The New York Times Co. has told regulators it might be selling shares and/or other securities in order to raise some seriously needed cash, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The Times has a $400 million payment on one of its two revolving lines of credit due in May, and is already set to borrow up to $225 million against its Manhattan headquarters building.

On Dec. 8, Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed that the publisher hired real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield Inc. to assist with refinancing through a mortgage or sale-leaseback agreement. The Times Co. headquarters, a 52-story skyscraper designed by architect Renzo Piano, is located on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, and is jointly owned with Forest City Ratner Cos. The Times moved into the new building in June 2007.

"While cash will buy the New York Times some breathing space, it hardly solves the long-term problems that are crushing the newspaper business," Reuters blogs reported.

Meanwhile, third-largest publisher in the United States has a remaining $366.3 million in its second line of credit, the bill on which is due in June 2011.

Following in the footsteps of newspapers like U.S.-based Orange County Register and France's Le Monde, Gannett-owned USA Today will now be available on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, mocoNews.net reported last week.

A monthly subscription to USA Today will cost US$11.99 and the first issue for sale launched Monday. The paper's Kindle December 26 issue was available for download for free. Single Kindle editions cost almost 75 cents for newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

USA Today is the 21st U.S. paper and the 28th paper around the world to be available on the Kindle reader, mocoNews.net reported. Kindle has gained popularity since its launch more than a year ago, but may be struggling with supply problems. Newer models, which cost $359, are currently out of stock and may be available within 8 to 10 weeks.

Sina Corp., which operates of the biggest Web portal in China, plans to expand beyond the Web. It will purchase Focus Media Holding Ltd.'s digital out-of-home advertising networks. The deal is worth about US$1.3 billion in stock, Bloomberg reported.

The deal will generate ad revenue from at least 120,000 flat-panel TV screens in office buildings and public spaces in more than 90 cities.

Online advertising contributed 73 percent of the company's sales last quarter, according to Bloomberg.

The deal has been approved by both companies and is expected to be completed in the first half of 2009, Bloomberg reported. Focus Media will keep its online ad department, its movie theatre ad network and some billboards.

According to Bloomberg, Sina will issue 47 million new ordinary shares, which Focus Media will offer to stockholders after the deal closed.

Five media companies have expressed interest in buying some or all of the daily and weekly Connecticut newspapers put on the auction block by Journal Register Publishing Co., the Associated Press reported Monday.

"Just as with any negotiation that we have with any business, we don't put the specifics of who we're discussing with out on the table until such time that it is appropriate," Joan McDonald, Connecticut's economic development commissioner, told the AP after a private meeting.

The state's Department of Economic and Community Development sent letters at the beginning of December to 16 media companies detailing Journal Register's plans to close daily newspapers The Herald (New Britain, Conn.) and The Bristol Press, as well as 11 weeklies, if a buyer does not come forward by January 12, the AP reported in an article posted by the Hartford Courant.

Journal Register, based in Pennsylvania, also hired a company in New Mexico to help locate possible buyers, according to the AP.

McDonald said her department may be able to assist buyers financially or technologically, such as low interest loans or training, as it does with any business.

The top three mobile phone operators in Thailand, AIS Dtac and True Move, are together introducing a system that will allow their customers to block unwanted SMS messages, including spam, the Bangkok Post reported last week.

The "smart pool mobile number" system is planned to be unveiled by the beginning of 2009.

To enroll in the system, a customer would need to call his operator's call centre and request that unsolicited text messages be blocked, no matter where they are coming from. Customers currently only have the power to block messages sent through their own networks, according to the Bangkok Post article, posted by AsiaMedia.

The mobile operators have created the system in response to criticism from mobile owners that their privacy was invaded when the Democrat party sent SMS messages to people asking for the support of new Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, without their consent, the Bangkok Post reported.

Newspaper insert magazine Parade added 71 new newspaper partners this year to its national distribution, an additional circulation of 2.42 million, MediaPost reported Tuesday.

The magazine's total circulation is now at 33 million, and Conde Nast-owned Parade claims it has a readership of 73 million. It is now inserted into 470 newspapers across the United States.

Of the 71 new newspapers, including the Napa Valley Register (California), Sioux City Journal (Iowa) and Journal Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), Parade stated that 53 of them switched from USA Weekend, another top newspaper insert magazine, according to MediaPost.

Most of the new partners are in smaller cities and towns, which are "faring surprisingly well" in terms of circulation and ad revenue, compared to their larger metro daily counterparts, MediaPost reported.

