November 2009 Archives

At the Press Freedom Round Table in Hyderabad on Monday, Chris Elliot, managing editor of The Guardian, said that in order for a newspaper to be of value it must have a thorough commercial strategy.

Elliot said The Guardian, like other media outlets, must reexamine its financial models to maintain journalistic standards. He stressed that newspaper success just isn't possible without a sound financial base.

For more on this story, visit our partner site, the Editors Weblog.

While politics make strange bedfellows, finances make even stranger ones.

The Associated Press reported today that four of the United States's largest metropolitan dailies - the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Philadelphia Inquirer - are set to continue operations under new management due to their inability to service crushing debt.

The bizarre part is that the would-be managers - their lenders - have each experienced financial troubles of their own recently.

In yet another potential example of economic censorship, The Respublika newspaper may be forced shut by a whopping libel judgment against it brought by an arm of its country's government, The Institute for War & Peace Reporting said Friday.

An Almaty court in September ordered Respublika - published in Kazak and Russian - to pay 60M tenge (US$400,000) in "moral damages" to the BTA Bank, nationalized in February, for comments relating to the possible loss of $45 million in deposits, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.

No sooner had a third daily newspaper come onto the scene in one U.S. city, than it announced plans to cease publication until January 1, citing inadequate ad sales, The Associated Press Friday reported.

The staff of the Detroit (Mich.) Daily Press -- drawn from the ranks of those recently laid off for the same reason by the city's two other newspapers -- will now enjoy five more weeks of unpaid leave, TIME magazine observed Friday.

Over the next few days, the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog will be providing extensive coverage of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress and 16th World Editors Forum, working with our sister publications, the Editors Weblog and the dedicated WAN-IFRA multimedia conference blog.

The November 18 edition of The Amazing Spiderman features a villain named Electro posing as a modern-day Robin Hood in order to fight a newspaper bailout because he wants the government funds for himself, Mania reported Monday. Issue 612 of Spiderman is not the first comic to deal with the issue of failing newspapers, though it may be the lengthiest or most in-depth.

This fantastical treatment of current events is plausibly enjoyable, according to High Five! Comics. The Daily Bugle - now a tabloid titled DB - is hurting and won't survive without financial help. Of course, Spiderman steps in to reverse the sinister plot concocted by Electro, whereby the villain incites a near-riot, uploading video of it to YouTube and arousing anti-newspaper sentiment by virtue of the viral spectacle.

Pulitzer-prize winning comic strip Doonesbury has also run a storyline featuring a failing print newspaper, The Washington Post reported in September 2008. That storyline was suppressed by some papers, The Guardian said in March.

Image: High Five! Comics

Looking to exploit the circulation spike that immediately precedes early Christmas shopping, several major U.S. newspapers will charge Sunday prices for tomorrow's edition, Bloomberg yesterday reported.

Thanksgiving is not known in the industry as a big news day, per se. However, the issue is packed with retailers' advertisements in advance of Black Friday, marketed as the official start of the holiday shopping season, according to The Detroit Free Press.

And, apparently, this year's premium newspaper price phenomenon is not an isolated incident but part of a growing trend over time, Monroe on a Budget said yesterday. The Detroit (Michigan, United States) Free Press, which according to Poynter Online recently doubled its single-copy rates, will charge US$1.50 for metropolitan editions and $2 for outlying areas.



Source: Newspaper Association of America

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch is no longer standing alone in the wind as he rails against the unpaid aggregation of content by search engine giant Google, Bloomberg reported yesterday. Publishers A.H. Belo and MediaNews Group may soon shield their content with paywalls, and de-index that paid content from search engines, Editor & Publisher reported.

Publishers resent Google because it does not share with them the money it makes from advertisements displayed next to news search results, Reuters said yesterday. Murdoch's ire goes one step further, seeking direct compensation from search engines for access to News Corp.'s articles, BBC reported yesterday.

Playboy Enterprises Inc. will outsource publication of its magazine to American Media Inc., Agence France Presse reported today. Outsourcing all functions besides editorial is being done to cut costs, and the company stated it hopes the move will bring the magazine back to profitability in 2011.

AMI is the fourth-largest magazine publisher in the United States. The Chicago-based Playboy is expected to lose about US$8 million by the end of this year, and $5 million in 2010, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. About 25 jobs will be lost in the restructuring. Circulation, production, advertising sales, marketing and other services will be handled by AMI, The Associated Press reported.

German publisher Axel Springer has acquired the Russian arm of Gruner+Jahr, another German publisher. The Russian titles will continue to operate under the G+J banner, with licensing of the respective names to Axel Springer. The acquisition - the value of which was not disclosed - must be approved by antitrust authorities before it can be finalised.

Axel currently publishes the Russian print editions and Web sites of Forbes, Newsweek, OK and Computer Bild. The merger adds to its list of titles: GEO, GALA Biografia, GEO Traveller, and GEOLenok print magazines as well as GEO.ru, Moi-Roditeli.ru, and MoiZvezdi.ru Web sites.

Following a scathing series about Scientology by the St. Petersburg Times, high-ranking members of the controversial institution have arranged to buy a sister publication of the newspaper, The New York Times yesterday reported.

The impending purchase of Governing magazine, now owned by St. Petersburg's parent, raised some concern following an unrelated flap about religious indoctrination at the church-owned Washington Times, The New York Times said.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has expressed absolute dismay and condemnation of the horrific massacre of 12 journalists, in an attack on a convoy in the southern Philippines which killed at least 46 people.

