The Philippine newspaper industry is healthy and growing, as a recent study by market research firm Synovate revealed a continued readership growth in the upscale market, BusinessWorld online reported Friday.

Synovate's global executive director, Steve Garton, announced yesterday that readership in A and B classes was up 64 percent from March to May. This comes on top of a 59 percent increase from November 2008 to January of this year.

"It's time to debunk the myth that newspapers are dying (here). They are not," he said.

The overall readership increase was slightly reduced with 34 percent growth for the most recent period next to 37 percent growth for the proceeding three month analysis. This drop was due to declines in the D and E segments, where lesser purchasing power exists compared with the more affluent categories.

"This is a good thing. In today's economy, advertisers are looking for efficient targeting of people. Print has an advantage because it is increasingly a target of the upper-socio," Garton said.

However, the Philippine print industry has shared similar advertising woes as its international counterparts. A Nielsen Media Research study revealed that print publications capture just 5 percent of an estimated P40.7 billion spent on advertising in the first quarter.

Synovate also discovered a 24 percent increase in office readership numbers, up from an 11 percent growth in the period before.

A bankruptcy court judge has accepted the Minneapolis Star Tribune's reorganisation plan, which could enable the paper to be independent of chapter 11 bankruptcy protection within the next few months, the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal reported.

The plan remains to be approved by creditors who will vote on whether or not to accept the proposed reorganisation that would give more than 95 percent of the company's stake to an investment group.

The newspaper is also expected to install a new board of directors and name a new publisher by the end of August.

The project should allow the paper to leave behind chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, taking a $100 million in debt with it.

An announcement yesterday by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel confirmed the acceptance of buyout offers by 29 full-time and five part-time staffers, Editor & Publisher reported.

Though no names have been released, several employees who opted for the buyout offer are suspected to be longtime staff members of the newspaper. Reports include veteran columnists, reporters and critics of the paper in the list of staff that will be leaving the paper.

The deadline to accept the buyout was Monday night, with layoffs to follow if not enough employees accept the deal. The buyouts mark a third attempt by the paper to reduce staff and costs. Greg Pearson of the newsroom employees union has reported that executives for the Journal Sentinel expect to have to cut "substantially more" positions.

A deal struck between Microsoft and Yahoo offers few advantages to newspapers in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, Ken Doctor wrote in a piece for iStockAnalyst.

Mike Silver, the Consortium's executive director, told Doctor "we would expect that with Yahoo now focused on display advertising, the response (to newspaper company needs) should be stronger."

"What the deal doesn't include is more traffic generation, a good Yahoo benefit, as it gives preference to newspaper content. No Microsoft preference in this deal," Doctor states.

The deal also does not include the right for consortium papers to use resources such as Yahoo's HotJobs site nor does it expand newspapers' local markets since Microsoft and Yahoo will "go their own ways in selling display advertising," leaving consortium papers out of the loop of Microsoft's local.

A local entrepreneur of in the Minnesota town of Willmar has launched a trilingual newspaper publishing in English, Spanish and Somali, the Post-Bulletin reported Wednesday. Marian Sanchez is the founder and president of La Gran America, and was encouraged to start her own paper after working on the now defunct Spanish version of Sauk Centre Herald, called El Heraldo.

The newspaper has opened a small operation with a circulation of 1,000 within the Willmar area, and Sanchez personally delivers the paper to other rural cities including as Alexandria, Spicer and Pelican Rapids.

Sanchez is also the newspaper's primary contributor, supplemented by half a dozen volunteer writers from the relative ethnic communities.

The newspaper's content is around 60 percent Spanish, 30 percent in English and 10 percent in Somali.

"This newspaper has a lot of stuff with Somali people," said Abdi Hussein, a Somali resident. "Some Somali people don't have information or news to know what's going on here in the United States, or Minnesota; that is why we like the newspaper."

Thus far Sanchez has personally funded the venture. "...if it generates or doesn't generate any money, we'll just have to wait and see where this goes, but in the meantime, that's what's most important, the satisfaction of helping people," she said. The eventual aim is a bi-monthly publication if the newspaper can source significant advertising revenue.

Texas weekly newspaper, the Northwest Tarrant County Times-Record, which served Saginaw and Lake Worth areas, printed its last issue on Wednesday, as the ad market and local competition left the paper starved for revenue, the Star-Telegram reported Wednesday.

