Results matching “newspaper adver”

With all the recent developments in media consumption on mobile devices, from state of the art e-readers and the sleek iPad to the advent of countless newspaper iPhone apps, it is no wonder technology has taken center stage among news companies.

Mercedes Bunz from Media Guardian spoke to executives from The New York Times and CNN, companies who have built remarkable online presences, about how to keep up with technology companies who usually figure among the biggest sources for news on the Internet.

Mecom, the European newspaper publisher most prolific in Denmark, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands, released its online paid content strategy today along with dismal fourth quarter results.  Despite a total 28 percent fall in profits for 2009, David Montgomery, Mecom's chief executive, is optimistic about the company's future.

"This last year has been an advertising crisis, not a newspaper crisis," he was quoted as saying, going on to emphasize the need for more online advertising revenue.

Montgomery's outlook is reflected in their pay strategy, which aims to increase revenue from paid online content and online advertisements by 100 million euros over the next three years.  In addition, Mecom hopes to increase unique users on its websites by about 20 percent by the end of 2012, vastly increasing its current unique usership of 32 million.

ABC recently announced plans to initiate a paywall for some of its online content starting this June, hoping to alleviate some of its financial troubles and increase revenue.  The announcement comes in the wake of ABC's restructuring plans and its decision to eliminate 300 to 400 jobs through buyout propositions.

ABC's initiation of a paywall should come as no surprise to those watching media news over the past year.  Beginning with the success of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal's moves to paid content, NewsCorporation, MediaNews and the New York Times followed in their path with plans to erect paywalls by 2011.  Just this week, the Washington Post announced its launch of Capital Business, a business weekly for  subscribers only.

These changes result from a steep decline in ad revenue for online newspapers over the past year, with American newspapers earning 17% less from advertising on the web than they had a year earlier, according to the Economist.  The Washington Post alone lost four percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009, and new paid content plans hope to alleviate some of the financial stress of the past year.

Heading up the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, an independent investigation looking at the future of public life, Geoff Mulgan has branded the majority of online news as little more that  "recycled 'churnalism'", the Guardian reports. To combat this, the commission has proposed a tax on the likes of Google and websites using news that they themselves have not produced. It is estimated that the tax could generate £100m a year, which would be distributed amongst local newspapers feeling the pinch.

Journalists in China will have to brush up on their communist history if they hope to continue reporting the news. China's print media censor is planning to introduce a new qualification exam for journalists as the government tries to exert further control over news outlets, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday.

Li Dongdong, the deputy director at the General Administration of Press and Publication confirmed on Wednesday that that qualification exam would resemble the test taken by civil servants, and that all aspiring journalists would be required to take it before applying for a reporting job.

Under the new guidelines, the Communist Party's stance on journalism would be required reading for students studying journalism.

The "Year of the Paywall" is upon us and in a time where most newspapers seem to be gearing up to build one around their websites - the New York Times and the News Corporation Wapping publications are just a couple of examples - some executives believe there is still room for other revenue models to coexist with paid content.   

The head of digital media at News Corporation, Jonathan Miller, told delegates at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that "dual revenue streams" are likely to co-exist as media organizations try ways of making money online, according to Guardian.

The Media Management Center will be teaching the Media Executive Leadership Program from July 19 to 31 on the Northwestern University campus in  Evanston, Illinois.

The program was launched last summer to train media executives from all fields in strategy, leadership, innovation and integration. Mike Smith, Executive Director of the Media Management Center said that based on the responses of the participants and their instructors, he believes this was the most successful program in 20 years of teaching media executives.

The Center is looking for media executives from a variety of content platforms - television, newspaper, magazine, radio, digital, interactive, new media or advertising. Specific job functions or level of expertise are not that important; but they should be leaders - or potential leaders - who are facing new challenges and being asked to develop new strategies.

For more information about the Media Executive Leadership Program see here.

