror's chief executive has said, The Sunday Times reported.

Google and other digital rivals do not fall under the rule of the 2003 Communications Act, which has strict ownership and market share rules down to the local level, and traditional media are increasingly feeling the sting as digital companies go unregulated, while they are powerless to fight back, Sly Bailey told the House of Lords communications committee last week.

Pay-TV mobile subscribers prefer entertainment channels over news or sports, research group Telstra has announced, The Australian reported.

In Australia, mobile entertainment channels Fox8 and The Comedy Channel are the most watched, followed by music channels Channel V2 and Channel V.

Cablevision is the latest in a line of four owners to take over Newsday since 1995, and the newspaper's staffers and readers wonder if it will still have the independence to critique itself and its new corporate owners once the sale is complete, not to mention if the cable company is prepared to run a newspaper, The New York Times reported Monday.

“Not so long ago, Newsday belonged to the front rank of American journalism. It reached far beyond its original role as chronicler of Long Island, covered news worldwide, undertook big reporting projects and even had the audacity to take on the New York City market. But since 1995, a series of owners and managers has chipped away at Newsday’s news budget and its mission, turning it into something smaller, more local and, in many ways, less ambitious — a good regional newspaper,” states The New York Times article, by Richard Pérez-Peña.

Telegraph.co.uk overtook guardian.co.uk to become the most popular UK national newspaper site in April, according to the most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic, the Guardian reported Thursday.

The Telegraph Media Group, the online portal for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, which also carries original content, witnessed its unique user numbers increase 9.45 percent from March to 18,646,112 for April.

The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) will review the way data is gathered for Audit Bureau of Circulation Electronic (ABCe) audits of newspaper Web site traffic, Journalism.co.uk reported Friday.

Newspaper publishers currently are at liberty to decide on one of several technologies to be used to gather their web data.

Although many New Zealanders do not have a broadband connection, those that do are spending much more time online than watching television, a new Cisco survey has found, The New Zealand Herald reported Thursday.

People with high-speed Internet access spend an average of 22 hours a week surfing the Internet, compared with 14 hours watching TV, the Cisco Connected Consumers survey shows.

McClatchy Co announced it has bought US$300 million in aggregate principal amount of debt securities, which will help the U.S. newspaper publisher reduce its debt by $17.5 million, Editor & Publisher reported Thursday.

Pat Talamantes, McClatchy CFO, called the oversubscription a “win-win transaction for the company and its bond holders.”

Free afternoon daily mX, published by News Corp., is appearing to have mixed readership results over the past couple of years, Newspaper Innovation reported Thursday.

In Sydney, readership fell from 91,000 to 88,000 from April 2006 to March 2007. In Melbourne, mX readership plummeted more, from 147,000 to 131,000.

Digital media penetration in the United States will continue rising into 2011 from its 2000 levels, according to research firm MAGNA Global.

In 2000, almost all digital media reached less than 10 percent in the country, except for the mobile phone (about 40 percent) and digital cable/satellite and TelcoTV (about 20 percent).

Traditional media companies with the most experience in selling advertising should look to buy online groups, such as social networks, to gain online audience numbers and an international outlook, leading Internet investor Saul Klein, of Europe's Index Ventures firm, told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit in Paris Wednesday, Reuters reported.

If newspapers want to find new audiences, they will need to look to online, mobile and social media companies, he said.

Robert Thomson, former Times editor, was appointed managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Tuesday night, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

Thomson will have the top editorial position at the Journal and he will be replacing Marcus Brauchli, who quit in April over disapproval over the rapid changes taking place following Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's US$5.2 billion takeover of the paper in December.

The Daily Mail may expand its online international presence through a new Web site in India, the Daily Mail and General Trust board chairman announced, Journalism.co.uk reported Tuesday.

Lord Rothermere said the paper might launch the Indian Web site to profit on the Daily Mail's “global potential,” and would build on existing partnerships with the Washington Post and Today Media in India.

Television in general is the highest reaching medium, with more than 85 percent penetration in 2007, according to research firm MAGNA Global.

TV, except for in Germany and India, outshines other media as being the highest reaching. Radio, however, reaches more than 60 percent of the population, except for Spain, India and China.

