Fairfax Media, New Zealand's largest media company, will combine all of its publications into one online home as the Fairfax Media Digital Edition, the Taranaki Daily News reported Monday.

Fairfax Media publishes nine daily newspapers, the country's two national Sunday papers and more than 50 community newspapers around New Zealand. All the daily papers, the two Sunday editions, more than 30 of the community papers and real estate guides will be amalgamated on one Web site as Digital Edition.

The Digital Edition of the daily and the Sunday newspapers will be offered in 12 major foreign languages and will be able to read itself out loud. The company plans to offer these services to community editions in the near future.

A study by University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication found that 22 percent of Internet users have cancelled their newspaper subscriptions now that they can find the same content online, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

However, the study also found that newspapers would be missed. Sixty-one percent of Internet users who also read newspapers in print would rue the disappearance of the print publication. This is a 56 percent increase from a year earlier.

Earlier this week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released figures that showed an average sales decline of 7.1 percent for the sixth month period ending March 31. The authors of the Annenberg survey suggest that their results show that this decline will be a permanent trend, the AP reported.

Jeffery Cole, head of the Annenberg School's Center for a Digital Future, 10 years ago predicted a long and prosperous future for print newspapers. He now accepts this hypothesis as optimistic, according to the AP. He further predicted that print newspapers would be a thing of the past within the next few years, citing the acceleration of the advertising decline by the economic climate as the catalyst for the death of the print format.

The survey, conducted from April 9 to June 30, 2008, had a sample size of 2,030 people aged 12 and over, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent.

American Community Newspapers, publisher of smaller newspapers across four U.S. markets including the Still Water Gazette in Minneapolis and Plano Star Courier in Texas, announced on Tuesday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Editor & Publisher reported Wednesday.

"While we have proactively managed our business by right sizing our cost structure and driving efficiencies to maximizing our cash flows, our operations are not able to support our current capital structure," Chairman and CEO Gene Carr said in a prepared statement.

The filing lists assets valued between US$50 million to $100 million with debt at around $107 million. Last Autumn ACN was delisted from the American Stock Exchange after its stock sat at only 1 cent per share, E&P reported.

ACN publishes 86 newspapers in Dallas, Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio and Northern Virginia areas, according to an Associated Press article Wednesday.

ACN said its secured creditors would provide a $5 million debtor in possession creditor facility. The creditors are the "contemplated stalking horse bidder for ACN's assets," ACN stated. With this lending support, ACN will attempt to reorganise its debt under the 363 sale process, freeing its newspapers and other properties from debt, E&P reported.

New Digital's recent product, First Impressions, will allow ads to be seen by Internet users who find stories through links or search engines, The Australian reported.

Previously users only saw ads when they went directly to the Web site, whereas the new technology provides what New Digital's chief commercial officer Ed Smith described as "maximum reach for online advertisers."

Smith told the Australian First Impressions "ensures that you capture everyone within that domain, not just the home page." The new product will be launched this week and is priced at $50 for each 100 users who see an ad.

May 7 marks the launch of new Portuguese newspaper, 'i', by media group Sojormedia, Editor & Publisher reported on Monday.

The paper will utilise publishing suite Milenium cross-media software created by Madrid-based Protecmedia. Sojormedia hopes the technology will help to build a completely integrated online and print newsroom.

The newspaper is attempting to combine cost cutting measures and a high quality service, and plans to provide each journalist with mobile multimedia kits, enabling image capturing and sound recording for both online and print publication whilst on the job, E&P reported.

The paper will use the Protecmedia LSO 3G communications protocol that allows journalists to connect to the editorial system while in the field.

The newspaper will employ 70 journalists in various areas, and the newsroom will be equipped with 16 TV screens to keep staff up to date with latest breaking news, according to E&P.

Asian newspaper conference Publish Asia, originally scheduled for May in Bangkok, has been cancelled due to the recent political turbulence in Thailand, The Straits Times reported Monday.

The newspaper summit will instead be held in Chennai, India, in September, said world publishing organisation IFRA. The relocation is due to "the recent turmoil in Bangkok triggering travel restrictions there by many countries" combined with the global recession.

The seminar, now set for September 23-25, will now be combined with the annual IFRA India conference and expo, originally set to be held in Hyderabad.

The collaboration of the events in Chennai "will benefit our stakeholders, the newspapers and the suppliers active in Asia, Middle East and Indian subcontinent," said Thomas Jacob, IFRA's managing editor for the greater Asia-Pacific region.