When newspapers aren't grappling with the question of how to monetise online content, they are most likely battling against the hostile economic climate and advertising revenue downturn. Then, there is the age-old question of how to deal with competitors: Newspapers may be united in the preservation of print, but as the following story illustrates, each newspaper is its own separate entity:  

The SF Weekly will be forced to pay rival publication San Francisco Bay $21 million in damages, after a court ruling found the former guilty of lowering the costs of its advertising space with the intent of putting its rival out of business, The San Francisco Chronicle has reported.

La Derniere Heure, a Belgian daily newspaper, treated readers to a special 3D edition of their paper Tuesday. Those who obtained copies were given 3D glasses making advertisements and images come to life. This is the first time a European newspaper has used 3D technology in a publication. 

In Janowo, an 850-person village in north eastern Poland, on a Monday last month, a dozen people - mostly teenagers or over 40s - were gathering in a multi-activity meeting hall. They were listening to Igor Hrywna, a journalist at Gazeta Olsztynska, the dominant newspaper in this "Warmia-Mazury voivodship" (Varmia-Masuria). That day he left his base in the regional capital of Olsztyn to meet this group for the third time in one month. With his assistance, they are learning how to contribute to the recently launched hyperlocal website janowo.wm.pl, covering the 3,000 people "gmina" (commune) centered on Janowo, one of the smallest of the region.

"There are fewer than 120 broadband Internet subscribers today. Our goal by the end of the year is to have at least 6000 unique users", explains Hrywna, who supervises Gazeta Olsztynska's commune portals. "To achieve this, we are organizing two to three hour long training sessions for citizen journalists. I also learn from them!" The training for citizen journalists always begins with the easiest things, like sending pictures with a short description. It includes how to search and browse in the website, how to write, and how to be accurate.

Gazeta Olsztynska's hyperlocal websites like Janowo's are typically 80% filled by local citizens, with user generated content (UGC) mostly on social events. Staff journalists provide the rest, through their assistance and through their own written and edited pieces. "Small communities know what kind of information they need. That is why we base our portals on civil journalism supported by our professional knowledge. The goal is to have the so far marginalized villages really exist in the social cyberspace," comments editor-in-chief Ewa Bartnikowska.

During the Janowo training session, a retired music teacher, Janina Sadowska, who has been a reader of the regional daily for a long time, explained that she was there for two reasons. "First, it is a natural prolongation of my habit of sending readers' comments to the editor. Second, I am at the head of a women's club, and we want to have a presence in our gmina's website."

The young aspiring journalists, between 12 and 18 years old, came from a nearby agricultural school. One of them was filming the reunion with a small camera, planning to post some sequences in the website. Another one, Przemyslaw Ciesielski, 18, explained in clear English: "We don't buy newspapers, but we are interested in news."

For Jarek Tokarczyk, the president of Edytor, Gazeta Olsztynska's publishing house, the involvement of the young in his online projects is critical, because "they already know the Internet, which is accessible at school, even in the most remote villages; through them we can also reach their parents for other publications." Bartnikowska added: "It is very important for us to have roots in print, even though we go at the lowest geographic or smallest community levels only online. This strategy for localism is also only possible if we have social and not only media projects."

Edytor is already managing 35 such hyperlocal websites, as a way to get closer also to small advertisers. In the villages, the biggest companies are often the bakery which employs only eight persons, or the hairdresser with a staff of four. "We want to reach the places where print is not profitable, asking our advertising salespersons to monetize potential markets which have been ignored until now. For this purpose we also train our print representatives to understand the web, setting online revenue goals for each of them," explains Tokarczyk. "We know that the number of Internet users in the country and small towns is going to grow. We have to do it now because tomorrow will be too late." This "deep in localities" strategy is timely with new legislation to be implemented in the coming weeks, for broadband access everywhere in Poland. There are also local governments elections in September, which will boost the interest for hyperlocal news.