As Thomson Financial News merges with Reuters news service, the global Thomson Reuters Corp. plans to cut 140 journalist positions by the end of the year, Reuters UK reported Monday.

More than 50 percent of the job cuts will be in Europe, David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief, wrote to employees in a memo Monday. However, Reuters is also planning to add about 50 new jobs in growing areas.

The U.S. blogosphere is booming into the mass market, according to the recent eMarketer study “The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots."

The number of bloggers in the country will reach more than 35 million by 2012, representing about 16 percent of the online population, the study predicts.

Google Health's test run has ended, and the site launched officially Monday, paidContent reported.

The site requires users to agree to its terms of service before registering for free, stating that “When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services.

The Albany Times Union, based in New York State, will cut up to 30 staff members, the Times Union reported Tuesday.

The newspaper Monday offered voluntary buyout packages to employees in every department, but said it would consider layoffs if too few people accept the offer.

Tim Warner Inc.'s AOL unit announced Monday it has completed its purchase of social media network Bebo, Business Week reported.

AOL agreed to buy Bebo in March for US$850 million.

Norwegian media group Schibsted will buy 35 percent of free Swedish newspaper Metro and end publication of its free newspaper Punkt SE, Metro's rival, Monsters & Critics reported Monday.

The deal would cost Schibsted SEK 350 million (US$35 million), and must be approved by competition authorities in Sweden.

The third session of the Indian Newspaper Congress 2008 held a debate on how viable the country's market might be for free newspapers, as many parts of the world are seeing huge growth in the freesheet sector, exchange4media reported Monday.

“Newspaper is a serious tool for dissemination of news. It has distribution and production costs to it. We have to decide whether a free newspaper would give news or whether it would be a product that is selling other products,” Hormusji Cama, publisher of the Bombay Samachar, told the Congress Friday.

The Lancashire Evening Post will soon celebrate the one-year anniversary of its special Talking Newspaper Service, serving visually-impaired visitors to its Web site, according to the Post.

The audio version of selected top stories, posted on lep.co.uk, launched June 4 last year.

Readership of online newspapers in Australia is surging while print editions are moving marginally up or down, according to The Age.

The most popular online news sites in the country are smh.com.au, ninemsn news and theage.com.au, which saw the average number of monthly unique browsers grow 66 percent, 21 percent and 56 percent, respectively, in the first quarter of this year compared with the same time in 2007, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

Fairfax Media hopes to get a slice in the booming Internet search market by acting as a middleman between the search engines and small advertisers, The Age reported.

The media company has begun a joint venture with Web site domain name registrar Melbourne IT, to resell pay-per-click advertising for searches on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

The most widely circulated newspaper in Afghanistan has launched its own Web site, the International Center for Journalists reported Friday.

Kabul Weekly covers news, economic, social and features, as well as sport, cinema, cartoons and readers' letters.

The Spokesman-Review has won the International Newspaper Marketing Association's first prize for innovation, a new contest that pays tribute to supporting continuing news investment, Poynter Online reported Thursday.

The Spokane, Washington newspaper's local business directory, BizFinderNW.com, offers listings including, the address, store hours, map and photo for free. Business can buy display ads or add to their listing.

CBS announced Thursday it will buy CNET Networks for US$1.8 billion in cash, thus marking its largest online growth since hiring former media and technology investment banker Quincy Smith to run its interactive unit in 2006, the International Herald Tribune reported.

CNET, whose assets contain a popular technology-news Web site, was attempting to fight off a group of activist investors looking to gain power over its board of directors.

Hollinger Inc. has agreed to hand over its share in the Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) to one of its creditors, Davidson Kempner Management LLC, as part of a revised agreement that ends the bankrupt Toronto holding company's control of the Chicago Sun-Times publisher, Editor & Publisher reported Thursday.

The super-voting class of stock, which permitted Hollinger Inc. to have power over a 70 percent voting stake in STMG with a mere 19.7 percent equity wager, will be put to an end through the agreement.

Yahoo! and WPP Group will announce a partnership that will make it easier and more effective for WPP and its agencies to buy and target online advertising.

Based on the agreement, WPP agencies will develop a proprietary trading system in order to display ads online, the New York Post reported.

In 2006, checking e-mail, online news sites and search engines are the most popular online activities in China, according to data from the China Internet Network Information Center.

E-mailing is the most popular – with more than 55 percent of the Chinese online population do so. Reading online news and using search engines are also popular – with 53.5 percent and 51.5 percent do so.

Social networking site Plaxo Inc. announced in a blog post it will be purchased by Comcast Corp., the largest cable operator in the United States, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal reported Thursday.

Although Plaxo CEO Ben Golub did not disclose the selling price, Reuters reported Comcast paid between US$145 million and $175 million.

As newspapers in North America and Europe suffer dwindling advertising revenue and other financial woes, repaying debts could be in jeopardy, but money from Asian and Middle East investors may be able to help out, according to Followthemedia's Philip Stone.

Just as some U.S. and European banks have turned to Asia and the Middle East for cash to ease the pain of the U.S. sub-prime credit problem, the UK-based Johnston Press has also made a similar deal, Stone reported Thursday.

Metropolitní Expres ended publication on April 7, as the Czech free daily's operations merged with Czech Metro, Newspaper Innovation reported Thursday.

Sixty percent of the Metro shares were purchased by Mafra, the publisher of Metropolitní Expres, in December 2007.

The Le Monde staff is backing a new plan from the paper’s management, thus ending more than a month of chaos at the distinguished French newspaper, the Guardian reported Thursday.

Employees voted 81 to one, with seven abstentions, in favour of the measures to minimise compulsory redundancies and to expand the deadlines for staff to take a voluntary redundancy until June 30.

Google has replaced Yahoo for the first time as the most popular Web site in the United States, according to comScore's rankings based on the number of monthly visitors in April.

Google has been the online search leader for a long time, but its audience has trailed Yahoo's when counting all other services including e-mail and photo sharing.

According to the 2006 data from China Internet Network Information Center, the online population in China is skewed to male and the younger generation.

To break down by gender, more than 58 percent of Chinese online users are male, while only four out of 10 are female.

Journalism.co.uk launched a new press release distribution service through Twitter to mobile devices, the site reported Wednesday.

Journalists and bloggers can sign up to receive free SMS alerts to their mobile phones when a press release in their area of focus is published on Journalism.co.uk.

Times-Shamrock Communications announced its agreement in principle to buy the Virgin Islands Daily News, Editor & Publisher reported Wednesday.

The 8,500-circulation daily newspaper covers the U.S. Virgin Islands and part of the British Virgin Islands, and is based on the island of St. Thomas.

Design group Research Studios unveiled its redesign of new Polish national newspaper Polska, Brand Republic reported Wednesday.

Research Studios previously redesigned The Times and Guardian Unlimited, and has spent a year working on Polska.

Chilean newspaper publisher La Tercera will use mobile content and services delivery platform Viigo Inc. to distribute content to its readers, Business Wire reported Wednesday.

The free, branded version of Viigo will be offered for readers to download, aiming to make La Tercera news and information more easily accessible via smartphone.

More than six out of 10 consumers in France ages 11 and older said they had gone online within the past 30 days, according to a survey conducted by Médiamétrie in March 2008.

The figure is up nearly nine percent compared to the same period one year ago.

British regional newspaper group Johnston Press unveiled plans to raise more than £250 million to fight against falling advertising revenues, partly through issuing new cut-price shares, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

The publisher, which owns more than 300 regional and local papers, including the Scotsman, the Yorkshire Post and the Sheffield Star, hopes to raise £212.3 million through a deeply discounted rights issue.

Reuters is making its news content more available to developers through a non-commercial API offering, available through Reuters Labs, Mashable reported Monday.

This will enable developers to create applications around Reuters news, or make the content fit better on existing sites or applications.

The Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association will gradually merge their operations during the next two years, Media in Canada reported.

The two associations together represent more than 830 daily, weekly and community newspapers across Canada.

According to a new survey by Prospectiv, about 87 percent of people feel that very few (58 percent) or none (29 percent) of the ads offered on social networking sites match their specific interests and preferences.

Fifty-six percent polled said their online experience would be improved if social networking sites offered more advertisements tailored to their specific interests and preferences.

Even as U.S. newspapers are going through a tough time of change and financial woes, they are investing in online, beefing up their video operations, a pleasant and encouraging surprise, according to the Newspaper Association of America's online video survey report, out this month.

The report, part of the NAA's Development and Growth Guide for Newspaper Web sites, aims to give newspapers information on hardware and software, as well as expert advice, case studies and articles about online video. The survey was conducted in February and March 2008.

Google is now playing an increasingly critical role in the business of newspapers – it accounted for almost two-thirds of search traffic going to U. S. newspaper Web sites in March, according to data from Hitwise.

People are heading online for news in larger numbers, and more and more of them start at a news aggregate site such as Google News or Yahoo! News. These sites do not actually produce content, but direct users to other sites, according to Josh Cohen, head of business development at Google News, at the Newspaper Association conference in Toronto last week.

As many Dutch paid newspapers saw circulation shrink in 2007, free dailies climbed higher in the overall readership share, Newspaper Innovation reported Tuesday.

De Telegraaf is still the most read newspaper in the Netherlands, with a circulation of 704,000, but free daily Metro bumped up to second place, increasing 11 percent, to a circulation of 517,000.

The Liverpool Daily Post on Tuesday offered its readers a chance to influence what will be in Wednesday's newspaper, HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reported Tuesday.

A team at the newspaper hosted a live blog throughout the day, updating readers on breaking news stories, and welcoming them to log in to give comments or suggestions on the content or design of Wednesday's paper, as well as to ask the journalists questions.

The newspaper business is booming in much of the world, as new newspapers are springing up in developing countries, gaining both readers and advertising money, the International Herald Tribune reported Monday.

Despite difficulty in the newspaper industry in North America and Europe, circulation is rising in the double-digits at existing newspapers in Africa and much Asia, and new newspapers “are springing up from Rwanda to Tajikistan,” the IHT article states.

U.S. cable television group Cablevision announced it is buying New York-based Newsday for US$650 million, beating out Rupert Murdoch's bid of $580 million, BBC News reported Monday.

Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, also bid $580.

The International Newspaper Marketing Association is changing its name to the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, to “reflect the evolution of its member newspapers and lead the newspaper industry toward its multi-media future,” INMA said in a statement, Editor & Publisher reported Monday.

The board of directors of the Dallas-based organisation voted unanimously May 6 to make the change.

As part of a newsroom reorganization, the London Evening will be putting an end to the position of media correspondent, the Guardian reported Monday.

Amar Singh, the last to hold the position, started at the paper in 2005, and has been promoted to senior reporter as the media role was axed.

Facebook has raised US$100 million (£51 million) to expand its server capacity in order to deal with an explosive growing numbers of users.

The social networking site is borrowing $100 million from the venture loan company TriplePoint Capital to finance the plan, Media Guardian reported.

Social network users in Europe will reach 107.4 million in 2012, up from 41.7 million in 2007, according to Datamonitor.

The UK is expected to be the biggest grower in social networking over the next five years, up from 9.6 million users in 2007 to 27.1 million in 2012.

Homes in Singapore will be wired with a fibre optic link, hooking them up to broadband, the Straits Times reported Friday.

In as early as two years, the Fibre To The Home (FTTH) technology promises faster broadband access for all homes in Singapore.

The E.W. Scripps Co. board has approved a plan to separate its media company into two public companies, to begin July 1, the Associated Press reported Friday.

Completion of the plan must still meet government regulatory approval.

Google cares about copyright protections, and operates consistently with copyright law, Josh Cohen, Google News content specialist told the Toronto Star in a Q&A Friday.

Speaking at the 2008 Canadian Newspaper Association/Canadian Community Newspapers Association conference in Toronto, Cohen “delivered a message of peace and partnership,” Toronto News reporter Brett Popplewell reported Friday, telling the audience that although news content is “bigger than it's ever been ... how people are getting it is going through tremendous change.”

Lower valuations for U.S. metro dailies have unfairly led to lower prices of small-market papers, according to the CEO of community newspaper publisher GateHouse Media Inc., Editor & Publisher reported Friday.

Newspapers' market valuations have “spilled too much into the small-market newspaper industry,” CEO Michael E. Reed said in a conference call with analysts. “What that means is there’s a fantastic opportunity in that space.”

The Sun-Times Media Group said Wednesday its shares are expected to be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its price doesn't meet the minimum, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers in the area disclosed in late March that the NYSE had notified it that its shares were in danger of being delisted.

