U.S. mobile Internet usage skewed to a male, younger demographic with a higher income, According to iCrossing's study “How America Searches: Mobile” published in April 2007, World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

More than 30 percent of respondents under age 39 access the Internet on their mobiles, especially those ages 20 to 29, with more than 40 percent doing so. Of respondents over age 50, less than 20 percent have online access on their mobiles.

For those with a household income of more than US$75,000, more than three out of 10 have mobile Internet access, while those with lower incomes have less access, according to iCrossing.

Among male respondents, nearly 35 percent have mobile online access, while less than 30 percent of females said they did, according to the World Digital Media Trends 2008 report, released by the World Association of Newspapers.

The search engine portal Google has announced a new service for its Russian-speaking users. It would now be offering a classifieds search, collected from Russian-language sites, reported Lenta.ru Friday.

The results of the search feature headlines of the classifieds and the contact information. Once the cursor is passed over the headline, an extract of the classified ad appears and if the user clicks on the headline he will be re-directed to the site housing the original.

However, a number of ads from those found by Google may not exist anymore by the time the user clicks on the link, wrote Lenta.ru.

There are around 800 classifieds in the database, which can be categorised by price, date, author's location and website. Currently, there are classifieds from irr.ru, slando.ru, mercato.ru, olx.ru and rbz.ru.

The classifieds themselves are sorted into a variety of sections, including job offers or sales of mobile phones, animals or cars.

Transcontinental Inc. will print the Toronto-based Globe and Mail for 18 years, according to a new contract, valued at C$1.7 billion, Editor & Publisher reported.

The Globe and Mail took competitive bids from Canadian printers for 18 months, and the new contract will begin in 2010.

Transcontinental will print The Globe and Mail everywhere but in the countries prairies, and in colour on every page, according to E&P. The contract for the prairie region, which includes Manitoba, Saskatchewan and parts of Alberta and Northern Ontario, will be separate, according to E&P.

Transcontinental will invest about C$200 million in a new plant in 2009 and 2010, which will integrate newspaper printing and advertising circulars, which will allow it to print the newspaper and materials for retail customers, E&P reported.

Currently, transcontinental has printing contracts with The Globe and Mail. It now manages printing in Nova Scotia, Halifax, Boucherville, Quebec and Mississauga, Ontario, E&P reported.

Writers, editors, and advertising sales representatives at The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News Wednesday agreed to postpone a $25 weekly raise in order to help the papers cut $10-million costs by the end of this year, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The 700-strong Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia voted, and agreed to push back the raise until Aug. 1, 2009, one month before the current labor contract with Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC expires, according to the article posted on MediaInfoCenter.

“We are fortunate to have this choice,” according to Diane Mastrull, unit chairwoman for Guild members at PMH. She added that employees at other papers face even more severe circumstances.

Mark Frisby, PMH executive vice president, said the vote was an important step in the right direction, which signaled that the company and the Guild could work together, according to MediaInfoCenter.

The company aimed to cut $10 million in costs, Frisby added.

With the Guild vote, Frisby said three of the company's unions, also including The Teamsters and mailers, had agreed to forgo or postpone the raise, The Inquirer reported.

Printing-press operators voted Tuesday and decided not to consider forgoing the raise, while mechanics, voting on Aug. 10, took the raise. Frisby said that mechanics had been laid off to achieve the targeted savings, according to MediaInfoCenter.

Sony Pictures and producer Scott Rudin said that they had asked screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to write screenplay for a film about the creation of social network Facebook, which has over 100 million active users, reported Lenta.ru.

With the help of his assistant, Sorkin has started a discussion group on Facebook to help him understand Facebook more.

By Thursday afternoon (+4 GMT), over a hundred questions were asked on the discussion group, according to Lenta.ru.

Sorkin has written numerous Broadway shows, including “A Few Good Men”, “The Farnsworth Invention”, as well as films such as “The American President” and “The Trial of The Chicago 7.”

The global advertising market has grown by 4.9 percent to US$506.7 billion this year, instead of the predicted six percent, according to Carat. Russia's advertising market is assumed to become the fastest growing this year, with ad expenditure surging by 22.8 percent to US$11.8 billion, 0.2% higher than expected, Gipp.ru reported.

Carat expected that ad expenditure in the U.S., Great Britain, Spain and China would plunge by five percent, while countries from Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America should experience double-digit growth.

According to Irina Belozerceva, Director of Public Relations for Aegis Media Russia, the country's market is still not “saturated”, gipp.ru reported.

Vladimir Evstafiev, vide-president of the Association Of Communications Agencies in Russia is surprised by the Carat study because "it is harder to measure an advertising market accurately when there is a strong political influence. His association predicted that the total ad expenditure in Russia this year would be between US$5.13 and US$5.18 billion, a 20.4% since last year.

According to Carat, India would be ranked on the second, with a 21 percent growth to US$5.2 billion while Mexico follows with a 20 percent rise to US$5.4 billion.

Spain would lag far behind, having a 2.3 percent decline to US$8.5 billion instead of the expected 3.9 percent surge. This may be due to an unhealthy economic environment and a real estate “crisis”, reported gipp.ru.

Lippo Group, a substantial Indonesian conglomerate, announced the launch of The Jakarta Globe, an English language daily newspaper which will be available both in print and online.

“As the fourth largest country in the world, Indonesia is poised for a period of sustained economic growth. With the middle class expanding, we think this is a great time to be launching a newspaper and website,” said the paper's senior editorial consultant A. Lin Neumann.

Indonesia's social economic situation, with it's “pluses” has been compared to India's, as the latter experiences a growth in its newspaper industry, and may be the reason behind businessman James Riyandi wanting to invest in The Globe, reported The Guardian three weeks ago.

Bhimanto Suwastoyo, who worked with the AFP for over 20 years, will be the paper's deputy editor. The editorial team also includes Ahmad Pathoni, who previously held senior positions at both AFP and Reuters, and A. Lin Neumann, former executive editor of the Hong Kong Standard and editor-in-chief of South Korean daily JoongAng.

The Globe will be released in the next two months and will be aimed at both Indonesians and expatriates. It will receive funding through advertisements and subscriptions, Brand Republic reported.

Telegraph Media Group will create 40 new permanent jobs for people with new media skills, such as data management and mapping, and will cut casual staff, Press Gazette reported.

Casual staff working for the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk have been invited to apply for the new jobs, advertised on the company's intranet.

There will be “around 18 content editors, a new role for TMG, for multi-skilled journalists who are able to do everything from write, to commission, to edit, to produce both across online and print,” Richard Ellis, executive director of editorial told casual staffers in a letter.

There will also be six new reporting positions, five part-time production journalist jobs, seven “new world” jobs, such as “data mapping expert” and a “digital technologist” position, Press Gazette reported Tuesday.

October 13 is the final date to apply. For those who are not interested in or not hired for one of the new jobs, TMG has set up a “resource centre” for a month to aid workers in finding a new job.

The first uniform audited data on digital “circulation” for newspapers and magazines in Australia will be out by the end of the year, in an effort to catch up with other areas of the world, The Australian reported.

“We need to be relevant to what is happening in the industry,” said Gordon Towell, chief of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, according to The Australian. “There are massive changes going on and delivery of content through web and digital media is becoming increasingly important. From a media buyer's and an advertiser's point of view it is critical that some sanity be brought to web measurement.”

Although media groups currently get online figures from research houses like Nielsen, Google Analytics and the Internet Advertising Bureau, “non of it is public, none of it is comparative, non of it is done in an audited way,” Towell told The Australian.

The lack of an industry standard means “cowboys out there (are) making the wildest of wild claims on what their Web sites are doing,” he said.

Without a standard measurement system, advertisers have been unable to ensure their campaigns are reaching the number of people they hope they are, and have no way of knowing if they've invested their ad dollars wisely, The Australian reported.

ABC will release its audited online data along with its print audit figures.

After years of lagging behind European countries, U.S. is now to take the top spot for mobile Web usage by the end of this month, according to data collected by technology firm Bango, AdWeek reported.

In July, the U.K. topped on mobile Web usage, accounting for almost 19.4 percent of the worldwide total. U.S. followed with about 18.9-percent contribution. Other countries on the top-five list were India (10.8 percent), South Africa (8.8 percent) and Indonesia (4.1 percent).

However, Adam Kerr, Bango's VP in North America, said that the usage in U.S. in recent weeks has risen four percent while that in the U.K. was up one percent only. He expected the U.S. to surpass the U.K. in usage by the end of August, with a nearly 23 percent and 20 percent share of the total mobile Internet market, respectively, AdWeek reported.

Kerr pointed out several drivers to the change in the report, such as that U.S. mobile carriers are aggressively building 3G networks, which greatly facilitate mobile Web-based video, which British and other European-based carriers have done years ago. Also, most of the new handsets in U.S. offer higher quality reception of video and music as well as cheaper subscriber, according to AdWeek.

The sites with most traffic tend to be those providing news, sports and weather. The spikes appear during rush hour and lunch breaks.

Over one-third of U.S. adult online users read online newspapers, according to the "Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment" report by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, eMarketer reported.

The report said that 39 percent of respondents watch cable news regularly, while 29 percent regularly watch the nightly network news.

Those who read online newspapers tend to be better-educated. According to Pew, 44 percent of college graduates read an online paper on a daily basis, while only 11 percent of those with a high school education or less do so.

Moreover, the percentage of Americans who read a print newspaper on a typical day has dropped by about 40 percent since the early 1990s, while the proportion of those who watch the nightly network news on a regular basis also declined by one-half, eMarketer reported.

The demographic findings echoed those from the earlier study conducted by the Readership Institute, which found that those who read online newspaper tended to have higher education than those who do not, according to eMarketer.