September 2008 Archives

Uber.com, a startup blog platform backed by Discovery Communications and Universal Music Group shut down Friday after the investors pulled out, according to CNET.

“We have some bad news. The crisis in the economy has claimed Uber as its latest victim. Our investors have decided to stop supporting Uber and we have closed the doors,” The Los Angeles-based company posted on its Web site.

Circulation of free newspapers in Europe is dropping for the first time in history, Newspaper Innovation reported Monday.

Currently, free newspaper circulation in Europe is at 27 million, while at the end of 2007 it was at 27.3 million.

The New York Sun shut down on Tuesday, after six years in business, The New York Times reported.

The conservative-leaning Sun announced at the beginning of September that the paper would close if it could not raise more money.

After its advertising selling deal with NBC Universal, Google has added Bloomberg Television to its stable, Media Post reported Friday.

Bloomberg Television, the cable financial news network with more than 50 million subscribers, will sell its ad inventories through Google's TV Ads service, an auction-based, self-service system. Bloomberg, just like NBC and the Dish Network which have also reached deals with Google, hopes the range of advertisers will be expanded on its network.

Daily Mail and General Trust Plc, the publisher of Daily Mail in the UK, dropped for four days straight last week in London trading, after releasing full-year profit estimates at the lower end of analysts' forecast, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

Daily Mail shares have lost 20 percent within a week. According to analysts’ predictions, full-year pretax profit, excluding some items, will total 257 million pounds (US$479 million) to 279 million pounds. Earnings per share are estimated to be 45.6 pence to 51.6 pence. Profit on that basis was 288 million pounds in the previous year, according to the company statement.

The top 100 U.S. media companies had total revenues up 4.6 percent last year, the slowest growth since 2001, according to a new report “100 Leading Media Companies,” released by Advertising Age, B to B online reported.

According to Ad Age, the top 100 U.S. media companies had revenues of US$299.1 billion last year, including those from advertising, subscriptions and fees.

The Washington Post Co. announced Monday it will acquire Foreign Policy, a magazine focused on global economics and politics, according to the company press release posted on TradingMarkets.com.

Foreign Policy, based in Washington, was founded as a quarterly publication in 1970, and later re-launched as a bimonthly magazine in 2000. With its focus on global politics, economics and ideas, it now has readers from more than 160 countries and is printed in nine languages, according to Bloomberg.

Internet usage in Ireland is on the upswing, with more than a third of all adults in the country accessing the Internet each day, and more than half of those users shopping online, according to the latest report from the Joint National Internet Research (JNIR), The Sunday Business Post reported.

Irish users going online do so mainly for news, travel and banking, according to the report.

Newspaper advertising spending in the Arab region has spiked 33 percent in the first half of the year, compared to the first half of 2007, according to a report by the Pan Arab Research Center (PARC), Business 24/7 reported Monday.

Overall, print in the region makes up the biggest ad spend share of any media, with 45 percent, a US$1.7 billion ad value for print media in the first half of the year. In the same time last year, ad value was at $1.27 billion.

The number of American online video viewers has doubled over the past year, with more and more younger viewers watching movies and TV shows online, according to a study by ABI Research, Yahoo News reported.

The number of Americans who watch video streamed on the Web has soared from 32 percent last year to 63 percent, according to the study.

As some Associated Press member newspapers criticise the fee structure being implemented next year, a sizable number are still interested in taking advantage of its growing web tools.

According to the Associated Press, 500 newspapers have signed up for AP Member Marketplace, the online system allowing its subscribers to exchange stories, photos and graphics, according to paidContent.

Citizen journalism platform Stomp, a project by The Straits Times New Media Unit, will launch a new online mobile portal to give users access to articles, post comments and view photos, the Editors Weblog reported Friday.

The Straits Times New Media Unit launched Singapore's first online television service, RazorTV, in August.

The London Evening Standard will change its current site name, Thisislondon.co.uk, to Standard.co.uk, beginning today. The rebranding is being done to clarify and house the newspaper's online offerings under one main page, Brand Republic reported Friday.

Thisislondon.co.uk will now be used to house the Evening Standard's entertainment guide.

Technorati has released the last two sections of its annual report, “State of the Blogosphere,” revealing how bloggers monetize their sites, and how the blogosphere impacts brands.

According to the Technorati’s survey, the majority of bloggers have advertising on their blogs. To marketers and advertisers, blogs offer high-quality content and thus attract growing, loyal audiences.

As U.S. newspaper publishing company Media General struggles with paying off debt and a plunge in advertising dollars, it has cut its quarterly dividend to 12 cents per share, down from 23 cents, Reuters reported.

The cut is a “response to the continued weak economic conditions impacting out businesses and industry, and allows cash flow to further reduce our debt,” Marshall Morton, chief executive of the publishing group, said in a statement. Advertisers across the United States are tightening advertising budgets due to the dwindling economy, which experts have predicted will cut ad spend in all sectors.

The Guardian is the top online newspaper in the United Kingdom, with 23.1 million unique users in August, a 12 percent increase from the previous month, according to ABCe data, BizReport reported Friday.

The Telegraph took the second online newspaper spot in terms of users, with 22 million unique users, a growth of 125 percent from the same period last year. The Times Online saw 20.1 percent growth from July to August this year, reaching 19.6 million uniques.

The average online video ad spending per person in the United States has been growing strongly since 2003, according to eMarketer, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

In 2003, ad spending per U.S. online user was at US$1.63, but it reached nearly $2.5 in 2005, and is expected to achieve $8.7 by the end of this year.

Vodafone Hungary will partner with Dutch mobile advertising technology operator MADS to offer a mobile platform for its Vodafone Live! portal. The network provider launched a mobile initiative that would provide brands with “highly targeted” display or text ads, PR Web reported.

The mobile ad service aims to target consumers on a more individual basis, which is done to bring about greater responses than non-targeted ads.

Content-sharing site Digg has obtained funding from Highland Capital Funding (HCF), which it will use for a “major expansion effort,” Digg CEO Jay Adelson announced in his Digg Blog.

The US$28.7 million investment will help Digg expand the site on a global scale, Wired.com reported. Furthermore, the company intends to optimise its recommendation system, to develop category and topic views, as well as to improve content organisation.

Apple’s iPhone 3G is expected to be sold on the Russian market beginning at midnight on the night of October 2 to 3, through network providers such as MTS, VimpelCom and Megafon, Vedomosti reported.

The three telecommunications operators bought 15,000 devices from Apple and hope to sell them all by the end of this year. Apple is looking to sell 4.5 million iPhones in Russia by 2011.

China's available network addresses are expected to run out in about 830 days, due to the growing rate of demand for Internet connectivity, ChinaTechNews reported Wednesday.

IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses are the standard for most networks in China. However, they are limited and 80 percent of the allocated IP addresses have already been taken, according to the ChinaTechNews article, posted by ZD Net Asia.

Technorati has released the second and the third section of the annual report “State of the Blogosphere,” revealing what, why, and how people blog.

Most bloggers write about multiple topics, and personal and professional topics are both equally popular, according to the study, released on the company's Web site.

Dutch publisher TMG will not buy De Pers, owned by Dutch millionaire Marcel Boekhoorn, Newspaper Innovation reported.

Boekhoorn holds a 5 percent share in TMG, which has recently seen its share price rise.

Three newspapers in western South Dakota, in the northwest United States, will combine to form a weekly newspaper beginning Oct. 22, due to a slowdown in the economy that is causing a downturn in advertising and increase in costs, the Belle Fourche Post & Bee reported Wednesday.

The Valley Irrigator, Belle Fourche Bee and Belle Fourche Post will merge to become the Butte County Post, which will publish on Wednesdays.

Broadband households grow in number in Asia, especially in China, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

From 2004 to 2010, China is predicted to remain the top country with the most broadband households, growing from 24 million to 130 million households, while Japan and South Korea follow behind.

Online advertising in the United Kingdom is expected to slow as a result of the global financial crisis and UK’s economic turmoil, the Guardian reported Thursday. While online ads are still expected to see stronger growth than those on television and in newspapers, their growth might decrease from 38 percent last year to 20 percent in 2008.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report shows that this slowdown may not be due to declining expenditure online, but is because advertisers intend to decrease their overall budgets.

Online digital publisher Zinio has announced that its partnership with top magazine publishers like Bonnier, Hachette Filipacchi and Greenspun for a “free digital subscription giveaway” that urges users to be more concerned about the environment, Brand Republic reported.

The Read Green Initiative gives readers the chance to sign up to receive one of the free 50 million yearly subscriptions to digital editions of nearly 200 publications such as Elle and Woman’s Day.

Five million Apple iPhone 3G devices will be available in Latvian and Lithuanian markets on Thursday, Lenta.ru reported.

One million iPhones have already been reserved, despite the “long queues” and inadequacies in the activation system.

Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang has announced the firm’s new online advertising system will feature a “more efficient process” that will make online ads “cheaper” and “easier” for advertisers and publishers alike by permitting them to market on multiple sites, Reuters reported.

The APT system may be more simple and efficient since it will forgo the “current process of selling banner ads” through lots of sites, which may be “time-consuming” since it is rooted in traditional media practices.

U.S. advertising spending has plummeted the most since 2001, as companies cut marketing budgets in the weakening economics that tighten consumer spending, according to Bloomberg.

Ad spending dropped 3.7 percent in the second quarter year-over-year, the biggest drop since 2001, according to a statement from TNS Media Intelligence Wednesday.

Yahoo! Inc. has relaunched its online advertising system and renamed it APT, which aims to streamline the advertising process by putting its Newspaper Consortium members on the same management system, Dow Jones Newswires reported Wednesday.

Yahoo! Chief Executive Jerry Yang said the technology is a “game changer.”

The difficult economy is expected to cut into ad budgets into 2009, with advertisers looking to make their budgets stretch further, AdWeek reported Tuesday.

Jack Klues, managing partner of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi, told the Advertising Week “Leadership Conversation” that he believes many advertisers will alter their “media mix” in an effort to make a “relatively fixed amount of dollars work harder.”

MySpace will on Friday stream live footage of the debate between U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, and also plans to offer software tools that will permit users to see which “candidate is in tune with their views,” AFP reported Wednesday.

"For the first time in American history, viewers of the debates will be empowered to watch the event in real time online and review candidate responses on demand," said MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe. "From the candidate profiles on MySpace to the viral fundraising by our community, we are committed to creating an environment that creates higher levels of civic engagement."

Three Zambian journalists have launched The Watchdog, the first breaking news Web site in the country, despite the lack of important tools and funding, the European Journalism Centre (EJC) reported. The site is geared toward residents and expats alike and strives to have 24-hour news coverage, a “rare objective in Zambia.”

“Newspapers in Zambia are expensive and distribution sometimes is poor, so people may get the news late, but those who are connected to the Internet can access the Watchdog free and get news fast,” said Editor Lloyd Hamaambo.

As newsprint costs increase and the popularity of online outlets grows, Thailand's newspapers and magazines are augmenting their cover prices, Brand Republic Asia reported.

The Bangkok Post raised its daily price from 25 to 30 baht (US$0.90), after newsprint costs increased from US$550 last year to $900 in 2008. Media Transasia Thailand, the local publisher of magazines OK! and Seventeen, is also expected to raise prices by almost 10 percent, and other media firms are predicted to do the same in 2009.