Guardian News & Media has revealed more information on its plans to combine the newsrooms of the Guardian, Observer, and guardian.co.uk as it closes in on the goal to become a 24/7 multimedia operation by the end of the year, when it moves to its new location at Kings Place, the Guardian reported Friday.

The Web site and two newspapers will keep their own executive management teams, and the Observer will also retain its news desk and team of news reporters, as well as its editing operation, magazines and separate features department.

China will own the biggest share of broadband per household in Asia throughout 2010, while Japan and South Korea are expected to lose shares gradually, consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has forecast.

In 2004, China owned 40 percent of overall broadband households in Asia Pacific, while Japan and South Korea accounted for 27 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

As News Corporation Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch gave thanks to strength in his Australian businesses Thursday, he also kept an eye trained on New York newspaper Newsday.

News Corp. is sticking with its US$580 million bid for Newsday, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.

Seoul's first free afternoon paper celebrated its first year in business last week, Newspaper Innovation reported Thursday.

The City has a circulation of 400,000, while total circulation of free newspapers in Seoul is about two million.

As the economic outlook for advertising remains uncertain, Trinity Mirror Plc announced it will remain cautious, but predicts its performance for the year will not change from previous forecasts, Reuters reported Thursday.

The British newspaper publisher stated it is still poised to deliver £7 million in cost savings by the end of 2008.

Less than a year after New York's Avista Capital Partners bought the Minneapolis Star Tribune from the McClatchy Co., the investment has “gone so sour” that if there is no monetary infusion or Avista does not hold a firesale, bankruptcy may be the only way out, Followthemedia's Philip Stone wrote Thursday.

“One has to assume that the Avista people are not stupid – they went through the Star Tribune’s books, they saw the cash flow, they thought (they) knew what they were getting into, believing that the cash flow would handle debt and operate the business with very little need for any major cutbacks,” Stone states. “And yet in less than a year that investment has gone so sour that although the newspaper insists it is not in a bankruptcy situation and it can still handle debt this year, it has brought in a another private equity firm to analyse its balance sheet.”

Google is considering running illustrated advertisements with the results of Web image-queries, a step beyond its text-based ad business, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“Matching graphical-display ads with image searches represents a large opportunity, and there's lot of potential for advertising revenue there,” Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, told Bloomberg Radio Wednesday. She added that the company at the same time must ensure such ads don't drive users away.

The United States took the lead in terms of time spent online in January 2008, according to the data from Nielsen Online.

The data was derived from nine countries, including the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Australia and Switzerland during January 2008.

Global media reporting site Followthemedia will close May 16 unless €35,000 is raised, the group announced on its Web site.

Followthemedia has been reporting on media issues for four years, and counts 1.5 million visitors.

Industrial action by journalists at French daily Le Monde has been suspended, after the newspaper's management announced job cuts could be fewer than previously suggested, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

The announcement by management was made Wednesday, following an editorial staff meeting at which employees were to vote on whether they would begin a longer strike next Tuesday.

The idea that “free” news on the Internet is the cause for current financial woes in journalism is incorrect; on the contrary, a lot of money is generated by the news, very little of which makes it back to news providers, wrote Peter Osnos, senior fellow for media at The Century Foundation on Tuesday.

The fact that content creators are not receiving a fair amount is “no longer tolerable,” Osnos stated. “News is no more free these days than the 'complementary' bag of pretzels you get on a plane, after you’ve paid for the ticket.”

Most newspaper editors around the world no longer think of their product as “print-only,” and are optimistic about the future of newspapers and their place in the multi-media revolution, according to the Newsroom Barometer, an annual survey of editors around the world, released Tuesday.

The second annual survey of 704 editors and senior news executives from 120 countries was conducted by Zogby International in March, and commissioned by Reuters and the World Editors Forum, a partner of the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project and also part of the World Association of Newspapers.

Online advertising in Australia continued to march ahead in the first quarter this year, albeit at a slower pace than over the previous four years, The Australian reported.

The total Internet ad market grew 30.8 percent to AU$385 million in the first three months. Compared with the same period last year, it dropped from a 51-percent increase in 2007.

