The long-running LVMH-Les Echos deal came to an end this week, as LVMH officially took control of the leading French financial paper and agreed to sell the number two paper, La Tribune.

LVMH and Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, signed the final agreement on Christmas Eve, transferring Les Echos to the luxury goods group for €240 million.

LVMH has also signed a separate agreement to sell the paper La Tribune to Alain Weill, the head of NextRadioTV, which owns the BFM business news radio station. However, due to the anti-trust regulations, LVMH must ensure La Tribune can compete against Les Echos for several years.

LVMH has agreed to recapitalise La Tribune to the tune of about €40 million, including a deal to guarantee a certain volume of advertising for two years, and a bonus payment to staff, according to The Financial Times. It has also ensured not to create advertising links between Les Echos and the LVMH financial magazine Investir for a certain period, as well as to maintain the existing relationship with La Tribune.

Oppositions from staff were strong for both deals, with journalists at the dailies went on strike several times during negotiations. A source close to LVMH said on Wednesday the saga was now “definitively closed.”

Nicolas Beytout, the former chief news editor at the French daily Le Figaro and once editor of Les Echos, has been named chairman of the paper's board.

Family-controlled Freedom Communications Inc. has postponed plans to buy two minority partners, Blackstone Group LP and Providence Equity Partners, due to weak credit markets.

Freedom, which owns the Orange County (California) Register, had planned to spend more than $500 million to buy back Blackstone and Providence's 45 percent stake, according to people familiar with the situation, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The deal was nearly completed a few weeks ago, with Freedom to planning borrow from General Electric Co.'s GE Capital and others to make the purchase.

Negotiations have been suspended, due to trouble in the credit market, as some banks were “leery of lending money to Freedom,” partly because of problems and uncertainties the newspaper industry itself is facing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A person familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal that the Hoiles family, which controls Freedom's majority stake, will wait for the market to calm down before making another move.

Irvine, Calif.-based Freedom owns more than 30 daily newspapers and eight TV stations.

Brazilian metro daily Folha de Londrina, which is published in the Parana state, is using net-linx' nxAdvertising system for back-office advertising management, including 30 remote users spread over 12 locations and web users, according to net-linx.

The system offers the daily a single-vendor solution for advertising, production, ad make-up and Internet, and has been integrated with many of the paper's web verticals. Multi-buy packages allow users to schedule cross-media XML ads, and a self serve module in VRUM (the automotive ad vertical) allows customers to book their own ads, published either on-line in VRUM, in print or in both.

Folha de Londrina chose to finance the system with monthly payments of product and maintenance fees rather than a capital expense project, according to Editor & Publisher.

Headquartered in Dresden, Germany, net-linx has offices opened in South America to support the growing Latin market, including an office in Brazil.

The Internet is the fastest growing in terms of ad spending of all the media in U.S. throughout 2011, according to eMarketer's estimates.

The U.S. online ad spending in 2006, grew with a nearly 35 percent, while the growth rate dropped to 26.8 percent this year. Although it is dropping and stabilised by 2011, the annual online growth still exceeds 10 percent and tops those of all other media.

With the Internet taken out, other media grow very poorly throughout 2011 – the annual growth of total media without Internet is even less than one percent, except for the 2.4 percent in 2006. The overall growth of U.S. ad spending in media fluctuates between two and four percent from 2006 to 2011, eMarketer reported.

Badoo, a social networking website which allows users to pay to be popular while banning all advertising, is going to launch in the UK market.

Though Badoo is now a relatively unknown brand, Google rated it on the second spot on its "fastest rising" list – only behind the iPhone and even ahead of Facebook.

While positioning itself as a "natural evolution of existing social network and blogging sites", Badoo has an unusual business model, different from other advertising-led social sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

"We wanted to be advertising free in order to have a clean site so our users weren't subject to adverts which we know can be a turnoff," Neil Bryant, the managing director of Badoo said.

For $1 in the US, €1 in Europe's eurozone and £1 in the UK, Badoo users can have their profile moved to the top of a rolling list - in a blend of Digg and a Reuters ticker - that all users can see.

"With Badoo users don't have to add friends - they have immediate access to get their profile in front of the site's entire online community," added Bryant.

For security, users can block any "undesirable" or annoying profiles on their web page and also keep information confidential such as birth dates.

So far, Badoo has had presence in Latin American, as well as in European countries including France, Spain and Italy. The UK is a top priority market for Badoo next year.

The latest report out of Britain's Office of Communications shows the United Kingdom is ahead of most other countries in Europe when it comes to use of digital media.

The “International Communications Market” report also covers France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States and Japan, and is designed to give international comparisons for the United Kingdom, according to an eMarketer report.

eMarketer noted that the report's data agrees closely with its own estimates for 2007, which puts the United Kingdom ahead of the United States for the first time. Although there are notable levels of broadband penetration already in Britain, take-up is still rising, the report indicated.

In the United Kingdom, 33 percent of mobile phone users and other mobile device users send picture messages, 16 percent use mobiles to connect to the Internet and 10 percent use them for e-mail, the report stated.

According to the report, adults in the United Kingdom also spend more time on social networking sites than other Europeans polled, with two in five UK adults logging in regularly to these sites, averaging 23 visits and 5.3 hours each month.

At the beginning of 2007, 76 percent of UK households were receiving digital television services, a higher percentage than any other countries surveyed.

The eMarketer UK Internet Users and Usage report with comparative data is scheduled to be published in February 2008.

Canadian group Transcontinental Media has acquired L'Autre Voix, a community newspaper serving 13,500 households in the east Quebec. The amount of this deal was undisclosed.

With this acquisition, Transcontinental Media has 172 community publications across Canada in total, with about 250 million copies annually.

L'Autre Voix was founded by local businessman Mathieu Tremblay four years ago,.

"Transcontinental is committed to serving local communities with information that is relevant to them," according to Serge Lemieux, Transcontinental's general manager for newspapers in Quebec and Ontario. "L'Autre Voix is a very respected community paper and we look forward to being a part of its future growth."

Transcontinental Media, which is part of printer and media firm Transcontinental Inc., is the second largest community paper publisher in Canada. It also publishes consumer magazines and French-language educational materials.

The parent company has more than 15,000 employees in Canada, the United States and Mexico. It reported revenues of $2.3 billion in 2007, a Google article reported.

Television delivered by Internet protocol – IPTV, will be used in 38.4 million homes worldwide by 2012, according to a newly released Informa Telecoms & Media's report.

IPTV subscriptions and video-on-demand are expected to bring in $14.7 billion revenues globally by 2012, up from $1.5 billion in 2006.

The estimate $14.7 billion in 2012 included $13.6 billion from subscription revenues and $1.1 billion from VOD. This will come from only 3.1 percent of the world's TV households, eMarketer reported.

"In the shorter term we are forecasting 10.6 million IPTV households by the end of 2007, double the 2006 figure of 5.3 million," Adam Thomas, media research manager at Informa, said.

"Much of the recent growth has come from service launches by European telcos, although US cablers are also starting to look anxiously over their shoulders at the success of U-Verse and FiOS," Mr. Thomas added.

Although Britain leads Europe in Internet penetration, e-commerce revenues and online advertising, Germany has the largest online population, a role that is setting the country up to shape Europe's online future, according to an eMarketer report released Friday.

“While consumers and advertisers in Britain were generally quick to explore the benefits and potential of the online channel, many Germans – and German businesses – took time to warm to the Web,” eMarketer stated.

By the end of the year, eMarketer stated in its report that online ad spending in Germany will reach €2.4 billion. The report also projects online spending will continue at double-digit rates, reaching €3.5 billion in 2010.

Socially and commercially, Germany is more conservative than many of its European counterparts, according to eMarketer.

“Practicality is a virtue, and established leaders in many industrial sectors are not inclined to pursue innovations in advertising and marketing until they are proven to bring results,” eMarketer stated in a release about the report.

Le Monde's top editor and two senior managers walked off the job following a dispute with the editorial staff, which is also the newspaper's largest shareholder.

Eric Fottorino, the editor-in-chief; Pierre Jeantet, chairman; and Bruno Patino, deputy chairman, made up the executive board of the most well-known French daily paper.

They said in a statement they resigned Wednesday after “realising their inability to exercise their responsibilities” when faced with opposition from the Society of Editors of Le Monde, a group that can veto certain board decisions, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The executives have been in their positions since last June, and their resignation will be effective Jan. 4.

Libération, another Paris daily, reported the resignation of the executive board was due to an e-mail sent to 400 Le Monde staffers by the Society's president, Jean-Michel Dumay. The message detailed the newspaper's financial status, which the board considers confidential.

In November, 300 staff members of Le Monde demonstrated in front of the paper's Paris office when the Society disclosed the newspaper was €150 million in debt. In 2005, Le Monde cut 200 jobs, and employees expect more cuts in 2008.

“We asked the board to draw up a recovery plan seven months ago, and we are still waiting,” Dumay told Libération, according to Bloomberg.

Telegraph.co.uk gained more than 1.6 million new users in November, it's busiest month ever, and recorded traffic growth of more than 100 percent year-on-year.

Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic figures, published Thursday, show the Telegraph Media Group Web site had 12,800,627 unique users in November, climbing past its rival, Times Online, for the first time.

November user numbers increased by 15.2 percent from October, and 100.8 percent from November 2006, when the site recorded just 6,374,362 unique users. From October to November, page impressions rose by five million, to 109,278,179, MediaGuardian reported.

The growth puts the Telegraph in third place behind Guardian Unlimited and the Daily Mail online for user numbers in the United Kingdom, and ahead of Times Online.

“Telegraph.co.uk is going from strength to strength,” Edward Roussel, digital editor of Telegraph Media Group, told Brand Republic. “We are optimistic about 2008, which will be a year of innovation and significant change for the Telegraph's digital operation.”

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