As News Corporation Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch gave thanks to strength in his Australian businesses Thursday, he also kept an eye trained on New York newspaper Newsday.

News Corp. is sticking with its US$580 million bid for Newsday, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.

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Seoul's first free afternoon paper celebrated its first year in business last week, Newspaper Innovation reported Thursday.

The City has a circulation of 400,000, while total circulation of free newspapers in Seoul is about two million.

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As the economic outlook for advertising remains uncertain, Trinity Mirror Plc announced it will remain cautious, but predicts its performance for the year will not change from previous forecasts, Reuters reported Thursday.

The British newspaper publisher stated it is still poised to deliver £7 million in cost savings by the end of 2008.

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Less than a year after New York's Avista Capital Partners bought the Minneapolis Star Tribune from the McClatchy Co., the investment has “gone so sour” that if there is no monetary infusion or Avista does not hold a firesale, bankruptcy may be the only way out, Followthemedia's Philip Stone wrote Thursday.

“One has to assume that the Avista people are not stupid – they went through the Star Tribune’s books, they saw the cash flow, they thought (they) knew what they were getting into, believing that the cash flow would handle debt and operate the business with very little need for any major cutbacks,” Stone states. “And yet in less than a year that investment has gone so sour that although the newspaper insists it is not in a bankruptcy situation and it can still handle debt this year, it has brought in a another private equity firm to analyse its balance sheet.”

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Google is considering running illustrated advertisements with the results of Web image-queries, a step beyond its text-based ad business, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“Matching graphical-display ads with image searches represents a large opportunity, and there's lot of potential for advertising revenue there,” Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, told Bloomberg Radio Wednesday. She added that the company at the same time must ensure such ads don't drive users away.

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The United States took the lead in terms of time spent online in January 2008, according to the data from Nielsen Online.

The data was derived from nine countries, including the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Australia and Switzerland during January 2008.

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