Young audiences are spending more time listening to the radio, and radio profits are up in Europe, a recent study has found.

The younger audience, ages 14 to 29, listened to the radio for 158 minutes per day on average, 10 minutes more compared to the last survey period, according to a study conducted by The German media research institute AG.MA.

On the profits side, the quarterly financial statement from Emmis Communications, which owns and operates several radio stations in Europe and the United States, shows a 28-percent revenue gain at its European division compared to the previous quarter. The company's U.S. radio revenue fell three percent.

The Daily Afrikaans newspaper Beeld has launched a mobile addition to add a “third avenue” to reach readers.

While the newspaper has a daily print edition and Web site, they thought it was important to take the next step and make the newspaper available mobile.

Ina Knott, Beeld's multi media manager said readers are “very loyal to the Beeld brand. We find our younger audience interacting more and more with the Web site while readers 35 and over prefer accessing information through the daily newspaper ... with the release of beeld.mobi, a third avenue lends itself to those wanting news on the move. We believe that readers covering the age spectrum will make use of the service.”

The service will cost 2c per page, and users can access beeld.mobi on their mobiles, or SMS the word “Beeld” to 32424, and a link will be sent to their mobile.

China's ban of online publication China Development Brief amounts to “growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country” the group Reporters Without Borders stated Thursday.

The Beijing Statistics Bureau and Public Security Bureau ordered Nick Young, the site's founder, to stop publication July 4. Because the server is British, they could not order the site's closure, but told Young publishing any further is “illegal.”

The Brief, based in Beijing, www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com, has both Chinese and English versions. Its bi-monthly newsletter counts the World Bank, UN agencies and several NGOs as subscribers, and since it was founded in 1995, has become a major source of information on China's development.

Wikipedia has added nearly 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top destination for online news and information, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

In May of this year, Wikipedia had about 46.8 million unique visitors, 72 percent more than those from June 2006. Wikipedia has remained on the top of the news and information category every month so far this year – way ahead of the Weather Channel site, with a margin of about 10 million visitors in May.

Wikipedia, run by the nonprofit group Wikimedia Foundation Inc., allows thousands of users, editors and administrators to make edits, create new pages and correct mistakes. This user-run format is often negatively viewed, sued for misinformation or vandalised. Its strength, however, is hard to ignore: When breaking news happens, the pages can be updated in real-time.

London's Westminster Council says Associated Newspapers Ltd. and News Corp. are creating “a mountain” of garbage on the city's West End, and have threatened to penalize the publishers if they don't do something to help clean up the mess.

Westminster officials said 20 tons of discarded newspapers have been collected each week since Associated's London Lite and News Corp.'s rival theLondonpaper were both launched last year. Vendors hand out the newspapers every afternoon during the weekday.

The council said it costs 111,000 pounds ($224,000) to get rid of the newspaper waste each year, and voted this week to place distribution limits on both papers if publishers do not agree to a clean-up plan within a month.

In an attempt to meet the needs of those with no time to read, the Economist is launching an online audio version of every issue of the magazine.

Beginning this week, listeners will be able to download audio versions of articles by section or in their entirety, from the magazine's Web site. The service is free to subscribers, and non-subscribers can buy each issue for £4. The weekly has a worldwide print circulation of nearly 1,198,000, and says it is the first top international publication to offer a full audio edition.

Offering audio versions for readers to take advantage of while they are on the move follows the turn newspapers have taken into offering podcasts on their Web sites.

News International's four daily and Sunday newspapers will integrate editorial print and online teams, as well as make the Times Online full archive, which includes stories dating back to when the Times was first published in 1788, available to the public, according to a staff announcement.

Executive Chairman Les Hinton also told employees future changes will include the integration of the Sunday Times Travel magazine into News Magazines Limited, a decision on the future of News International's Wapping site and the launch of the Sun's mobile Premiership goals service in partnership with Sky.

Hinton also stated in an internal business update to staff, obtained by MediaGuardian.co.uk, that the company will focus on “staying number 1” in the newspaper industry, increasing audience and profitability in new media and launching new products, according to a MediaGuardian report.

Online growth is slowing for newspaper Web sites, according to June comScore data.

Wachovia Equity Research Senior Analyst John Janedis and his team wrote a note using the data, which stated unique users and page views are sluggish for companies Wachovia covers, and these new numbers “could have material impact on top line results.”

Projections for 2007 online revenue growth were lowered by Wachovia recently, from a 25 percent increase to 22 percent.

In terms of Web traffic, The New York Times Co. is outperforming its peers, with unique visitors growing 12 percent to its popular newspaper sites, such as NYTimes.com and Boston.com. Unique users at the Tribune's Web sites are up 7.8 percent over last year, while page views jumped 18.4 percent, according to the note.

The Wachovia experts also noted E.W. Scripps unique users grew 13.5 percent over last year, after declining for six months; page views, however, dropped 17.3 percent. Uniques were down 3.8 percent at Gannett, mostly due to the 12.7 percent drop at USA Today's website, Janedis and his colleagues wrote.

The Indian government will introduce the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill in the coming parliament session this month. The bill contains several harsh clauses meant to gag electronic media.

Electronic media representatives held a meeting with Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi in May. There, the government expressed reservations and complained about how events were being covered in India by electronic media. Coverage of uprising of Gujjars in Rajasthan also created friction between media and the government.

The bill was introduced initially in parliament last year, has caused a debate in the Indian media and was scrutinised by a House Select Committee, causing the government to revise and reintroduce the bill.

The case against former media baron Conrad Black is centered around non-compete payments, with a jury sifting through thousands of documents about payments from newspaper sales, which will likely determine whether the former head of the Hollinger International newspaper empire goes to jail.

The trial has taken three and a half months, and is now being debated by a jury.

Along with Black, former Hollinger executives Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson, along with Chicago lawyer Mark Kipnis, are accused of participating in schemes in which more than $60 million was funneled from the company. All have pleaded not guilty.

Source: The Associated Press, via Washington Post

A planned merger between newspaper groups PCM and NDC-VBK has been halted, and will not continue, both sides said in a statement today.

The newspaper groups stated differing management agendas and economic benefits that would end up being less than they had expected were the main reasons to not go ahead with the merger.

Source: DutchNews.nl