The Bancroft family has accepted News Corporation's $5 billion buy-out offer of Dow Jones & Co., a Dow Jones executive announced Tuesday.

“The Bancroft family has accepted,” John Prestbo, editor and executive director of Dow Jones Indexes is quoted as telling reporters in Chicago. The publisher of The Wall Street Journal “will be part of News Corp.,” he said.

More

Following a public health scare in the news, the Chinese government has announced that journalists and media that “fabricate” stories will face severe penalties.

The announcement was made by China's three departments that control the media: the Communist Party's propaganda Department, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the General Administration of Press and Publications, Asia Media has reported. The crackdown follows the arrest of Beijing TV journalist Zi Beijia, who is charged with manufacturing a report on cardboard steam buns.

More

Monday's first edition of Yisrael Hayom was difficult to overlook, reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“This is not just a newspaper, it is a newspaper with an agenda,” wrote Haaretz's Asaf Carmel.

More

A project with the goal of training, paying and providing advanced mobile phone equipment to African journalists has launched Tuesday in four of the continent's countries.

Voices of Africa will begin providing reporters in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa with state-of-the-art mobile phones to help them better do their jobs, capturing stories on the hand-held devices so they can upload them anywhere.

More

Pearson PLC has boosted its revenue growth forecasts for the year, even as it reported losses in the first half due.

Losses for the publisher of the Financial Times newspaper and Penguin books are due to the weakening U.S. dollar and the sale of its government-services unit.

More

The New York Times is teaming up with NBC News/MSNBC.com for the coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

As part of the collaboration, MSNBC.com will release national political coverage from NYTimes.com, while the Times will have access to NBC’s political news video for publishing and streaming on NYTimes.com in return.

More

“The rejection of celebrity-based journalism in Britain with the decline of red-top newspapers is being echoed in the States,” writes The Guardian's Roy Greenslade.

One of the popular U.S. supermarket check-out weeklies, Star, is facing problems. According to sources familiar with the magazines, “the title will not make its $1.5 million rate base for the first half of this year, and is considering another rate-base reduction, to as low as $1.2 million, for next year.”

More

The Vancouver-based citizen journalism site NowPublic.com has closed a $10.6 million round of financing with a series of Canadian and U.S. venture funds, the Web site announced Monday.

The deal was led by Rho ventures in New York and Montreal, as well as existing investors Brightspark and GrowthWorks Capital Ltd., both of which were seed investors, the site said in a statement.

More

The Associated Press is closing down its “asap” service in October, saying the multimedia service failed to gain enough traction with newspaper clients, the AP has announced.

The asap service was launched in September 2005 as a way for the AP to target a younger audience, between the ages of 18 and 34, but has evolved into a venue to feature multimedia packages.

More

The government in Kenya and media stakeholders have compromised on proposed amendments to the country's controversial media bill.

Media Owners Association Chairman Hannington Gaya and Orange Democratic Movement-Kenya activist and media consultant Tony Gachoka welcomed changes to the bill, but both are apprehensive that a Parliament “deemed hostile to the media may interfere with the passing of what they perceived as a 'healthy' bill,” AllAfrica has reported.

More

Richard Stott, 63, former editor of the Daily Mirror, died early this morning at home of pancreatic cancer, according to an announcement by his family.

Stott wrote columns for the News of the World, and more recently the Sunday Mirror, which he continued writing until shortly before his death. His last column in the Sunday Mirror was published June 3.

More

A new free daily Hebrew newspaper has launched Sunday.

Israel Hayom distributed 150,000 copies in train and bus stations, with a goal of reaching a daily circulation of 300,000. For its first month, the paper will sell advertisements only to non-profit organisations, and distribution will include placing copies in private mailboxes, as well as being distributed in transportation hubs.

More

After obtaining newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands and Ukraine, Mecom wants to expand into France too.

The European publisher bid for regional assets of the Le Monde Group and Lagardere, including free daily titles Monpellier Plus and Marseille Plus.

More

European B2C e-commerce sales will grow threefold by 2011 to $407 billion, with a 25 percent annual growth rate over the next four years.

The United Kingdom, Germany and France are currently the market dominants, making up 72 percent of total online sales, according to eMarketer’s new report, European B2C E-Commerce: Spotlight on the UK, Germany and France.

More

The Bancroft family has until 5 p.m. today to present voting agreements on whether to sell Dow Jones & Co. to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which has offered $5 billion, or $60 a share, for the company.

The family, which controls 64 percent of Dow Jones's voting shares, headed into final deliberations over the company's fate yesterday, but a decision is still too close to call. Michael Elefante, the family's lead trustee, indicated to some on the board last night he has slightly less than 30 percent of the overall vote, according to The Wall Street Journal. It is unclear whether News Corp. would proceed with less than that.

More

DoubleClick, the Internet ad serving services developer and provider, launched a new video feature this week, which allows developers to create teaser ads with short flashes of video.

More

Microsoft executives said they will response the threat to its software posed by competitors such as Google, who offer Web-based applications to users. They will add some similar online services to its most-famous PC application, such as Office or Excel.

More

AOL has continued its Web remodeling, this week for its Money & Finance site. With the launch of the new-look site, AOL hopes to engage current users and eventually gain some attention while competing with Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and also Google Finance.

More

Microsoft yesterday announced an agreement to acquire AdECN, Inc., a California-based advertising exchange platform firm. Financial terms have not yet been disclosed.

More

U.K. newspaper publisher DMGT and its subsidiary, Associated Northcliffe Digital, have signed with Tomorrow Focus, a German digital content company, to sell advertising on the Internet across a European advertising network.

The network calls itself Premium Publishers Online, and connects Spain's El Mundo, France's 01net and 01men, Holland's Telegraaf Media Groep, Agora Group and Poland's Gazeta. They will offer advertisers campaigns spanning the continent to reach up to 40.2 million users in eight European countries.

More

Timesonline.co.uk is the only UK national newspaper Web site reporting a significant gain in readers and increased monthly traffic, according to figures released Thursday by ABC Electronic.

The Guardian and Telegraph both posted month-on-month unique users down, while the Sun saw the number of unique users barely up versus the prior month.

More

Print media such as newspapers and magazines are not being pushed aside due to the growing popularity of digital publishing, the Magazine Association of Thailand announced.

“The claim that consumers have gradually stopped reading magazines is a myth,” said Wiluck Lohtong, the association's secretary-general, who is also the CEO of Inspire Entertainment Co., at a seminar on the magazine industry's trends on Monday. He said the myth that young people do not read print media anymore is false.

More

Baidu.com, the most popular Chinese search engine, said its second quarter revenue and profits more than doubled compared to the same period in 2006, although its growth rate is expected to slow down.

This Wednesday, Baidu announced its second quarter revenue achieved 401.3 million renminbi, representing a 109 percent growth, while net income grew 143 percent to 141.9 million renminbi. Both increases are obviously lower than last year, which indicates the Chinese Internet market and Baidu’s business size are near maturity.

More

In a letter published in Thursday's Le Monde, journalists at the French financial daily Les Echos appealed to Bernard Arnault to quit talks to buy the newspaper because they say he does not know anything about the newspaper business.

“The newspaper business is a profession. It's not yours. We do not want you to send Les Echos into an infernal cycle of deficits. It would guarantee for certain that we lose our independence,” the letter stated.

More

The number of help-wanted advertisements in U.S. newspapers in June spiraled to a 49-year low, a research group announced Thursday.

The Conference Board, a global business research and membership organisation, stated that its Help-Wanted Advertising Index, which measures job offerings in major newspapers across the United States, dropped one point in June, to reach the index number of 26. That number was 32 a year ago.

More

A department editor at Azerbaijani newspaper Bizim Yol (Our Way) has been sentenced to three months in prison in a closed court hearing Thursday for taking $35,000 in bribes from a Labour and Social Protection Ministry employee.