As of Q1 2008, 31 percent of Britons ages 15 and older listened to the radio via a digital platform every week, including a digital audio broadcast on the radio, cable television or personal computer, according to the Radio Joint Audience Research estimates.

The growing audience also spent more time on digital radio. Weekly listening hours increased nine percent to reach 184 million in the first quarter, and digital radio now makes up 17.8 percent of all radio listening in the UK.

News Media Corp. has bought the Arizona Silver Belt from GateHouse Media for an undisclosed amount, Editor & Publisher reported Tuesday.

“We did not see the Arizona operation as a good strategic or geographic fit and felt we could redeploy the capital more effectively elsewhere,” Michael Reed, GateHouse CEO said in a statement.

The Lexington Herald-Leader Co. will offer buyout packages to employees in order to decrease its work force by an estimated four percent to deal with the decreasing advertising and circulation revenue, the Herald-Leader reported Wednesday.

Owned by the McClatchy Co., the Herald-Leader currently has 385 full-time employees and managers.

Children in New Zealand are more media savvy than ever before, but know when they need to switch off the television, Internet or mobile phones, according to a new study, TVNZ reported Tuesday.

The country's Broadcast Minister Trevor Mallard on Tuesday released the Broadcasting Standards Authority report, Seen and Heard: Children's Media Use, Exposure, and Response.

Sir Paul McCartney will give away his latest album with editions of the Mail on Sunday, Gigwise.com reported Tuesday.

The Beatle alum's album, “Memory Almost Full,” will be free with the May 18th edition of the newspaper. It was released on Starbucks' Hear Music label last year.

The Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer will begin cutting staff numbers, offering voluntary buyouts to an unknown number of employees, the Sacramento Business Journal reported Monday.

The newspaper is making the cuts in an attempt to offset advertising revenue declines, the paper's Web site stated.

MediaNews group, a newspaper company that publishes 57 U.S. dailies, has outsourced its customer care to a Philippines-based company, APAC, according to a company statement Saturday.

Joseph Santiago, chairman of the House committee on information and communications technology, said the decision will push MediaNews’ rivals to do the same in order to stay economically competitive.

After their merger completion last month, Thomson Reuters is facing its first major industrial dispute, as Thomson’s UK journalists voted to hold an official ballot for industrial action.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) had official recognition and a majority of membership among journalists in either Reuters or Thomson UK operations before the deal, Press Gazette reported.

A year after the launch of the weekend edition of RedEye, 100,000 opt-in subscribers have requested home delivery of the Chicago Tribune's free daily tabloid, Editor & Publisher reported Monday.

Readers must request the weekend edition, which is home-delivered only.

Newsknife, a site that rates news sites based on Google News performance, has released its May 2008 list of 155 sites in the U.S.

The site sampled 109,702 listings by 3,942 sites for 689 news items in 2008, and judged performance based on how often they appeared on Google News.

Mobile instant messaging (MIM) will replace text messaging (SMS) and eventually e-mail as the most popular mobile non-voice communication application, according to a recent global survey by TNS Global.

Currently, only eight percent of global mobile phone users surveyed use MIM. However, the study found that once users adopt MIM, it becomes the primary communications method and replaces other messaging tools.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group Interactive (BSMG) has launched a new local Web site, bringing together local newspapers to create the site, Editor & Publisher reported Monday.

ExploreHoward.com is a service of Patuxent Publishing and BSMG, and contains complete weekly content from Howard County's the Columbia Flier, Howard County Times, The View from Ellicott City and The View from Western Howard County.

Microsoft Corp. on Saturday withdraw its US$42 billion takeover offer for Yahoo!, after the companies failed to agree on how much the Internet firm was worth, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The unexpected breakdown came shortly after their chief executives met in Seattle one day earlier. The companies had finally engaged in talks since Microsoft said it would raise billions more for the deal in January.

The Associated Press and more than 100 of the news agency's member newspapers on Monday launched a service aimed at making news stories available on Apple's iPhone and other mobile devices, the AP reported.

Currently 107 newspapers are participating in the Mobile News Network, including the San Francisco Chronicle and The Miami Herald.

Dutch citizen photojournalism Web site Skoeps will be closing down, after being unsuccessful at finding a sustainable business model, Reuters reported Friday.

