Results matching “and reuters start news”

The New York Times Magazine reported on Sunday that the New York Times was poised to start charging online, citing un-named sources close to the decision-makers. The NY Magazine claims that the paper is looking at a metered system, similar to that adopted by the Financial Times. Reactions from media commentators suggest that the paper should step carefully, however.

Reuters writer Felix Salmon is a big fan of the New York Times' site, and believes that "any kind of paywall implementation is going to result in a deterioration of the experience of using it."

"Making people pay for access will almost certainly scotch the NYTimes.com's position," believes Jennifer Saba of Editor & Publisher. She believes that "AOL, NPR, CNN smell blood and will most certainly angle for those readers to come and read news for free." She adds that it is "baffling" that the NYT is trying to charge online but is giving away its mobile app for free: "why not charge for an app and seed people's behavior now?"

One of the largest media companies in Canada and owner of several daily newspapers has sought bankruptcy protection, The New York Times reported. The Times wryly noted that the move would make Canada's five largest banks the country's largest newspaper publisher.

CanWest Global Communications owns the main daily newspapers in the cities of Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal, as well as one of the national newspapers, the National Post. Its newspaper group is about 1.5 billion Canadian dollars in debt, and the company placed many of its broadcasting assets under court protection in October.

The Tribune's newspaper chain will go AP-free as of next week in an experiment to see if it can manage without the news feed and eventually cut back on the cost of subscribing to it altogether.

The trial period is expected to start next week (Nov 8), just over a year since Tribune Co. gave AP the required two year notice of cancellation.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos announced on Tuesday that the Kindle 2 would drop $40 in price from $299 to $259 in response to growing competition in the e-reader market. The decision comes amidst speculation that both Apple and Microsoft have plans to create their own devices and recent polls which have revealed that the current price point for e-readers is too high for the average consumer.

A new international Kindle that will allow users to buy books and newspapers wirelessly anywhere in the the world, will also be released on October 19 for $279, reports USA Today. Kindle users abroad previously needed a US Amazon based account and had to transfer their e-books from a computer via USB. "A book that may take two weeks to get shipped internationally in physical form can now be delivered in less than 60 seconds," Bezos told USA Today. The release is targeted at english-speaking expats and travellers and rivals the pricier iRex DR800SG ($399), previously the only e-reader to offer a global wireless network.

E-reader sales in the US have surpassed (albiet low) expectations, and Forrester Research, who previously predicted total sales would reach 2 million in May, has 'upped that projection by 50% to 3 million for 2009, with 30% of 2009 sales occuring in the holiday season of November and December.'

Social networking site, Twitter, is on the verge of receiving a cash injection of $100 million, reports The Guardian.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which allows people to post short 140-character messages via the Internet or SMS, is expected to secure the funding from Insight, a New York venture capital firm, and mutual fund, T. Rowe Price.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their online content given the abundance of free news available, reported Reuters. Schmidt was speaking via video link at a Q&A session at the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge, UK, responding to News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch's announcement that he planned to start charging online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," Reuters quoted him as saying. "So my guess is for niche and specialist markets ... it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news."

In May of this year, Reuters launched its first free-of-charge BlackBerry and iPhone news applications in the U.K, U.S, Canada and India. Those in the industry recognise that for news publishers, mobile technology provides a potential big-time opportunity, particularly for phone applications, to generate revenue. Whilst Reuter's senior vice president and head of consumer publishing, Alisa Bowen, notes that mobiles are now highly customisable devices, she also insists that charging a premium for users to have access to their online content isn't on the agenda.

The news comes following The Wall Street Journal 's announcement yesterday that it is to start charging for its mobile application in the next few months.

But has Reuters passed up on a money-spinner? Steve Outing at Editor and Publisher is of the opinion that although consumers are not frequently inclined to pay for news stories on mobile phones or online via micro-payments or subscriptions - they will buy applications.