Mushvig Huseynov was detained Tuesday by Azerbaijani National Security Ministry officials and was sentenced at Narimanov District Court by Judge Gulnara Tagizade. Huseynov is expected to make an appeal within three days, and has not admitted guilt.

More

The chairman of Lambrakis Press has sold 830,000 shares in the Greek publishing company.

Christos Lambrakis reduced his stake by 1 percent, and now controls 7.364 percent of the shares, and 33.242 percent of its voting rights.

More

Newspapers' online audiences are growing twice as fast as the Internet's general audience, according to research by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America.

This new research is being used to support the NAA's new ad campaign, Newspaper: The Multi-Medium. The campaign aims to attract marketers to newspaper Web sites based on the apparent higher earning power and sophistication of newspaper readers compared to average web surfers.

More

Due to a drop in ad sales, the Tribune Company has announced its second-quarter profit fell 59 percent.

The company's net income dropped to $36.3 million from $87.8 million. That's a 10 cent drop per share, from 28 cents to 18 cents, Tribune said today in a statement. In the period that ended July 1, sales fell 6.8 percent to $1.31 billion.

More

A police report against Malaysian webmaster Raja Petra Kamaruddin is causing many in cyberspace to believe a crackdown against Web sites and blogs critical of the government looms in the near future.

The United Malays National Organisation's chief information officer, Muhammad Muhammad Taib, filed the report Monday against postings on Kamaruddin's Malaysia Today Web site which he said insulted the king and incited racial hatred.

More

The Daily Mirror Wednesday said that by using the Terrorism Act to arrest two of its staff, the British Transport Police has jeopardised the future of investigative journalism in Britain.

Mirror undercover reporter Tom Parry and photographer Roger Allen were released early Wednesday morning on bail, after the police used the act to arrest them at the Stonebridge Park rail depot in northwest London Tuesday. They are scheduled to reappear in court in September.

More

Bulgaria's leading business media group and second-largest media group is buying 60 percent of Sofia Echo Media Ltd.

Economedia will have a stake in The Sofia Echo, real estate magazine PropertyWise and the Web sites www.sofiaecho.com, www.propertywisebulgaria.com and www.expatinbulgaria.com, all of which are part of Sofia Echo Media Ltd.

More

While children and young adults are immersed in digital media, they may not want to know about the technology behind it, new research conducted by MTV Networks and Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions has found.

Most kids are not interested in the detailed workings behind the technology itself. They only care about how technology can help communication and bring in entertainment. According to this study, only 20 percent of kids showed any interest in technology.

More

A radical trade union reportedly affiliated with Nepal's Maoist party has continued to disrupt newspaper distribution for the seventh day in a row Wednesday morning.

Delivery boys belonging to the union tried to forcibly stop printers loading newspapers onto trucks for delivery, and when trucks were able to leave under police escort, workers threw stones and threatened the drivers. The newspapers being disrupted are the English language daily The Himalayan Times and its sister paper The Annapurna Post.

More

China, the forth-largest economy with the second largest purchasing-power in the world, has the opportunity step onto the world stage at the 2008 Olympic Games, according to Ben Macklin, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new “China Internet Audience” report.

“In fact, the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics is likely to be the largest international marketing exercise the world has ever seen, and the fierce competition will extend for decades beyond,” Macklin said. “And one of the most important marketing channels will be the Internet.”

More

AOL announced Tuesday it has reached an agreement to acquire TACODA, an online behavioral targeting adverting network. TACODA will operate as a wholly-owned AOL’s subsidiary. This buyout is estimated around $275 million value.

Established in 2001 and based in New York, TACODA has about 1,000 employees. The network provides advanced technology that allows advertisers to have relevant ads and target customers based on tracking online users’ behaviours. TACODA’s technology will enable AOL to extend its targeting capabilities to both advertisers and publishers.

More

The first ever Welsh-language newspaper, Y Byd, will launch next March, and is confident it will be successful.