Skoeps is owned by Dutch media groups PCM Uitgevers and Talpa Media, and has 7,500 registered users.

Top Swiss free newspaper, 20 Minuten, distributed a new free discount magazine Monday in Zurich, Newspaper Innovation reported.

The magazine, 20's best, showcases 26 products, and gives readers special discount offers for those products.

Thomson employees voted unanimously to hold a strike ballot, after management at the financial news wire would not agree to use voluntary instead of compulsory redundancies as they look to make job cuts, the Guardian reported Friday.

Thomson recently merged with rival news agency Reuters.

Media Wales will not go through with its plan to launch a Welsh-language news Web site, HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reported Friday.

Media Wales publishes the Western Mail and other south Wales titles.

The Glasgow-based Sunday Post will be printed in Madrid beginning this weekend, in hopes of improving sales overseas of just more than 500 copies, allmediaSCOTLAND.com reported Friday.

Copies will be available to people on the coasts of Spain, as well as the Balearic Islands, the Algarve and Tenerlife.

In a struggling economy, there have been 290,671 job cuts in U.S. during the first four months of this year, up nine percent from the same period last year.

Media industry layoffs, however, jumped to 57 percent more than last year at 7,949 for the four-month period, according to a survey from global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The 2007 full-year layoffs numbered 11,700 in the industry.

New media became increasingly necessary to Americans from 2002 to 2007, while traditional media forms lost ground, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey.

According to the latest survey in 2007, more than half of respondents said they could not live without their mobile phones, followed by 45 percent who say they couldn't give up the Internet. The Blackberry/wireless e-mail devices category, though only picked by 36 percent, has grown six-fold since 2002.

Business researcher Henry Blodget on Wednesday predicted in his online column that U.S. print newspaper circulation will drop to about 50 million this year – the lowest it has been since 1946. As circulation drops to extreme lows in a period in which the U.S. population has doubled, this means “per-capita newspaper consumption has been cut in half,” Blodget stated.

So where are all the ad dollars going? Online, of course.

The All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS) has set a minimum cover price formula for newspapers in Pakistan, and newspapers that violate the new rule will be denied distribution in Akhbar Markets, Dawn reported.

The formula, effective Wednesday, was decided in collaboration with the Akhbar Farosh Federation, a press release from APNS stated.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) may report mobile traffic to its member Web sites in the future, and is currently considering the move, Journalism.co.uk reported Thursday.

ABCe will discuss how metrics, which are approved by Joint Industry Commission for Web Standards (JICWEBS), would be enacted to best measure and report mobile traffic.

American Community Newspapers (ACN) reported a net loss of US$4.5 million in the first quarter, while the publisher's revenue slid 11.7 percent, Editor & Publisher reported Thursday.

Revenue fell mainly due to poor performances from the Texas-based publisher's 44 papers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

The U.S. online newspaper audience has grown from 38.97 million in December 2004 to 63.05 million in December 2007, an increase of more than 60 percent over three years, according to the MegaPanel Data from Nielsen Online.

Active reach for online newspapers has also risen, from 26 percent in December 2004 to over 38 percent in December 2007.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution plans to cut its distribution area from 74 to 49 counties, which will result in 62 job losses, AJC.com reported.

This move will decrease its circulation by about 2.2 percent daily and 1.9 percent Sunday, the company said Wednesday.

Australia will get its first free mobile TV network beginning Thursday, when Bluetooth broadcaster YoMo launches, The Australian has reported Thursday.

The service will update a news and entertainment video feed throughout the day, and will broadcast it using Bluetooth technology to a network of transmission points in Eastern Australia.

The Guardian’s podcasts will be bring in profits within the next 12 months, the paper’s director of digital content has said, Journalism.co.uk reported Tuesday.

Currently, guardian.co.uk has 12 podcasts, and profit from that content in the coming months will come from implementing a new advertising delivery system that will place ads in the podcasts, Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News and Media told Journalism.co.uk.

Free dailies continue to lead circulation numbers in Spain, March circulation data from Spain, reported by Publicitas and PRnoticias, has revealed, Newspaper Innovation reported Wednesday.

All four free national papers are higher in circulation than the highest circulated paid paper, El Pais, which counts circulation at 460,000 copies daily, according to Newspaper Innovation.