Amazon announced on Tuesday it will be preloading its Amazon MP3 store to the "Google phone," T-Mobile's G1, which is operating on Google's Android OS technology, PC Mag reported.

Customers will have a "phone-optimised" edition of the store which requires a phone connection to pre-listen to songs and a Wi-Fi connection to buy them, according to PC Mag.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said buying technology network CNET gave the company an important spot in the digital sphere from being an “old media” outlet, reported Wired.com.

“We could build over the course of a decade, or buy CNET and become instantaneously a major player,” said Moonves.

The first family-oriented social network was launched for Russian-speaking Web users, offering the option of searching for relatives, to gather information about one’s family and to befriend other families, reported Lenta.ru.

FamilySpace will also allow members to construct family trees, keep a family diary and calendar as well as get access to historical address books from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In addition, it provides “traditional” social networking tools such as photo-hosting and the chance to make new friends.

The European Commission Tuesday decided to change the cost of sending text messages and may “tighten billing rules,” so that users are not charged “too much” when outside the country of their network operator, reported the European Journalism Centre (EJC).

The initiative would also look into decreasing the cost of using mobile devices to go online while they are in a foreign country.

Technorati released its annual study “State of the Blogosphere 2008”, seperated into five consecutive daily segments, according to the company Web site. The first one, titled “Who are the Bloggers?”, was released Monday, which unveils trends of blogging and bloggers.

According to the study, blogosphere has been growing in both size and influence, and the lines between a blog and a mainstream media is becoming less clear. For example, 95 percent of the top 100 U.S. newspapers now have reporter blogs.

Union drivers who deliver the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times from presses to distribution centres have voted to strike, a move that is sure to hurt both struggling newspapers, the Seattle P-I reported.

About 70 Teamsters union drivers voted on Sunday to strike after negotiating with The Seattle Times Co. for 10 months. The strike could begin as early as Oct. 21.

The Baltimore Sun and local television station WJZ-TV will partner by sharing content and promoting each other's businesses, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

WJZ will use news and information from The Sun's regional bureaux, while The Sun will run WJZ video on its Web site, and will include the TV station's weather forecasts in its print edition.

U.S. mobile data service revenues boost to $14.8 billion in the first half this year, up 40 percent over the same period of 2007, according to the CTIA, eMarketer reported.

Mobile data now make up about 20 percent of all mobile revenues, while text messaging is the key driver to its growth.

Wall Street Journal wants to expand classified advertising by partner with Tributes.com to sell classified obituaries on the paper’s Web site, Crain’s New York Business.com reported.

According to the deal announced Monday, Tributes.com is the new classified obituaries section of WSJ.com. Users will have the chance to add a print counterpart in the Remembrances section of the Saturday Journal.

Kuwait has ordered local Internet service providers to block YouTube over content which could offend Muslims, Reuters reported Monday.

“Since the Web site displays the Koran in the form of songs sung with the oud (stringed instrument) ... and displays disrespectful pictures of the Prophet Mohammad ... please proceed with immediate effect in blocking the Web site www.youtube.com,” the memo stated, according the copy obtained by Reuters.

Ad revenues continued to dwindle in August at top U.S. newspaper publishers, in some cases by double digits, Media Post reported. The New York Times Co.'s advertising revenue dropped 14 percent to $110.6 million, while Media General reported a modest decline of 4.4 percent.

Most of the key publishers in the country reported a loss in July-August, including NYT Co., Media General, Gannett, McClatchy, Lee and Scripps. According to Deutsche Bank analyst David Clark, "industry trends softened across all categories" between the second quarter and the first two months of the third, which, he added, may lead to an even more dismal second half of the year.

Although free dailies generally cut circulation numbers during July, due to more people being away on holiday and not commuting, Spanish free dailies lowered circulation more than usual, Newspaper Innovation reported Monday.

Circulation was 9 percent lower in July 2008 than in July 2007 – from 2,921,000 in 2007 to 2,662,000 in 2008 for four nationwide free dailies, according to calculations from PRNoticias.

Staff from UK newspapers Liverpool Daily Post and Echo began a campaign to discourage Trinity Mirror, the papers' owner, from relocating printing to Oldham, Greater Manchester. The move, scheduled for the end of 2009, may affect almost 100 positions, reported BBC News on Saturday.

A petition was launched in Liverpool, calling upon the public, government and local parliament members to help prevent the relocation. The papers may have historical value to the town since they were first published in the area nearly 150 years ago.

New economics-oriented news site e24.fr will be launched in France in mid-October, according to an article by Le Monde on Monday.

The site will be “totally free” and hopes to become the number one online economics news source, competing with business newspapers such as La Tribune and Les Echos. Online news source rue89.com will also be launching economics news site eco89.com by the end of this month although it is “more modest,” according to Le Monde.

New French weekly newspaper Vendredi will be launched on October 17, and will feature the "best information" found on the Web, Le Figaro reported.

Jacques Rosselin, who started the project, said the online information industry has reached “maturity” and that the paper will focus on the “sharp expertise” found on certain Web sites and blogs. The title will be printed in eight pages.

Canadian media group Sun Media has launched online e-versions of 32 newspapers over the past weekend, Media in Canada reported.

Users are able to view “exact-copy” images of papers, download issues for offline reading, listen to content on computers or mobile phones, comment on or share articles, publish stories on social networks, look at photo galleries and receive alerts for specific material.

British newspaper The Sun launched a campaign featuring a till receipt listing the variety of content that the paper includes with the slogan “All for just 30p,” the Guardian reported Monday. Advertising agency Euro RSCG developed the campaign, which is to appear on more than 10,000 “six-sheeter” posters and 60 “larger format portrait sites” for a fortnight.

The campaign costs nearly £1.3 million and will focus more on the north-east, north-west and Midlands areas, according to the Guardian. In London and in the south-east, 30-second-long radio ads will be aired and a TV counterpart is scheduled to launch in the middle of next month.

Fewer people in Ireland are in the habit of reading newspapers according to a survey, with 72 percent of adults saying they read a newspaper on Sunday, a three point drop from the prior survey, The Irish Times reported.

Newspaper readership is highest on Sundays, but on weekdays readership has decreased over the past three years, with 56 percent of adults saying they read a daily, the survey found.

After reporting a smaller drop in August revenue compared to the previous two months, the New York Times Co. saw its shares increasing the most in almost 29 years on the New York Stock Exchange, Bloomberg reported.

According to a company statement distributed by Business Wire Thursday, NYT revenue from continuing operations declined 8.8 percent to US$199.4 million in August, while advertising revenue was down 14 percent to $110.6 million on a plunge in classifieds.

Plastic Logic's e-newspaper will be released in the first half of 2009, and will use a black and white display created by E Ink, the San Jose Mercury News reported Friday.

The still unnamed device was unveiled this month in San Diego, and boasts a screen twice the size of Sony's eReader or Amazon's Kindle, which can be updated constantly.

Mobile Internet users and mobile search revenue in the United States are expected to grow throughout 2012, according to TKG Consulting, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

U.S. mobile Web users totalled 37.9 million in 2007, and will grow at an annual rate of 19 percent. It will boost to 54.5 million by the end of 2008, and reach 91.7 million in 2012.

Sony’s e-reader will be sold in French electronic and multimedia chain Fnac by the end of October, 01Net.com reported.

The Reader can contain up to 160 books and its battery will allow a user to read through about 6,800 pages before running out. Book publisher Hachette said it will initially supply 2,000 titles for the Reader.

The Wall Street Journal’s redesigned Web site has received nearly 10 million page views on the first day of its re-launch, according to consulting and marketing firm Sapient, who backed the revamp, Media Week reported Thursday.

The makeover featured a new layout that should facilitate navigation and boost content, containing a newsreel service that spotlights breaking news content in each main section of WSJ.com. The site also has a video player and interactive graphics that aim to expand ways to advertise.

The Associated Press announced Thursday that 948 news organisations have joined its Mobile News Network, which reached more than 16 million page views in August, MarketWatch reported.

More than one million local articles on the network were read, and almost 95 percent of the traffic came from Apple’s iPhone and iTouch, following the July release of the service.

In Estonia, newspaper advertising has decreased by 7 percent and television advertising has gone down by 1 percent, since last year, the Baltic Course reported. However, online advertising grew by 36 percent in the first half of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.

However, newspaper and news channel Web sites may be more popular than other information sources, according to the Baltic Course.

According to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. will boost subscription revenue from the Wall Street Journal, its Web site and Dow Jones by more than US$300 million annually over the next two to three years, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

“They're grossly undersold,” Murdoch said at a conference held by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York.

More and more U.S. consumers are using only mobile phones, partly due to the slower economy, according to a new Nielsen study.

Nielsen said that 20 million households, representing about 17 percent of the country, rely solely on a mobile phone for their communications needs. The number could go up to 20 percent of all New York-based homes by the end of 2008, Media Post reported.

Current and former Tribune Co. employee members of the company's Employee Stock Option Plan, as well as members of other company retirement programmes, have sued Tribune Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Zell “to protect Tribune Company’s pension and retirement funds; to give the employee-owners a place at the table with regard to management of their assets; and to remove Zell and his cronies from the Tribune Company’s board in order to save what is left of a still great news gathering operation,” paidContent reported.

The current and former staffers sued Zell in U.S. Central District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The first mobile operator in the world to be funded through advertising, Blyk, has doubled its number of members to 200,000 since April, Reuters reported Wednesday.

The Finnish company was launched in the United Kingdom in 2007 and provides 16- to 24-year-olds with the opportunity to send 217 free text messages and 43-minute-long phone calls in exchange for receiving six advertising messages daily.

U.S. mobile phone carrier firm T-mobile announced that it will release its first “Google-branded” mobile phone next week, New Zealand's National Business Review (NBR) reported Thursday. The “gPhone” will be built by Taiwanese contract manufacturer HTC and will contain Google, T-Mobile and HTC logos. The gPhone will run with Google’s mobile operating system Android.

“While details of the gPhone are still under wraps, pundits will be looking for how Android’s browser gels – or doesn’t – with Chrome; and whether its poised to take advantage of Google’s recent foray into buying large amounts of wi-fi spectrum – creating a possible future scenario for mobile VoIP calls that cut traditional cell phone service providers out of the picture altogether,” NBR reported.

Google has changed its AdWords policy, which states that ads featuring “abortion and religious-related content” would be blocked, Brand Republic reported Wednesday.

Search engine giant Google and the UK-based Christian Institute reached an agreement to allow the charity group to display an anti-abortion ad alongside searches.

CNN’s audience is increasingly engaging with digital media, Brand Republic reported Wednesday. The audience was found to watch 74 percent more recorded TV, read 70 percent more online magazines, listen 33 percent more to Internet radio and download 18 percent more podcasts than average users.

According to Brand Republic, a Synovate study discovered that CNN’s viewers were made up of “early adopters” and “frequent” mobile device users, who were considered to be more likely to own digital cameras (87 percent); iPods or similar MP3 players (35 percent); PDAs or “palm-top computers” (17 percent); Smartphone, BlackBerrys or iPhones (16 percent); portable media video players (12 percent) and “hand-held game consoles” (9 percent).

The European Parliament has launched a new Web-based TV channel on Wednesday, which aims to improve the Parliament’s image, Lenta.ru reported. The channel hopes to appeal to a young audience and to reach between 20 and 40 million viewers.

