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With much pessimism in journalism, from decreased advertising income and a lack of model for online publishing, the news media is in crisis.

But, does that mean news is over?

Not exactly, according to George Brock, former president of the World Editors Forum, current board member of WEF, and professor and head of Journalism at City University London, who recently gave an inaugural lecture on March 17 at City University on where journalism is right now and where it's heading.

His lecture not only explains what developments have led to the current state of media, but what to do to ensure news media survival "for they are in need of help."

The International Press Association, an organization representing all foreign reporters stationed in Belgium, is hosting a meeting today to discuss employment prospects for journalists reporting in Brussels.

The meeting, entitled "What does the future hold for Brussels-based journalists?" will attempt to address the exodus of much of the European Union press corps over the past five years and the diminishing presence of foreign press in Brussels.  According to a press release, the API "considers an urgent taking stock and a broad debate are imperative."  The group hopes to address three main concerns:

Nikkei Inc., the Japanese newspaper publisher of Japan's five largest newspapers, has announced it will launch a paid digital edition for its business daily, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (known as The Nikkei), on March 23.

Access to the publisher's previous newspaper website, Nikkei Net was free of charge. However, after March 23, access to part of the content of the new website will be limited to paid subscribers only, The Asahi Shimbun reports.

Nikkei President Tsuneo Kita said in a news conference that the company is approaching "this project from a different concept than the conventional perception that information on the Net is free of charge."

Despite promising growth forecasts made by many in the industry, staffing cuts at news organizations big and small indicate that the news media industry is not yet out of the woods.  

Today, Journalism.co.uk reported that BBC's Global News division is undergoing restructuring that will result in the elimination of a number of management positions.  And smaller but still significant Channel M, the Manchester regional TV station owned by Guardian Media Group (GMG), will be losing 29 positions--a reduction of 88 percent.

The BBC will be losing a laundry list of high-level positions, including the directorial positions of BBC World News, BBC World Service and BBC World Service English.

The 8.8 earthquake that ravaged central Chile on February 27 has also wreaked havoc on the newspapers that operate in the region. While some continued to print with borrowed electric generators and improvised newsrooms, some were forced to halt publishing for a number of days. Most of the local newspapers websites' in the most affected areas were down in the aftermath of the quake. But, even though the worst seems to be over for this battered nation's newspapers, damage to the country's largest paper factories could become a big problem for not only Chilean but also other south American newspapers.

As aftershocks still rattled central Chile, the Editors Weblog spoke to the General Manager of the Asociación Nacional de la Prensa of Chile, Ignacio Muñoz, about how the earthquake has affected Chilean newspapers and how they have coped with the difficulties of reporting under extraordinary circumstances.

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.

Al Jazeera English - the English-language arm of the Qatari news channel - has teamed up with YouTube to cover a wide range of Iraqi voices and their opinion on their country's democracy on the day of Iraq's first nationwide parliamentary election since 2005, according to the Official YouTube blog.

The short videos give us an insight into the Iraqi voices that are rarely heard in news coverage coming from that area. One video shows one Iraqi who showed up for voting, but found out his name was not on the list. Another one shows another Iraqi complaining that not all candidates are honest.

As a part of the Tribune Co.'s efforts to reduce costs and direct resources to focus on local coverage, the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia will outsource page design, formatting and editing pages to the company's flagship paper, the Chicago Tribune. This announcement came to the staff at both the newspapers on Monday, the Tribune reported.

The transfer of responsibilities from the Daily Press suggests elimination of copy editors and designers, Hampton Roads reported. The newsroom staff will likely be reduced by 15 percent, Digby Solomon, president and chief executive of the Daily Press, told the Tribune.

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

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.

The BBC will be teaming up with the non-profit blogging network of citizen journalists, Global Voices, to offer a "different range of perspectives and commentary from around the world," according to the BBC.

Content from Global Voices will be incorporated into the BBC's SuperPower season coverage, a special series on the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.

The BBC will be selecting and linking to some Global Voices stories, as well as asking GV editors to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news. The editor of the BBC's News website, Steve Herrmann, explained that he believes Global Voices and the wide range of opinions they feature could add an "interesting dimension to some of (the BBC's) news coverage."

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. 

Rupert Murdoch announced The Wall Street Journal's plans to launch a New York edition this April during a speech before the Real Estate Board of New York yesterday. Murdoch has reportedly set aside a $15 million budget for the new metro edition with the hopes of rivaling The New York Times in local news.

Murdoch, whose' News Corporation acquired the Journal in 2007 and also owns The New York Post, had not previously acknowledged public reports over the new section, one of the worst-kept secrets in the newspaper industry. His remarks mark the Journal's first foray into local news with a stand-alone daily section featuring articles on culture, sports, politics, and other news from New York.

After a long year of looking into the state of the press, the UK Culture, Media, Sports Select Committee has finally released its report on libel, privacy, and press standards, according to journalism.co.uk

The 167-page report completed by a committee appointed by the House of Commons offers recommendations on journalism ethnics to guarantee "a constructive way forward for a free and healthy UK press in the years to come."

According to the report's summary, this inquiry is the "product of the longest, most complex, and wide-ranging inquiry" the Committee has ever undertaken.

Community-funded news site Spot.Us introduced several new features and a streamlined design yesterday in response to user feedback. The updated format provides readers with a more interactive role in the journalism they help fund. Among the changes are story updates, the ability to create "assignments" for other users, and a presence on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea behind Spot.Us is simple: Stories begin when readers submit tips or journalist pitch stories. A price is set for the proposed article and Spot.Us lets the public donate to fund expenses for reporting.

The Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists is arranging a 'speed dating' event for freelancers to meet editors, reported MinnPost. For $30 (or $20 for SPJ members), freelancers can attend 'Freelance Love' on March 11 and have five minutes of "guaranteed face time" with editors from the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press and several magazines, according to the MNSPJ website.

SPJ board member Amanda Theisen told MinnPost that "Many of our members have been asking us to do something along those lines. ... The freelancer can pitch a story idea, or simply introduce themselves to the editor and show them some of their work.  Then, after five minutes, the freelancer moves onto the next editor, then the next, then the next...you get the idea!" When they register, freelancers are asked if they are interested in working for newspaper, online, magazines, or with photography or video.

Should journalists have to pay to meet potential employers? It seems an unusual move but one that definitely offers convenience. As news outlets suffer from lack of ad revenue, more journalists are left out of work and looking for freelance assignments, and more publications are looking for freelancers to fill the gaps that shrinking newsrooms have left.

Source: MinnPost, MNSPJ 

AOL is building a "newsroom of the future," reported BusinessWeek. What this means in practice is that AOL is using software to determine which articles readers might be interested in and then giving journalists detailed data on how much traffic and advertising revenue these articles generate, BusinessWeek said.

More than 500 full-time journalists now work for AOL, which has traditionally been a distributor rather than a creator of content. 150 were hired last year, and according to BusinessWeek, "As demand dwindles for the dial-up Internet service that made AOL (AOL) a tech powerhouse in the 1990s, Chief Executive Tim Armstrong wants to jump-start growth by creating original online content and selling ads to appear with it."

Matt Kelly, director of digital content for Trinity Mirror Group, has led a project to create standalone websites for niche groups of Mirror readers. Mirrorfootball.co.uk's success has been because of its unique offering, and its subsequent appeal to advertisers, Kelly stressed in an interview.




To hear more from Matt about mirrorfootball.co.uk, register here for the WEF Editors Webinar to be held tomorrow, Tuesday 23 February at 2pm GMT.

The Associated Press' six-month pilot project to distribute content from four nonprofit journalism outlets has so far proven to be a disappointment, Nieman Journalism Lab reported Friday.

Through interviews with the participating nonprofits as well as the AP, Laura McGann of Nieman Journalism Labs found that AP members had used very little of the content provided by the nonprofits.

"We're not really seeing that many reprints and we're not really sure why," Mike Webb, director of communications for ProPublica, told McCann. "We don't know what it is," he said.

Anyone paying close attention to Steve Jobs' iPad demo last month would have noticed a blank space in the middle of The New York Times home page. As most technology pundits were quick to point out, it was caused by the iPad's glaring omission of Flash, the Adobe animation software used by newspapers like the Times and The Wall Street Journal for interactive graphics and video on their websites.

Earlier this month, Jobs travelled to New York for secret meetings with representatives of the Times and the Journal, presumably to demonstrate how the iPad works to staff and answer questions. Details emerged Thursday about what exactly Jobs had to say during his demo in the News Corporation building for Journal staff, in a report published in Gawker.

AOL plans to expand its network of hyperlocal news blogs, Patch, from 30 sites to hundreds by the end of the year, Business Insider reports.

Patch is a fast-growing service. In October 2009 it focused on 12 communities in New Jersey and Connecticut, then announced plans to expand to another 11. It currently covers around 30, mainly in small towns in New York and New Jersey, and features the kind of local news and announcements that are not often reported by overstretched local media. Substantial growth, though, will still be needed to create a network of hundreds.

Three publications have teamed up for an ongoing investigative report into New Orleans and its police department, Editor and Publisher reports. They are non-profit investigative journalism project ProPublica, daily newspaper The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and public affairs television program Frontline.

The resulting project is called Law & Disorder and features video, social networking tools, photos and documents to report on several cases involving New Orleans police and civilians in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The collaboration came about when Frontline was searching for stories to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the hurricane and turned to ProPublica for help, while the Times-Picayune editor had seen ProPublica's piece about a New Orleans hospital published in The New York Times magazine. The newspaper and ProPublica then discovered that they had been working on some of the same stories. Times-Picayune managing editor Peter Kovacs told Editor and Publisher that he wanted to see this information in his newspaper.

Four Chinese journalists at the Financial Times are faced with redundancy if they do not return to China on half their current salaries, according to the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

Two of the four journalists, who produce a specialist Chinese language website for the paper called FT Chinese, are British citizens. Their terms and conditions are already "inferior" to other journalists at the newspaper, the NUJ said. The union branch has voted to demand the threat of redundancies be lifted and to ballot for industrial action if necessary.

More details have been released about the MediaNews paywall plans, which will charge for investigations and analysis but not for breaking news, Poynter Online reports.

Vice president for content development Howard Saltz said that investigations, enterprise, analysis, columns and reviews will be behind the paywall. "The kind of content that goes behind a wall is the kind of content that paid, professional journalists do," he told Poynter, "the kinds of things that you really couldn't count on bloggers and Web enthusiasts to do."

Articles will be free if it's necessary to remain competitive with other news sources, including breaking news and multimedia, he said.

The Berkeley Daily Planet will be phasing out its print edition as the paper transitions to an online-only format in March, the paper announced Thursday.

In an editorial, Editor Becky O'Malley and Publisher Mike O'Malley explained their decision. "The only way to cut expenses further is to give up print publication for the moment. We know that many if not most of our 40,000-plus faithful readers prefer paper, and frankly, we do too," the editorial reads.