Several Boston business moguls have been approached regarding the purchase of the Boston Globe; however, little interest has been received by the struggling paper, the Boston Herald reported on Tuesday.

Globe owner the New York Times Co. said it expects the Globe register a loss of around US$85 million this year on top of $50 million loss in 2008. The Times Co. has threatened the newspaper with sale unless it can get $20 million in concessions from its unions before the end of this week.

Herb Chambers, a local auto businessman, told the Boston Herald he was offered the opportunity to buy the Globe but turned down the offer. "If we were still big advertisers in the Globe, maybe it would make sense, but it would be an expensive proposition. I really don't have any interest."

John Fish, the head of Suffolk Construction, said business leaders in Boston have discussed "whether someone would step in and buy it." Fish told the Boston Herald that although he hopes the paper will find a local buyer, it will not be him.

Robert Kraft, owner of NFL team the New England Patriots, was offered up as a potential purchaser but was said to be uninterested after a Kraft family source revealed he "kicked the tires and ran away," according to the Boston Herald.

The Times Co. originally bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and valued it at around $600 million a couple of years ago. The current price tag is at about $130 million.

Former reporters for Newark's Star-Ledger are following the lead of Rocky Mountain News reporters and starting a Web site Editor & Publisher reported.

The site, NewJerseyNewsroom.com, is founded by 40 Star-Ledger reporters who opted to take the paper's buyout offer last fall, which afforded a year's salary. So far the site is counting an average of 10,000 visits each week. Its content ranges from original local reporting to links to other news sites, such as the Star-Ledger itself.

According to former Star-Ledger sports editor Matt Romanoski, the idea for a Web site was been conceived early on, "even before the buyouts were made," E&P reported.

Romanoski explained that "once everyone took the buyout, each of us went a different direction to recruit hires, find funding and look for online connections."

In these early stages, staffers are depending on their severance pay in lieu of salaries, while counting on some revenue from the site's Google ads, according to E&P.

Compared with last year, newspaper circulation has declined by more than 7 percent, The New York Times reported. The news comes on the heels of a recent study's findings that online readership has gone up by 10 percent.

The only major U.S. newspaper to not report a decline in circulation was The Wall Street Journal, which posted a 0.6 percent increase. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a drop of 20.6 percent for The New York Times. Analysis also showed that Sunday circulation has dropped by 5.37 percent.

The decreasing circulation marks an accelerated decline in the industry - the 7.1 percent drop follows findings of 4.6 and 3.6 percent drops for the two previous six-month periods.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, called the circulation figures "not very good, and probably a little worse than expected" and added that he anticipated a drop of approximately 5.5 percent, The New York Times reported.

The BBC is close to reaching cooperative agreements with a number of local newspapers and TV and radio stations, Media Guardian reported Sunday. The national broadcaster is set to reveal deals with local papers that allows free access to the BBC's online video content for their Web sites, use of the BBC's school of journalism and allowing rivals to utilise its iPlayer technology.

The proposals were announced Tuesday at an industry summit hosted by culture secretary Andy Burnham. The summit was called in the hope of securing the future of local papers who face an uncertain future as the global recession continues to reduce advertising revenue.

"The industry needs to pull together to weather the financial storm. While the BBC is also facing significant economic challenges, it can play a valuable role in underpinning public service broadcasting, and in helping to ensure wider choice and diversity, at a time when the industry is grappling with huge strategic challenges," a senior BBC source told MediaGuardian.

The sharing of resources was proposed earlier in the year but senior BBC sources have said an agreement is close to being reached. The deal is set to be mirrored on a similar arrangement already underway between the BBC and competing public service network ITV.

The American version of PRWeek has induced an awkward oxymoron as advertising decline forces it into monthly publication, The New York Times reported Sunday. This week's issue will be the last as a weekly production and the last as a tabloid size magazine. The publication's Web site will also switch to a subscription model.

Regarding the now incongruous title, publishing director Julia Hood said, "We definitely had a debate about that, but the PRWeek brand is very strong and we're very attached to it."

Hood said the title was already unsuitable, given the daily updates of the magazines Web site.

"PRWeek was, to a certain extent, a bit nostalgic long before this change," she told The New York Times. "We might as well have called it PRDaily."

The new monthly print edition will also condense its format from its current tabloid size to that of a regular magazine. The annual subscription price will remain the same at US$198.

PRWeek's online operation will switch to a subscription model. Hood told The New York Times that although the site's traffic continues to grow, "our subscriber base has not, and our subscribers deserve the best content we have.