Citizen journalism is being hindered and may even be dying at the hands of citizens themselves, a growing number of media experts believe.

The fad journalism model is being brought down by poorly written and poorly presented content that is greatly inferior to content produced by experts, they say. To put it bluntly, if you need information on a subject, would you rather rely on the edited and proofread opinion of an expert, or the misspelled musings from some guy sitting in his basement?

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Tribune Interactive announced Thursday that it has launched branded channels on YouTube for its television and newspaper properties.

"Our arrangement with YouTube underscores our efforts to leverage our award-winning content and make it more widely available to engage a new group of consumers," said Tim Landon, president of Tribune Interactive, in a statement.

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Swedish researchers for Sifo Research International have mapped out changing readership patterns of both paid and free dailies in Sweden on each day of the week, concluding that Thursday is the best day for free dailies, while paid morning subscription papers show almost no readership variation on different weekdays. Sunday readership for those papers, however, tends to increase, Newspaper Innovation reported Friday.

Peter Callius and Anders Lithner detailed their findings in their paper Daily Reach and Beyond, which was presented at the Readership Symposium in Vienna last month.

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Although Conrad Black is scheduled to be sentenced on federal fraud charges in Chicago in 10 days, that doesn't mean the world has seen the last of him, he told a British radio talk show Friday.

“This isn't a fall from grace and this isn't the end,” Black told Today, a BBC Radio 4 programme. “Even in the worst case I will be back.”

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The Independent will relaunch its Web site next month, but it is unsure whether it will still release its first ABC Electronic user figures before 2008.

Earlier in August, the British daily announced that it had signed up for its web traffic to be audited by ABC Electronic and said it would report its ABCe figures later this year.

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Fairfax Media has announced that its merger with Rural Press will secure $22 million in cost synergies for the fiscal year 2008, the Australian reported Friday. This is in addition to the strong first four months of the financial year.

Merger benefits are also expected to be higher than originally promised, climbing to $45 million in 2009, Fairfax said, according to the Australian.

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Even in the current a digital era, U.S. consumers still say their favourite leisure activities are reading, watching TV and spending time with friends and family, according to The Harris Poll.

Computer activities, however, were ranked fourth most favourite, despite the fact that the percentage of people listing it as a favourite has gone up slightly over the last seven years.

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Publishers around the globe are being asked to implement a new online publishing standard called Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), designed to end clashes between publishers and search engines.

Unveiled during a conference Thursday in New York, ACAP was developed at an initiative by the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council.

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