How to tackle copyright infringement has recently become a hot topic in the news industry. Attributor is offering a novel solution via the Fair Syndication Consortium that aims to keep all parties happy. The Silicon Valley-based start up has developed technology capable of tracking news outlets' online content, and came together with a group of publishers to form the FSC, which plans to seek advertising revenue when their content is reused. The Editors Weblog spoke to Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor, about what the company can offer to newspapers in terms of increasing revenue and protecting copyrighted material.

More than 1,000 publishers have now signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium and agreed to have their content tracked. Pitkow explained that he started to persuade some of these of the extent of the problem in January when Attributor took 250,000 articles from 25 major publishers and ran these through its system for 30 days. Attributor found that each article was reproduced fully an average of 11 times across the Internet. So the seriousness of the issue was clear, and Attributor decided that a type of ad revenue sharing scheme was the best solution.

Leave the content, take the money

Rather than ordering those who reuse content to take it down, Attributor wants "to find ways to share in that advertising revenue that's being generated."  This solution stems from the idea that the larger the audience for news, the better, and as long as the original producers of the content are able to receive revenue, it is fine for their content to be reused elsewhere. Pitkow explained that Attributor had decided to "work at the currency level" in an attempt to come up with a proposition that would mean that "everybody can still profit from the syndication of this content."

So, the Fair Syndication Consortium plans to work with advertising networks like Google's Adsense, which are used by many smaller sites to place ads, to demand a cut of the revenue generated alongside reused content for those who originally produced it. If this demand is denied, then the rights holders can order their content removed.

The sites that the FSC will target are those that "are specifically geared towards repurposing other people's content and using Adsense alongside," Pitkow clarified. As well as being more profitable for publishers, the FSC also intends to make the process of responding to misappropriation of content simple and straightforward, involving dealing with advertising networks rather than having to serve lawsuits to publishers.

For the FSC to work, it is essential to seek the cooperation of ad networks. The Consortium's first agreement has been reached, with AdBrite, and Pitkow was confident that this signals significant progress.  The company is looking to get other ad networks on board but even just one is a good start, Pitkow said. "If you have one network that participates, and the rest are going to be forced to remove their ads, it means that everybody who's syndicating content is going to move to the ad network that does."

There is a financial incentive for advertisers to take part, as well as the motivation to appear to do no evil, Pitkow emphasised. That is, if they do not participate, the rights holders might choose to remove the ads that such networks have placed.

Will the money be enough to make a difference?

PSFK, a trends research consultancy, believes that "the numbers don't add up:" smaller sites make such a small revenue per article that the effort would not generate much income for publishers, and larger sites have often noted how to stay on the right side of fair use law. Pitkow, however, pointed to comments made by Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, who said that Attributor's work would make a significant financial contribution and could really help change the nature of content syndication. Ahearn told the New York Times that there was "tens of millions of dollars worth of inventory that is likely being created that we are not getting our fair share of."

As well as a means to protect copyright, Attributor's proposal could be seen as a way to more effectively syndicate content. Pitkow pointed out that licensing deal essentially consist of estimations of the value of advertising that could be generated from content, and that this is what Attributor does, but more accurately. Pitkow said that smaller sites that do not have a formal syndication team could use Attributor for this.

So will it work?

Pitkow explained that Attributor is now taking this content of 1,000 publishers have signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium into its system and starting to monitor how widely it is being used. He anticipates that the revenue-sharing scheme could be fully operational this autumn.

The Associated Press is independently looking at ways to track its and its members online content to ensure that unauthorised use does not occur, using a microformat tagging system via what it is calling a news registry. It is not clear yet what the AP intends to do when it finds misappropriated content. Other solutions also exist, such as the WAN-IFRA backed ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol; however although this is a step forward in terms of a commitment to protect content, ACAP does not as yet seem to have a strategy on how it would actually make publishers more money.

And this is where the advantage of the Fair Syndication Consortium lies. Rather than simply trying to stop content being reused, it is accepting that this is inherent in the nature of the Internet and is looking at how to use this to publishers' advantage. It may well not be a solution that all publishers approve of as it does mean that their content might remain on websites that they do not support, but at least it could contribute to tackling one of the news industry's current key challenges: how to make more money from online news. 