Gazeta Olsztynska and its separate edition Dziennik Elblaski, covering an area integrated only ten years ago into the region, have a quasi-monopoly in Varmia-Masuria, one of Poland's 17 voivodships. National daily Gazeta Wyborcza has local editions, but they are read principally in the biggest cities like Olsztyn, where they have a weaker position. In addition to the Internet portals, Edytor controls 21 hyperlocal weekly freesheets, which encompass numerous news areas, social to e-commerce activities. Each has its online version, is available as a supplement of the daily, and corresponds more or less to a county ("powiat").

Janowo, for instance, is attached to the local newsroom based in Nidzica and covering a 35,000 people powiat. Weekly Gazeta Nidzicka's editor-in-chief Jerzy Grala is assisted by four reporters and three sales representatives. The portal nidzica.wm.pl is updated at least twice a day, and links to and sometimes feeds the central newspaper's website gazetaolsztynska.wm.pl. It is enriched by content provided by its communal websites, including janowo.wm.pl, which is updated a few times a week. Grala also posts occasional on his blog grala.wm.pl, which is easily accessible from his newsroom's portal.

There are 25 regional dailies in Poland in total, Edytor being an exception as an independent group. Most others are controlled either by Polskapresse (owned by Germany's Verlagsgruppe Passau) or Media Regionalne (owned by Great Britain's Mecom). The Varmia-Masuria voivodship is one of the less populated, with 1.4 million inhabitants, out of a total population of 38 million in the coutry (plus about 6 millions Poles living abroad). The region has a particularly high unemployment rate, exceeding 19% versus less than 12% on average nationally.

Given this context, Gazeta Olsztynska's intense efforts to develop online activities and "deep localism" are unusual. "We have over 30 equipped multimedia journalists covering the region, who already produce around 600 pieces of different information every month. With the contributions of the mobilized civil journalists, we expect to double within one year the level of 500,000 unique visitors we got last month," explains Bartnikowska.

Edytor is multiplying editorial and marketing projects, both in print and online, including 200 different supplements and freesheets, family service and obituary websites, a schools of excellence campaign (proposing pupils to write about their schools), celebration contests requiring payment via SMS, special publications promoting the natural wonders of the region and its lakes. "The wm.pl suffix that we use online [for "Warmia-Mazury"] is the most important brand here. We want to be a regional Google!" Tokarczyk says.

Another illustration of Edytor's focus on "hyperlocalities" are its Nowe Miasto operations. In this 11000 people town - or large village - about 85 kilometers far from Olsztyn, it publishes weekly Gazeta Nowomiejska, covering a population four times bigger. Its online hyperlocal news endeavours are already one year old, as shown in the "gminas" listed at the bottom of portal nowemiasto.wm.pl. Unlike in Nidzica, the newsroom is not based on a main central square, but its position may be more strategic. Gazeta Nowomiejska is located on a street in front of the church where, for deeply catholic Poland, mass sermons easily hit the headlines and a significant part of social life relates to religious activities. "The priest sometimes promotes our portal during the mass," says chief editor Stanislaw Ulatowski, also a local celebrity as a print journalism veteran.

His deputy, Lukasz Paczkowski, is a young online and multimedia reporter and Internet geek, who manages his blog paczkowski.wm.pl, which is also displayed in the front page of Gazeta Nowomiejska's portal. "We start updating the website before 10 am, when most people open their computer, until 8.30pm", he says. His partnership with Ulatowski also illustrates the complementary cross-promotion between the platforms. "The photo galleries encourage user generated content" comments Paczkowski. "Our online correspondents are very helpful, because our staff cannot be everywhere in the county, and they are more likely to create communes' portals. Then we print the most newsworthy pieces in the weekly."

