Google Inc. is considering moving into the UK wireless market after the region's telecommunications regulator announced Thursday it has plans to take back part of the region's mobile phone radio spectrum, the Guardian has reported Friday, without citing sources.

Regulator Ofcom proposed liberalising more than a third of the spectrum Vodafone and O2 have been using for 22 years, in order to auction it off to new market entrants.

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Associated Newspapers Limited has taken the prepaid public transit card idea and applied it to newspapers, allowing readers to tap their cards on electronic pads at newsstands, walking away with discounted newspapers, as well as reward points and even free iTunes.

The company's unveiling of the Evening Standard Eros Card is aimed to boost circulation of its evening daily Evening Standard, which competes against two free papers in London, as well as learn more about its readers. The Standard's current daily circulation is at about 270,000, including about one-third bulk sales, followthemedia.com reported Friday.

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USA Today plans to open a store in New York’s LaGuardia Airport in order to extend its brand footprint.

Merchandise will be available at the store, which will have everything displayed according to newspaper’s color scheme – lifestyle products in purple, sports in red, financial goods in green and news in blue.

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Austrian publisher Styria Medien will launch Slovenia's first free daily, Zurnal24, Sept. 26, followed by the Oct. 10 launch of Luxembourg first free daily, L'Essentiel.

Zurnal24's launch will increase the number of European countries with free dailies to 30, and will be published first in Ljubljana and Primorska. L'Essentiel is a joint venture between Swiss publisher Tamedia, which publishes 20 Minuten, and the Luxembourg publisher Editpress, which publishes Das Tageblatt, Newspaper Innovation reported Friday.

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Vodafone Group Plc has released the first consumer charter for mobile phone advertising, which the mobile telecommunications company wants other carriers to adopt, reports The Australian.

The charter comes as advertisers release the first wave of genuine display campaigns on mobile phones, and parent groups lash out at plans for fast food ads.

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Yahoo Japan Corporation's chief wants to seek tieups with a wide range of mass media, such as newspapers and broadcasters, to obtain more Net-based advertisers.

"We would like to widen our business fields through more business partners that we will seek to obtain down the track," President Masahiro Inoue said in a recent interview with Kyodo News.

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Taipei judges have ruled two Web sites will not have to pay compensation to the city's deputy mayor, King Pu-tsung, for criticising him on their blogs.

The bloggers, one on yam.com.tw and the other on udn.com, criticised Pu-tsung for “humiliating Taiwan” during the International Children's Games in Thailand last year when he was failed to prevent Chinese representatives from snatching Taiwanese flags from Taiwanese medallists as they walked to the podium. King lodged a complaint asking for an apology from the Chinese team, but he request was denied.

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Hispanics whose first language is Spanish are among the most avid newspaper readers in the United States, according to a new study of how ethnic groups consume old and new media.

The study was conducted by the Florida State University Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication, and contains more good news for newspapers, including that the time spent on print is not declining among whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, and English-speaking Hispanics in spite of their heavy use of online media and television.

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