The journalists were travelling with a group of politicians and political supporters planning to file nomination papers for Esmael Mangudadatu, an opposition gubernatorial candidate in Maguindanao province, when the attack occurred on 23 November.

U.S. newspapers are losing print subscribers, but some are seeing circulation numbers rise, The Associated Press reported Sunday, in an article titled "Newspaper circulation may be worse than it looks."

Some newspapers' overall circulation is on the upswing, as the Audit Bureau of Circulations' new standards allow newspapers to count electronic edition sales, those on a subscriber-only Web site or the the digital version of the print product. The standards sometimes also allow publications to count a subscriber twice if a bundled subscription - both print and electronic - is sold to that subscriber.

Critics of the new auditing standards say newspapers are cheating, while others say that as newspapers adapt and grow digitally, ignoring all the readership that happens across digital platforms would be unfair. Many reports focused on the case of the Las Vegas Review Journal, which saw circulation increase by 6.6 percent this year, despite weekday print sales dropping by 12,000 copies.

Photo: Flickr/MIT-Libraries

Google Wave - available only in experimental quantities yet - is already changing the way traditional publishers produce the news, Mashable reported Sunday. Because its interactive structure permits real-time dialogue with readers, Wave has prompted news editors to adjust budget lines to match public interest as it emerges throughout the day.

"It's a lot more live than Twitter because it's like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other," RedEye Web editor Stephanie Yiu was quoted as saying. "It's really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We're learning with our readers and moving forward together."

Microsoft recently offered News Corp. an undisclosed sum to make its articles unsearchable by Microsoft's chief competitor: Google, The Financial Times yesterday reported. The rumour comes even as News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has complained that Google shamelessly steals his media company's wares, The New York Times reported yesterday.

Various analysts have observed that newspapers have always been free to shield their products from indexing by Google. Shielding requires coding a no-index label into material published via Internet, like sewing a tag into the neckband of a sweater.

A colorable offer has come forward for a Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper which its bankrupt publisher had planned to shutter at year's end, The Portales News-Tribune Friday reported.

The East Valley Tribune's publisher, Freedom Communications Inc., has operated in receivership since filing for bankruptcy protection. Thus, it must obtain judicial approval for any sale of assets to occur. Judicial approval will likely chiefly entail review of the priority of distribution of any proceeds obtained.

The identity of the buyer was not revealed nor was the agreed-upon purchase price disclosed. The East Valley Tribune is based in Mesa, Arizona in the southwestern part of the United States.

Release of an electronic chalkboard from MacIntosh has been postponed so many times that PC World Thursday joined other gadget analysts in speculating that the much-anticipated product might be dead in the water. However, neither repeated design delays nor rumours that the project will ultimately be abandoned has stopped Conde Nast magazines from proceeding with development of Apple Tablet-compatible editions by pdf-maker Adobe, Mac Rumors said Saturday.

The Tablet's latest slow-up was attributed to a switch in subparts by DigiTimes on Thursday. Nevertheless, Conde Nast has prepared tablet-ready editions - for Apple, or its competitors - starting with a digital version of Wired, according to All Things Digital. To cement its commitment, Wired followed that report with a video published Saturday demonstrating the concept.

The Chicago News Cooperative, which we first reported on last month, launched today, publishing its first stories in The New York Times Chicago edition.

The first piece of journalism is about profits from Chicago's parking meter operations; the rest can be found here. Getting help from non-profit journalism firms is being discussed at length by publishers searching to cut costs, but not content. Critics, however, say that for these investigative enterprises to really work, they must produce important reporting that isn't available elsewhere.

What happens when there's more work to do than one editorial staff can handle? In the case of The Hartford Courant, the largest newspaper in Connecticut, United States, the answer is "aggregation," which on Thursday turned into a plagiarism lawsuit, filed by a smaller, family-owned newspaper, The Associated Press reported.

The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Connecticut, is suing The Courant, stating The Courant saved money by cutting back on local staff, only to publish the Journal Inquirer's reports under Courant reporters' bylines. Last summer, The Courant also began aggregating local news and summarising or re-writing the articles, and then attributing them to the original news outlets.

According to comScore, Yahoo! News was the top news site in 2008, with 40 million unique visitors, up from about 35 million in 2007, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

 

MSNBC, CNN and AOL News followed, with about 33 million, 31 million, and 27 million unique visitors in 2008.

 

The Financial Times will lift a year-long ban on raises and also increase its minimum wage for entry-level journalists in the new year, The Guardian reported yesterday.

FT Managing Editor Dan Bogler was quoted by The Guardian as saying that instituting the modest increase of 2 percent "balances a decent reward for everyone's efforts with a need to be careful about how far we increase our fixed costs."

Colin Lin, 50, invites fellow couturiers the world over to brainstorm new uses for old newspapers, according to The Associated Press. The Taiwan-based designer has already come up with her own strategy: attach them to strips of cotton and weave them into shoes and bags that are ecofriendly as well as profitable.

"I only contribute very little to recycling all the newspapers dumped everyday around the world," Lin was quoted in today's AP article as saying. "But other footwear and bag manufacturers may want to copy my idea and so contribute their own share to dealing with the problem."

Apparently, some already have. The full wardrobe of a fashion show at Hainan University last October featured nothing but recycled newspaper clothing, as China View then reported.

Photo: AP, via Daily Press

Ad revenue for U.S. newspapers totalled US$6.4 billion in the third quarter, a 28 percent drop from the same time last year, The Associated Press yesterday reported. The decline in revenue for online ads was somewhat less severe, with a 17 percent drop for the same period a year prior, paidContent observed.

