“Starting a print newspaper in an emerging market can be profitable,” said William Pike, CEO of Kenya’s The Star . It is a lot of hard work, he said, but from its foundations in 2007, The Star is now the third paper in the Kenyan market and has made a small profit.

Many say that as mobile adoption rises in Africa, it will threaten print, as online has in many other countries, but Pike thinks this view should be seen with a critical eye. He was speaking at the 19th World Editors Forum in Kiev last week.

“We believe that there is still a great market in print,” he continued, with just one paper published per 140 people in the country (in comparison to one per two in markets where readership is highest.) Young people still want to read newspapers, and he highlighted research that showed that more 18-34 year olds read newspapers than go on the internet, or listen to CDs. TV and radio still provide a larger threat than digital.

The Star is a subsidiary of Radio Africa, which operates both Kiss FM and Classic FM in Kenya. Its aim is to be low-cost but high-quality. It breaks big, hard-hitting stories that have an impact on the community, and Pike cited this as an essential quality for success for a new paper. It is also important to be analytical with good op-eds, he said.

Statistics released on Wednesday morning by the National Readership Survey have given many quality news titles in Britain reason to be cheerful. Healthy online audiences are proof that falling print circulation at “broadsheet” publications is a result of reader migration to digital editions, not a lack of interest in the news product itself.

For the first time ever, the NRS has taken into account both online and print audiences in its evaluation of readership numbers for British newspapers and magazines. The results produced by the NRS differ to some extent from those posted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations; the ABC’s data is based on the sales and traffic figures provided by individual publications, while the NRS instead uses statistics collected from a joint Nielsen and UKOM survey of 3,500 people.  

After running in stealth mode for the past five months as ‘Planet Daily’, the digital video news service ‘NowThisNews’ was officially unveiled on Monday. Using Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about its beta site, NowThisNews will air its first videos in mid-October.

As its mantra “Social. Mobile. Digital” would suggest, the site is set to deliver digital news content direct to consumers’ mobile devices via social media sites. In a press release the NowThisNews team declared their intention to “meet straight on the inevitable and rapid changes happening in news consumption.”

A debate has been ignited over the issue of journalism grants and funding.

At the same time that The L.A Times and The Washington Post have received financial support from the Ford Foundation ($1 million and $500,000 respectively), the independently run journalism start-up Homicide Watch was forced to raise funds via a Kickstarter campaign.

The assistance offered to established, for-profit news organisations and the neglect of pioneering journalism projects has raised questions about the kind of support innovative entrepreneurs can expect from institutions interested in protecting the future of quality reporting.

Founded and edited by former crime reporter Laura Amico, Homicide Watch provides in-depth information and reporting on murders committed in the Washington D.C area. With the help of a database designed by Amico’s husband Chris, for the past two years the site has sought to abide by its promise to “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” In doing so, Homicide Watch has attracted a large following in the D.C community and beyond: since its debut in 2010 visits to the site have escalated, rising from 500 a month to reach 300,000 in July of this year.