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Belgium's La Derniere Heure released an edition Tuesday in which all photos and advertisements are in 3D, and readers are given cardboard 3D glasses with every copy, ABC News reported today. Text is not three-dimensional.

It took two months to create the 3D edition, which had a print run of 115,000, higher than usual. Editor Hubert Leclercq told ABC News that the paper was following the trend of the recent rise in popularity of 3D films, television and video games.

Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC is planning to invest more than US$5 million in technology upgrades for print and online content, as well as back-office upgrades, Crain's Chicago Business reported yesterday.

A new centralised editing system could mean some employees will lose their job, CEO Jeremy Halbreich told Crain's. The project is expected to be finished at the end of the year, he said.

Aggregators such a Google are often accused of making life more than a little difficult for newspapers - yet the company has spoken out once again, offering advice for newspapers struggling against the ubiquity of online news:

In an article by Mercedes Bunz from The Guardian's Digital Content Blog, Google stated that the "key" to newspaper's survival online is "engagement". The statement, issued by Google's Hal Varian, places emphasis on the importance of offering readers interactive experiences but provided little information on specific steps publications should take to go about doing this.

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Online media revenue in the Middle East and North Africa is expected to spike to US$600 million by 2015, from less than $100 million last year, research from global consulting firm Booz and Company shows, The National reported today. Mobile revenues are also increasing, expected to reach $2.7 billion.

According to the report, 70 percent of audiences in MENA countries said they spend two hours or more on the Internet each day, while 36 percent said they spend two or more hours watching TV.

Newspapers must find new revenue streams outside advertising in order to survive, the CEO of Publicis told the inaugural Abud Dhabi media summit today, MediaGuardian reported.

"It is not and/or but and/and. We need to have advertising and paid content. Some part of the content could be open and others available on subscription or pay per view," said Maurice Lévy, head of the French advertising group, the third largest in the world by revenue.

Google's next move in the online advertising business will be to charge premium prices from brand advertisers for "above the fold" ads, making display the search giant's "next billion dollar business," CEO Eric Schmidt said, paidContent reported.

Premium, "above the fold" ad placements will be aimed at top marketers, who will be able to bid against one another for the units that will be placed in the top half of users' screens. Previously, advertisers have not been able to select where ads will show up.

Apple's iPad will go on sale in the United States April 3, and will be available for pre-order beginning March 12, TechCrunch reported early this morning. The "magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price" will start at US$499, Apple's Web site states.

The Wi-Fi models will be available April 3, but Wi-Fi + 3G will be available in late April in the United States, according to Apple's press release. All models will be available in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

As Fairfax Media restructures, adding a digital director with wide-ranging media experience is essential for the Australian media group's renewal, board chairman Roger Corbett told The Australian this week.

Corbett said he is talking to potential hires who will help strengthen the digital area. "We have pretty good traditional media experience in, of course, John Fairfax and (managing director) Brian McCarthy, but we certainly want to have a mind that understands media and helps us move into this broad new era and the changes that will happen," he said.

The Trinity Mirror will not implement a broad paywall strategy on its websites, according to Sly Bailey, chief executive of the newspaper group.

Bailey discussed the group's stance on charging for online access to content with MediaGuardian, confirming there are no plans to install a broad paywall. The group favors charging for more specific online services and products instead.

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

The Financial Times confirmed yesterday that payment for its day and weekly passes for its online content will go through PayPal, the e-commerce business owned by eBay. The FT first announced plans of its online subscription model last August before announcing the option of a day pass last month.

Despite previous reports, the FT will not be going ahead with a "micropayment" option, a model which would allow readers to pay a small fee to access a single article online. "Micropayments simply isn't going to work if you go to an article and you spend quarter of an hour filling out forms and ticking boxes," John Ridding, CEO of the FT, told the newspaper's Digital Media & Broadcasting conference in London.

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Dow Jones & Co. has acquired the 50 percent of SmartMoney it didn't already own, gaining complete control of the franchise from U.S. publisher Hearst Corp, BtoB Media Business reported yesterday. The brand includes SmartMoney magazine, Smartmoney.com and SmartMoney Custom Solutions, a custom publishing business. Hearst and Dow Jones first partnered on SmartMoney in 1991.

The news and business information group has also launched a new site, called Reprint Portal (reprintportal.com). The new site will take reprint orders for Dow Jones Factivia's content partners. In its beta period, the site offered content from The Associated Press, SourceMedia (a b-to-b publisher) and Dow Jones, according to BtoB.

Associated Newspapers, the UK newspaper division which houses the Daily Mail, today agreed to pay £25,000 in damages to Sir Michael Parkinson, Media Guardian reported. The Daily Mail published an article in May last year titled "Who's Telling Parkies," which alleged the British talk show host lied about his upbringing and that he was "grossly insensitive" to his elderly uncle.

The newspapers accepted that the allegations made in the article were "entirely false" and will pay damages as well as legal costs, Reuters reported.

Google last month took a page from Twitter's playbook, testing its trending topics concept and launching Google Buzz. Now it's Twitter's turn. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka reveals that Twitter's new ad platform looks a lot like Google's.

Although plans are still in the works, it is expected that ads will be linked to Twitter searches, and will also use Twitter's format. The micro-blogging service will work with ad buyers and agencies at first, with the aim to grow into the self-service model like Google, according to Kafka.

U.S. newspaper companies aren't exactly having an easy economic time, but as the global economy shakes off the recession, newspapers' negative results aren't as bad as years past, leading many to be upbeat about results, which are up by year-on-year comparisons, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported today.

E.W. Scripps reported a revenue drop of 18 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. "Scripps managed to present a negative as a positive," Nieman pointed out. The Wall Street Journal reported that the media company's shares rose to a 19-month high.

The rise of digital technologies have created a new generation of "digital junkies," voracious consumers and creators content, according to the new South African 2010 Flux Trendreview, BizCommunity's Issa Sikiti da Silva reported today.

Although some say digital junkies have difficulty understanding privacy, relating to people face-to-face or not being loyal to brands, especially media brands, Ian Calvert, co-founder of Instant Grass, said he disagrees. He told attendants at the Digital Lab workshop in conjunction with the Flux Trendreview conference that 52 percent of these people have blogged about a brand, 69 percent have given feedback on a brand's Web site, 69 percent have read a corporate blog post and 77 percent have viewed a television commercial on YouTube, da Silva reported.