Mainstream media sources tend to report on stories an average of 2.5 hours before blogs pick them up, according to a new study by Cornell researchers. However, the top 10 sources in terms of speed of reporting were all blogs.  

To come up with this and other trends of the Internet news cycle, the researchers tracked a series of key quotations appearing on news media sites and blogs during the last three months of the 2008 US presidential election. In total, the study encompassed 1.65 million websites that produced 90 million articles between August 1 and October 31.

News Corps CEO Rupert Murdoch yesterday reiterated his conviction that newspapers must charge readers online, and expressed extremely strong opposition to the idea of a government bailout for newspapers. He was speaking on the News Corp-owned Fox Business Network.

"We would never take money from the government," he declared, as this would mean giving up "our freedoms and everything else to criticise or to play our full role in the community." He added that he did not think that "even the New York Times would," and expressed doubt that the government would even try to offer money. Debate about government intervention in newspapers has grown following a recent US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet which discussed whether to help newspapers become non-profit or whether to relax antitrust laws. Obama then told those at the White House correspondents' dinner that "government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America."

Apture has created technology that aims to make flat web pages more three-dimensional: the third dimension being boxes that pop-up to show the reader further multimedia assets relating to an article. At first glance it does not sound too ground-breaking, but taking a closer look, the implications for both readers and publishers are considerable. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris about how Apture works and how it can help publishers.

Harris described what inspired him to start working on Apture. He and his co-founders came up with the idea while studying at Stanford, during conversations with the Knight Fellows. Frustrated with the fact that despite the web being "truly the richest medium we have ever had to communicate with, with all the computational power and multimedia assets" it has "this flat characteristic of flat story-telling," they decided to try to do something about it.

Easy access to multiple multimedia sources

Apture has created a media search engine that allows writers to "quickly leverage all the media that's available on the web, in many different APIs and digital libraries," Harris explained. The journalist highlights keywords in the text, such as the name of a person, place, event, or a certain topic, and a box will then appear with a list of possible media assets to link to. These include reference tools such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Twitter search, even the US Congress, photos from Flickr or Yahoo, videos from YouTube or Daily Motion, maps from Google Maps, documents from Scribd, and the journalist can pick what assets they feel are apppropriate - possibly more than one - and set up a link.

When the reader clicks on the hyperlink, instead of opening in a different browser window, another small box appears to display the article snippet, video, photo or map which the reader can consult without losing their place in the original article. And as Apture allows journalists to clip a specific section of a video or link to a certain quote in a book, the box will hopefully offer them only the most relevant information. Readers can click through to the original site by clicking on a link within the box.

For individual publishers, their own archives and assets can be incorporated into the search engine. Apture has also developed deals with some clients so that any Apture users can access their archives: for example Reuters videos, or snippets from New York Times, BBC or Washington Post articles. Apture just added Google Books and NPR audio podcasts to the asset list.

The technology is free to blogs and websites with fewer than 5 million page views per month. Harris added that as the company is "getting a lot of valuable information from people using it," meaning that the system is getting better and better. Larger publishers pay "hundreds and thousands a month" to use Apture, however. Harris explained that they are willing to do this because the tool creates a "more compelling experience on their websites," as shown by the fact that there is "a proven difference" in user's engagement with pages.

Benefits for publishers

According to Harris, putting one or more Apture links on a page leads to 2 or 3 minutes added engagement time. Looking at Comscore media matrix data, he clarified, it appears that 20 to 30% of publishers' traffic is lost to search. If a paper does not answer a reader's questions, it is extremely easy for the reader to just leave. Harris believes that if journalists are thoughtful and thorough about the links they add throughout a whole site, you could imagine that the publication "may well be able to double the amount of time spent on the site." And obviously, more time spent on the site means more advertising money.

