May 2007 Archives

Chairman and chief investment officer of T. Rowe Price, Brian Rogers, wants the Bancroft family to sell to Rupert Murdoch. T. Rowe Price is the largest stakeholder in Dow Jones & Co. outside of the Bancroft family, with $4.5 million in shares.  

According to a new study from the Newspaper Audience Databank, daily newspapers in Canada reach 56% of adults 40 plus on the average weekday and 78% each week. "Their readership habits have changed little over the past 20 years despite intense media fragmentation and technological innovation resulting in a 'media everywhere' marketplace," the study found. 

A partnership between the Associated Press and Attributor, a California-based technology company, will help track AP content anywhere on the Web. “We are looking at it not just to protect our rights but to derive some intelligence,” said Srinandan Kasi, vice president, general counsel and secretary of AP. 

New York print media have been challenged to market a local business for $500 by Interesponse.com, a search engine marketing company specializing in local business. The idea is for each advertising medium, print or Interesponse.com, to put up an advertisement for $500 and find out which is better. 

The Chi Town Daily News, a local news site, recently received $340,000 from the Knight Foundation.  The Daily News is planning to use the money to recruit, train, and deploy volunteer journalists who will report on Chicago’s 70+ neighborhoods, an idea which truly embraces citizen journalism and local news.

When it comes to new media, the BBC is recognized as one of the most forward thinking traditional media organizations. Over the past few years, its implementation of user-generated content and citizen journalism has been especially respected. Director of Global News, Richard Sambrook, spoke with the Editors Weblog about the Beeb’s initiatives, previewing his upcoming speech at the 14th World Editors Forum being held in Cape Town, South Africa, June 3-6.

At the 7th World Young Readers Conference, hosted by the World Association of Newspapers in partnership with the Newspaper Association of America and Norske Skog, the problem of declining 14- to 25-year-old readership was discussed. One of the key problems is that young people are more likely to get their news from news aggregators like Google or Yahoo. 

User-generated content and local news are among some of the important changes going on in the news industry today. What may be surprising to some is that some newspapers in India are using material written by local people almost unchanged in their newspapers. 

Marketplace, created by the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, is a website listing businesses in Lawrence, Kansas. Users get to browse local businesses and businesses get exposure on the Internet. How does this model generate revenue? Businesses on the site pay different fees for varying levels of sophistication in their listings. 

According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper websites’ ad revenues rose 22.3 percent to $750 million in Q1 compared to Q1 2006. However, this impressive increase, in general, did not make up for  losses in the newspapers’ print advertising revenues. 

This week the Independent on Sunday is going to launch its redesign. The redesign consists primarily of amalgamating pullouts and magazines into a newspaper and a magazine and a stronger focus on graphics.

BBC Worldwide is creating “Digital Delivery”, a team of about 30 people who will be responsible for developing and launching a number of community-based, video-rich websites. The team is headed by BBC Worldwide managing director for magazines, Marcus Arthur. 

“It is destroying the credibility of photojournalism and journalism in general. It is one lie after another and the public is looking at these lies and losing faith in our industry.” This is what John Long of the National Press Photographers Association had to say about the way some magazines have been altering pictures of celebrities. 

Print advertising may be ready to drop by about $2 billion, falling from $46.6 in 2006 to $44.5 this year. This projection comes on the heels of a 6.4% drop in print ad sales in the first quarter of 2007. Included in this decline is a 13.2% drop in classified revenues. 

Awards for the 2007 EPpy awards have been announced: NYTimes.com won Best Newspaper-Affiliated Web Site for over one million users per month, the Associated Press took honors for Best News Web Site for under one million users, and the Washington Post won the award for Best Design of a Media-Affiliated Web Site. 

The deal between Gannett Co. and Tribune Co., which would have had Gannett purchase the Advocate and Greenwich Time newspapers from Tribune Co. for $73 million, has fallen through due to Gannett’s refusal to assume a contract between Tribune and the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America. 

The largest newspaper company in the US, Gannett, is beginning a strategy that may let it distribute its brand and content over the Internet – the launching of widgets. Widgets are small plug-in windows that users can add to web pages to keep track of various things, such as news, weather, prices, etc. 

The Russian Union of Journalists is being evicted from its headquarters in Moscow to make space for the Russia Today television channel. The move comes less than two weeks before the union hosts the triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists.