Penn State University is launching a pilot programme in a partnership with USA Today, which distributes its "e-edition" of the publication to all students, faculty and staff, the Daily Collegian reported.

Students can also choose to sign up and receive their e-edition through "Campus Buzz," an e-mail notification.

"We want to know how people react to the online edition," said Nancy Gromen, web developer in education resource development for USA Today Education.

The e-edition has different features than these on the newspaper's Web site, she said. The Campus Buzz can also direct readers to the entire story through a direct link.The new programme will be evaluated in the spring semester next year, compared to the hard copies distributed on campus. "Changes will be made based on the evaluation," she said.

According to journalism professor Russell Frank, the e-edition is a positive effort. He said the numbers of hard-copy circulation and online registration may not truly reflect the total amount of students reading what's there.

"Any mechanism that gets the news into students' hands or in front of their eyes is worth a try," he said. "But the interest has to be there.

An Armenian trial court hearing a breach of contract complaint settled the suit not by ordering that the debt be repaid, but by ordering the newspaper to cease operations altogether, Armtown reported Tuesday.

The newspaper, Tchorrord Ishkhanuntyun, changed hands and is publishing under a new masthead in the face of the order, a reporter for PanARMENIAN is quoted as saying. However, the plaintiff, Gind, is seeking enforcement of the injunction obtained against former owner Ogostos Ltd. to extend to the newspaper's new publisher, Koghmnaki Andzants M.

The original complaint, seeking payment of a debt, apparently never requested judicial relief in the form of the newspaper's outright closure. The amount of the litigated debt was not immediately clear from available reports on the incident.

U.S. media company Hearst Corp. may have a good reason for choosing an investment banker as its new chief financial officer: it has a US$1 billion "war chest," the New York Post reported, citing "insiders" as sources.

Hiring Mitchell Scherzer as the new CFO signals Chairman and CEO Frank Bennack's "more aggressive acquisition strategy" as he seeks new revenue streams.

Despite the corporation being debt-free, maintaining profitability and revenues of more than $7 billion, Hearst's newspapers have experienced difficulty in the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle was nearly closed earlier this year, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer switched to online-only. However, Hearst's magazines, which include Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, have fared better than those at Condé Nast or Time Inc.

According to paidContent, Hearst will likely look to buy technology firms over editorial properties. It has already invested in E-Ink and an e-reader with FirstPaper.

Internet ad spending in the United States decreased for the third consecutive quarter this year, down 4 percent to US$6.4 billion year-over-year, according to new data from IDC.

Worldwide online ad dollars slightly dropped 1 percent to $14.7 billion over the period.

Although still in decline, those figures showed an improvement compared to the prior quarter's drops of 7 percent and 5.6 percent, in the United States and worldwide, respectively. IDC said online advertising may have begun to bounce back, and it expected the U.S. market to slip again in the fourth quarter, only by about 1 percent, before actual growth is expected to return in the first and second quarters of 2010, MediaPost reported.

Other researchers also predict a rebound in 2010 for online advertising. eMarketer revised its online ad forecast for 2009 downward and expects a moderate growth in the next two years, with spending up 5.6 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, according to MediaPost.

An Iraqi court has ordered The Guardian newspaper to pay Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki UK £52,000 for an April article which characterized the new leader as "increasingly authoritarian," The Guardian yesterday reported. The ruling is subject yet to several appeals.

Global advocates of freedom of the press contend the lawsuit is part of a larger attack on impartial journalism throughout the region, The Guardian today reported. The prime minister's administration has apparently sued four organisations in the last year, forcing out local news agency Al-Jazeera for what the administration called anti-government bias.

The technique of silencing reporters through civil process has come to be known in English-speaking countries as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or SLAPP, according to Reporters Without Borders. Such process usually takes the form of a defamation action carried out with the aim of forcing the target, a news media or NGO, to either fold or retract because mounting legal costs or the threat of a ruinous damages award, the organisation said.

New Zealand News UK, which suspended print publication in July, has officially sounded the death knell to its paper operations, RadioLIVE reported today.

