Recently by Alisa Zykova

South African newspaper The Times has launched a new website that will be focused on covering the country's general elections, to be held on April 22, 2009. Saelections.co.za features news material and opinions from thetimes.co.za as well as information about the election from various Internet outlets and blogs, media analysis and interactive tools like Web voting.

Opinions and analysis are provided by contributors such as editors, columnists and bloggers from The Times and Sunday Times as well as politics expects and "thought leaders" from the field, wrote Biz Community. Furthermore, Media Tenor, which offers research on media, is tendering to graphs and annalsis. Saelections.co.za also contains links to Facebook groups, Twitter feeds and numerous political and electoral associations.

The New York Times (NYT) may no longer be simply a newspaper, but also a "platform company," suggested blogger Taylor Barstow after visiting the Times Open seminar last week, an event concentrating on Application Programming Interface (API).

This week, the title will be launching the Times NewsWire API, which will act like a "firehose" and "stream of consciousness," providing Web developers with access to the NYT's live headlines. The API will include a "trimmed down data set" but may include all online content in the future, Barstow acceded. 

Publisher Trinity Mirror's Merseyside-based newspapers will be teaming up this week to liveblog the titles' shift towards a new centralized editorial hub. The week-long initiative will feature eight papers, including the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post.

News conferences and meeting will be streamed live, video and images off the restructuring process will be uploaded and reporters will be providing additional content through Twitter.

China's state-funded English-language newspaper China Daily has launched a U.S. edition that will offer coverage of "local events related to China," chinaview.cn wrote. The edition will also feature analysis and opinions from contributors in the US and China.

The Chinese government previously announced plans that it would be developing the country's presence across global media in order to "improve China's image with foreign viewers," an initiative that included a US$6.6 billion investment.

Nearly 80 percent of Russian Internet-based news outlets copied and pasted complete articles from other sources from September 2008 until January 2009, Lenta.ru reported. Furthermore, research by web portal Yandex showed that only 8 percent of news articles contained links to the original content.

Almost a quarter of all news was about the economy and over 20 percent of articles contained the word "crisis." However, by January news about the gas problem between Ukraine and Russia received the most coverage. Science, medicine, tourism and the Web were issues that were least reported on, Yandex found.

According to research from The Bivings Group, which included 100 daily U.S. newspapers, the ideal newspaper website is NYTimes.com since it incorporates new Internet tools while managing to retain a classical look. The study focused on web features, key concepts and navigational aspects.

Russia's publishing house Komsomolskaya Pravda started testing its new radio station in Moscow. The official launch is expected to be in March 2009, lenta.ru reported. The station's core audience is expected to range between 35 and 50 years. Investment details are not known yet.

Director Vladimir Sungorkin said that while economic difficulties may have affected the company, the radio station's studio is finishing construction and publicity work will begin next month.

The Guardian's Peter Preston hinted that newspaper subscriptions may be interesting to titles since they offer future marketing possibilities which retail outlets may not and furthermore, present a product that has between 25 and 35 percent slashed off the cover price, which is a "real long-term help" during the economic recession.

In certain European locations, subscriptions may represent as much as 90 percent of sales. Subscriptions in the U.S. may be more common than newsstand sales, Preston suggested. However, overall circulation may be plunging across both the U.S. and the UK.

Netherland's Telegraaf Media Groep, publisher of newspaper De Telegraaf, is preparing to launch a broadcasting division, Wakker Nederland, radionetherlands.nl reports. An advertisement was printed in today's issue of the paper in order to attract members.

50,000 are needed before April 1, radionetherlands.nl says. De Telegraaf's current subscribers will be offered a free membership to Wakker Nederland.

Source: radionetherlands.nl

To complement the first issue of free local weekly MoskvaInfo, Russian publishing house MediaInfo Group announced that it is launching an online multimedia portal www.moscow-info.org.

The portal will have news material, editorial articles, audio and video reporting as well as informational archives. It will also allow users to adapt news content to their preferences by picking what material they will receive updates on, gipp.ru wrote.

India's "second largest" English-language daily newspaper The Hindustan Times announces that it is undergoing a makeover process in the next few months that will feature transformations across all the sections, supplements as well as its Sunday magazine Brunch.

Mario R. Garcia will be in charge of the redesign. Garcia previously redesigned papers like The Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal in the US and Sakaal Times and The Hindu in India.

"In a crowded print market, Indian publishers are increasingly relying on good design to help a new product stand out on the newsstand and keep the impatient young reader from navigating away from printed pages," wrote contentSutra.

Source: contentSutra

Slate.fr, US online magazine Slate's French edition, finally saw the launch of its beta edition on Tuesday, after experiencing financial complications that pushed the date by a month in January. Co-founder Johan Hufnagel, former 20minutes.fr editor-in-chief, spoke to Le Figaro about the launch.

Slate.fr's goal is to follow in the footsteps of Slate.com by offering reporting that is both "ironic" and "precise". The site will not only feature political and economic stories but also  "original subjects" such as articles about the Internet or cultural issues, according to Hufnagel.  

Document-leaking site Wikileaks has published 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports containing digitalized research material intended for Congress members and their employees.

The documents date back to 1990 and are predicted to be worth US$1 billion. Although the reports do not have classified information, they do refer to "politically sensitive" issues such as social policy, foreign affairs and defense, IT World wrote. Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Schmitt said the reports were received almost a month ago and that the website spent some time organizing them prior to publishing them.

In light of the expanding ties between Taiwan and China, Hong Kong's English-language daily newspaper the South China Morning Post (SCMP) will be launching a bilingual edition in Taiwan. Since there are already three English-language newspapers in Taiwan, the SCMP will be centered on online ventures in Chinese, but will have occasional news content in English. 

In a move to develop its business, cultural and entertainment news content, Russia's English-language newspaper The Moscow News, a part of the RIA Novosti group, has appointed British reporter Tim Wall as its new editor-in-chief.

Wall has been working in Moscow for five years and is the former business editor of The Moscow Times. He mentioned that he is eager to make The Moscow News "an original" and "lively" news outlet that would offer "independent" and "objective" news coverage.