The dismal report represents the 13th consecutive quarter of declines, according to The Washington Business Journal. Despite the disastrous trend, John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America which compiled the data, was quoted today by Bloomberg as saying, "The broad consensus is that the worst has passed."

If newspaper or magazine content online was no longer free, 80 percent of consumers say they would not pay for access, a new Forrester Research report has found.

The remaining respondents who were willing to pay are split on how to pay: 8 percent said they would prefer a subscription for all online content, and another 8 percent said they would like one subscription to cover print, online and mobile. Three percent, meanwhile, said they would prefer to pay per article.

Citing no concrete figures, Sony announced yesterday it would disappoint some online shoppers who preordered its Kindle-like e-reader for US$399, The Associated Press reported yesterday. The company blamed high demand for the backlog of its Reader Daily Edition shipments, which may not make it to buyers in time for Christmas, Reuters reported.

The handheld electronic text storage device is intended to entirely replace printed matter. Sony promised to announce this month which newspapers it would be delivering as part of its default content package, DarkVision Hardware today reported.

The Roscommon Herald-News, in continuous publication since 1883, breathed its last on November 5, The Crawford County Avalanche yesterday reported. The weekly community newspaper - published in Michigan, United States - sold its assets to the Houghton Lake Resorter, according to a Nov. 7 article on the Roscommon Herald-News Web site.

According to data kept by Michigan lawmakers, the two newspapers were the only ones published in the region as of 1999.

An early morning fire of unknown origin gutted a newspaper warehouse in a suburb of New Delhi, The Indo-Asian News Service today reported. A dozen fire teams responded to the incident, which occurred around 6:30 a.m. in Noida, a city in Uttar Pradesh province, Asian News International reported today.

Arun Singh, general manager of Dainik Jagran, said the Hindi-language newspaper's parent company, Jagran Prakashan Ltd., sustained heavy losses as a result, Press Trust of India today reported. With a daily circulation of 2.3 million readers, Dainik Jagran - or The Truth in English - has grown in recent years into one of the five most widely-read newspapers in India, according to Financial Times.

Japan boasts two new newspaper Web sites, both of which deliver the news in a highly-stylised artistic form known worldwide as manga, Asiajin yesterday reported.

Manga no Shimbun, or Manga Newspaper in English, is a general interest daily launched by KaBA Net on October 15, 2009. In pictorial headlines of such high quality they put to shame the ads beside them, the newspaper instantly and economically communicates the subject of a story to readers - and nonreaders - of any language.

Nigerian publishers Monday advanced self-regulation of the industry as the preferred means of safeguarding the freedom of and bolstering public confidence in the press, allAfrica.com reported yesterday. The impulse to grapple autonomously with the issues of credibility and censorship through a peer-appointed ombudsman follows legislative efforts to impose tighter controls on the press as a whole.

"What the colonialists tried to do but failed under the Newspaper Ordinance of 1903; what our politicians tried to do in 1964 but failed; and what the Buhari/Idiagbon regime and a succession of military dictatorships tried to do but all failed, is now being put forward again," Newspaper Proprietors' Association of Nigeria President, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, was quoted in today's Guardian as saying at a public hearing on the matter.

An industry already rattled by severe reductions in force was further shaken yesterday as police raided production areas of several New York newspapers, CNN Justice reported yesterday. Prosecutors, who refused to further explain what prompted the investigation, limited public remarks to absolving the newspapers themselves.

New York's Newspaper & Mail Deliverers boasts a 1,600-member non-editorial union, long suspected of ties to organised crime, ChattahBox yesterday reported. A similar racketeering probe in the 1990s led to criminal indictment of the union's then-president, accused and later acquitted of involvement with the Lucchese crime family. The same union has yet to shake the taint of allegations it attempted to extort the New York Post into switching delivery companies.

The Irish-language newspaper Foinse, closed in June, has been relaunched and will be available for free with the Irish Independent each Wednesday, the Independent announced last weekend.

Foinse's closure was lamented across the island nation, as it both informed readers and furthered the Irish culture. The publication was previously financed by Foras na Gaeilge and had been published since 1996. Previous circulation was 4,500, but thanks to the agreement with the Independent, Ireland's best-selling daily, circulation will reach more than 152,000.

For more on this story, visit our partner site, editorsweblog.org.

Photo: Slugger O'Toole's Flickr photostream. (Unfortunately Foinse had not been included in his copy).

YouTube today launched a free tool to enable news outlets to better emphasise video from citizen journalists on their Web sites, Agence France Presse reported.

The open source application, called YouTube Direct, will allow news organisations to customise YouTube's upload platform to their own sites, and then review video and make selections.

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, kept on growing slowly and its market share was up another half point in October, Business Insider reported.

Bing's market share was up from 9.4 percent in September to 9.9 percent in October, according to comScore.

Days after media mogul Rupert Murdoch accused Google of copyright infringement, two media lawyers co-authored an editorial in one of Murdoch's U.S. newspapers in defense of such a theory, TechDirt reported Friday.

According to Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown of Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C., the world's largest search engine is illegal because it "make[s] and store[s] full copies of texts to power [its] search functions, profit[s] from this material, and at the same time demand[s] that copyright holders opt out if they don't want to be google-able," they wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Image: Murdoch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 2007. Photo from WEF's Flickr.

A study released Monday by a business strategy firm shows that less than half of Americans would be willing to pay for news online, Nasdaq reported today. Meanwhile, as many as 66 percent of Finns, 63 percent of Germans and 62 percent of Italians on average would pay between US$5 and $7 monthly for Internet-based journalism, The Guardian today reported.