Ned Thomas, a former Times journalist, is the force behind the publication, and has said there has never been a better time to start a Welsh newspaper.

More

The Bancroft family has heard arguments for and against the sale of Dow Jones & Company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation yesterday, and in the next several days will tell their lawyers where they stand on the issue, so that results can be tallied up.

The Bancroft family, which controls a majority of the voting shares, met in Boston yesterday, and has a week to make their decisions.

More

As search engines try to balance between wanting to dig into users' private information to improve their businesses and the consumers' and privacy groups' concerns over the risk of leaking confidential information, the battle of search engines is changing.

Major search engine companies are now competing partially based on how well they can provide privacy policies to protect users.

More

Tamedia AG and Editpress have announced they will launch a daily newspaper together in Luxembourg by the end of this year.

The newspaper, to be called LEssentiel, will target young, urban readers with spending power.

More

The U.S. mobile search market is expected to be a fierce battlefield in the next few years as companies compete for the title of mobile search leader.

According to eMarkter, mobile search ad revenue in the U.S. will achieve $713.7 million, representing almost 15 percent of the total $4.7 billion mobile advertising market value.

More

As of Friday evening, the editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times will no longer work there.

Chaitanya Kalbag joined HT Media, which publishes the Times, in Sept. of 2006 after serving as managing editor of Reuters Asia.

More

The Norwegian media group A-pressen may sell its stake in the country's largest circulation tabloid newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, to Grigory Beryozkin's ESN Group, it was announced Monday.

If the group sells its 25 percent stake in the newspaper and one share in its publisher, A-pressen could be on the receiving end of about $41 million, according to a report.

More

More people have visited newspaper Web sites in the second quarter this year than ever before, according to new information from the Newspaper Association of America.

More than 59 million active Internet users – 37.3 percent of all Internet users – visited newspaper Web sites in the year's second quarter, 7.7 percent higher than the same period last year. Page views are also up, at about 2.7 billion page views per month in the second quarter, compared to 2.5 billion in the same period in 2006.

More

The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United Kingdom has no eminent plans to produce a single combined figure for newspaper and online readership like its American counterpart.

ABC announced last Tuesday it had approved development of the new measurement tool Audience-FAX, which will combine newspaper readership and online audience estimates into ABC circulation reports beginning in November. The figure will appear at the end of audit certificates in addition to print circulation numbers, and the combined readership total will be based on a research panel with data assembled by Scarborough Research.

More

The French daily newspaper Mutations has mutated into two versions, being sold side-by-side at newsstands Monday. One version is being published by the South Media Corporation, the previous publisher of the paper, and the other by Haman Mana, its editor-in-chief until yesterday.

Sunday, the newspaper was in a single newsroom, but Monday saw journalists working in two separate newsrooms. One is at the newspaper's old headquarters under the South Media Corporation now managed by Alain Batongue, and the other is in its new quarters of Haman Mana at the Kabba Ngondo.

More

The click fraud rate for online ads is increasing this year, according to a new report from Click Forensics. The click fraud rate in the second quarter this year was 15.8 percent, with a 14.1 percent rise over the same period last year and 14.8 percent increase from the first quarter this year.

Click Forensics also indicated the fraud rate within large pay-per-click networks is more serious – making up 25.6 percent of all fraudulent traffic in the second quarter, increasing 21.9 percent over the same period 2006 and 19.2 percent over the preceding quarter.

More

A Maoist affiliated trade union has disrupted the distribution of The Himalayan Times and Annapurna Post Monday morning, despite Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's assurances he would not tolerate attacks on press freedom.

According to the Times, union members forcibly took control of vehicles that were loaded with Monday's edition in Bhaispati, at Sama Printers, which prints both dailies. The Times also reported that police remained quiet spectators to the activities, and following requests, the police escorted vehicles to the main distribution at Bhugol Park.

More

An Arizona judge has dismissed former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit's defamation lawsuit against weekly The Sonoran News, which said in an article the California representative lied to investigators about his relationship with a Washington intern who disappeared and was found murdered.

After 13 years in Congress, the Democrat lost his 2002 re-election when news coverage about Washington intern Chandra Levy's 2001 disappearance made national headlines. Her remains were found in a Washington park in May 2002, and Condit denied he had anything to do with her disappearance or death.

More

Macau has the highest mobile penetration in the world, according to a new study.

“2007 Asia - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Hong Kong and Macau” by Research and Markets has found that although Macau had a fixed line saturation a little over 35 percent a few years ago, the mobile penetration has already reached 137 percent, making it the highest penetrated in the world.

More

Global Voice editor and Inmediahk.net blogger OiWan Lam is facing a 12-month imprisonment or HK$400,000 fine for posting and linking to images which authorities consider “indecent.”

Lam is protesting the standard the government has to determine obscenity by publishing the art photograph and articles. Flickr, where Lam linked the images from, has limited Hong Kong users access of the Photos Lam referred, as well as other possibly obscene images.

More

A dozen officials from Beijing ordered the China Development Brief to stop publication July 4, and charged the editor, Nick Young, with conducting “unauthorized surveys” in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law, Young has said in a statement.

Young said in a New York Times article that the publication did not conduct surveys or polls, and that the 1983 law is so vague it can be used to prohibit any type of information-gathering involving citizens.

More

Former newspaper baron Conrad Black will stay out of jail until his November sentencing for his obstruction of justice and fraud convictions, a Chicago judge ruled Thursday.

More

Dow Jones Director Dieter Von Holtzbrinck has quit in protest over News Corp.'s bid to buy the company, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing has revealed.

More

Dow Jones's chief executive, who has led the company's negotiations with News Corp. over its $5 billion buyout offer, explained in a memo to employees why the company's future could be “even brighter” if the deal is approved.

More

Online video advertising spending will reach $775 million this year in the United States, with an 89 percent annual growth rate. It will continue to grow with at least 39 percent annually in five years, achieving $4,300 million in 2011, according to eMarketer.

More

Eighty-one percent of newspaper Web site readers have also read the printed newspaper in the last seven days, according to a new released study by Newspaper National Network LP and Scarborough Research.

More

U.S. advertisers consider their own Web sites to be the most effective online marketing tool, according to the “Annual Ad Spending Study” by Outsell Inc. E-mail and search marketing came in second and third.

More

The Audit Bureau of Circulation has announced it will begin offering combined print and Web readership data of U.S. Newspapers.

Web and print numbers combined will be much more positive than print alone; however, an emerging question is whether advertisers will buy into it. Usually advertisers are guided by circulation when they buy print, and they pay much more for print readers than for Web readers. So, although the total readership is up, will advertisers look at the figure, or just concentrate on merely print and online numbers, like they always have?

More

A Dow Jones board member could face civil charges in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of insider trading linked to News Corp.'s bid for the company.

David Li is chairman and chief executive of the Bank of East Asia. The bank received a “Wells notice,” about Li. The notice indicates the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is considering the recommendation to take action against him.

More

The new Web site IOL Classifieds, launched this week, will give access to the collective classified advertising sections of all the newspapers in South Africa's Independent News & Media Group.

These papers include The Star, The Cape Times, The Cape Argus and The Mercury, as well as IOL's own service. The collective circulation of the group's newspapers reaches over 2.2 million print readers and 2.2 million unique online users.

More

The Nepalese government will soon recognise and issue press passes to journalists working for online news sites.

The agreement was struck at a meeting between journalists at the Federation of Nepali Journalists, the Online Media Association and Ministry of Information and Communication officials.

More

Google has bested Yahoo! and Microsoft in revenue earned per share in the second quarter of 2007, according to the white paper “Market Share Trends within the Engines, and Their Impact on Brand Marketers,” from SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets.