To extend his team's expertise, Tokarczyk has built a partnership with the promoters of the C3 concept ("Complete Community Connection"), Chuck Peters and Steve Buttry in the United States (the former is the CEO of Iowa's Gazette Communications, and the latter just left this paper to be the director of community engagement at a high-profile, Washington DC based digital start-up). In spite of being based in a remote region of central Europe, Edytor is being very pro-active in looking for ideas directly provided by the world's top experts in its fields of coverage.

Along with the hyperlocal websites, the Gazeta Olsztynska team has also launched numerous thematic portals about students, community centers, and even an "ethnic" group recently. Website ukraincy.wm.pl is dedicated to the 60,000 strong Ukrainian community, made of descendents or survivors of the group displaced by force to this part of Poland in 1947. It is benefitting from and promoting the revival of their language and religion (Greek Orthodox). "Our aim is to have half of the community visit the portal at least once a month by the end of this year. It will be 100% UGC, and fun," says Hrywna, who is also Polish-Ukrainian.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

While newspapers struggle to turn a profit from their websites, an encouraging finding from the Columbia Journalism Review has good news for media websites: 60% of larger magazine websites are profitable, MediaGuardian reports.

The survey and report Magazines and Their Web Sites, conducted by Victor Navasky, chairman of the CJR, and Evan Lerner, Editor of SeedMagazine.com, is the first effort of its kind to document and clarify what advantages and strategies 665 consumer magazines utilize on their websites.

The final report revealed that more than half of consumer magazines that receive over 1.5 million visitors per month are more profitable. Advertising, as expected, accounts for the largest revenue source for 83% of the magazines which answered the question.

Bloomberg media recently revealed a redesigned version of its recently acquired weekly publication, BusinessWeek. In adopting what MediaWeek described as a "bullish" strategy, the new version will feature more content including a "leisure/arts" section, and the number of annual issues will increase from 47 to 50. 

The Walt Disney Company paid roughly $700,000 to the Los Angeles Times for a front page ad for its upcoming "Alice in Wonderland" movie, a source at the newspaper confirmed to The Wrap.

Readers of the LA Times last Friday morning had to flip to the second page to read the day's headlines, while a multicolored picture of Johnnie Depp, dressed as the Mad Hatter, obscured two stories on health care and the war in Afghanistan.

The editorial board at the LA Times opposed the ad, but the decision was ultimately made by the newspaper's business executives, according to anonymous sources at the paper who spoke to The New York Times.

"Obviously, it was not my decision," said Russ Stanton, the top editor at the newspaper.

"We worked very closely with Disney to come up with an exceptional and distinctive way to help them open 'Alice in Wonderland,'" said the Times' spokesman, John Conroy. "It was designed to create buzz, and to extend the film's already brilliant marketing campaign."

The Tindle Newspapers Group, publisher of around 230 local and regional papers in the UK, is to launch four weekly local newspapers in London, the Guardian has reported.

Three of the four weekly titles were available from last Friday and have been identified as the Edmonton Herald, East Barnet Advertiser and Winchmore Hill Herald. The print runs are very small at 3,000 copies of each paper, and the first issues were distributed door-to-door. Specific details regarding the fourth paper, set to launch in a couple of weeks, are as yet unknown. 

The date has been set for the release of Apple's iPad in the US: the first Wi-Fi only version will be shipped on 3 April, slightly later than the time period that was initially specified, possibly due to manufacturing difficulties. The 3G-enabled product will launch at the end of April, and both will become available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Sony is planning to take on Apple with a new line of handheld products. One of these is a portable device that "shares characteristics of netbooks, electronic-book readers and handheld-game machines." It sounds just like the iPad, and the WSJ reported that unnamed sources said that it is intended as a competitor. 

El Mundo is to launch a paid service for reading its content online or on a smartphone, Agence France-Presse reported. The Spanish daily's standard website - which is the world's most visited Spanish-language news site - will remain free, however.