The Boston Consulting Group's findings were extrapolated from a survey of 5,000 respondents, according to Sunday's New York Times.

The Washington (D.C.) Blade closed its doors by noon yesterday, another casualty of the insolvency of its Atlanta-based parent publisher Windows Media, The Washington Times reported today. The weekly tabloid was reputedly the longest-running gay newspaper in the United States.

Undaunted by the abrupt closure, though, staffers intend to carry on with a public social event scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday in the District of Columbia's Hard Rock Cafe restaurant, The Washington Examiner reported yesterday. The publication confirmed the event yesterday via Twitter.

The (Colorado Springs, United States) Gazette shed 11 more workers Friday, the Denver Post reported today. This round of layoffs, which hit the newsroom hardest with seven from editorial positions, brings the total staff of the Colorado daily under 300.

The Gazette is owned by Freedom Communications Inc., based in Irvine, Calif., according to 5280 Magazine. Freedom filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors in September, as 5280 then reported.

Advertisers' exploitation of online marketing has lagged far behind consumers' appetite for it, according to a study presented Friday at a media conference hosted by Yale University.

Consequently, newspapers must be ready for this seismic shift in ad delivery over the course of the next five years, Poynter Online reported in today's recap. Media analysts Penelope Muse Abernathy and Richard Foster, who produced the report, warn that print newspapers are currently not up to the challenge.

In an especially indelicate layoff scenario, a pair of publications produced under one roof closed the doors forever last week, leaving only a note for workers to find when they showed up to the office on Monday, WXIA-TV in Atlanta reported today. Media Window, the umbrella company of Gay City News and Southern Voice, had apparently been facing insolvency for some time, but the inability to continue operations had not been communicated to the firm's employees.

Editor Laura Douglas-Brown confirmed the incident via Southern Voice's page on Facebook, saying: "I am personally grateful to all of the staff, and to all of you who have had the courage to share your stories. It has been the honor of my life to help you tell them." The remark prompted 62 messages of condolence within seven hours.

The BBC Web site will soon feature RSS feeds providing access to content published in local newspapers, Holdthefrontpage reported today. The fledgling partnerships follow a poor review by the BBC Trust in the area of linked media, as reported by Journalism.co.uk in May 2008.

The newspapers and locations to be selected have not been settled upon, according to Journalism.co.uk report today. However, the focus will be on areas with the least coverage at this time.

Television news network CNN has ended production on continuous live video for its Web site, CNN.com, a "curtailing [of] one of the Internet's biggest news experiments," The New York Times reported last week. In its place, CNN will turn to investing in on-demand video.

Although the network has seen online video advertising gains in 2009, executives have decided the live video featuring news anchors, called CNN.com Live, are not cost-effective. However, the live Web casts make up a small number of videos on the site - two to three million out of 100 million video streams each month.

As of the end of 2007, China was the leading mobile market in the world, with more than 500 million subscribers. This figure was up from about 300 million in 2004, with a net addition of more than 50 million each year, according to IDATE.

 

The United States was the second largest mobile market, with more than 250 million subscribers at the end of 2007. The market was relatively mature as it reached nearly 200 million in 2004, and grew less than 25 million annually, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

Adobe, maker of pdf software, has announced plans to create a new division within the company devoted to products focused on newspapers, among other things, Read Write Web today reported. The initiative comes even as Adobe has had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce in other departments due to the economic climate of the past year.

Though Adobe's announcement did not specify which newspaper products were in development, The Boston Globe newspaper may give a hint. The Globe today launched GlobeReader, a digital newspaper that replaces print but does not require live Internet access the entire time it is being viewed. The GlobeReader relies on Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, both components of the Flash Platform, as announced in today's press release.

Brothers Gary and Mark Stern have set out to fill the gap left by declining newspaper circulation in the northern U.S. state of Michigan, The Lansing State Journal today reported. To do so, they will launch a print daily to be sold from street corners and sell ads at a quarter of the rate of competitors, according to Crain's Detroit Business.

The Sterns' journalism experience comes from strikebusting across the United States during several decades, Editor & Publisher yesterday reported. The Detroit Daily Press expects to follow its 50-cent per copy street sales with 150,000 at-home subscriptions, The Detroit News today reported.

The New York Times News Service, which, like The Associated Press, repackages its articles for redistribution to news wires around the world, will trim 25 of 28 jobs and relocate this arm of its operations to Florida, paidContent reported yesterday.

The new round of cuts comes on the heels of 100 layoffs recently announced in the print newsroom, Reuters today reported. Starting sometime in 2010, the news service will be housed at The Gainesville Sun, a non-unionised New York Times Co. newspaper, according to The New York Times.

The executive editor of The Washington Times walked out on the newspaper effective November 6, 2009, The Associated Press reported today. John Solomon, formerly with The Washington Post, had only held the position since January 2008.

Politico yesterday reported that The Times had announced on Monday its dismissal of three top executives: President and Publisher Tom McDevitt, Chief Financial Officer Keith Cooperrider, and Board Chairman Dong Moon Joo. In the leadership wake, Jonathan Slevin ascended to acting president and publisher.

Third quarter profits at one of the world's largest media companies were up compared to the same time last year, while operating profit was also up, Dow Jones reported today. German publisher Bertelsmann AG's profit after taxes reached €87 million, compared to €15 million in the third quarter last year, when charges of €59 million hurt profits.

Revenue, however, was down 5 percent, from €3.8 billion in the third quarter last year, to €3.6 billion in the quarter this year, according to a BusinessWeek report.