"As we approach the European elections of June 2009, EuroparlTV should be an excellent Internet tool for citizens, especially young people, to keep themselves informed about the activities and decisions of the directly-elected European Parliament - decisions which have an impact on the everyday lives of almost 500 million European Union citizens,” said Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering.

Yahoo! Buzz, the Web portal's social news site, is now available on mobile through a new widget which allows people to see the top "buzzed" stories in the last 12 hours, Media Post reported.

By clicking on stories, users will see a summary and image, which are linked to the publishers' site for the full story. A site tailored for iPhone users will be available too.

U.S. newspaper Web sites see the highest advertising revenues from local ads, about US$3.7 billion, paidContent reported Wednesday.

However, growth rates at local radio and television sites are double the growth rate for newspaper sites, according to a Borrell Associates study.

McClatchy announced it will cut another 1,150 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce, its second big job elimination of the year, paidContent reported.

Excluding $20 million in severance costs, this move is aimed to save $100 million for the company over the next year, which represents about 6 percent of trailing 12 month expenses for the company. About half of the cuts will come from “voluntary programmes and managed attrition.”

French media group Figaro experienced a 10 percent growth in audiences, attaining 5 million individuals and is now the third most popular media outlet in the country, Le Figaro announced Monday.

Figaro owns daily newspaper Le Figaro, supplements Madame Figaro and Le Figaro Magazine and lefigaro.fr. The group's properties attract one out of 10 people in France, ages from 15 and up, Le Figaro reported.

Online advertising expenditure has grown for more than 80 percent of European advertisers this year, with most of the funding coming directly out of their print, TV or direct marketing budgets, a study by the European Interactive Advertising Association has found, Brand Republic reported Tuesday.

Meanwhile, 82 percent of advertisers in question decreased other types of advertising. Out of print, TV and digital marketing budgets, advertisers took 40 percent, 39 percent and 32 percent, respectively, according to the study.

BBC World Service has announced a partnership with Deutsche Welle, the world-wide German broadcaster, which would allow a joint English-language digital radio service that would be geared towards 170 million Western and Central European listeners. The service is expected to be launched early next year, Brand Republic reported Tuesday.

The feature would be available from early morning until late at night and would include content ranging from global news, current affairs, in-depth analysis, documentaries and cultural broadcasts. Text would be offered alongside audio and would be taken directly from the BBC News site.

Many newspapers in major cities in China have announced plans to double their newsstand price this month, FollowtheMedia reported.

According to Li Zhaoxiang of the Beijing Youth Daily, “skyrocketing newsprint costs are the major reason for the price jump.” BYD is one of the five newspapers in the city that will raise its newsstand price.

A real estate and investments billionaire and a healthcare boss are looking to buy the Orange County (California) Register, the Orange County Business Journal reported.

George Argyros, a real estate and investments billionaire, and Larry Higby, chief executive of Apria Healthcare Group Inc., have shown interest in buying the newspaper. The Register is also said to be in talks with the Los Angeles Times about combining some operations in order to share costs.

The proposed Google and Yahoo! advertising partnership is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and a European Commission, and now 11 U.S. states are doing their own investigations. Meanwhile, the deal has most recently been attacked by the Association of National Advertisers, CNBC reported Tuesday.

All parties are concerned the ad agreement, which would allow Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google next to Yahoo! search results, violates competition laws, as it would funnel millions of dollars worth of revenue to Yahoo!, all while strengthening Google's hold on the search ad market.

A DVD about radical Islam was included in the Sunday Miami Herald and 70 other newspapers as an advertising insert, and has angered many Muslims in South Florida, the Miami Herald reported Tuesday.

“We walk a very fine line between ensuring the freedom of expression that we try to uphold at all times and not falling into the process of censorship,” said Alexandra Villoch, senior vice president of advertising at the Miami Herald. “In this case, we reviewed the DVD, the wrapping, the Web site and the materials posted and we opted to not enter into the realm of censorship.”

Google’s share in online searches is the highest in the world, amounting to 62% in the United States in July, according to comScore data. In addition, the search engine company is also outracing its mobile Web competitors, the Silicon Alley Insider reported Tuesday.

Sixty-three percent of mobile Internet users employ Google for searches, which is nearly double that of Yahoo!, which attracts 35 percent of all users.

Gannett reported its publishing division's advertising revenue plunged 16.8 percent in August, compared to the same period in 2007, Editor & Publisher reported.

The plummet was due to steep declines in classified advertising revenue.

According to a report from Goldman Sachs JBWere, classified advertising at some of Fairfax Media Ltd.'s largest metropolitan newspapers in Australia has dropped by as much as 40 percent this year, The Australian reported.

The volume of classified ad pages at all Fairfax's metropolitan titles declined 13 percent in July, compared with the same month one year ago. Volumes were down 19 percent in August, according to Bloomberg.

Nokia Media Network will grow even larger, as publishers across Europe, including Agence France-Presse, Grupo Prisa, RTL Mobile and Trinity Mirror join forces with the mobile advertising network, Nokia announced Tuesday.

The network helps advertisers target consumers via mobile publishing. Previously, Reuters, Cosmopolitan and AccuWeather had signed on with NMN. New additions include RTL Mobile, Germany; Cuatro, Spain; Unidad Editorial, Spain; CNet, United Kingdom; Telegraph Media Group, United Kingdom; and the pan European International Herald Tribune.

French daily newspapers increased their reader numbers by a million, or 4.4 percent, between July 2007 and June 2008, reaching a total of 23.7 million readers, according to a study published by Audipresse on Monday. However, paid dailies such as Le Monde and Le Figaro saw a total loss of 1.8 percent in revenues, Le Monde reported.

The country’s daily paid papers experienced a 7.3 percent increase, boosting readership by 600,000 and reaching a readership base of 8.8 million. This figure corresponds to 17.6 percent of all French people, ages 15 years and above.