This report revealed that Google has a 76 percent market share, regardless of only 60 percent of ad impressions. Because of Google’s continual tweaking of quality score algorithms and minimum bid requirements, its revenue per search keeps on growing. On the other hand, Yahoo! had 34 percent of searches among its network even though it held 18.3 percent of media spend in the second quarter this year.

More

As part of its ongoing selling process, Trinity Mirror agreed Thursday to sell 14 regional newspapers in Berkshire for 10 million pounds.

The company will sell Berkshire Regional Newspapers, including its Reading Chronicle series, to a unit of the Scottish group Dunfermline Press.

More

Korea has reached 90 percent high-speed Internet saturation in April this year with 14.3 million subscribers, according to the Ministry of Information and Communication, and the penetration keeps on growing.

This figure defied the idea the broadband penetration rate had already reached its limit a couple of years ago. Yet, an official at the Information Ministry said, that's not the case.

More

Coverage critical of the Niger government's handling of lethal attacks by armed nomadic Tuareg rebels in the country's north led authorities to close the private bimonthly newspaper Aïr Info beginning last month, for a period of three months.

The newspaper's director was detained Thursday by police as he attempted to relaunch the paper this week under the new name Info Aïr.

More

Google Inc. announced Tuesday it is expanding its Print Ads program that will allow online advertisers to buy print advertisements in 225 U.S. newspapers. The programme is in general release now.

Google launched a limited test for the Print Ads program in November 2006, allowing advertisers to make offers for newspaper advertising inventory online in the same way they buy Web, radio or TV ad space.

More

During the first half of 2007, mergers and acquisitions in the media industry have set a new record, according to figures compiled by the investment banking Jordan Edmiston Group.

From January to June 2007, the transaction value of mergers and acquisitions in the media industry achieved $76 billion, growing 78 percent from $43 billion in the same period last year. The number of media companies involved in these deals also rose from 355 at the first half of 2006 to 399 this year.

More

As Gannett Co. reported higher second-quarter profits Wednesday, helped by a gain due to selling several newspapers, its earnings excluding those sales fell, as advertising for the entire industry is migrating to the Internet.

The largest newspaper publisher in the country saw net income increase to $365.7 million, or $1.56 per share for the three months ending in June. In the same period last year, net income was at $310.5 million, or $1.31 per share. Excluding $73.8 million in earnings from the sale of newspapers and discontinued operations, profit was in line with the McLean, Virginia-based company's forecast, at $1.24, versus $1.28 a year ago.

More

As competition from the Internet and other media has transformed the market, the rate of decline in newspaper advertising revenue is accelerating. This decline, which is causing newspaper stocks to plummet, has spurred restructuring and consolidation, and has affected Dow Jones's talks with News Corp. and the Tribune Co. sale.

A slump in advertising revenue that began last summer is accelerating this year, as total print and online advertising revenue is down 4.8 percent to $10.6 billion in the first quarter, compared to a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

More

After months of negotiations, the Dow Jones & Co. Inc. board has voted in favour of a $5 billion buyout offer from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The deal will have to be approved by the Bancroft family, which controls 64 percent of Dow Jones' voting shares.

The 16-member board was not unanimous in its decision, but a “strong majority” voted to approve the deal, according to a source familiar with the matter.

More

Digital content-provider Jupitermedia Corp. announced Wednesday it has bought Mediabistro.com, a community and job search Web site for creative industry and media professionals, for $20 million in cash.

The deal includes a two year earn-out that could net an additional $3 million.

More

The Fresno Bee has announced it will outsource some of its advertising production jobs to workers in India.

The California newspaper, owned by McClatchy Company, will send seven of its 31 ad production jobs to India, and those currently holding the positions in Fresno will be terminated if they can not be placed in other jobs, said Ken Hatfield, a spokesman for The Bee.

More

Broadband penetration has a strong correlation with household income, according to the “Broadband Access and Service in the Home 2007” study by Leichtman Research Group.

53 percent of U.S. households subscribe to a broadband Internet service at home. So far this year, broadband accounts for about 72 percent of all Internet subscriptions at home, compared with 60 percent last year.

More