June 2010 Archives

Le Monde's board voted for new ownership between two candidate groups Monday, and accepted the offer from a trio of left-leaning entrepreneurs, led by Lazard banker Matthieu Pigasse, Reuter reported.

Pigasse, Xavier Niel and Pierre Berge offered €110 million euros ($136 million) to help the publication stop losses and repay debts.

Photo: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

1seg is a mobile terrestrial broadcasting service offering digital audio/video and data in Japan and Brazil. The service was introduced experimentally in 2005 and commercially launched on April 2006 in Japan. In Brazil, it began in late 2007 in a few selected cities. The first mobile phone handsets for 1seg were on the market in autumn 2005 in Japan, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

According to data from JEITA and NTT DoCoMo, there was only a small number of 1seg-enabled mobile phone handsets in March 2006, but in December 2007, that number reached 20 million in Japan.

All five national newspaper sites in the UK had a month-to-month traffic rise in May, mostly due to the election coverage, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Media Guardian reported.

Nintendo 3D gaming device, 3DS, should hit the market no later than March 31, 2011, or even sooner than that, 1UP.com reported.

According to Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata in an interview, the device's online connectivity could also be used for downloading and viewing traditional print media.

U.S. newspaper market saw a biggest drop by 30 percent from 2007 to 2009, while the UK declined 21 percent, according to the latest report release by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Greece, Italy, and Canada came next with 20 percent, 18 percent and 17 percent, respectively, Media Bistro reported.

Digital technology not only creates e-waste, but also uses energy when devices are not turned off, and in many cases, unplugged. However, the good news is that better technology today means more efficient energy use. Today's personal computers, and especially laptops, use substantially less energy use when using them for reading, according to a 2009 report by the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, "Screening environmental life cycle assessment of printed, web based and tablet epaper newspaper."

The average PC and LCD screens on the market in 2005 used 110 watts in idle mode, and laptops used 32 watts, according to the report. A modem adds an additional nine watts, SFN's Going Green reported.

Newspaper Web sites are benchmarked on two key metrics: revenue per unit of print circulation, and share of online advertising spent in that newspaper's local market, according to Borrell Associates.

The circulation benchmark is useful only from the perspective that the size of the newspaper might be relevant to the revenue its Web site can generate. However, this metric is becoming less relevant as many newspapers branch out beyond mere "newspaper sites" and use the Web to launch multiple products such as online directories, mobile applications or e-mail newsletters. It is likely that many smaller newspapers could be generating 10 times the online revenue of a newspaper with twice its circulation. In short, print circulation has less and less to do with a company's ability to generate significant Web revenues, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

Trinity Mirror is to cut 200 editorial staff at its three national titles, including the Daily and Sunday Mirror, and The People, Media Guardian reported.

The company said the cut was due to the creation of new multimedia newsrooms, which emerged from its web-based content management system, ContentWatch. Among all the 200 people being made redundant, 140 of them are full-time.

 Photo: Daniel Jones / Alamy

Around the world, newspapers are recognizing the value and promise for the future that is created by implementing a green strategy. The move to be more environmentally friendly is happening across businesses, consumers and governments. For their part, news publishers are taking a hard look at efficiencies that can be implemented across their value chains, such as more aggressive recycling schemes, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, lowering electricity usage and better ways of handling e-waste, SFN's Going Green reported.

InfoTrends, a U.S.-based market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry, partnered with the North American Publishing Company in January 2008 to create a new quarterly tracking programme called "Emerging Strategies in Production Print." The project is aimed at polling print service providers on the hottest industry topics.

Yahoo! Inc. Monday announced its Web site change, with full product integrations with Facebook. The company said that more such connections are on the way, Market Watch reported.

According to the company statement, users of both Yahoo! and Facebook can link their accounts, view, and share updates with friends across both sites. 

In general, newspaper companies remain overly dependent on the "Big Three" classified advertising categories of real estate, automotive and recruitment advertising, according to Borrell Associates. Their struggles to develop Internet revenues can be tied directly to their dependence on these categories, all of which have experienced a catastrophic free-fall over the past eight years, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

In 2000, newspaper print classifieds peaked at US$19.6 billion. Last year they were half that, at $9.9 billion. The development of online classified verticals hasn't come close to making up the difference. Last year, newspapers generated about $2.4 billion in online revenue from classified advertising categories, only about 25 percent of their annualised losses in print, according to Borrell.

Around the world, newspapers are recognizing the value and promise for the future that is created by implementing a green strategy. The move to be more environmentally friendly is happening across businesses, consumers and governments. For their part, news publishers are taking a hard look at efficiencies that can be implemented across their value chains, such as more aggressive recycling schemes, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, lowering electricity usage and better ways of handling e-waste, SFN's Going Green reported.

InfoTrends, a U.S.-based market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry, partnered with the North American Publishing Company in January 2008 to create a new quarterly tracking programme called "Emerging Strategies in Production Print." The project is aimed at polling print service providers on the hottest industry topics.