As well as this financial benefit, Harris described a less tangible but arguably equally valuable advantage of using Apture: the fact that it allows newspapers to be a more effective guide for their readers and to offer them a more coherent reading experience. When a paper sends their readers away, either by linking to an external source or just not providing enough information, it is "severing its relationship with you as your guide to that information." By using Apture to supply necessary background information in multiple different formats while keeping the reader on its site, a news organisation can "be the guide to an entire web's worth of resources, but retain a relationship with that reader," Harris asserted. The fact that publishers are "the owners of that relationship" puts "a lot more power in their hands," he added.

For those publishers contemplating offering their content back to Apture, one concern might be that by displaying their content in boxes on other sites via Apture, they could end up losing traffic. Harris stressed, however, that readers can always go back to the source, and that rather than trying to remove traffic from websites, Apture sees its role as "providing an opportunity for those media partners to get their content in front of new eyeballs that they would not have seen before."

What next?

"What we are really doing is creating an efficiency in the market that really wasn't there before," Harris concluded. Apture is connecting information "in a way that wasn't possible before." He said that the company intends to improve its current product by continuing to integrate new content partners and bring costs down. He also hopes to create new products that will "transform the medium, changing the way that people interact with the web," and which are "not constrained to the two dimensions that we've had up until now."

The advantages offered by online journalism are numerous, and products such as Apture's should be welcomed by journalists striving to find better ways to tell their story in a multimedia environment. The fact that the Internet allows us to see, hear or find out more about pretty much anything and consequently make a story richer and more meaningful is something which papers should take advantage of. Arguably, going a step further and creating their own new multimedia experiences should be a priority for newspapers, but using existing content to supplement their articles is a good start. 

According to the pressgazette.co.uk, Thomson Reuters has launched a new resource for small businesses, which it has added to its website.

By visiting the site at reuters.com/smallbusiness, users will be able to access breaking business news stories, commentary as well as audio and video content from a variety of Reuters' business journalists and content partners, including content from specialist US business publications such as BNET, which provides intelligence for managerial professionals, Entrepeneur, Greener World Media which offers environmental responsibility advice, IDG's CIO business technology publication, PC World, Network World, Computerworld and Wired magazine.

MarketWatch has redesigned its site, "showcasing the breadth and depth of its original content" and the market data and "valuable tools" it offers to investors, according to a press release. The site is part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, published by Dow Jones.

The new design features new navigation, "expanded content and features and better surfacing of the site's leading personalities and columns." Within the site there are two new tools, a "Terminal Header" at the top of each page and the "Dock" which is a floating tool bar. Both can give "on demand quotes, news and customized data and charting," A new advertising element has also been introduced, the "Kiosk," which offers "a blend of content and advertising delivered dynamically in a rotator format." There is also increased coverage on emerging markets and key European, Asian and Latin American markets.

Canwest Global Communications Corp announced a plan to stop publishing the National Post's Monday edition for nine weeks during the summer months. The cost-cutting move should start in June with no layoffs or content changes, according to spokesman John Douglas.

The Post already had to reduce some of its presence in Western Canada, while Canwest faced 560 job cuts and a C$4 billion debt. The company is also planning to continue cutting costs by selling some of their stations and its stake in Sports Media.

Despite the apparent difficulties Canwest faces, David Akin, of Canwest News Service published an article in The Windsor Star that said Canadian papers were better off than American papers. Akin makes the point that throughout the recession, Canadian businesses always seemed to be doing slightly better than the US. For example, about 73 percent of adult Canadians read the printed version of a daily newspaper at least once a week, while American readership lags a little more.

The Fair Syndication Consortium, a partnership between Silicon Valley start-up Attributor and a group of publishers, held its first meeting since the project was announced on Thursday. The group aims to target online advertising networks and request a cut of the money made of ads alongside reproduced newspaper content, with Attributor acting as a middleman. Editor & Publisher associate editor Jennifer Saba asks 'now what?' and establishes what exactly the public knows about it so far. The answer, it seems, is not very much.

Attributor found that for every one visitor who reads content on the original site, five find it in full elsewhere: figures that should be enough to persuade publishers that this issue should be addressed. "We don't presume the top publishers are going to move entirely to this model," Pitkow said. "We are just here to unlock inventory for these rights holders." If ad networks do not cooperate, Pitkow said that "the copyright holders can request those ads be removed," as once a copyright owner alerts a source of illegal use, any "safe harbour" disappears.

Silicon Valley start-up Attributor and a group of online publishers have partnered to form the Fair Syndication Consortium which aims to help publishers receive a cut of the advertising revenue generated on sites which have reproduced their content. Companies such as Google or Yahoo operate advertising networks that broker advertising to websites, and the group hopes to persuade these and other players to give them a share of the ad revenue.

Attributor Corp currently works with companies such as the AP and the Financial Times to track their text, audio and video content. If it is found that someone is using it inappropriately, the news outlet can request that it is taken down. Now, however, Attributor intends to use its technology to keep the content up, but with a share of ad revenue going to the publisher. "What we are saying is maybe there is a middle ground," said Attributor's chief executive Jim Pitkow. "If people are taking full copies of your content - why don't you take a revenue share?" Attributor would go direct to the offending company and demand a cut of the revenue.

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch declared at The Cable Show, an annual cable television industry event in Washington, D.C, that if papers want to survive, they are going to have to start charging for news online. "People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change," he said.

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi questioned whether the Associated Press' decision to sell its news content to online portals may have had a damaging effect on the daily newspapers that actually own the wire service. Back in the 1990s, millions of subscribers to AOL or other early portals and hubs of the web such as CompuServe would get their daily news from AP's packages. And now, the wire service is the primary news provider for online giants such as Yahoo or MSN, and is used by Google. Hundreds of sites, asserts Farhi, are "in the news business because of the Associated Press."

So this essentially means that the AP, a non-profit news cooperative owned by US newspapers, has been enabling these sites to compete for traffic and ad revenue with the very newspapers that own it. Or as Farhi puts it "for years, newspapers have effectively been handing their online competitors one of their chief weapons in the fight for the news audience, the AP wire."

The Financial Times group yesterday unveiled the launch of a new search engine called Newssift aimed at business professionals. Rather than scouring the entire web, the tool will give users access to relevant databases, as well as filtering articles from a wide array of international business news outlets, including professional sites, opinion pages and blogs.

UK tabloid The Sun is to launch an online radio station called Sun Talk, reported MediaWeek. The station will start broadcasting on 20 April for three hours a day every weekday morning, from 10am-1pm.

Former TalkSport host and current Sun columnist Jon Gaunt will host the show, and its first guest will be David Cameron MP, leader of the Conservative party: apparently part of the paper's attempt to align itself with a more upmarket audience. The new station is aiming to reach 150,000 listeners within its first year. The Sun's website already has a SunTV portal offering video content.

As newspapers lose advertising revenue to the Internet, papers like The Washington Post find themselves forced to reorganize their layouts to save money on printing. Just in the last year, The Post has cut the Sunday Source section and Book World in addition to combining the Sunday Arts and Styles sections. Now, the paper plans on eliminating its business section six days out of the week and moving the important business stories to the "A" section.

"The A section gets more readers than the Business section, so we'll have more readers for our business coverage. We aren't changing the size of the staff" Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Post and former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, told Reuters.

Google has just added a comments section to its Reader service: making it "your new watercooler," according to the Google Reader Blog. Previously, readers could add a comment if they shared an article, but users could not start a conversation. VentureBeat described the new feature as "the crucial missing ingredient."

Venturebeat writer Anthony Ha believes that this is "a big step towards turning Google Reader into a real social news service, that may eventually compete more directly with sites like socialmedian and MeeHive." He does, however, see a downside to this expansion of Google Reader's scope: the fact that "this only increases the fragmentation of online discussions," as many people already use more than one social network to link to or comment on news articles. He suggests a service called UberVu, described by VentureBeat as "a one-stop shop for dealing with all of the online content you create," to keep track of discussions.