Art Jones, who has published the paper with his wife Joan since 2001, listed the arrival new local newspaper The Eagle and two coupon mailing firms as the the catalyst for the Times-Record's closure.

Jones, who built the paper from an initial circulation of 600 copies per week to 2,500, said revenue first dropped in August last year and in February the newspaper had begun accumulating debt.

"We really didn't try to sell it," he said. "I talked to a couple of (newspaper) brokers. But I just didn't want to go through that exercise."

Independent Newspapers Inc., based in Eastern Michigan, will begin a citizen journalism programme for residents of Macomb County, Editor & Publisher reported Wednesday.

The Press has begun to receive regular contributions from citizens. At present, the group is fielding e-mails from interested citizens with the opportunity available to work on one of the Independent's publications including The Macomb Daily, and weeklies The Voice, The Armada Times, and the Advisor & Source Newspapers.

"They wanted to replicate some of the things they'd done at The Oakland Press (Journal Register daily based in Pontiac, Michigan), which has a really thriving citizen journalism program," Jeff Payne, editor at New Baltimore weekly paper The Voice, told E&P.

The contributing citizens selected will receive one day of training in late August or early September and will then be paired with a staff member.

"I really don't care if one person or 10 people get involved - if it improves our local news content, and means greater involvement with the community, it will be a success," Payne said, according to E&P.

Strikes planned to take place at the UK's Trinity Mirror newspapers in Birmingham on Thursday have been called off by the National Union of Journalists, Press Gazette reported.

The proposed strike was met with strong opposition from Trinity Mirror upper staff members, with managing director Georgina Harvey calling the decision to strike "reckless and negligent." However, the reason for the strike's cancellation is due not to its negative reception but rather to a confirmation on the part of the publisher that no posts would be job cuts at the Birmingham-based papers.

A statement issued by the NUJ said the union "worked closely with BPM Media management to avoid job losses and are relieved that no union members will be made compulsorily redundant this week."

Attributor, a start-up that offers ad revenue sharing services to newspapers and blogs, "wants to bring the ad networks into the mix, to allow them to be the revenue distributor that looks not only at the site that offered up the news story but also the news outlet that created the story," ZDNet Senior Editor Sam Diaz commented in his blog.

Diaz applauds the start-up's business model, saying the proactive approach to generating revenue from news aggregation is sorely lacking amongst newspaper executives who, according to Diaz, "knew only one way to respond: cry foul" when they saw their old business models being challenged.
Ultimately, Diaz writes that Attributor offers as "a smart idea that could be part of the overall transformation" of the new business models for newspapers, which must find a way to turn a profit from their aggregated content.

The New York Times referred to Attributor as "more carrot than stick." Although the start-up's plan faces legal obstacles, it has received the attention of The New York Times Co., the Washington Post Co., Hearst, MediaNews Group, Reuters, McClatchy and Conde Nast.

The New York Times Co. value increased the most since February of this year on the back of speculation of profit increase, leading a group of newspaper publishers with similar results, Boston.com reported Tuesday.

According to Edward Atorino, a New York-based analyst at Benchmark Co., the Times Co. will earn nine cents a share next year as profits rebound after a 2009 loss. The company surpassed all expectations when it posted significant second quarter profits after significant cost cuts at both The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
"The doomsday scenario no longer applies,'' Atorino said yesterday, according to Boston.com. "The quarter was bad, revenue was awful, but cost-cutting was remarkable. Some who thought they were going to go out of business have to buy stocks.''

Times Co. shares rose 16 percent to $7.71, its highest price since December. Gannett Co. also had significant value growth with a 12 percent gain to $6.52 a six month high. McClatchy Co., formerly forced into delisting from the NYSE, had a 19 percent gain to finish at $1.39.

The three publishers have watched their share prices decline for four straight years and have lost more than 80 percent of their value since 2004.

The UK's public broadcasting station, the BBC, will team up with four major national newspapers in order to provide video content for their online editions c21media.net reported.

The videos will be embedded in the sites of the participating papers; The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and Independent. Video content will appear along with the papers' own unique content on politics, business, science and technology.

The partnership is included in the BBC's "Project Marquee" which aims to "share content, expertise and technology in the name of public service."

Speaking of the new collaboration as well as the mounting pressure on the BBC to spread its wealth, Guy Ruddle, Telegraph's head of visuals said The Telegraph has "been waiting for the BBC to start sharing its content with us and this is definitely a step in the right direction in promoting partnerships."