Metro is advancing its focus on digital, launching its first mobile service and two new online portals.

Associated Newspapers-owned Metro will feed the print edition's national news and entertainment content into Metro Mobile for online-capable mobile phones. The two online portals will centre around user-generated and music content, and is backed by a six-figure investment, Brand Republic reported Tuesday.

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Local online advertising spending will surge 48 percent next year to $12.6 billion, driven by paid search and video advertising, according to a new study from Borrell Associates.

Spending on local search will double to $5 billion, while online video will triple to $1.3 billion, according to Borrell Associates, also a partner of the World Association of Newspapers. Although an economic slowdown is expected to continue next year, Borrell’s forecast for 2008 exceeds the estimated 44 percent growth for local media in 2007.

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A local newspaper in the richest real estate market in Australia has become a media target for corporate regulators, The Australian has reported Wednesday.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Tuesday issued a draft proposal to stop a deal would have allowed the Wentworth Courier to offer volume-based rebates to advertisers in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

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Sakaal Group of Publications has announced it will launch two television channels and an English-language newspaper in 2008, Exchange4media reported Tuesday.

The major media house in Maharashtra and Goa publishes several titles, including Daily Sakaal and Gomantak in Marathi and Gomantak Times and Maharashtra Herald in English.

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Michel Hajji Georgiou, a senior political analyst for the French-language daily L'Orient-Le Jour in Lebanon, has been awarded the World Association of Newspaper's 2007 Gebran Tueni Award honouring editors and publishers in the Arab region.

Georgiou, also a member of the newspaper's editorial board and chief of its yearly political supplement, received the award Sunday, during the opening ceremony of the second Arab Free Press Forum in Beirut. The prize honours Gebran Tueni, a Lebanese publisher and WAN board member who was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in December 2005.

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Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the U.S. broadcasting industry's transition to the digital spectrum in February 2009. However, the segment of the population least aware is the one likely to be most affected - households that receive their programming exclusively from over-the-air signals, according to a new study by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM).

The study surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers in November, and found out that generally good progress is being made by the TV industry's consumer awareness campaign. Forty-eight percent of U.S. households say they are aware of the impending digital TV transition, while only 29 percent were aware in a survey conducted in July 2005.

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The jurors who convicted Conrad Black of fraud in July told the Chicago Sun-Times that “justice is served” when he received a 6½-year sentence on Monday.

“Justice is served,” Monica Prince, who works as a railroad billing clerk, told the Sun-Times in an article Tuesday. “He knew he was doing wrong. And it's only right that he serve his time.”

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