Search giant Google has bought South Korean blogging developer Tatter and Company, Lenta.ru reported Monday. The firm’s main product is blogging service TextCube.

Tatter might expand TextCube outside of Korea, as Google’s sister site, according to Lenta.ru. Google, meanwhile, is expected to increase its share in the Korean online market, which is the ninth largest in the world.

The World Association of Newspapers has asked competition authorities in Europe and North America to block an advertising agreement between Google and Yahoo on anti-competitive grounds, saying the deal would have a negative impact on the advertising revenues that the search giants provide to newspaper and other Web sites, and on the cost of paid search advertising.

The European Union's Competition Commission announced Monday it is studying the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo!. Currently, the deal is limited to the United States and Canada. A deal in Europe could violate E.U. price fixing rules, as well as rules about sharing sensitive business information, Jonathan Todd, competition commission spokesman told The Los Angeles Times. The U.S. Department of Justice is also examining the deal.

Other than teenagers and young adults, baby boomers (ages 44 to 61) are also heavy users of social networking sites, according to the Entertainment Trends in America study by The NPD Group.

The study found that 41 percent of baby boomers have visited social networks, and 61 percent have been to sites with streaming or downloadable video, Brand Week reported.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle announced the launch of its fifth annual blogging competition, focusing on excellence in blogging, podcasting and videoblogging in 16 categories and in 11 languages, the European Journalism Centre (EJC) reported Monday.

Languages include Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Finnish publisher Sanoma will combine two of its free dailies, Metro and Uutislehti 100, and today will continue operating them under Metro, which will see its circulation increase by 50 percent, Newspaper Innovation reported Monday.

The new combined paper will have about 400,000 readers.

Digital growth in TV and related media platforms will continue growing strongly over the next five years, Media Post reported.

By 2012, DVRs will reach nearly 43 million homes globally, 36 percent of TV households, up from 24 percent, or 27.2 million homes today, according to Magna group.

IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL) may develop a “Spoken Web” project that would offer voice-based Internet access to users who are not able to read or write or those who do not have access to the Web. The initiative would make use of the fast-paced spread of mobile phones in developing countries, such as India, Computer World UK reported Monday.

"The penetration of the PC and the Internet is not as high as that of the mobile phone, so we want to ensure that everything that is done on a web browser on a PC can be done with a mobile phone," said IRL director Guruduth Banavar.

MySpace's music service will be sponsored by Sony Pictures, State Farm, McDonald’s and Toyota, Jeff Berman, MySpace's president of sales and marketing has announced, AdWeek reported Monday. The destination will be linked to News Corp.’s MySpace for “some functionality,” but it may also be used as a separate resource by those who are not part of the social network.

The new service will have the characteristics of an Internet community instead of a mere music source, and although ads will sponsor live streaming of songs, users may be charged for downloads, Berman said.

Russian web portal Mail.ru has bought online resource Smape.com and mobile ICQ service Sm@per, Lenta.ru reported Monday.

Smape.com, a mobile portal with an average of 500,000 visitors per month, redirects Web users to Mobile.Mail.Ru.

USA Today is rolling out rich media advertising ad units for iPhone, Editor and Publisher reported Thursday.

The ad units will be created by PointRoll, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett.

News Corp. may sell a Russia billboard unit to JCDecaux SA, the world's second largest seller of outdoor advertising, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

The two companies are negotiating the sale of Moscow-based News Outdoor Group. JCDecaux would pay by cash and shares, according to an email statement from the France-based company.

The permanent migration of Facebook users to its new site started this week, and will continue over the next few weeks, said a company spokesman, Media Post reported.

Since the new version of the site unveiled in July, Facebook has continuously made changes to it based on member feedback. Some users were against the upgrade formed a group called "Petition against the New Facebook", which has grown to nearly one million users, as of Thursday.

Mobile network access will be available in Glasgow’s subway stations by December, according to The Independent Wednesday.

UK mobile phone and broadband provider O2 has teamed up Arqiva, a transmission company, and Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) to establish a “multi-user distributed antenna system” that would offer the UK’s first ever mobile communications in the subway.

Web banners and rich media were the most popular Web ad formats in U.S., according to the 2007 Online Publisher Survey conducted by Advertising.com, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

In 2007, nearly 95 percent of U.S. interactive publishers supported Web banner ads on their sites, more than 80 percent supported rich media ads, while some 60 percent supported video ads and contextual ads on their sites.

“News organisations must protect their right to charge for content online,” Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of the Financial Times Web site, said Wednesday.

“Publishers have adopted a ‘free for all’ model for too long,” Grimshaw added at the SIIA Global Information Industry Summit, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Over six out of 10 U.S. CMOs and senior marketing professionals surveyed said that digital tactics, including mobile, contributed more than one-quarter of their agency marketing, according to a study conducted by Zoomerang for Sapient in July 2008, eMarketer reported.

The study also found the importance of digital marketing was growing. About half (45 percent) of respondents had either switched or planned to switch agencies during the next 12 months for more access to digital expertise. Nearly eight out of 10 said agencies' interactive and digital aptitude was either “important” or “very important”.

Associated Press is expanding on its program that provides options for legal reuse of content, announced in April, to share advertising and syndication revenue with more of its subscribers, paidContent reported.

According to Mike O’Donnell, the CEO of iCopyright, which serves as AP’s copyright licensing and content service monitor, the program was originally designed only for clients that host AP content, but now will be available to those that subscribe to an AP feed.

In China, online ad revenue in growing since 1998, according to Shanghai iResearch Co. Ltd., SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

The once tiny market surged to about US$40 million in 2000, with an annual growth rate of nearly 300 percent. In 2004, online ad spending exceeded $200 million, and reached about $500 million in 2006.

