Dietmar Schantin, director at WAN-IFRA, spoke today about the integration of print and digital media. The interaction between the two is vital for future newspapers in order for them to stay successful.

All media is being used now to get the news out as quickly as possible. He explained the importance of each media and how it relates to and relies on another.

Schantin also described the four most prominent types of newsrooms by the way they are organised and prioritised. They are the Multiple Media Newsroom, the Cross Media Newsroom, the Media Integrated Newsroom and the Audience Targeted Newsroom. Each type differs mainly in the structure but all of the structures focus on the same goal, he said.

The multiple media newsroom uses separate editorial units for both the print and online news. Journalists in these newsrooms often do their own reporting and research.

The cross media newsroom relies on the concept that journalists provide content for all types of media under their channel. Each channel may have different goals and specifications but the journalist will still provide the content for all media.

The Media Integrated Newsroom integrates the complete news flow from print to digital, beginning to end. One journalist is not in charge of the news flow as in the first two newsrooms. Instead, a section head is responsible for the news gathered.

Are Stokstad (Norway), executive vice president at A-Pressen, discussed that electronic reading devices are now making it necessary to build a strategy for newspapers that combines both the traditional newspaper and the business modelfor e-reading.

Large investments have been made to expand the opportunities for online newpapers. Social networking sites have become a large part of the generation of these new online papers.

"This past year 3,000 print pages originated in social media. Next year we hope to increase this number to 30,000," he said.

Social networking sites create groups of people interested in similar topics and activities. Many online newspapers are targeting their articles towards these groups, increasing online readership.

For more coverage of the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum please follow us on Twitter (#WANindia09) and on our sister publications editorsweblog.org and http://www.ifra.net/blogs/wan-congress-2009.

Over the next few days, the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog will be providing extensive coverage of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress and 16th World Editors Forum, working with our sister publications, the Editors Weblog and the dedicated WAN-IFRA multimedia conference blog.

You can follow our coverage on Twitter @NewspaperWorld and @WANindia2009, using the hashtag #WANindia09, or on Facebook at the conference page.

Looking to exploit the circulation spike that immediately precedes early Christmas shopping, several major U.S. newspapers will charge Sunday prices for tomorrow's edition, Bloomberg yesterday reported.

Thanksgiving is not known in the industry as a big news day, per se. However, the issue is packed with retailers' advertisements in advance of Black Friday, marketed as the official start of the holiday shopping season, according to The Detroit Free Press.

And, apparently, this year's premium newspaper price phenomenon is not an isolated incident but part of a growing trend over time, Monroe on a Budget said yesterday. The Detroit (Michigan, United States) Free Press, which according to Poynter Online recently doubled its single-copy rates, will charge US$1.50 for metropolitan editions and $2 for outlying areas.

Source: Newspaper Association of America

Playboy Enterprises Inc. will outsource publication of its magazine to American Media Inc., Agence France Presse reported today. Outsourcing all functions besides editorial is being done to cut costs, and the company stated it hopes the move will bring the magazine back to profitability in 2011.

AMI is the fourth-largest magazine publisher in the United States. The Chicago-based Playboy is expected to lose about US$8 million by the end of this year, and $5 million in 2010, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. About 25 jobs will be lost in the restructuring. Circulation, production, advertising sales, marketing and other services will be handled by AMI, The Associated Press reported.

Following a scathing series about Scientology by the St. Petersburg Times, high-ranking members of the controversial institution have arranged to buy a sister publication of the newspaper, The New York Times yesterday reported.

The impending purchase of Governing magazine, now owned by St. Petersburg's parent, raised some concern following an unrelated flap about religious indoctrination at the church-owned Washington Times, The New York Times said.

The Scientologists buying the magazine told The New York Times their religious affiliation has no bearing on the publication's future performance.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, the sale of Governing would be the third Washington affiliate Times Publishing has sold in the last two years. In July, it sold Congressional Quarterly, a profitable D.C.-based publication, to British-owned Roll Call. Last year, Times Publishing sold CQ's books division, CQ Press, to Sage Publications of Thousand Oaks, Calif.

U.S. newspapers are losing print subscribers, but some are seeing circulation numbers rise, The Associated Press reported Sunday, in an article titled "Newspaper circulation may be worse than it looks."

Some newspapers' overall circulation is on the upswing, as the Audit Bureau of Circulations' new standards allow newspapers to count electronic edition sales, those on a subscriber-only Web site or the the digital version of the print product. The standards sometimes also allow publications to count a subscriber twice if a bundled subscription - both print and electronic - is sold to that subscriber.

Critics of the new auditing standards say newspapers are cheating, while others say that as newspapers adapt and grow digitally, ignoring all the readership that happens across digital platforms would be unfair. Many reports focused on the case of the Las Vegas Review Journal, which saw circulation increase by 6.6 percent this year, despite weekday print sales dropping by 12,000 copies.

Photo: Flickr/MIT-Libraries
"It's important to show advertisers we are fighting the good fight and using other platforms to reach readers," Steve Coffeen, circulation director of the Review-Journal, told The AP.

Microsoft recently offered News Corp. an undisclosed sum to make its articles unsearchable by Microsoft's chief competitor: Google, The Financial Times yesterday reported. The rumour comes even as News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has complained that Google shamelessly steals his media company's wares, The New York Times reported yesterday.

Various analysts have observed that newspapers have always been free to shield their products from indexing by Google. Shielding requires coding a no-index label into material published via Internet, like sewing a tag into the neckband of a sweater.

The worry has been whether readers will actively reach for news when it cannot be easily located. Thus, to shut out other search engines in favour of Microsoft's Bing, rather than withdraw from all sites altogether, might help both parties to any contemplated agreement.
The Financial Times further noted in its article that Microsoft's willingness to pay nearly any price to amass Google's share of the search engine market bodes well for the ailing newspaper business.

Release of an electronic chalkboard from MacIntosh has been postponed so many times that PC World Thursday joined other gadget analysts in speculating that the much-anticipated product might be dead in the water. However, neither repeated design delays nor rumours that the project will ultimately be abandoned has stopped Conde Nast magazines from proceeding with development of Apple Tablet-compatible editions by pdf-maker Adobe, Mac Rumors said Saturday.

The Tablet's latest slow-up was attributed to a switch in subparts by DigiTimes on Thursday. Nevertheless, Conde Nast has prepared tablet-ready editions - for Apple, or its competitors - starting with a digital version of Wired, according to All Things Digital. To cement its commitment, Wired followed that report with a video published Saturday demonstrating the concept.

What happens when there's more work to do than one editorial staff can handle? In the case of The Hartford Courant, the largest newspaper in Connecticut, United States, the answer is "aggregation," which on Thursday turned into a plagiarism lawsuit, filed by a smaller, family-owned newspaper, The Associated Press reported.

The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Connecticut, is suing The Courant, stating The Courant saved money by cutting back on local staff, only to publish the Journal Inquirer's reports under Courant reporters' bylines. Last summer, The Courant also began aggregating local news and summarising or re-writing the articles, and then attributing them to the original news outlets.

The Tribune Co., which owns The Courant, defended the practice, saying it is admissible, as long as the reports aren't contained in the print edition. However, in September, Courant CEO and Publisher Richard Graziano apologised for the practice, according to The AP.

As with other Tribune newspapers, The Courant has undergone a large number of layoffs, leaving just a skeleton crew to cover the news, leading editors to scramble for enough coverage, according to the Baltimore City Paper.

The lawsuit lists 11 local news stories that the Journal Inquirer says The Courant took from the Journal Inquirer and published as original content.

The Financial Times will lift a year-long ban on raises and also increase its minimum wage for entry-level journalists in the new year, The Guardian reported yesterday.

FT Managing Editor Dan Bogler was quoted by The Guardian as saying that instituting the modest increase of 2 percent "balances a decent reward for everyone's efforts with a need to be careful about how far we increase our fixed costs."

The announcement comes a month after FT's parent, Pearson, revealed expectations that the worst of the recent economic crisis was over.

"In FT Publishing, the Financial Times continued to face a weak market for financial and corporate advertising in the third quarter, but it is benefiting from its long-term strategy of earning premium revenues from users for valued content in print and online," CEO Marjorie Scardino was quoted as saying by Fitz & Jen in October.

In 2007, FT instituted a firewall around its online edition, which boasts a paying base of more than 121,000 subscribers. Paid online subscriptions are up 22 percent from last year.