The weekly tabloid had been published in London for expatriates of New Zealand since 1927, The New Zealand Herald today reported. The newspaper, which launched an Internet edition in 2006, will still publish via the Web, The Otago Daily News today reported.

In a development lauded by the printer as a success, The Australian newspaper - published also in England to satisfy expats - has joined the digital revolution that is overtaking the rest of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. holdings in the United Kingdom. That is, The Australian will soon be printed at a Stroma plant in London recently automated to conduct the printing process digitally. As a result, Aussies abroad will receive their hardcopy newspapers as many as six hours earlier than their countrymen back home.

The Australian's transition to digital printing follows a similar switch in New York. News & Tech reported in October that The Wall Street Journal, historically printed at mammoth analog presses in South Brunswick, New Jersey, has converted two of its own presses to digital production and will outsource the rest of its newspaper demand to local printers.

Digital printing is in its infancy, except in Malta, where Miller Newsprint Ltd., has been churning out The Financial Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Express, The Daily Mirror and The Daily and Sunday Telegraph on a Kodak VL4200 for some time, News & Tech reported Thursday.

Independent News & Media bondholders today voted in a meeting to back plans for restructuring the Irish publishing group, RTÉ Business reported. A plan that would give bondholders a 46 percent stake in the group will be voted on Nov. 26 by shareholders.

"INM welcomes this essential endorsement of the restructuring and anticipates that the restructuring will now be completed on schedule and prior to the year end," the company said in a statement, according to Reuters.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade stated in his blog today that INM's CEO, "Gavin O'Reilly, is on the verge of comprehensively defeating the troublesome shareholder Denis O'Brien." (Note: O'Reilly is also president of WAN-IFRA, of which SFN is part). O'Brien has previously demanded to hold several emergency meetings and has bid to unseat two board members, a move shareholders overwhelmingly voted against.

The U.S. state of New Hampshire has taken the unprecedented move of acting as guarantor to a private bank loan on behalf of a local newspaper changing hands, The Associated Press yesterday reported. The decision to underwrite The (Claremont) Eagle Times was approved by the state's legislature Wednesday without comment.

The Valley News of Lebanon suggested Sunday that the fact that the very government which The Eagle Times is assigned to cover bailed it out of a dire financial crisis may produce an irreconcilable conflict of interest, precluding independent and objective coverage.

News of the unorthodox partnership was made public by former Claremont City Councilman Jim Sullivan at The Sullivan Report, which bills itself as being "dedicated to providing the taxpayers with 'transparency' to city government." The item was also briefly mentioned in Sunday's Nashua Telegraph in a summary of the council's meeting.

Even as Rupert Murdoch today announced his more aggressive stance against online news aggregators, those on the other side of the aisle suggested that more, not less engagement with search engines might be a better solution.

Chris Silver Smith, director of optimisation strategies for KeyRelevance, today wrote that other than the biggest players in the dailies market, the newspapers he frequents to help with projects are usually not optimised for search engines. "It's hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other," he stated in his Search Engine Land column, using the example of newspapers' mixed feelings toward Google.

Smith points out that not long ago, newspapers perceived yellow page companies to be as much of a threat as they feel Google is today. Becoming more tech-savvy is the best tool, and currently newspapers have at their fingertips the possibilities of monetizing archives, as well as making on-site search better.

For search engines' spiders to better crawl, index, process and rank a page, Los Angeles Public Relations Firms recommends a few basics for Web sites looking to optimise:

News of the World, known for publishing salacious details of celebrities' lives, has been cleared of charges it hacked the mobile telephones of various subjects in search of bombshell coverage, Agence France-Presse today reported.

The investigation by the UK Press Complaints Commission followed The Guardian's report in July that Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers, which publishes News of the World, had paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of the tabloid's repeated use of criminal methods to get stories.

In August 2006, a News of the World editor and a private investigator were jailed after members of the royal family told Scotland Yard that certain stories about them must have been sourced from voicemail messages on their mobile phones, The Guardian today reported.