Google announced to fund O3b Networks, an initiative comprising of 16 satellites that would allow fast but cheap Internet access to “emerging markets” around the equator, (including those from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East), Information Week reported Wednesday.

"Only when emerging markets achieve affordable and ubiquitous access to the rest of the world will we observe locally generated content, widespread e-learning, telemedicine and (much) more," said Greg Wyler, the project lead. "O3b Network will bring multi-gigabit Internet speeds directly to emerging markets, whether landlocked in Africa or isolated by water in the Pacific Islands."

Analysts have concluded that people may not mind ads on their cellphones, The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. Nine percent of people agreed that cellphone advertising is acceptable and 31 percent thought it is acceptable only if it decreases their wireless bills, according to Paul Kultgen, Nielsen’s director of mobile advertising.

"We're at a tipping point," said Kultgen. "The best days for mobile ads are in front of us."

Austria daily Österreich is famous for its giveaways to new subscribers, such as iPods, coffee machines, free highway vouchers. The latest offer is a cash refund, according to Newspaper Innovation.

New subscribers for at least one-year subscription will receive €100, either in cash or on their bank account.

Google Inc. has cut the amount of time it stores personal data from users' online usage habits, which is aimed to improve its privacy policies, according to a company official, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The leading online company used to store such data for 18 months, but now trimmed it to nine months.

Northcliffe Media released audited traffic data for 10 of its network of regional news Web sites, claiming three million unique users in January and a growth of 45 percent year on year, The Guardian reported.

The network sites named “This is…” cover local news from the company's newspapers around the country.

Swiss publisher Tamedia reported turnover up but profits drop in the first half of 2008, Newspaper Innovation reported.

The company publishes paid paper Tages Anzeiger (Zurich) and Berner Zeitung, as well as free dailies 20 Minuten/Minutes and News in Switzerland. It also publishes free publication L’Essentiel in Luxembourg.

Armenian radio and television broadcasts may undergo a technological development as they shift from analog to digital, reported Lenta.ru Wednesday.

Nerses Yeritsyan, Armenian Minister of Trade and Economic Development, announced that the change to digital is required by the Association for Internation Broadcasting (AIB).

Russian business daily Vedomosti announced that its site would now offer news alerts to users, who may pick the content they wish to receive in their e-mail boxes based on keywords, authors or sections in the paper.

Gipp.ru reported that the new service may be advantageous to firms who wish to keep a track of stories regarding their respective organisation or that of their competitors.

Fairfax Media will buy free weekly community newspaper D-Scene, based in Dunedin, New Zealand, the National Business Review reported.

D-Scene was launched earlier this year, in a heated market, and Fairfax has said it is in a position to give readers and advertisers more choices.

Digital media will be the key contributor to sales and profits for over 100 media companies in Asia over the next three years, according to Media Partners Asia's Vivek Couto at the Asia Media Summit Monday.

Sales and profits are expected to increase seven percent and 17 percent, respectively. The sectors with the most growth will be online and out-of-home, according to Hollywood Reporter.

Free title 20 Minuten again wins the most-read Swiss newspaper, according to the MACH Basic readership survey, Newspaper Innovation reported.

With about 1.3 million daily readers, 20 Minuten now reaches twice as many as the former leader paid paper Blick. Both papers had only around 750,000 readers each four years ago.

Google is scanning microfilm from newspaper archives to make them available through online search, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The historical archives, including those from The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time magazine, will first be available on Google News, and then on the newspapers' Web sites.

Gannett announced plans to re-organise its corporate structure and cut about 100 management positions, according to U.S. Community Publishing President Robert Dickey in a letter to employees Tuesday, Editor and Publisher reported.

The company just eliminated its workforce by 1,000 positions in August, due to a series of buyouts and attrition in its newspaper division.

Google finally landed a deal with NBC Universal on TV ads, paidContent reported Monday.

According to this multi-year partnership between the GE media unit and Google, NBC Universal will use Google TV Ads to sell national ad inventory for several of its cable networks, including Sci-Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller but not Bravo or USA.

Sunday red-tops in the United Kingdom weathered a difficult time for newspapers in August, and saw the biggest growth in a sector seeing overall downturns, Marketing Week reported.

The Sun continued to grow and remained the market leader, rising 1.48 percent to 3.1 million in the six months up to August, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations figures.

Following its launch into online ventures last year, French media firm My Media announced to launch Eggs, a multimedia advertising agency, reported Le Journal du Net Monday.

According to Le Figaro, Eggs would develop web content for clients and would be led by MK2’s multimedia developper Emmanuel Gilibert, previously employed at Ogilvy & Mather, a global advertising, marketing and PR outlet.

Startup firm Plastic Logic scheduled the release of an e-book reader for the first half of 2009, with the possible intention of competing with Amazon’s Kindle reader. The aim of the device is to “reduce the amount of paper that business users have to carry around with them,” according to Information Week.

The reader is the size and thickness of an 8.5"x11" pad of paper and is geared towards reading business reports, marketing content, public relations data, books and magazines. Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta said that the device was designed for professionals who “read more business content than recreational content,” reported Information Week.

Shares of major U.S. media companies rallied on Monday, after the Federal Reserve's decision to bail out mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to analysts, Reuters reported.

Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. shares were up more than four percent, while Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. increased nearly three percent on the New York Stock Exchange.

Politico.com announced the launch of an advertising and content distribution network that includes 40 “handpicked” sites that range from local news to independent political news outlets, according to Media Week.

“What we are doing here is very different than other ad networks,” said Roy Schwartz, Vice President of business development at Politico. “We’re going after very large sites, but what they don’t necessarily do is concentrate on politics. This is very unique.”