Local news is the topic that draws most people to newspapers, while most TV viewers are usually attracted by international topics, and online users by headlines, according to a Pew study in 2006, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2007 reported.

About 35 percent of the survey respondents said local news is the most interesting subject to them in newspapers, while 28 percent and 21 percent picked headline and sports news, respectively. Thirteen percent said international news is the most interesting.

Among TV audiences, 24 percent said international news is the most interesting. "Headline" was picked by 23 percent of respondents, while "local news" was chosen by 20 percent. Another 12 percent and 11 percent chose politics/elections and weather as the most interesting topics on TV, according to the Pew study.

On the Web, headlines were the most interesting topics, picked by 27 percent of respondents. Another 22 percent picked international instead. Sports, politics/elections and business were also picked by 15, 13 and 11 percent, respectively, according to the report, World Digital Media Trends 2007, released by SFN and the World Association of Newspapers.

The New York Times Co. announced Wednesday that advertising sales plummeted 20.9 percent in November, the biggest drop of the year, due to the global recession, MarketWatch reported.

Online advertising was also weak, down 4 percent during the month.

Shares of The New York Times declined 4.5 percent to US$6.04 early on Wednesday. It hit an historical low of $4.95 in November, down more than 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

The decline was due to "weakness in the studio entertainment, national automotive, book and financial services categories, which offset growth in technology, media and advocacy advertising," according to the company. Retail advertising revenue also decreased on lower department store, mass market and fashion/jewellery advertising, MarketWatch reported.

The Times Co. experienced a sales drop of 16.2 percent in October. The company's New England Media Group, which publishes the Boston Globe newspaper, saw ad sales go down 23.3 percent while the NYT media group declined 21.2 percent and the regional media group was down 22.2 percent.

However, circulation revenue rose 4.2 percent for the month, according to Market Watch.

The U.S. presidential elections at the beginning of November sent more people in the United Kingdom online seeking quality news Web sites, causing the Times Online, Indepndent.co.uk and Guardian.co.uk to all record boosts in traffic, MediaGuardian reported Tuesday.

Guardian saw traffic reach 26 million uniques for the first time, while the Times Online and Independent.co.uk each saw traffic increase by more than 5 percent month-on-month.

The Guardian network, including GuardianAmerica.com for U.S. audiences, saw unique numbers reach 26,043,707, an increase of 0.26 percent month-on-month, and a 48.8 percent increase from the same time in 2007, MediaGuardian reported.

Meanwhile, Times Online's traffic reached 21,598,720, a month-on-month rise of 5.5 percent, and year-on-year increase of 75.8 percent.

Independent.co.uk's traffic was up 5.7 percent from the previous month, to 8,888,221 uniques, a 92.4 percent increase from the same time in 2007, according to MediaGuardian.

German-based business networking firm Xing announced Friday that it acquired U.S. social network Socialmedian for US$7.5 million, Computer Business Review (CBR) reported. The social network is expected to have news networking as a result of the deal.

Users may join "news networks" focusing on different issues and may receive updated news stories as well as share the content within their social network, CBR reported. The news articles are collected from around 19,000 outlets (such as Digg, Twitter and Google Reader) and are then filtered according to a user's social networking contracts.

Almost 510,000 of Xing's users pay nearly $90 per year for a premium account with full networking capabilities. Xing's revenue between January and September this year was $32 million, CBR reported. Socialmedian's mostly professional user base adds up to 7 million people.

The company's main business social network competitor is LinkedIn. Since 2006, Xing has turned its attention towards acquiring "smaller, country-specific" business networks in Europe. It has already bought Spain's eConozco and Neurona and has merged Turkey's Cember into its own network in 2007, according to CBR.

Daytime is the prime time for online video, according to Nielsen Online's October VideoCensus report.

About 65 percent of online video viewers streamed at least one piece of content in October, during the traditional nine-to-five working hours in weekdays, compared to 51 percent who did so on weekends from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., Media Week reported.

One of the catalysts for the heavy concentration during working hours is that 96 percent of those people have broadband access, said Nielsen.

The third most popular streaming time is 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday, when 49 percent of online viewers streamed at least one clip in October.

The traditional TV prime-time (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) during weekdays also ranked high, with 43 percent of viewers watching video online during that time, Media Week reported.

Although the average online video viewer seems to be consuming longer, the overall universe seems to reach the plateau, according to Nielsen Online's latest VideoCensus report. The number of total viewers dropped slightly from 124,023 million uniques in September to 120,711 million in October, while the total number of video streams remained flat.

However, average time spent per viewer was up by 10 percent, from 156.4 minutes in September to 171.7 in October, according to Media Week.