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When the Ann Arbor News ceases printing in July, Ann Arbor will become the first US city with no daily newspaper. The publication as it exists now will disappear completely, although a new venture, AnnArbor.com, is set to take over local news on the web and will produce a print product two days a week.

In a column for Poynter's The Biz Blog, Rick Edmunds postulates on what factors led to the decline of the News in Ann Arbor, whose vibrant, educated community would appear to be the ideal location for a newspaper. Edmunds even goes so far as to suggest starting over with AnnArbor.com might not be such a bad idea.

As the controversy over the recent election in Iran and the subsequent media response have made abundantly clear, social media like Twitter are playing an increasing role in the world of journalism. While today's working journalists must learn how these tools will affect their jobs on the fly, j-schools have a great opportunity to instruct the next generation of journalists before they enter the newsroom.

In a column on Mashable, Vadim Lavrusik - himself a journalism student at Columbia University - outlines "10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media." Lavrusik spoke with professors and deans at some of the top j-schools in the US, who told him how their respective schools have integrated lessons about how new technology can assist in reporting and provide a tool for promotion and self-branding on the web. The questions Lavrusik raises regarding ethics and social media are perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the article, and could have real consequences for students.

Integrated journalists for integrated newsrooms

Almost everyone present agreed that journalism schools had a duty to train students across all media disciplines, with everyone having the opportunity to learn about print, web, video and audio platforms regardless if they were specialising in newspaper, broadcasting or online journalism.

As for content, the educators had differing views on the importance of choosing a specialist field, with some saying it was important to cater to the needs of the industry and the wider community. Recent outbreaks in bird and swine flu as well as the global downturn were cited as examples of areas where journalistic expertise was lacking, with Doreen Weisenhaus, associate professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, saying there was a great need for health journalists, particularly in Asia, where bird flu was first detected. She also said that as a key financial hub, Asia was calling out for journalists trained in financial reporting. Others made similar points about science and business journalism.

Classifieds website Craigslist has provided a noteworthy boost to alt-weeklies' adult classifieds revenue after its recent policy change that requires closer regulation of its adult-services classified ads.  This is an ironic turn of events for the online colossus of classifieds that has wrought havoc on its competition, in print and online, ever since 2005.

The Washington City Paper reported increases in adult ads of 38% compared to one year ago, a change Andrew Beaujon from the paper's City Desk blog correlates directly to Craigslist's tougher regulation of their adult ads. Beaujon reminisces that for alt-weeklies like his, "Craigslist's free classifieds were an extinction-level event." But now Craigslist's requires would-be adult-services advertisers to waver that their posts contain no "content that is unlawful, pornographic, or which advertises illegal services", no ads "suggesting or implying an exchange of sexual favors for money", and no "pornographic images, or images suggestive of an offer of sexual favors.". These stricter standards have driven adult advertisers away from Craigslist, resulting in the higher figures for the local papers and free weeklies that used to account for so much of the classifieds market.

It is becoming increasingly clear that a proportion of general news content is going to be put behind some kind of a pay wall in upcoming months. Several publishers have expressed their intentions to start charging, and several third parties want to help them do it. Journalists don't seem to want it, it seems pretty unlikely that readers would want it, so how are publishers going to succeed? Can it restore value to good journalism which is increasingly becoming a commodity? The Editors Weblog takes a look at some of the different services on offer and strategies being considered.

Journalism Online

First, Journalism Online, a start-up founded in April by industry experts Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery, has taken facilitating charging for online content as one of its core goals. Brill made a presentation at the NAA-organised newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago on May 28 at which Journalism Online's mission was stated as enabling "news organizations to restore the optimal mix of circulation and advertising revenue necessary to finance original reporting and editing" hence giving them the chance to "realize the revenue they deserve--and can command--from readers and distributors for their digital content."