Penn State University is launching a pilot programme in a partnership with USA Today, which distributes its "e-edition" of the publication to all students, faculty and staff, the Daily Collegian reported.

Students can also choose to sign up and receive their e-edition through "Campus Buzz," an e-mail notification.

The Detroit Free Press, of Michigan, United States, may have sparked a firestorm last week when it admitted to fulfilling corporate requests to coordinate the placement of a Target store ad with stories on education, MinnPost reported Tuesday. The MinnPost's article, denying similar practices, was prompted by a story on the subject published by The Wall Street Journal on November 2.

In the article, The Wall Street Journal questioned the ethics of taking editorial suggestions from commercial interests outside the newsroom despite the evident opportunity to maximise an advertiser's return on investment such a practice would represent. Meanwhile, The MinnPost, of Minnesota, United States, is a nonprofit entity, funded by several charitable organisations, fundamentally altering its business model from that historically followed by a commercial newsgathering enterprise.

An Armenian trial court hearing a breach of contract complaint settled the suit not by ordering that the debt be repaid, but by ordering the newspaper to cease operations altogether, Armtown reported Tuesday.

The newspaper, Tchorrord Ishkhanuntyun, changed hands and is publishing under a new masthead in the face of the order, a reporter for PanARMENIAN is quoted as saying. However, the plaintiff, Gind, is seeking enforcement of the injunction obtained against former owner Ogostos Ltd. to extend to the newspaper's new publisher, Koghmnaki Andzants M.

The original complaint, seeking payment of a debt, apparently never requested judicial relief in the form of the newspaper's outright closure. The amount of the litigated debt was not immediately clear from available reports on the incident.

A former editor who was fired from her position at the New York Post in September sued her former employer Monday, claiming her dismissal was discriminatory and stemmed from her complaints surrounding an editorial cartoon that critics said likened U.S. President Barack Obama to a dead chimpanzee, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. Sandra Guzman served as an associate editor at the Post since 2003.

The suit puts the magazine's parent company, media conglomerate News Corp., at the centre of yet another legal controversy this week. The Post maintains Guzman's position was eliminated because " the section she edited was discontinued due to a decline in advertising sales," according to a statement.

U.S. media company Hearst Corp. may have a good reason for choosing an investment banker as its new chief financial officer: it has a US$1 billion "war chest," the New York Post reported, citing "insiders" as sources.

Hiring Mitchell Scherzer as the new CFO signals Chairman and CEO Frank Bennack's "more aggressive acquisition strategy" as he seeks new revenue streams.

Complaining that English libel laws have the effect of extorting rather than vindicating, news publishers have spelled out the reforms they seek in the most comprehensive report on the subject to date, Journalism.co.uk reported yesterday.

The report, titled "Free Speech is not for Sale," urges parliament to adopt a single-publication rule, among other reforms, which means civil judgments are not multiplied based on the number of times a libelous statement was reprinted in various copies of the same edition. A second reform advanced by the report is the capping of libel judgments at £10,000. A third involves employing alternatives to court process, such as informal mediation and arbitration.

Internet ad spending in the United States decreased for the third consecutive quarter this year, down 4 percent to US$6.4 billion year-over-year, according to new data from IDC.

Worldwide online ad dollars slightly dropped 1 percent to $14.7 billion over the period.

In a process underway since May 2007, a wage board established by the Indian legislature met today with newspaper employees, their unions, and their employers in the central city of Lucknow, The Press Trust of India today reported. Lucknow is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, which publishes 11,789 of the country's 74,000 newspapers, The Indo-Asian News Service in July reported.

Board chairman Justice G R Majithia along with nine other members visited Uttar Pradesh for two days to gather more information toward establishing a minimum rate of pay nationwide for editorial and non-editorial employees alike. The board's recommendations are due to the legislature in May 2010, according the board's enabling legislation.

An Iraqi court has ordered The Guardian newspaper to pay Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki UK £52,000 for an April article which characterized the new leader as "increasingly authoritarian," The Guardian yesterday reported. The ruling is subject yet to several appeals.

Global advocates of freedom of the press contend the lawsuit is part of a larger attack on impartial journalism throughout the region, The Guardian today reported. The prime minister's administration has apparently sued four organisations in the last year, forcing out local news agency Al-Jazeera for what the administration called anti-government bias.

The technique of silencing reporters through civil process has come to be known in English-speaking countries as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or SLAPP, according to Reporters Without Borders. Such process usually takes the form of a defamation action carried out with the aim of forcing the target, a news media or NGO, to either fold or retract because mounting legal costs or the threat of a ruinous damages award, the organisation said.

The Church of Scientology has a long, storied tradition of fighting back in the public eye when characterised by the media as a cult, which has been often. Typically, though, the organisation's response has been limited to either suing or pursuing, according to a massive series published last week by The St. Petersburg Times. Today, the 56-year-old embattled institution turns the page.

Apparently, Scientology leadership has decided to adopt a "fight fire with fire" approach in this instance, offering employment to seasoned journalists principally in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, according to Gawker. The investigative reporters would freelance for Freedom Magazine, a publication which bills itself as covering "human rights and social betterment issues" and conducting "investigative reporting in the public interest" since 1968.

New Zealand News UK, which suspended print publication in July, has officially sounded the death knell to its paper operations, RadioLIVE reported today.

The weekly tabloid had been published in London for expatriates of New Zealand since 1927, The New Zealand Herald today reported. The newspaper, which launched an Internet edition in 2006, will still publish via the Web, The Otago Daily News today reported.

Mobile Internet penetration reached 18.2 percent in the United States in February 2009, the highest among the countries surveyed. It reached 16.9 percent of mobile subscribers in the United Kingdom in the first quarter of 2009, according to the Nielsen Company. The reach in the last quarter of 2008 in Canada was 16 percent, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported..

 

In France, Italy and Spain, the penetration was more than 12 percent, while in Germany it was 9.6 percent.

In a development lauded by the printer as a success, The Australian newspaper - published also in England to satisfy expats - has joined the digital revolution that is overtaking the rest of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. holdings in the United Kingdom. That is, The Australian will soon be printed at a Stroma plant in London recently automated to conduct the printing process digitally. As a result, Aussies abroad will receive their hardcopy newspapers as many as six hours earlier than their countrymen back home.

The Australian's transition to digital printing follows a similar switch in New York. News & Tech reported in October that The Wall Street Journal, historically printed at mammoth analog presses in South Brunswick, New Jersey, has converted two of its own presses to digital production and will outsource the rest of its newspaper demand to local printers.

The Russian edition of Forbes magazine has launched free access to its Web site, Lenta.ru reported yesterday. The online outlet contains sections such as "Main," "Economy" and "Your Business," which are further divided into sections.

In addition, the site contains video content, blogs, popular publication material, "the best" articles from the archives, links to other publications and a page on which to subscribe to the print edition, according to Lenta.ru. Visitors will be able to access any content from past editions, which have been published since 2004.

Independent News & Media bondholders today voted in a meeting to back plans for restructuring the Irish publishing group, RTÉ Business reported. A plan that would give bondholders a 46 percent stake in the group will be voted on Nov. 26 by shareholders.

"INM welcomes this essential endorsement of the restructuring and anticipates that the restructuring will now be completed on schedule and prior to the year end," the company said in a statement, according to Reuters.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade stated in his blog today that INM's CEO, "Gavin O'Reilly, is on the verge of comprehensively defeating the troublesome shareholder Denis O'Brien." (Note: O'Reilly is also president of WAN-IFRA, of which SFN is part). O'Brien has previously demanded to hold several emergency meetings and has bid to unseat two board members, a move shareholders overwhelmingly voted against.

Shares of Dogan Yayin - Turkey's largest media group - sank today following denials of its sale to a German publisher despite a rising tide on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, Reuters reported today. Trading in the security also was suspended briefly on the basis of the rumour, Reuters India reported.

Rumours of the sale to Axel Springer emerged after Dogan Yayin announced in October it sought a partner or to liquidate some ancillary assets in order to satisfy a record tax fine worth more than the company itself, Reuters reported elsewhere.

The U.S. state of New Hampshire has taken the unprecedented move of acting as guarantor to a private bank loan on behalf of a local newspaper changing hands, The Associated Press yesterday reported. The decision to underwrite The (Claremont) Eagle Times was approved by the state's legislature Wednesday without comment.

The Valley News of Lebanon suggested Sunday that the fact that the very government which The Eagle Times is assigned to cover bailed it out of a dire financial crisis may produce an irreconcilable conflict of interest, precluding independent and objective coverage.

Responding to constituents' resistance to behaviourally-targeted advertising, governments around the globe are considering legislation to block the Internet practise, even as the marketing tool gains momentum, The Agence France-Presse reported today.

Renewed interest in the topic arose as a result of the 31st International Conference of Personal Data and Privacy Protection Commissioners, a three-day media privacy conference held through Friday in Madrid.

Even as Rupert Murdoch today announced his more aggressive stance against online news aggregators, those on the other side of the aisle suggested that more, not less engagement with search engines might be a better solution.

Chris Silver Smith, director of optimisation strategies for KeyRelevance, today wrote that other than the biggest players in the dailies market, the newspapers he frequents to help with projects are usually not optimised for search engines. "It's hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other," he stated in his Search Engine Land column, using the example of newspapers' mixed feelings toward Google.

News Corp. titan Rupert Murdoch has taken a more aggressive stance against online news aggregators in the wake of his delayed paywall plans for The Wall Street Journal, SkyNews today reported.

Following publishing division losses reported in July, Murdoch had announced plans to monetize all his online content, Marketing Vox reported in August. However, that dream never materialised due to the many workarounds available in the cyberworld, as described by blogger Mathew Ingram in June 2008.

News of the World, known for publishing salacious details of celebrities' lives, has been cleared of charges it hacked the mobile telephones of various subjects in search of bombshell coverage, Agence France-Presse today reported.

The investigation by the UK Press Complaints Commission followed The Guardian's report in July that Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers, which publishes News of the World, had paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of the tabloid's repeated use of criminal methods to get stories.

Social media users are open to marketing on social media sites, according to a new survey by Performics, the ad performance division of Publicis Groupe, BtoB Online reported today.

Thirty-four percent of respondents said they used a search engine to find a product or brand online after seeing an ad on a social networking site, and 46 percent said they would recommend or talk about a product on Facebook. Meanwhile, 44 percent said they have already done so on Twitter, according to the survey, conducted in partnership with ROI Research.

A new domain extension for the Russian Federation will be officially available for registration beginning Nov. 25, gipp.ru reported Thursday. The move is part of an expansion plan by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to include national alphabets of countries that do not use the Latin alphabet.

Instead of "standard" characters, Web sites would now be able to include Cyrillic, Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, according to gipp.ru. ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said this development was the most important technological development in Internet history.

Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. posted 14 percent gains overall, despite a 44 percent drop in profits from its newspaper division, Dow Jones reported today. The announcement follows Scripps' successful bid for a controlling stake in the Travel Channel, reported yesterday by AmLaw Daily.

Scripps, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, jumped 62 cents per share yesterday on news of the acquisition, according to Bloomberg.

Revenues dipped sharply even as circulation remained stable for the FP Newspapers Limited Partnership, The Winnipeg Free Press reported today. The FP Newspapers Income Fund owns 49 percent of the publishing house which produces the Winnipeg Free Press and the Brandon Sun dailies as well as six weeklies under the umbrella of Canstar Community News, Street Insider today reported.

The media group declared a dividend of 9.5 cents per share for shareholders of record on October 30, according to an article on October 20 by Earth Times. The distribution will be paid on November 27.

The Associated Press is expanding the AP Mobile News Network to Latin America and U.S., Editor and Publisher reported.

AP Mobile America Latina provides news sources to consumers in two ways: AP Mobile en Espanol is offered to people in the U.S. who want international, national and local news in Spanish. AP Mobile Latina is available to Latin American users, which features regional, national and world news from AP and participating partners.

As of 2010, an eco-friendly exterior design firm will begin offering insulation made of recycled newspapers, a real estate Web site today announced. According to La Vie Immobiliere, Soprema of Strasbourg has opened a plant in Cestas capable of converting old newspapers into as much as 5,000 tonnes of heat-trapping wadding per year. Newspaper insulation is more energy efficient to produce than fiberglass, according to an October 13 article about the innovation in La Tribune.

It is not clear what impact the general decline in print newspapers has had on the price and availability of recycled materials of this kind.

French journalists on Tuesday penned an open letter to their nation's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, seeking relief from what they see as an attack on the press industry from all sides, Le Monde yesterday reported.

Calling the situation "extremely troubling," The National Journalists' Union (SNJ, by its initials in French) linked the ongoing economic collapse of traditional news media to the onset of Sarkozy's term of office in May 2007, according to the letter published on the organisation's Web site.

Bloomberg LP may charge up to US$1,000 per year for access to some news on its Web site, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Although Bloomberg would not confirm WSJ's report - the two are financial news rivals - it did say it is "in the process of evaluating various approaches," according to paidContent.

Bloomberg.com is currently free, and the site's users already do not have access to all the financial data professional users pay for, either through subscriptions or through Bloomberg's special terminals, common in newsrooms and financial firms.

The San Francisco Chronicle's circulation has sunk faster than that of any of its peers over the course of the past year, The Associated Press reported yesterday. Starting Monday, the print edition of this newspaper aims to fight back by putting some of its copy on glossy paper, the San Francisco Business Times yesterday reported.

The newspaper said it was the first to employ this upscale approach. The magazine-style paper will follow today's launch of a new arts section titled "Ovation," The Business Times reported in a separate story. Ovation was described by the newspaper's parent company, Hearst Corporation, as offering longer, magazine-style coverage of the local arts scene.

The Chronicle's "sprucing up" is the latest chapter in what is shaping into a modern-day newspaper war: The New York Times introduced a special bay area edition last month and The Wall Street Journal is launching one today, The Associated Press story noted.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. was all the buzz this morning with many ups and downs for the media conglomerate simultaneously underway.

First, the corporation posted double-digit gains for the most recent quarter, thanks in large part to its box office hit, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," The Associated Press yesterday reported.

Under the banner, "Our precarity is your disinformation," the 600,000 member-journalists in 116 countries of the International Federation of Journalists have declared today to be the International Day in Defense of Journalists, the Madrid Press Association announced Monday on its Web site.

In support of that campaign, Spanish journalists have advised they would "take to the streets" at noon "in defense of media professionals' employment rights" and the public's right to quality, credible news reporting. A journalism school in Catalunya also promised to picket in solidarity at San Jaume Plaza during the same hour.

A U.S. newspaper founded in 1978 by striking workers won partial vindication yesterday when a Pennsylvania supreme court ordered the retrial of a US$3.5M libel suit brought by the former business partner of a convicted mobster, The Citizens' Voice today reported.

The libel suit, originally won by juvenile detention center operator Thomas A. Joseph, stemmed from news coverage of a federal money-laundering investigation of Joseph and his business partner, William D'Elia, according to yesterday's court order. D'Elia, currently incarcerated on separate charges, is the reputed head of the Bufalino crime family.

Welt Kompakt, a spinoff of the German daily Die Welt, is among the first newspapers around the world to integrate Google Wave into its coverage, Revolution Magazine reported yesterday. The addition comes even as the lifestyle daily also invites readers to follow its editors - and contribute to content - via the free tabloid's Twitter account, Welt Kompakt yesterday announced.

Calling Welt Kompakt "Germany's most successful newspaper start-up in recent years," WELT Group publishing director Jan Bayer promised in an article published by Welt Online on October 23 that the launch of technological advances such as this would continue responding and appealing "to the needs and aspirations of young, educated and high-income readers" in urban areas well into the future, reaching potential subscribers well beyond national borders.

Microsoft announced its third round of cut this year, which will affect another 800 jobs, due to depressing sales and profits, Media Post reported.

"Some portion of the new cuts will serve as the final phase of the company's original plan, announced in January of this year, to cut up to 5,000 jobs over 18 months. However, the new layoffs are expected to take the company beyond the original plan, as well," according to the tech news site TechFlash. paidContent also noted that "the number of jobs cut so far seems to have now exceeded the 5,000 figure, since Microsoft had said in its most recent quarterly filing that it had already eliminated 4,600 positions as part of those reductions."

The parent company of Canada's most widely read newspaper yesterday announced it would ship more than 100 newspaper jobs overseas, Bloomberg reported. The announcement comes even as Torstar Corp. today posted third quarter gains, according to Editor & Publisher.

One hundred of the Toronto Star jobs being offshored are editorial in nature, accounting for a quarter of the newsroom, a union leader told the Globe & Mail. Approximately 60 more jobs in advertising and layout are reportedly moving to India as well, Canadian Business said yesterday.

Stephens Media, which on Tuesday acquired several U.S. news outlets in northwest Arkansas, on Thursday launched a new weekly in Boulder City, Nevada, according to the Las Vegas Business Press.

News of The Boulder City Review came on the heels of another newspaper announcement in that town: the shuttering of The Boulder City News, published there since 1937.

West Australian Newspapers today told investors that it expected to deliver a third straight quarter of increased circulation for the period ending in December, The Brisbane Times today reported. CEO Chris Wharton said the media group's growth of the last two periods was not due to discount sales and, thus, continuing price restoration would not hamper ongoing revenue generation.

The news of increased readership followed the media group's recent posting of a 22.9 percent loss in profit as compared to the same quarter last year, according to The Australian Business. The loss in profit prompted a 21 cent - or 3 percent - spike in stock shares because it reflected an 18.6 percent improvement on the average $19.3 million net gain recorded in the previous two quarters, The Australasian Investment Review observed.

"We are seeing positive trends and, almost without exception, we have seen week-on- week growth since August," Wharton told the Australian Stock Exchange in a statement last week.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out today that newspapers are reaching the end of costs they can cut, and need to see increases in ad revenue. However, ad revenues continue to decline or merely stabilise, and Wachovia analyst told the WSJ that "it's increasingly likely that expense cuts, while significant, won't be enough to drive upside earnings."

So what are newspapers to do? Experts are increasingly recommending newspapers find many smaller revenue streams instead of counting on one large revenue stream to come back. These can include charging for premium content, as the Economist or Wall Street Journal does; developing niche print and online products like the Bakersfield Californian's Bakotopia or getting help from non-profit content providers, like ProPublica or Associated Reporters Abroad.

The most famous contract in the UK logistics market has landed in the hands of a different vendor, Logistics Manager announced today. Rupert Murdoch, owner of News International, has opted for DHL instead of Ceva Logistics to deliver some 25 million newspapers to wholesalers across England and Wales.

The multimillion-pound, five-year deal entails road transport from four printing plants to 68 wholesalers throughout the region 364 days per year, according to International Freighting Weekly.

The Tribune Co. will next week aim to cut down on the amount of Associated Press content it uses in its papers in order to decide whether the U.S. publisher can go without content from the news cooperative.

As the company cuts costs, the experiment will hopefully indicate whether dropping the AP is a viable option next autumn, the Chicago Tribune, the publisher's flagship, reported yesterday. During the week, the publisher will use content not just from its own staff, but also from sources such as Agence France Presse, Reuters, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Global Post and McClatchy newspapers. Most of these sources are not usually available to the company's newspapers, according to the Tribune's Phil Rosenthal.

Italian newspaper ad sales through September were down 23 percent, while magazine ad sales sank 29 percent, Bloomberg reported today.

Meanwhile, TV ad sales for the same period rose 3 percent over the year prior, according to ANSA news wire.

The East Valley Tribune newspaper of Mesa, Arizona will close on December 31, just months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, The Associated Press reported yesterday.

The Tribune's parent company, Freedom Communications, made the decision following unacceptably low bids to buy the U.S. news outlet, according to Editor & Publisher.

Video sites and content owners have usually wanted to hold the intellectual property, but many of them now would like to offer multiple channels instead to embrace complimentary audiences, according to a panel discussion at Digital media Conference West, InternetNews.com reported.

Examples include Funny or Die or DailyMotion, which own video content and look for airing their videos on more notable sites such as YouTube or cable networks.

The New York Times may soon begin to charge for online content. "We're within weeks of a decision," Executive Editor Bill Keller said Saturday.

The newspaper's management expected to make a decision by late summer, but are still weighing the complicated issue. Although charging for some online content would bring in subscription revenues, that potential revenue could cut into the millions in advertising dollars, as online advertisers want to reach the largest amount of readers as possible, Clark Hoyt reported.

An Austrian daily recently sparked a lawsuit by a national transit authority when it offered free highway toll passes to new subscribers for at-home delivery of its print edition, The Austrian Times reported Friday.

But the transit authority, known as Asfinag, dropped the suit Friday when Österreich made a partial payment on the passes it gave away.

The Daily Sentinel, newspaper of record for Grand Junction, Colorado, today publishes its first edition in the hands of Seaton Publishing Co., a family-owned U.S. media group based in Manhattan, Kansas, The Associated Press reported yesterday.

The 116-year-old newspaper said readers would not feel a change, except for an upgrade in the Web site, according to an article posted to gjsentinel on Saturday.

The Wall Street Journal has been used as an example time and again as having mastered the paid/free online transformation - a fine line many publishers continue to struggle with. In December, those attending the 62nd World Newspaper Congress can hear the chief of Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, explain exactly how the conversion was performed.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) announced Saturday that Les Hinton has been added to the programme of the World Newspaper Congress to be held December 1-3 in Hyderabad, India.

Independent News & Media posted a 37 percent decline in operating profits for the year ending October 23 as compared to the same period in 2008, but says advertising losses have tapered off, The Guardian reported Thursday.

Following the performance report, the Ireland-based publisher announced that it had secured a two-month extension of its outstanding loans,arranged to safeguard the newspaper's future, The Guardian reported Friday.