Earlier this week, Google News unveiled a new feature that creates a local section for any city, state or country in the world and includes thousands of news sources for that local section. What makes the feature different is that every word in each story – not just the source or byline – is analysed to understand the location the news focuses on, and where the news source is located, Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in their blog Wednesday.

So does this new way of analysing data to come up with the most relevant top news for an area actually work? I checked on my own city, Chicago, to see how relevant the Internet giant's news results are.

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Free newspaper group Metro International posted 61 percent fourth quarter losses in operating profits on Friday, blaming its performance on a difficult global newspaper market.

The Sweden-based group also said its poor U.S. results were due to global credit problems. In the United States, newspapers are having trouble as print advertising migrates to the Internet, and problems in the real estate sector have hurt classifieds.

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Promotodora de Informaciones SA (Prisa) saw net profit fall from 228.9 million euro to 191.9 million euro in the full year to December.

The profit drop was in line with analysts' estimates of 135 to 236 million euro for the Spanish media giant, Thomson Financial reported Thursday.

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Finland's top media group SanomaWSOY reported fourth quarter profits that missed previous forecasts' marks, due to weak showings in its newspaper unit and education and books division, Reuters reported Thursday.

Operating profit in the fourth quarter of 2007 declined to 68.3 million euro, from 73.9 million the same quarter the year previous, the company announced Thursday.

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According to a ZenithOptimedia estimate, global Internet advertising spending will reach US$45 billion this year, and exceed US$60 billion in the year of 2010.

In 2010, North America will still own the lion’s share of the overall global online ad spending, which is over one-third of the total. Following are Western Europe and Asia Pacific, according to the estimate.

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Sam Zell has started filling a promise he made in December to streamline The Tribune Co., which will start with a string of layoffs this week.

About a dozen Chicago-based employees in the human resources department have been informed their positions at Tribune Tower are being eliminated, according to sources cited by the Chicago Tribune Thursday.

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The Chicago Tribune confirmed Friday it will terminate remote printing of its Midwest edition this spring, shrinking its distribution area, Editor & Publisher reported Friday.

Its Midwest edition has been printed by Capital Newspapers in Madison, Wisc., and The News Gazette in Champaign, Ill.

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