Recently by Ben Thalman

In a study commissioned by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and conducted by D-Code, results indicate that, in addition to spending most of their time with new media as opposed to traditional media, young people are getting their news from friends and social networks, as opposed to newspapers or television. 

The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) recently published a study called “Openness & Accountability: A Study of Transparency in Global Media Outlets.” The results of the study indicate that The Guardian and the New York Times are the most transparent and accountable while Sky News and Time are the worst. 

Confetti by Crazy Egg allows website owners to track where their users are clicking. Spots that users have clicked on are represented by colored dots on the website and these different colors represent the different categories that clicks are sorted by, e.g., operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search brought the user to the page. 

The free daily Metro in Sweden could launch Metrobloggen, a tool that would pay bloggers 3 öre, or half a US cent, per page view. Bloggers must get at least 5,000 views to be given any money and page views are counted monthly and not aggregated. So if a blogger gets 4,999 page views during the month of June they get nothing and they start at 0 for the month of July. 

Editor & Publisher has recently launched an informative segment called ‘Pauline’s Picks,’ that will help publishers keep up-to-date on some of the developments being launched on their peers’ news sites. 

There is some concern, especially among those at Reporters Without Borders, about the approval by the Zimbabwean House of Assembly of a draft law that would allow the government to intercept mail, phone calls, and e-mail without having to seek a court order. 

A recent case in which the media was banned from reporting on has caused Mike Dodd, legal editor of the Press Association, and two regional newspaper editors to call on Lord Chief Justice to act on what they call unlawful and unnecessary restrictions. 

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today might introduce magazines into their weekend newsprint editions. Both magazines would focus on lifestyle material such as jogging traveling, kayaking and hiking, and would attempt to exploit an advantage of magazines that remains despite the digital age; that advantage being the allure of glossy thick pages to advertisers. 

The New York Times took the number one spot for web traffic in May, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, with 12,755,000 unique visitors, compared to 13,735,000 in April. USATODAY.com came second with 9,528,000 unique visitors. 

General Electric and Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, are having talks about a possible joint bid for Dow Jones & Co. Those familiar with the situation have said that Pearson contacted GE, which controls NBC entertainment group and CNBC, about a joint bid but it is unclear if any bid will materialize. If a bid were to be made GE would have to finance the majority of it.

The Bush administration opposes a bill that would shield reporters from being forced to reveal their sources. Media advocates say that without the bill journalists will continue to be jailed due to their refusal to give up sources. New York Times magazine writer, William Safire, says: “The movement to force journalists to reveal their sources is an attempt to turn the press into an arm of the law.'' 

Ph.D. and adjunct professor, Ric Jensen, recently taught an online journalism class for the Mass Communication Department at Sam Houston State University. Jensen’s primary goal was to “give students a broad understanding of how they will have to develop new skills and new ways of thinking to succeed in online journalism.” 

A decision by Justice Scott Brooker in Canada to allow the media to attend the first week of the murder trial of a Medicine Hat teen, agreeing with lawyers of several media outlets that restricting media coverage was not necessary, raises the question: who should pay to keep the public informed about the justice system, the media or the government? 

An agreement between The Sun of Baltimore and the Newspaper Guild has been reached. In return for the agreement to take photos, the union received a change in the proposed raise structure that will keep a current mix of automatic raises and merit pay increases, as opposed to a shift to all-merit pay increases, also, reporters will receive training before they are required to take photos. 

Today the political and satirical Croatian weekly, Feral Tribune, is being forced to close, due to an overwhelming tax debt. The finance ministry froze the Tribune’s bank accounts because of 68,000 € of unpaid value-added tax (VAT).