Recently by Lisette García

The publisher of USA Today, as well as 80 other U.S. print newspapers, yesterday claimed to have gained ground in the losing economic battle faced by many western dailies worldwide, The Associated Press yesterday reported.

The optimistic pronouncement was delivered by Gannett Chief Financial Officer Gracia Martore at the UBS Media and Communications Conference, according to the company's press release. The preliminary report indicated that, while revenues were down 17 percent as compared with the same period last year, the company overall expects to show a profit for the most recent fiscal quarter.

Google yesterday launched a project updating articles by The New York Times and the Washington Post as the stories unfold, The Associated Press reported. The project, titled Living Stories, aims to maximise the use of Web technology in the delivery of news by traditional media organisations, according to a Google press release.

"We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways -- ways that simply aren't possible offline," said Google engineer Neha Singh on the search engine's official blog, credited to product manager Josh Cohen. Cohen, through Google spokesman Chris Gaither, declined further comment on the project.

The New York Times Co. yesterday announced that it has abandoned plans to sell a Massachusetts newspaper due to a transformation of its "journalistic and business operations," Agence France-Presse reported yesterday.

Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger and chief executive Janet Robinson were quoted by AFP as saying the following in a memo to employees of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette: "We are convinced that in partnership with the Boston Globe you are now prepared to move forward to a brighter future."

German publisher Axel Springer has joined the chorus of publishers seeking to abandon the free-for-all Internet news business model, The New York Times reported yesterday. To achieve this goal, though, Springer plans to enlist the help of Google, the most powerful search engine, paidContent said today.

Springer's proposed partnership deviates from the emerging pack of traditional media, which has generally cast Google as the villain in this unfolding story, according to Wednesday's report in The Telegraph.

A state trial court judge Thursday ordered The Myrtle Beach Sun in South Carolina, U.S., to disclose the true identity of "Elmer Fudd," who posted potentially libelous remarks about the area's chamber of commerce on the newspaper's Web site, The Myrtle Beach Sun Thursday reported. The newspaper announced Friday that the poster's email is noadtax@gmail.com but did not know the individual's actual name, The Sun reported Friday.

On the editorial side, the compelled disclosure runs up against the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protection of freedom of press and expression as well as the Fourth and Fifth Amendments' protection of privacy and self-incrimination. For business purposes, though, the ruling signals that publishers may incur significant legal costs in defending suits prompted by readers' alleged abuse of interactive media.

Hearst Corp. apparently tired of waiting for the tech world to produce an electronic delivery software suitable for its many publications. So, it spent the last two years developing Skiff, a platform of its own which is set to start selling in mid-2010, The Wall Street Journal today reported.

"The platforms and devices that other people are building are not really appropriate for newspapers and magazines," Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media was quoted Thursday by Apple Insider as saying. "We are going to create an entity by publishers for publishers."

The former president of the Boston Newspaper Guild was impeached in absentia for misfeasance when he signed unauthorized checks as well as using a credit card for personal expenses, Editor & Publisher Thursday reported.

Poking a little fun at some late-coming high technology, The Sun newspaper today marked its 40th anniversary in continuous publication by posting several videos to its Web site highlighting the pioneering nature of its paper edition, Media Blog reported today.

One video demonstrates the high-tech nature of its pen-to-paper interface crossword puzzles, as well as its easy-to-disseminate pullout pages, a.k.a. file sharing, TechCrunch Europe today reported.

While politics make strange bedfellows, finances make even stranger ones.

The Associated Press reported today that four of the United States's largest metropolitan dailies - the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Philadelphia Inquirer - are set to continue operations under new management due to their inability to service crushing debt.

The bizarre part is that the would-be managers - their lenders - have each experienced financial troubles of their own recently.

In yet another potential example of economic censorship, The Respublika newspaper may be forced shut by a whopping libel judgment against it brought by an arm of its country's government, The Institute for War & Peace Reporting said Friday.

An Almaty court in September ordered Respublika - published in Kazak and Russian - to pay 60M tenge (US$400,000) in "moral damages" to the BTA Bank, nationalized in February, for comments relating to the possible loss of $45 million in deposits, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.

No sooner had a third daily newspaper come onto the scene in one U.S. city, than it announced plans to cease publication until January 1, citing inadequate ad sales, The Associated Press Friday reported.

The staff of the Detroit (Mich.) Daily Press -- drawn from the ranks of those recently laid off for the same reason by the city's two other newspapers -- will now enjoy five more weeks of unpaid leave, TIME magazine observed Friday.

The November 18 edition of The Amazing Spiderman features a villain named Electro posing as a modern-day Robin Hood in order to fight a newspaper bailout because he wants the government funds for himself, Mania reported Monday. Issue 612 of Spiderman is not the first comic to deal with the issue of failing newspapers, though it may be the lengthiest or most in-depth.

This fantastical treatment of current events is plausibly enjoyable, according to High Five! Comics. The Daily Bugle - now a tabloid titled DB - is hurting and won't survive without financial help. Of course, Spiderman steps in to reverse the sinister plot concocted by Electro, whereby the villain incites a near-riot, uploading video of it to YouTube and arousing anti-newspaper sentiment by virtue of the viral spectacle.

Pulitzer-prize winning comic strip Doonesbury has also run a storyline featuring a failing print newspaper, The Washington Post reported in September 2008. That storyline was suppressed by some papers, The Guardian said in March.

Image: High Five! Comics

Looking to exploit the circulation spike that immediately precedes early Christmas shopping, several major U.S. newspapers will charge Sunday prices for tomorrow's edition, Bloomberg yesterday reported.

Thanksgiving is not known in the industry as a big news day, per se. However, the issue is packed with retailers' advertisements in advance of Black Friday, marketed as the official start of the holiday shopping season, according to The Detroit Free Press.

And, apparently, this year's premium newspaper price phenomenon is not an isolated incident but part of a growing trend over time, Monroe on a Budget said yesterday. The Detroit (Michigan, United States) Free Press, which according to Poynter Online recently doubled its single-copy rates, will charge US$1.50 for metropolitan editions and $2 for outlying areas.



Source: Newspaper Association of America

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch is no longer standing alone in the wind as he rails against the unpaid aggregation of content by search engine giant Google, Bloomberg reported yesterday. Publishers A.H. Belo and MediaNews Group may soon shield their content with paywalls, and de-index that paid content from search engines, Editor & Publisher reported.

Publishers resent Google because it does not share with them the money it makes from advertisements displayed next to news search results, Reuters said yesterday. Murdoch's ire goes one step further, seeking direct compensation from search engines for access to News Corp.'s articles, BBC reported yesterday.