Guardian News & Media announced the launch of the Guardian Publisher Network, an advertising network that will permit advertisers to reach audiences by targeting “key special interest” sites, reported Brand Republic Tuesday. The network was tested over the previous eight months and is scheduled to be launched in the UK at first and later on in United States.

The company is collaborating with small to medium-sized publishers and intends to sell ads “on their behalf” across the entire network, which is joined to the principal Guardian website and houses nearly 30 sites.

Reading Web sites is more likely to lead people to read magazines, and is less likely to hurt magazine print readership, according to a new PPA survey, Media Week reported.

Magazines continue to be a top information source of 65 percent of readers surveyed, according to the study, commissioned by the PPA and done by subscription site magazinesbymail.net.

Yahoo relaunched and rebranded its advertising network users in the UK and Ireland, claiming that its network now reaches 80 percent of Web ad, according to The Guardian Monday.

The Yahoo Network, including new distribution partners across search, display and mobile sites, has over 29 million combined unique users each month.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the US announced that it does not support the proposed online advertising venture between Yahoo! and Google, reported the European Journalism Centre (EJC) on Monday.

The deal might control 90 percent of the search inventory and might “diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising,” the letter claimed.

After having teamed up with a consortium of newspaper to feature their listings on its real-estate website in November last year, Zillow.com announced to expand the venture to include sales of ads on all the sites, reported CNet. The consortium includes 11 newspaper firms such as Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group and E.W. Scripps.

The Zillow Advertising Network agreement would allow the newspaper consortium’s advertisers to “tap into” Zillow’s 5 million unique monthly visitors’ user base.

Australian papers The Age and The Sunday Age will cut between 45 and 55 editorial jobs in the next two months, according to acting editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge Wednesday, Asia Media reported.

The cuts, making up between 11 and 14 percent of the publications' editorial staff, are part of the plan to cut 550 workers outlined by Fairfax Media couple weeks ago.

According to CNN, members of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency are experimenting with A-Space, a social network specially formulated for use by analysts from 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, reported the European Journalism Centre (EJC) Monday.

The site would allow the members to communicate information on terrorist activities and global military events.

The New York Times Co. is closing down its metro distribution center, and cutting 550 jobs, paidContent reported.

The center, called City & Suburban delivers the NYT and about 200 other publications to newsstands and retail stores in the New York area.

Online video ad spending in the United States will reach $1.4 billion in 2010, up from $619 million this year, according to video ad company LiveRail, eMarketer reported.

This year, online video still makes up only 2.4 percent of all online ad spending, LiveRail predicted.

U.S. newspaper ad revenues were down 16 percent in the first half of 2008 – a fall of US$3 billion, with total online sales of $1.6 billion, paidContent reported.

Online revenues in the second quarter only were down 2.3 percent, or $776.6 million, according to the report on Thursday.

As U.S. newspapers are deal with losses in advertising and circulation, while despite readership gains online, Web advertising isn't enough to make up for print losses, magazines that attract high end advertisers could be just what newspapers need to stay afloat, Wired reported Friday.

The Wall Street Journal's WSJ, shipped to most subscribers Saturday, is the latest newspaper-launched glossy magazine on the market.

Many U.S. student newspapers have experienced tough times, with circulation declines forcing many universities to cut costs, The Daily Texan Online reported.

Several student papers in the country are reducing staff or publication days. The Spartan Daily, the campus paper for San Jose State University in California, has hired more staff, but the decrease in funding has caused it to scrap its Friday edition cut the size of the paper.

Russian sports daily Sport is now available in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and hopes to reach a mass audience of sports enthusiasts, Gipp.ru reported.

The paper, available in those countries since Aug. 15, is 32 pages long, with sections are divided into “Football”, “Hockey”, “Basketball”, “Boxing” and “Formula 1.”

More than 140 million mobile subscribers worldwide will use social networks on mobile devices by 2013, which bring in more than US$410 million in subscription revenues, according to ABI Research's "Mobile Social Networking" study, eMarketer reported.

ABI said the predictions are conservative.

Spanish free daily Mini Diario has launched a complete make-over, according to Newspaper Innovation.

The new design is much more modern, using the same tone of colour throughout the paper, according to the report.

Interpersonal recommendation/users’ opinions and newspapers are the most trusted types of advertising, while online/mobile ads are trusted by fewer respondents, according to eMarketer and Nielsen, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

According to the study, interpersonal recommendation, such as word of mouth, is still the most trusted ad format, by nearly 80 percent of the respondents.

Ukraine's Kyiv Post will on Sunday launch its redesigned Web site, which will include archives, top online news and the entire content of the newspaper, the Kyiv Post announced on its Web site Thursday.

The newspaper, owned by KP Media, is the country's top English-language newspaper.

The Belfast Telegraph has launched a new weekend lifestyle magazine, which hits newsstands today, the Telegraph reported.

The 64-page Weekend supplement is a first for Northern Ireland, with celebrity and fashion features, as well as restaurant reviews, travel, gardening, cooking and health features. Famous writers, such as novelist Carlo Gebler and Frances A. Burscough, will contribute as columnists each week.

Google has said it will back Project Kangaroo, which plans to launch an ad-supported Web site that will give users access to current programmes on UK television stations ITV and Channel 4, as well as all BBC programmes a week after their original air date, the Times Online reported.

The Competition Commission is investigating Kangaroo, but Google has said the online media market is already very competitive.

Large boxes that distribute multiple newspapers are replacing single boxes in Vancouver in an effort to clean up city streets, organise newspapers and reduce the number of newspaper boxes, the Vancouver Sun reported Thursday.

The project was initiated by the city, and also aims to increase recycling, as each of the boxes contain a compartment for recycling old papers. However, configurations of the new boxes force tabloid format newspapers to be displayed sideways, making them difficult to read, and the cost to rent a compartment in the new boxes is much higher than the cost for single boxes.