On Monday, for a price of €14.99 per month or 60cents per day, a new application called El Mundo en Orbyt will offer full access to the paper edition as well as a range of other services including archives, pop-up video reports, access to regional editions and supplements, commenting, the opportunity to communicate with the newsroom and special offers, according to a video on the site. The paper is already developing an app for Apple's iPad, AFP said.

International news outlet GlobalPost has released a free iPhone app. The news service, launched in January 2009, was founded to fill the gaps in international reporting that it feared were appearing as traditional media outlets cut down on foreign correspondents.

The app shows a list of top stories, and offers stories broken down by geographical area and topic. Stories can be saved and shared using Facebook or Twitter. 

The Trinity Mirror will not implement a broad paywall strategy on its websites, according to Sly Bailey, chief executive of the newspaper group.

Bailey discussed the group's stance on charging for online access to content with MediaGuardian, confirming there are no plans to install a broad paywall. The group favors charging for more specific online services and products instead.

"We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," said Bailey. "It won't be possible for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it's free elsewhere...the BBC is an obvious one here."

Magazine publisher, Condé Nast, is getting ready to create iPad versions for its Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Glamour magazines, according to The New York Times.

While GQ will have a tablet-friendly version ready by April, Wired's version will come in June, with the New Yorker and Glamour getting their iPad versions by summer, said an internal memorandum on Monday.

The New York-based magazine publisher is no stranger to mobile technology. GQ has an iPhone app (pictured on the left) that sold over 15,000 copies last January.

The BBC is to halve its number of web pages, as well as closing two radio stations and cutting spending on imported TV shows, the Times reported. The changes will be announced next month by director-general Mark Thompson, according to the Times, and Thompson will admit that the corporation has become too large and must shrink to allow its commercial rivals more room to operate.

The halving of the number of pages on the BBC website will be accompanied by a 25% cut in staff numbers and a 25% cut of its £112m budget. To appease rival publishers, it will pledge to include more links to articles from other news outlets, and not to produce news services at a more local level than it does currently. These latter elements do not signify a dramatic change in policy: last month, the BBC's director of news Helen Boaden asserted that the organisation was not looking to go more local, and the corporation's news website already provides a "from other news sites" section alongside each story where it displays links to similar articles on newspaper websites.

Newspapers are still the most used and valued local news destinations, and online is no exception, according to a new study from comScore and the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web sites are the "most used and valued sites for consumers seeking credible and trustworthy local content and advertising online," the survey found.

About 57 percent of the more than 3,000 respondents said local newspaper sites are their top online sources for local information - more than the totals for all other media. The percentage is higher for those with a college education (60 percent) and households with higher incomes (63 percent).

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

The Miami Herald Media Co. - responsible for The Miami Herald - has stopped accepting volunteer donations to finance its online editorial content, according to The Miami Herald's website.

Last December, the Miami-based daily, experimented with an innovative way to finance its online operations by asking its online readers to donate if they "prefer the convenience of the Internet."

A move that worked for the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was reported to have been working well for The Miami Herald.

"What's happening?" asks Twitter. "What's on your mind?" asks Facebook. A question that's fast becoming more important to smartphone users, though, is simple: "Where are you?" And that's exactly what a new social network, Foursquare, aims to answer.

Foursquare might be relatively new on the scene, having launched just under a year ago, but it has recently made deals with a long list of major media companies. The New York Times and the Canadian freesheet Metro are on board, as well as HBO, Warner Brothers, the History Channel, Bravo, Lucky Magazine and restaurant guide Zagat.

USA TODAY is teaming up with Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Día to launch a USA TODAY Puerto Rico Edition. The newspaper will be produced and written by El Nuevo Día journalists and will start publishing on Monday, February 22, 2010, according to a company press release.

In addition to the News, Money, Sports and Life sections, the Puerto Rico edition will include two pages that will offer a unique perspective of the local events in the area, like politics, economy, society, sports, entertainment, and the Puerto Rican tourism experience. The newspaper will print from Monday through Friday and will be available in hotels and in the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico.