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The London Evening Standard's readership has gone from 556,000 in April to September to 1.37 million in the last three months of 2009, Stephen Brook from Guardian reports.

These positive readership figures follow the newspaper going free in October of last year and more than doubling its circulation to 600,000 copies in the process. The London Evening Standard was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebeveb in 2008, and his decision to drop the paper's 50p cover price was made in the hope that boosted circulation would increase advertising enough to make up for the lost revenue of having no cover price. His move towards the freesheet format prompted speculation that other London quality newspapers may drop their cover price as well.

The Washington Post may be looking into providing readers with more news and information on local business. A source told the Washington City Paper that the Post is planning to launch a business publication called Capital Business, which would be issued weekly and cost US$1.99 per week.

This comes less than a year after the Post shuttered its daily business section to "save on newsprint - an important objective in these times." However, the Business Insider pointed out today that the prototype sent out to subscribers for their input is in print, not online.

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

The San Francisco Panorama, also known as the the 33rd edition of McSweeney's Quarterly, was released yesterday. The 320 pages of full color comes complete with investigative reporting, comics, a book section, posters, and a 16$ price tag.

According to media wonderchild and McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers, the quarterly chose to make a newspaper from scratch for its newest issue to "demonstrate the many things that newspapers can do uniquely well, and how necessary they are to a thriving democracy."

McSweeney's collaborated with over 150 freelance writers, designers, and artists. The Panorama includes contributions by Stephen King, Miranda July, Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Adichie, and Art Spiegelman.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey has found that a slight majority of Canadians would support a government bailout of the newspaper industry, and that 87% of those polled believe newsprint has an important role in the media.

According to the survey, approval was highest in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, among women, younger people and lower-income earners. The poll was conducted just before the announcement of Canwest receiving parital bankruptcy protection yesterday.

Doug Anderson, senior vice-president at Harris-Decima, notes that "In fact, there is a very high degree of respect for the newspaper industry and a widespread sense that it matters to people."

Total newsprint consumption in the U.S. plummeted 27.1% since last August, according to data from the Pulp and Paper Products Council. Almost all of the slowdown occurred in August alone, when 26.3% of consumption dropped from 3.415 million tons of 2009's first eight months to 2.682 million tons.

Production of newsprint also fell 38.6%, while overseas exports dropped 44% since last year. Curiously enough, overseas imports to North America (all to the U.S.) rose 24.8%. Both Canadian and American paper mill operating rates were at just 65% in August, compared to 96% and 97% last year.

With newsprint markets still sliding, analysts have said more downtime -- particularly permanent closures -- would be needed to firm up markets enough to raise prices. Last week, AbitibiBowater Inc. announced several indefinite shutdowns of newsprint capacity at three Canadian mills and one mill in the U.S., plus a groundwood paper mill in Canada.

Reporters from America's leading daily press and cable networks flooded into New Haven, Connecticut last week, following the news of the discovery of murdered Yale grad student, Annie Le's body, hidden inside a wall in a campus building where she worked. With the latest development that Raymond Clark III was arrested and charged with Le's murder yesterday morning, the level of attention the story has received from national, as well as international press does not appear to be letting up anytime soon.

Credit goes to the university's own student news website, The Yale Daily News, partner to the college's newspaper,  which has been praised as being one of the best sources for information throughout this tragic series of events, for its unsensational and accurate daily online reports.  In another commitment to journalistic ethics, the New Haven Independent chose not to name suspect Raymond Clark III before he was arrested and charged, referring to him as the "person of interest" instead, and only supplying details that would not lead the public to him.

Reflecting continuing growth in the digital publishing market, five organisations involved in the development of mobile applications and e-reading devices have become the latest members to join the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a forum of the world's leading magazine and newspaper publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies.

According to Editor and Publisher, both Sony; creator of the Sony Reader line of digital readers, and Plastic Logic; creator of the Plastic Logic Reader for mobile business professionals, are among two of the big name enterprises set to join the organisation, alongside current members Amazon, Texterity and Zinio.

The winners of the 2009 World Young Reader Prize have been announced: Zero Hora of Brazil and Express & Echo of the United Kingdom have been named World Young Reader Newspapers of the Year for two vital kinds of excellence in the annual competition organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

The awards are part of WAN-IFRA's annual World Young Reader Prize competition, which honours innovative newspapers that have devised the best project or activity to attract young readers. The awards are made in six categories: branding, public service, press freedom, editorial, and in "making the news".

The departure of the Agence France-Presse bureau from Fleet Street on Sunday, the last international desk remaining on the strip, is a further reminder that home of British journalism is now history and shorthand.

The image of Fleet Street today, filled with investment bankers and lawyers, is radically to different to that of thirty years ago, when the street was bustling with British and international newspaper hacks moving in and out of their headquaters. As of Sunday, Scottish publishers D. C. Thomson's London bureau will be the only newsroom left standing in the street, laments the South Africa's The Times.

The backwards-thinking yet futuristic idea of taking content from the Internet and reproducing it in printed form has not been the overwhelming success The Printed Blog hoped it would be. Founder Joshua Karp announced in a blog post yesterday that the publication would be put on hold indefinitely after running out of capital and failing to attract investors.

"Creating a new breed of newsprint publication from scratch was an amazing experience," Karp wrote, "and it was humbling to have been so prominently included in the global discussion on the future of journalism and the print media."

Many newspaper readers would agree that word games are an essential component of the newspaper package. Yet, in last Sunday's edition of the New York Times magazine, the Acrostic puzzle had apparently disappeared.

The magazine has been making modifications to economise on newsprint. It has been reduced in size and the puzzle content altered: two Sundays ago the acrostic had moved page, and its original spot filled by a maths puzzle, the KenKen.

The Washington Post recently took the unusual step of publishing a long investigative reporting piece on a local homicide only on its website, rather than in the print paper. Even though many articles are published online first and then in print, it has become common practice to publish in-depth pieces which are not breaking news in the print paper first, and the Washington Post's move is somewhat of a break with tradition.

The 7,000 word article on the unsolved murder of Robert Wone appeared on the Post's website in two parts, on May 31 and June 1. It is, however, the "sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age," according to the New York Times. And unsurprisingly, keeping the article out of the print edition angered many readers who pay for the newspaper, with comments on the article questioned the move.

Advertising Age, an online resource of the news on media and marketing, has concluded that "Print is not aging well. Or, rather, its readers are aging rapidly."  The statement is based on the latest research on the newspaper and magazine industries, conducted by Mediamark Research for Spring 2009.

The research focused on ascertaining the average age of the readership of papers and magazines.  The findings, given the large amount of attention paid to the inexorable rise of digital sources of information- generally thought of as catering to a younger user base, are hardly surprising: readers of the print are getting older.

In an article for the New York Times, Tim Arango and Richard Pérez-Peña have discussed the impact of Rupert Murdoch's dedication to newsprint on his business decisions.  Whilst Murdoch's passion for print was once looked past by potential investors, in the current tough economic climate "they find that a tougher chore these days, as other media struggle and newspapers suffer through their worst slump since the Depression."  The article focuses particularly on News Corp's acquisition of Dow Jones for more than $5 billion, looking increasingly overpriced as it generated just $100 million in operating profit last year.

"Emotional biases and attachments play into our strategic decisions in really significant ways," said Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, in reference to Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal, which despite (somewhat unusually in current circumstances) maintaining its circulation, has suffered a loss in advertising revenue.  The article also reasons that the continued high level of circulation could be due to the heavy discounting that the publication introduced last year.

The New York Times has announced its as yet un-named application, which aims to recreate the effects of browsing the newspaper on a Sunday, "spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch".  The application lays out as many stories as possible in a grid on the page, not displayed with a date but fading as they age.  Users can browse stories by topic, a little like choosing which section of the newspaper to read, and there are plenty of keyboard commands for the efficiency lovers.

Whilst the NYT admits that it can not replicate "the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint", the very attempt to put the better aspects of newspapers onto a website is a very telling sign of current media trends.  The website doesn't give a launch date for the new application, but it provides a prototype for users to try and "hopes the result is a little taste of Sunday relaxation, whenever you need it".

Source: New York Times

So forget online-only, not-for-profit, paid online content, subscriptions, free dailies and all those other ideas currently being flung at the ailing printed press.  Bill Shein has had enough of them and the result is a whole new - and frankly a whole lot more fun - list of suggestions to put newspapers back on track.  

That age-old problem of inky fingers after flicking through the morning news, he asks? Easily solved with flavoured ink,  a suggestion similar to Jon Stewart's narcotic newsprint.  Or why not take it a step further with entirely edible pages.  A martini flavoured Bond review, or a football game report that tastes of hot-dog.  To make sure readers buy the following day's edition is easy: just don't tell them what happens at the end of a story.  'Who Shot JR?' style mysteries.

With these suggestions newspapers would taste better and contain cliff-hanging content, so how to make them look better is the next step.  The answer is simple apparently; front page nudity. Print half of all daily editions with 'Page One Girls', and the other half with 'Page One Guys'.  Then turn paperboys into full-scale concierges who deliver direct to your bed and also provide breakfast.  Finally, add mind-reading Web 2.0 products to find out what online readers want and complete consolidation of publications - so that there would be no option but to read.  Follow these simple steps and the perfect newspaper is born, Shein concludes.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Walter Isaacson, ex-managing editor of Time magazine and current CEO of the Aspen Institute yesterday addressed the current conundrum of the printed press: how to make money.  The crux of the dilemma is that printed news costs money, yet identical content online is given out for free.  This combined with a decrease in advertising revenue due to the global economic crisis has left many newspapers and magazines struggling.

In a Time piece entitled 'How to save your newspaper', Walter Isaacson bluntly reveals his attitude to the printed press; "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it."  His logic is indisputable; very few people would pay for that which they can have for free.

Isaacson is struck by the irony of the situation; news publications have a higher readership that ever when you consider both print and online figures, yet they have never been more under threat.  He links the problem back to the online advertising boom which at the time looked like its revenues would be more than sufficient to carry both online and print editions of any newspaper.

Another batch of daily newspaper are cutting back print editions.  In Philadelphia, three publications of the Calkins Media Group (The Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer of Doylestown and the Burlington County Times) are moving their Saturday editions to online-only, whilst in California the Tahoe Daily Tribune will be printed just three days a week.

Both publications have cited different financial difficulties for the move.  Calkins publisher Michael Scobey says the removal of Saturday editions is a return to the traditional publishing schedule as "the market no longer supports the additional day of print publication".  Tribune publisher Mary Jurkonis explained the decision is due to "increases in the cost of newsprint and the sour national economy."

Source: Editor & Publisher

While the press around the world is scrambling to integrate their newsrooms to adapt to the digital age, entrepreneur Joshua Karp is aiming to do just the opposite. In an adventurous new media venture, he has started The Printed Blog, a twice-daily free printed newspaper which will publish content from blogs online. 

According to a report published by the Pew Research Center, the Internet overtook print newspapers as a news source this year in the United States.

The report found that Internet usage surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers, the Guardian reports.

The New York Times reports that the change "does not represent a decline in the popularity of newspapers," but rather a "near-doubling" of the number of people that name the Internet as their primary news source.  Newspapers actually gained a percentage point in popularity over the last year.

Consulting firm Deloitte has released a report showing that the 14-25 demographic watches a considerable amount less television than its older peers. Whereas Generation X (26-42) watches 19.2 hours of TV per week, the Millennial generation average a mere 10.5 hours in front of the boob tube. Still, this generation consumes the most media of any other demographic. Surprising figures? Not really.

With all of the interactive options Millennials have (video games, social media, mobile phones, MP3 players, etc.), sitting in front of a screen controlled by traditional "gatekeepers" seems less appealing. Getting their fingers dirty on newsprint that doesn't give the chance to talk back, even more so. Obviously, the trend of already declining newspaper circulations will only perpetuate as Millennials grow older and their grandparents pass-on.

But all is not negative for traditional media, whose audiences have never been bigger thanks to their Internet presence. The Bivings Group recently released a report indiciating that the large majority of newspapers are "getting it" on the Web, integrating social media and RSS, eliminating registration pages and opening their articles to reader comments.

An even brighter light shines on these promising developments when considering Internet ad spend. UK based-bank Barclay's released its US ad forecasts this week, expecting a 6.1% increase in Internet advertising. Although this rate is a huge drop from the 20-30% increases Internet advertising has been experiencing for several years, the global economic crisis combined with the fact that TV and newspaper advertising will drop 10% and 17% respectively means Internet-based companies can remain optimistic that ad revenues will continue to fill their coffers.

Of course, even increasing Internet revenues are not coming close to making up for lost ad revenues of media companies through traditional outlets. Content production and journalism in general are suffering because of massive staff layoffs. And perhaps to make things worse, Barclay's predicts that the bulk of Internet ad jump in 2009 will go to search, up 20%, compared with a 4% rise in display advertising. Some traditional media companies may not like it, but they're going to have to share more revenues with Google and the like. Still, that's not all bad. As they leave the paper on the doorstep and the TV off, most Millennials only find traditional media through Google to begin with, which may mean search engines are the only way traditional media houses will remain relevant. 

Sources: Reuters through European Journalism Centre, Seeking Alpha, Read Write Web  

Are there any newspapers willing to move completely online, foregoing the current struggle for a print edition?  This is the question journalist Gary Andrews asks, analyzed by Media Guardian's Roy Greenslade.  

As of December 8, the Seattle Times will be presented in three sections, rather than four on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The first section will remain unchanged aside from the addition of the Opinion page.  The third section, Sports, will also remain the same.