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Australian public broadcaster the ABC has launched a new digital initiative called ABC Open to feature user-generated content on existing ABC local websites.

The initiative aims to develop the digital skills of local communities to tell their own stories. The reports produced through the project will be published on the broadcaster's local websites and other sites, and may also be distributed on radio, television or mobile platforms.

More than 50 editors and producers, based in local radio offices around the country, will be charged with helping communities design and develop media-rich local stories.

The launch of Apple's iPad has garnered much optimism in the newspaper industry, driving hopes that the innovative tablet computer will be able to breathe some new life into an industry battered by an advertising downturn.

Much speculation has placed very high hopes on the capacity of the iPad and a slew of new generation e-readers to revamp the industry and bolster its business model. But, as Poynter Online's Bill Mitchell reports, the iPad will probably not be the solution to all of the newspapers' woes, but this sleek electronic device could play a substantial role in the migration of users from a cost-heavy past to a more efficient future.

In what seems to be the latest move in the battle of the e-readers, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch screen technology, to possibly update its Kindle e-reader so it can better compete with Apple's iPad.

The New York Times reports that Amazon will merge Touchco's technology and staff members into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, based in Cupertino, California, a source briefed on the deal said on Wednesday.

On Monday The Chicago Tribune announced changes to its content and format as it prepares to roll out a narrower-by-one-inch page size as of 8 February. Editor Gerould W. Kern revealed these changes to be cost-cutting measures for the Tribune Co. paper, which is still crawling its way out of the bankruptcy protection it entered over a year ago.

The LA Times, another Tribune Co. publication, is also implementing similar cost-cutting alterations, evident yesterday. The most notable change was not the inch the paper also shaved from its width, but rather the new section - LATExtra - including local and California stories including entertainment, business, national and foreign news, as well as the lottery results and weather page. The section runs from Monday to Saturday.

It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, in exclusive talks to purchase the Independent newspapers, may attempt to bring an Egyptian partner into the deal, according to reports in The Guardian.

Lebedev is trying to persuade Egyptian billionaire Samih Sawiris to join him in investing in The Independent and Independent on Sunday, according to sources close to the deal. The details of the proposed agreement are unknown.

The Associated Press (AP) and Yahoo have renewed an agreement for AP stories, photos and videos to appear on the Yahoo website, it was widely reported. This is in contrast to the AP's negotiations with Google and Microsoft, which have not yet concluded. New AP content has not been hosted on Google News since December 24.

Neither party has offered details of the agreement, so it is unclear whether they have achieved their financial objectives. The deal had previously been expected to set a higher price for AP's stories and impose tighter restrictions on them.

The AP has previously argued that agreements providing relatively inexpensive access to a broad range of its content only devalue its news offerings. The New York Times reported that the AP was asking news websites for more money, but that aggregators have been arguing that news content is less valuable than it used to be because advertising is down.

While The Wall Street Journal struggles with advertising, it continues to diversify its offerings by delving into another realm - travel services. PaidContent reports that the WSJ officially announced Thursday the launch of WSJTravel, a website that will offer 50 travel packages to destinations including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America.

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

The Bay Area News Project, a nonprofit news and media organization based in San Francisco,  announced last Thursday that it had filled two key positions and had reached a deal to contribute content to the Bay Area edition of the New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project appointed as its CEO Lisa Frazier, a current partner at the consulting firm, McKinsey and Company.  Frazier has experience  advising online newspapers, information, and media companies on strategies for growth and marketing and sales.

Journalists should be willing to fight for strong freedom of information and open records laws, said the president of the Associated Press in a speech on Friday.

Speaking at the Kentucky Press Association, AP president Tom Curley stressed the importance of these laws as part of the "journalistic tool kit" to help reporters access information in the public interest.

"It's vital," he said. "A strong FOIA in the hands of strong journalists with strong legal support breaks news."

The holding company for MediaNews Group, publisher of The Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and 52 other daily publications, has filed for bankruptcy, Editor and Publisher reports.

Affiliated Media Inc., the privately held parent company for the publisher, expects to emerge from bankruptcy in one or two months. It has said that it has a deal with creditors to reduce its $930 million debt to $165 million. Lenders including Bank of America would get most of the company's stock, wiping out shareholders such as Hearst Corp. A bankruptcy court in Delaware still has to approve the plan.

A staff memo from the Tribune Company's CEO Randy Michaels and COO Gerry Spector, obtained by Romenesko Wednesday, announced the company's financial results for 2009. Despite a dicey year for newspapers all round, which left the Tribune company "feeling as though we would be fighting for our very survival", the bankrupt enterprise still managed to ring in an operating cash flow of almost $500 million at the end of last year - an impressive $100 million more than it had reason to predict a month ago. 

Journalists might be doing more harm than good in Haiti, suggests Noam Scheiber in a polemical piece published yesterday in the New Republic. While many journalists initially struggled to get to Haiti amid the chaos, nearly all major news outlets have a presence in Port-au-Prince by now. The New York Times and Washington Post each have ten staff in the country, not to mention CNN and CBS with their fifty-person production crews.

In some ways, he feels the mere presence of the media is hindering the rescue efforts they came to report. An excess of news staff puts an unfair burden on the country's already meager resources, with reporters "mooching off supplies intended for earthquake victims." On top of that, he dismisses the bulk of the news reported back as "redundant."

Non-profit investigative news groups have been encountering many of the same financial difficulties as the newspapers they have been working with, according to the AP's Andrew Vanacore.

As newsrooms cut costs and staff, investigative non-profit groups like the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) have picked up where they left off, or more appropriately, what they left out. Charitable foundations and philanthropists have pumped tens of millions of dollars into these non-profit watchdogs to investigate issues like corruption and the environment, which some newsrooms lack the resources to cover.

Editor & Publisher, "America's oldest journal covering newspapers", has risen from the dead, following its acquisition by a boating magazine chief.
  
Editor & Publisher, an independent news organization reporting on all aspects of the newspaper business, has resumed publication in print and online following its sale on Thursday to Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc, as Poynter Online reports.

Sports betting is a very fashionable topic, says Christian Kalb, the founder of CK Consulting, France, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'. Sports have always hoped to benefit from new sources of revenue and sports betting is one opportunity to do so, he adds.

He points out that gaming revenue, the total amount of money that people have bet, is not all profit. Gaming operators have to pay taxes, and these vary widely between countries. When this is taken into account, total sports gaming revenue is around €400-500 million globally.

Today, thanks to the internet, there are no borders, he says. People can gamble in a more interactive way with more forms of betting, including live betting, which enables bets to be placed even after the game starts. The number one target is young urban active males, a little more affluent than others and more likely to bet. Even in the most evolved markets, though, gaming operators can reach no more than 13-14% of the population. Only one country is higher - Finland at 20-30%.

With newspapers struggling to make a profit as advertising revenues decrease - just in the last quarter of 2009, American newspapers earned 17% less from online advertising than they had done a year earlier - many newspapers have turned to offering their online content for a fee.

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

All AP journalists should use social media, and more AP accounts will be rolled out on social networks in the coming weeks, according to AP's new manager of social networks Lauren McCullough. In an interview with Steve Myers on Poynter Online, McCullough has explained her vision of an active two-way conversation about the news.

"Social media plays a central role in our newsgathering," she says, adding that social networks are used both to build sources and monitor trends. At the same time, the AP seeks to distribute its content through social networks, such as on their new winter Olympics website, optimised for social sharing. Accompanying Twitter and Facebook accounts are planned.

A new survey shows that most Australians are unwilling to pay for news online, as the national newspaper The Australian prepares for a corporate restructure ahead of implementing its paywall plans.

Just over 70% of Australians would not consider paying to read online news, according to research published on Australian news website Crikey. Among 18-24-year-olds, the figure was even higher, at 76%.

'News junkies' who check for online news several times a day were less likely to pay for news than those who only read online news daily or weekly. And those who lived in urban areas in states with limited access to broadsheet newspapers appear to be more likely to pay for online news than those who live, for example, in the nation's capital Canberra, where broadsheets from all over the nation are readily available.

The planned closure of the LA Times' Orange County printing plants, announced last week, will mean more than just staff layoffs. According to LA Observed, editorial deadlines could be brought forward as much as five hours.

After the closure, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times will both be printed on the same Los Angeles presses. Under a plan approved by Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein, the Times will move to the earlier, and thus less desirable time, while the paying customer, the WSJ, will benefit from the later deadlines.

Two newspaper printing plants, one each in the US and the UK, are set to close, and substantial layoffs are expected to follow.

In the UK, Harmsworth Printing has begun a 30-day consultation over closing its Plymouth printing plant. If the plant is closed, 90 staff could be lost, although the company has said it would try to find jobs for them elsewhere in the organisation.