Journalism Online is marketing its proposal as an e-commerce platform. The idea is that it would make premium content from multiple publishers easily accessible to readers and allow annual, monthly subscriptions, day passes or single articles. There will also be all-you-can-read bundling options. Publishers will decide what content they want to charge for, how much to charge (though it is unclear how all-you-can-read prices will be decided) and how to charge. In the presentation, Brill suggests $50-60 a year and $5-6 a month for small to large city papers, but he stressed that this was an arbitrary choice and clearly the price would depend on how much content the publisher put behind the pay wall. He had previously suggested $15 a month for an all-you-can-read subscription.

The company maintains that implementing its system will not lead to a substantial loss in traffic or ad revenue, claiming that papers would be able to keep 88% of page views and 91% of ad revenue, as any paid content would be part of a hybrid model. In his examples, Brill demonstrates how he believes a paper could essentially double its income. Brill has also stressed that Journalism Online will incorporate lots of sampling. He told Nieman Lab's Zachery Seward that Journalism Online's assumptions are that 5-10% of current monthly unique visitors will be willing to pay for content; that 95 percent of those paying customers will choose subscriptions over micropayments; and that after subscribing, those readers will view 30-40 percent more pages than non-paying readers.

Overall, the company seems to be presenting its service as a chance for newspapers to focus on their best customers, offering a premium service to those who are prepared to pay. At the Chicago meeting, Journalism Online also emphasised the advantages of paid online content in terms of preserving the print product: it is "about the value proposition of print... about print subscriber acquisition and retention costs."

ViewPass

Another third party service was presented at the NAA-organised meeting in Chicago: ViewPass. It is the brainchild of Alan Mutter and Ridgely Evers, and could be implemented in 9 months at a cost of $6 million. The idea is that newspaper readers would be required to register once with ViewPass and it would then track their activity across participating websites.

Like Journalism Online, it would aim to offer readers the chance to purchase premium online content from multiple sources, with potential for subscriptions, micropayments and bundling. Essentially, the ways in which it differs is that ViewPass would be industry-owned, giving publishers the chance to (hopefully) share profits in the business itself, and it most crucially it would allow users to 'pay' for their content with their time or their information instead of with cash, because of their increased value to advertisers. In fact, ViewPass would focus on presenting readers that were attractive to advertisers for highly targeted ads. Mutter himself is not enthusiastic about charging for much online content, suggesting to Nieman Lab that it would only work for specialist content.

Circlabs

The creation of another start up was announced the day before the Chicago meeting: CircLabs, founded by Bill Densmore, Jeffrey Vander Clute, Martin Langeveld and Joe Bergeron. Its first product, code-named Circulate, aims to "offer a solution" to publishers who are experimenting with micropayments and subscriptions, suggesting that they should charge for content which is "both scarce in nature and of high utility to a segment of the audience." CircLabs is also focussed on developing opportunities for "high-value" advertising revenue, and plans to incorporate personalised news services. Further details are yet to appear.

Efforts of individual publishers

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has announced that all the company's newspapers would be charging within a year. It is looking at bundling content, according to chief digital officer Jonathan Miller, such as putting all the media conglomerate's New York-based content into one subscription package. One of the company's prime assets, the Wall Street Journal, is proof that paid premium content does work, although of a specifically financial nature. The paper is to expand its paid online options, with plans to introduce micropayments later this year along with a further level of premium subscriptions. Murdoch suggested that the company wants to "test" a pay model on some of its stronger properties first, and there has been speculation that the Sunday Times will be among these. The paid online content debate, although definitely present in the UK, has not been as strong as across the Atlantic, and it would be interesting to see what sort of reaction such a move would provoke.

MediaNews Group is planning to charge online under the belief that "we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free." A memo to staff from CEO Dean Singleton and president Jody Lodovic suggested that a part-paid strategy is in the works, and made it clear that the company is intending to charge for existing content rather than for new products or services.

The New York Times is apparently looking at two different ways in which it could charge for online content. The first would be somewhat similar to the Financial Times' model, whereby readers could surf the site without charge until a page-view or word limit were reached, when a 'metre' would start running and it would charge a user for the rest of their time spent. (The FT allows 10 free articles per user per month, then demands a subscription.) This would have the advantage of not putting specific content behind a paywall, and therefore not angering journalists.

The other option is a 'membership' scheme: readers would donate money and subsequently be invited into a "New York Times community," which would offer them free merchandise and other benefits. Possibly a tiered membership scheme could be implemented. When these proposals were discussed, Bill Keller told staff that a decision would be made by the end of June. The NYT is wary following its failed TimesSelect experience back in 2007 and seems determined to find a solution that will not damage its significant ad revenue.

Potential obstacles: search and antitrust

Currently many people find their news through search engines such as Google, and for articles to get good Google rankings and appear higher up in search results, they cannot be behind a paywall. Newspapers must strive to find an appropriate solution to this when they start charging: the Wall Street Journal's tactic of allowing its paid content to be accessed free via Google is clearly not fair to its paying customers, and is a definite deterrent to potential subscribers.

Antitrust regulations in the US effectively prevent publishers from coming to a joint agreement on when and how they should start charging for content. At the newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago on May 28, an antitrust lawyer was present to make sure all the discussion was legal. Poynter analyst Rick Edmonds suggested that the use of a third party "vendor" such as Journalism Online could be the solution to these concerns. Journalism Online has taken on David Boies and Ted Olson for antitrust advice.

So, is it going to work? And how?

Undoubtedly, implementing paid content is going to be a considerable challenge and is likely to involve substantial experimentation. Newspapers need to consider what exactly they would want to charge for, for example whether they could create a new paid service or put what is currently free behind a pay wall. It seems as if it would be easier to persuade people to pay for something new, rather than telling them they have to start paying for something previously free. But then people might decide that they are happy with what they get now and that they do not want to pay for anything extra. A paper with a highly developed website such as the New York Times could possibly offer basic news free but keep its interactive graphics and other more innovative content for its premium customers.

As yet, Journalism Online seems to be ahead of the pack with regards to third party services. No papers have publicly signed on but Brill told Seward that he had already spoken to about half of those at the Chicago meeting. In terms of connections and credibility of its founders, Journalism Online has a head start. ViewPass and CircLabs do seem to be onto something, however, with their focus on offering consumers as targets for higher-revenue advertising and effectively allowing them to pay for their news by looking at ads. Could these companies coexist, or is there only room for one?

A crucial factor which should not be underestimated in any attempt to charge online is ease of use for the consumer. People will be far more likely to part with their cash if doing so is simple and straightforward. For this reason, sign-in-once and all-you-can-read offers are likely to appeal. And once people are paying, the level of service should reflect this: good journalism presented attractively and accessibly. An element of personalisation would also seem worth paying for.

Can paid online content 'save' newspapers? If Journalism Online's figures are correct, it looks like it could make a significant difference to a newspaper's fortunes. The next few months will be telling in terms of experimentation and competition between proposals, but it will take some years for the definitive answer to this question to be realised.

A new report produced by the publishing arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers - the world's largest professional services company - in conjunction with the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), examines the outlook for newspapers as they seek to realign themselves within a digital framework and minimise the impact of the global recession.

The study identifies interactivity, specialisation and new business models as being key to ensuring the survival of the newspaper in an online age.

According to a new book published by Dr Andrew Cook, Jack the Ripper was an invention created by journalists to boost sales. Historian Andrew Cook claims that the murders of several women in Victorian London were the work of not one man, but of various men involved in a spate of unrelated attacks.

In his book entitled "Jack the Ripper: Case Closed," Cook draws on the evidence and accounts offered by police and medical experts at the time to argue that there were too many differences in the style of the killings to suggest that all the victims died at the hands of the one same man. Among the testimonies supporting this view include one from assistant police surgeon Percy Clark, based at the Whitechapel Division. Clark, who had unparalleled access to all the victims, told the East London Observer in 1910: "I think perhaps one man was responsible for three of them. I would not like to say he did the others."

Reuters is using new technologies to boost business and reader engagement by pairing up with Apture, a company that aims to reinvent web pages into multimedia experiences. The company announced today an agreement with Reuters.com.

The site will offer easier viewing experiences for readers, allowing Reuters to incorporate videos, maps, images, sideshows, documents and audio into their stories. The changes will help readers explore content without having to leave the page they're in. Reuters Fan Fare blog displays some examples of the changes.

Apture also works with BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle. At the end oast year, Apture partnered with WashingtonPost.com to help them create pop up links that would not make readers jump out of their view page.

Source: Apture Press Release

As a mark of just how hard layoffs and cutbacks have hit some struggling US newspapers, Richard Perez-Peña writes that even "winning your profession's highest honor does not mean you get to keep your job, and neither does taking a bullet while at work." He follows the stories of two US journalists who have lost their jobs despite being involved in rather extraordinary stories.

Paul Giblin, a former East Valley Tribune writer was laid off in January, as was Patti Epler, a former editor at the publication. With a few of their colleagues, the two started the subscription and advertising funded online-only Arizona Guardian. The two won "a string of awards" for a project criticising a county sheriff, which they worked on together - topped off by winning a Pulitzer prize last week.

Eight hyperlocal community projects in the US have been chosen as the Knight FoundationNew Voices winners for 2009 funded , and as a result will receive $25,000 in start-up funding over the next two years. The winners were selected by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism from 304 applicants, as they were examples of "frequently updated and robust sites generated by a diverse mix of content contributors". It was pointed out that the sites which won had a good knowledge of digital media tools; a reflection of the changing landscape of news.

Gary Kebbel, Knight's journalism program officer said that learning from such hyperlocal projects "is all the more important in light of newspaper closings across the country". The difficulties of more traditional media have allowed online-only news sites to come to the forefront, but have also displayed the absence of hyperlocal news reporting. Projects such as New Voices are important in giving a steadying hand to new hyperlocal start-ups, awarding them much needed funding to get their projects up and running - although not all not all new projects can receive such grants, and a more sustainable and permanent business model is as ever being searched for.

Source: J-Lab

Writing two separate articles, firstly in the Evening Standard and then in the Guardian, Roy Greenslade denounces councils for their proliferation of council-run newspapers.

According to Greenslade, "the phenomenon of papers published by local councils" poses a real threat to local titles which are already struggling with advertising losses and dwindling circulation figures.

As information becomes increasingly available and accessible online, newspapers find it hard to justify paying for a subscription to news wire services: an Associated Press membership, for example, can cost up to $800,000 a year for a newspaper. As a cost cutting measure, newspapers are sharing their news rather than subscribing to costly news wire services. Some examples are Tulsa World and the Oklahoman, Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Inquirer with Pittsburg Post-Gazette,

Jacek Utko, a newspaper designer, talks about how the industry may be saved through strong designs, using his redesigns of Eastern European papers as an example. Although he says it was not the design alone that improved the paper, it was an enhancement of the entire product that did. Circulation increased 29% in Russia, 35% in Poland, and an incredible 100% in Bulgaria he said.

Utko talked about his initial frustrations with newspaper designing and how Cirque du Soleil inspired him because he saw how they took "a creepy, rundown form of entertainment and turned it into the highest level possible of performance." This is when he realized that newspapers could do the same.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death on the terraces. At the time, as it does today, the event made headlines across the country; for the most part, sympathetic with the plight of the Liverpool fans. However, the Sun and its then editor Kelvin MacKenzie notoriously laid the blame firmly at the feet of the fans.

In an article headlined 'THE TRUTH', three sub-headings below read "Some fans picked pockets of victims ... Some fans urinated on the brave cops ... Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life". The story sparked outrage in Liverpool, and as a result many in the city boycotted the newspaper.  In 2004, when the Sun apologised for making "the most terrible mistake in its history", circulation of the publication in Liverpool was still just 12,000 - compared to 3.3 million nationwide.

Writing on website Editor & Publisher, author Ralph Keyes argues that too many journalists risk "alienating" foreign and younger readers in what he dubs the overuse of "retrotalk," which he defines as "employing terminology rooted in our past that may not be familiar" to certain audience groups.

Keyes refers to various US-specific examples, although I particularly liked the one about New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, who once referred to George W. Bush as having "a slight, almost Chauncey Gardiner quality" alluding to Peter Sellers' dim-witted character in the 1979 movie "Being There."

In light of recent debate over whether paid online content has the potential to save the newspaper industry amidst falling ad revenue, New York Times journalists Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango posed the million-dollar question: how do you get consumers to pay for something they have grown used to getting for free? They cited several examples from industries that have pulled it off: Coca-Cola successfully sells filtered tap water under the name Dasani, people subscribe to premium television services such as TiVo, airlines have introduced charges for luggage and meals, and iTunes has got at least some people to pay for music.

So what can newspapers learn from this? "All of these success stories offered the consumer something extra, even if it was just convenience," is the conclusion the NYT has come to. And indeed, the journalists point out, news organisations have been trying to persuade their readers that they can provide something more valuable than an aggregator or blog, by adding features such as e-mail alert services, high quality video or discussion forums.

In South Africa, the iDike-lethu News has launched to cover the Alice community in the Eastern Cape of the country. The publication will be printed in isiXhosa, which is the language spoken by the majority of the local population - previously, the majority of the newspapers printed in Alice were either in English or Afrikaans. IDike-lethu is funded by the Media Development and Diversity Agency. It is a monthly newspaper, covering local community news and its print run has increased from 2500 to 5000 since it began, Biz Community reports.

In the UK, two other small communities are gaining a newspaper. The towns of Deal and Sandwich are to see their own editions of publisher Kos Media's midweek free newspaper Your. The publisher is also revamping its Saturday newspaper, with the new title Kent on Saturday, larger sections and more editorial. Whilst both the launches are small and low-key, they are welcome examples of communities gaining local coverage.

Source: Biz Community, Hold the Front Page

There has been much discussion of the state of regional press in the UK recently, particularly at government level, and a recent early day motion in the Commons in favour of supporting local journalism gained the signatures of over 100MPs. Much of the debate has surrounded the best way to help local newspapers and their journalists, and has centred on whether or not to relax strict merger rules. However in the Guardian, Stephen Moss has written a very interesting article more focussed on how events are unfolding at local level.

In Long Eaton, Moss demonstrates how the loss of the local paper (the Long Eaton Advertiser was closed down by Trinity Mirror in October) has had much more of an affect upon older members of the community, whilst younger members are happy to get their news online or buy the Nottingham Evening Post in its place. "The people who can least afford to be connected to the new world are also those keenest on being involved in their local communities," Mark Dodson, head of regional media at the Guardian Media Group says, in reference to a hypothetical world without local newspapers.

The struggles of many American newspapers have been well documented recently, the closure of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's transition to online-only being two of the more high profile stories. Yet European newspapers seem so far to have avoided the plight of their US counterparts. Writing for the New York Times, Eric Pfanner describes how despite Europe facing similar problems to the US "a few newspaper publishers have found innovative ways not only to survive, but thrive in the face of the recession and the Internet."

Oslo based publisher Schibsted earns "about a quarter of the company's revenue and the vast majority of its profit" from online activities. VG Nett is the website of Schibsted's daily tabloid Verdens Gang, and boasts a profit margin of over 30% as well as rivalling Google as the most popular site in Norway. German publisher Axel Springer generates 14% of its revenue online, which is a higher percentage than most publishers in the more digitally developed US manage, and is currently in the position to search for "undervalued assets" to buy.

It has become increasingly common to see newspapers that were once strong, even nasty, competitors sharing news content and collaborating as the financial crisis continues to suffocate them. Some examples are Tulsa World and the Oklahoman, Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburg Post-Gazette, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News, the "Northeast Consortium" (five papers in the New Jersey and New York area), four papers in Tennessee, three papers in Florida, and the list goes on.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last ever issue yesterday, 17 March 2009, and is looking at an online-only future. Parent company Hearst decided it could not afford to keep the paper open in its current form after it lost $14 million in 2008, and after trying and failing to sell it, they proceeded to stop the presses but keep the website. The P-I is not the first paper to make such a move, but it is by far the largest US publication so far. What does this closure mean for the paper and the people of Seattle, and what are the implications for the wider industry: will other papers follow suit?

The cost of keeping the Seattle P-I's website should be a fraction of the cost of printing the paper: Poynter's Rick Edmonds estimates costs have fallen by 80%. Staff numbers have been reduced from 165 to 20, including just one photographer, and the site will be less like that of a traditional newspaper and more like the Huffington Post, according to the New York Times, as it will have limited original reporting and consist largely of links, advice and commentary, with several local columnists. It will repackage some health and home material from Hearst's many magazines, and has about 150 unpaid bloggers who will continue to provide content. The original reporting will focus on more hard-hitting news such as government, spending and crime, said P-I executive producer Michelle Nicolosi.

Seattle will be left as a one-paper town: the Seattle Times is now the only major daily in the city and although it should benefit from no longer having competition from Hearst's paper, it will no longer be sharing printing, delivery, advertising and marketing expenses with the P-I, as it had been for more than 20 years. P-I subscribers will automatically start to receive the Times instead.  It remains to be seen whether the paper will flourish or continue to lose money. The P-I's new most direct competition is a non-profit local news website focusing on the Northwest, CrossCut.com.

How should the web-only paper tackle the competition?

This huge change for the P-I can, and arguably should, be seen as an opportunity to revamp its site and be a front-runner in innovation. Online news leaves plenty of room for original development and possibilities for increased interaction with readers, personalisation options and linking are particularly relevant for local papers such as the P-I. It is "an adventure in journalism," according to columnist Joel Connelly. Slate editor Jack Shafer called upon Hearst to plunge into experimentation by sending in the "interactive cavalry," as everything that the publisher learns in Seattle can be used at its other newspaper sites. Examples he suggests are going hyperlocal, updating the site as much "as humanly possible," and to hire as many developers as they can. Rick Edmonds seems to be in agreement, writing that as long as losses are kept low, the P-I could be an effective "real-time test of what works and what doesn't in an online-only local site." And Nicolosi has promised that the paper will "experiment a lot, fail fast" with what is on the site: if something is not working they will cut it immediately and try something else.

Does going online-only make business sense?

The paper's online traffic is 1.8 million unique viewers per month and is usually more than its former rival/partner, the Seattle Times, which has considerably higher print circulation. And according to Forbes magazine in January, Seattle is the most broadband-connected US city: hence a place seemingly well suited for an online-only publication.

And online readership figures are high: according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media in the US report just released, traditional media has not lost its audience, rather this audience is shifting online. The Pew Research Center reported at the beginning of the year that the Internet had overtaken print as a primary news source in the US for the first time. This trend is not just American: British papers reported record online readership in January: with the Guardian website boasting almost 30 million unique viewers.

Several other smaller publications have made the switch to online-only over the past few months. The most well-known is the Christian Science Monitor, which announced its intention to cut its daily print edition in October 2008, though it will not actually make the conversion until April 1 this year. The CSM reasoned that its web product had a far wider reach than its print paper, particularly due to its international audience, and that producing the print publication would become untenable as the Christian Science church was preparing to stop its subsidisation. Others include the Monitor in Canada, and the Kansas City Kansan, San Francisco's AsianWeek, Hoy Nueva York and Wisconsin's The Capital Times in the US: all for financial reasons.  

The State of the News Media report, however, argues that it does not currently make sense for suffering papers to "kill their print editions and go online-only" as print still commands "premium ad pricing" and US papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and the average cost of printing and delivering the printed paper is 40% of costs. So, the report believes, why would you cut almost all your revenue to save less then half your costs?

Is online-only the future of news?

Arguably, despite many people's love of print, online is the future of news: how distant a future, it is difficult to say. But the vital, million-dollar question remains: how to actually make enough money out of all these online readers in order to support good quality, in-depth reporting? Nicolosi said that she thinks it is "possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city's readers well while turning a profit" and that "a digital news product is a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate." She seems to be convinced that the paper will make money online, but gives no indication of how this will happen. With the traditional ad-based business model proving less and less effective as online advertising prices fall, will the P-I come up with an innovative strategy? One of the major criticisms of the industry in the State of the News Media report was the lack of innovation in the sector in terms of business models. Nicolosi has assured readers that she is willing to try out new things on the site, but will the paper be as experimental in terms of business models?

For an online-only operation, the incentive to try to make money from Internet readers is surely greater than for a print publication with a website. And if the P-I does manage to find a way to support itself, whether through being successful enough to generate sufficient advertising revenue, or by adopting some kind of paid content system, the model will undoubtedly be looked at very carefully by other suffering papers around the world.

Despite the government subsidisation that they have received, Cyril Blanc of the Guardian thinks that French newspapers are still in trouble. Blanc writes that the problems of the US industry look particularly gloomy from France, as "the French regard the NYT and papers like the Los Angeles Times as the perfect incarnation of what their own papers should be." So, it is with great irony that he quotes former Le Monde director Alain Minc, who has previously said that French newspapers should become more like the NYT but writes in his new book that "this very same paper will be bought out by Google for a symbolic dollar by 2011".

Criticising the French for ignoring online successes such as Rue89, whilst subsidising the struggling newspapers, Blanc believes that "a more creative approach is needed".  He cites other examples that the French media could learn from, such as the Huffington Post. Blanc believes that Sarkozy's tax exemptions and advertising boost for newspapers "could only have the effect of postponing their collapse", whilst the "more dramatic move to give every 18-year-old in the country a one-year subscription to a daily paper... is perhaps the only measure that might have a longer term effect".

With closures and threatened closures for local newspapers around the US, Pew Research has asked a "nationally representative sample of 1,001 adults" their thoughts on the matter. Suprisingly, just 43% of those surveyed said that civic life would be hurt "a lot" if local newspapers were to close - and 23% were of the opinion that the effect of such an event would be "not much" or "not at all". With regard to the role of local newspapers, 30% of those who believe their demise would have "a lot" of impact on civil life give the reason for this as reliance upon them to provide in depth local news. Conversely, 29% of the 23% who didn't think the effect would be too great, cited other news sources providing similar information.

Similarly, the UK regional press is under pressure. Ian Burrell of the Independent writes that the sector is "in unprecedented crisis and there is not one of the media organisations with interests in this sector that has been immune to this catastrophic downturn in the industry's fortunes". Whilst not parallel statistics, Burrell states that "an impressive 82 per cent of UK adults read local newspapers", compared with the 41% of Americans in the Pew Research survey who said they get local news from newspapers "regularly".

At last week's Journalism That Matters: Adapting Journalism to the New News Ecology conference organized by Poynter Institute and Media Giraffe Project, journalists gathered "to help create, define and populate the next digital newsroom wherever it takes root." The three-day conference was a multimedia event with constant Twitter updates from participants, live chats, and video feeds of speakers.

The conference's objectives were first to determine the new roles of journalists and to define the relationship of the media to the public and then take action that will help promote journalism in a changing industry. On his way to the conference, Mark Briggs, CEO of Serra Media, tweeted that his hopes for the conference were to "develop a Code of Innovation to guide new-era news orgs. Then build one."

The Spanish media has rallied together in an effort to gain government support to save the country's television, radio and press from demise, with newspapers seeking generous tax breaks.

The various branches of the communications industry have each put together their own list of proposals, which have since been presented to the government.