April 2007 Archives

Well, it's May again, a month scattered with numerous vacation days, tomorrow, May 1st, being one of them. We'll be back online on Wednesday giving you the most pertinent developments in the newspaper industry. Stay tuned...

Starting May 4, the Guardian Weekly will follow the Guardian’s lead and shrink from tabloid to half-Berliner format.

The Hindustan Times (HT), a leading English-language daily, has relaunched its website to provide around-the-clock breaking news and more interactive features.

At an EconSM conference, newspaper industry insiders sounded pleased with how newspapers are responding to the rise of online news.

Many news organizations regularly buy keyword ads to put their online coverage into the top spot on a search engine. Rob Garner of SearchInsider says this could be “the most effective and relevant form of news advertising” and that doing so for tragic events, as many papers did after the Virginia Tech shooting, is a necessary part of the business of online news.

As newspapers battle with falling print circulation and ad revenues, Boston Globe reporter Dan Kennedy says that the solution for the Globe and others could be in finding a new business model to escape the profit demands of Wall Street – perhaps going non-profit.

Jason Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment, recently said that traditional media need to stop worrying about sites stealing their content and instead “track and monetize” what’s being stolen.

News International’s (NI) Times Online has implemented a new web content management system that allows for reader-contributed features and multimedia integration. Other NI titles, including the Sun, will follow.

In the run-up to the 14th World Editors Forum, to be held in Cape Town between June 2 and June 7, the Editors Weblog is providing snapshots onto some of the ideas to be developed by the main speakers. Starting first: Mike van Niekerk, Online editor-in-chief of the Australian group Fairfax Media, who will speak about his experience with integrated newsrooms. He describes the necessity of cultural change among the staff, of going through the process slowly but surely, and how Fairfax – once mindsets were changed – equipped its reporters with multi-functional devices.

Publisher Fairfax Media will introduce a narrower broadsheet format for the Sydney Morning Herald and its sister publication The Age as part of a company-wide restructure.

The online edition of 20 Minutos claimed a few days ago that Spanish paid-for dailies are imitating free papers, in an effort to reproduce the great success of the freebies since they have appeared.

Prevented from working by a lockout, union employees of Journal de Québec have launched their own free daily newspaper, MédiaMatin Québec. The new paper will publish Monday to Friday with a focus on local news.

Director at Google’s offices in New York, Tom Phillips, joined a wide array of speakers at the 77th annual International Newspaper Marketing Association’s (INMA) World Congress taking place in Paris, April 25 to 27, to talk about one of the projects he heads, Google Print Ads.

Another step toward the paperless paper: Fujitsu is set to debut the FLEPia e-book, the first e-book with color e-ink capability. It will also have WiFi connectivity and the ability to store up to a year’s subscription to a digital daily newspaper.

Getty Images has entered a deal with Lulu.com, a site on which amateur publishers can create and sell books, calendars, photo albums, and ebooks. Under the deal, Lulu users will be able to add images from Getty’s library to their content; this brings a professional aspect to an amateur site.

David Evans of Forbes says that newspapers’ advertising revenue woes lie in the paper-advertising format, where papers can’t get feedback on who looks at their ads and thus can’t target them accordingly. The answer, he thinks, is in creating a paperless paper wherein news organizations can employ better-targeted advertising.

Poynter writer Leann Frola reports on the annual American Copy Editors Society convention. Among the main issues, what is happening to the role of copy editors, whose numbers seem to be thinning out of the newsroom – at a time when they are even more important?

Österreich, an Austrian daily launched in late 2006, mixes newspaper and magazine in both content and style.