Recently by Katherine Thompson

Business Week's report that Amazon planned to launch a new version of its eponymous Kindle e-book reader have proved wide of the mark.

Dow Jones Newswire report that Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said on the issue: "Don't believe everything you read -- there's a lot of rumor and speculation out there about Kindle. One thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be no new version of Kindle this year. A new version will come out sometime next year at the earliest."

Source: Guardian.co.uk

See also:

Sony Reader muscles into Kindle territory

Along with launching a new lifestyle magazine (WSJ.), News International are pushing through a WSJ.com relaunch, which will debut on September 16.

The International Herald Tribune report, Robert Thomson, managing editor of the Journal, said the new site will sport "lots of wonderful gizmos" and a new design providing easier access to free content.

Thomson went on to say that the Journal will likely introduce additional magazines along with other features to boost its Saturday edition. News International reportedly believes this is an ideal way to reach its readers in a more relaxed environment -- and with it, additional direct-to-consumer advertising to offset reductions in business-to-business placements.

Source: International Herald Tribune

See also:

US: Wall Street Journal unveils magazine supplement, WSJ.

The Chicago Tribune is undergoing a radical overhaul which is scheduled to be launched in a matter of weeks.  Prototypes of the new pages and sections for this redeign were posted in Tribune Tower for review by employees on Thursday.

Sources told the Chicago Sun-Times that the space devoted to news in the Chicago Tribune will be significantly reduced, with the paper's front section including national and international news, the local and business reports and the editorial page. The Tribune publishes freestanding sections for metro and business news currently.

The redesigned paper is set to have a three-section format, Tribune employees reported to the local rival newspaper. The newspaper's other sections would be for features, with a working title of Live, and Sports. According to the prototype, the pages for local news will be labeled Chicagoland, a term Tribune editors use to define the city and its suburbs.

The Chicago Tribune, is aiming to launch the revamp by the end of September.

The Tribune itself has refused to comment on the leaked information. The sources that spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the pages they saw were works in progress, with some section having several versions up for review. The recently leaked idea that the newspaper would be renamed The Trib has reportedly been abandoned.

Source: Chicago Sun-Tribune via IFRA Executive News

See also:

US: Chicago Tribune prototype redesign leaked

The Kyiv Post website is undergoing a redesign scheduled to be launched on September 7. The new site will incorporate online news resources and will contain all the content of the print edition.


Brian Bonner, chief editor of the Kyiv Post, said that the redesigned site will contain more news and content than is possible in the print version.

Bonner went on to report that Kyiv Post readers can expect a redesigned print copy of the newspaper this month. It will contain more pages for news and entertainment coverage, a separate employment section containing tips for both employees and employers.

Source: Kyiv Post via IFRA Executive News

The Sony Reader is muscling into Kindle territory, and early reports on the new player in the market are positive.

The Kindle is more expensive the Sony's model and the Kindle does not have "format neutrality." The Kindle is unable to read formats like Acrobat PDF unlike its Sony rival, which can read virtually any format. However, the Sony Reader may not have always-on Internet connectivity, according to Gizmodo.

The Reader also does not does not have as many titles as Amazon's gadget has, but you can read any PDF, TXT, RTF, DOCs, Blogs and RSS for free and right away. But, you have to pay for each blog and RSS you subscribe to with the Kindle. This is disappointing when you can access these for free with an iPhone.

Furthermore, the design of Sony's model is more aesthetically pleasing than Kindle. The slimline model makes its rival look somewhat cumbersome by comparison.

Sources: Guardian.co.uk and Gizmodo

An Ipsos Mori British Business Survey 2008 (BBS) has revealed that News International's The Times, The Sunday Times and Times Online still attract more business executive readers than their rivals.

This is despite the fact that The Times has suffered a decline in its readership since the last BBS survey in 2005. The survey reports that The Times averaged 330,000 daily business readers, which is slightly down on the 339,000 it registered in 2005.

The Daily Telegraph attracts 187,000 business executive readers each day, down from 202,000 in 2005. The Times has 83,000 C-Suite readers (board level executives holding positions such as chief executive and chief financial officer), which News International say is 38% more that the Financial Times.

The Sunday Times also led the way in the Sunday market, averaging 453,000 business readers, ahead of The Sunday Telegraph on 169,000 and The Observer on 147,000.

For its web edition, Times Online attracted 269,000 business readers in the latest survey, up from 167,000 in 2005, putting it ahead of Telegraph.co.uk, which secured 155,000 readers on average per day, followed by Guardian.co.uk with 193,000 and the FT.com on 199,000.

Source: Brand Republic

20 Minutes, the French free daily, will undergo a makeover this November.

The newspaper will create more space for photos and change the font. It will not reduce the editorial content. Management wants to make the newspaper more visual, spacious, and clearer. These changes at the newspaper have been in the pipeline for sometime.

The Editor-in-Chief, Johan Hufnagel, of 20Minutes.fr was fired recently due to a difference of opinion with the Editor-In-Chief of the print edition, Corinne Sorin. 20 Minutes President France, Pierre-Jean Bozo, believes there cannot be two Editors-in-Chief at the publication.  This action provoked a five-day strike at the website editing department in August. Negotiations are ongoing at the newspaper.

Source: AFP via IFRA Executive News

Google is dropping a section of the licensing agreement for the new Chrome browser after complaints.

Google reported yesterday that it is removing the section that gave the company, "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the new browser.

Shortly after Chrome was launched users raised concerns about the language in the copyright. Some critics said the language would allow Google to use any Web content displayed in Chrome without copyright permission.

Google has indicated that this is a misunderstanding, and that it simply borrowed language from other products, "in order to keep things simple for our users," when it inserted the copyright provision in the Chrome license.

Source: PC World

The Society of Editors' Executive Director, Bob Satchwell, says that contempt of court legislation in the UK needs to be updated. Legislation in the UK currently restricts the reporting of trials during proceedings to prevent undue influence from the media affecting a case.

However, Journalism.co.uk's Judith Townend reports that, "even if something is reported prior to a case becoming active - namely, after an arrest has been made - the content is still 'live' and easily accessible by jurors online during a trial."

The Society of Editors (SoE) has appealed to two different Attorney-Generals for a review, and in July petitioned secretary of state for justice, Jack Straw, to start the process.

Satchwell says, "There is a need for, "a general review of contempt so everyone knows where we stand." Satchwell is concerned that the UK will get to the stage where the media will be told, "you just can't report anything", which would be "quite ridiculous". He goes on to say, ""The public has a right to know these things and the public must be kept informed. What must be done is a review of the rules."

The Editors Weblog spoke to Ian Cobain, senior reporter and investigative reporter at the Guardian, and he echoed these concerns about contempt of court legislation. Cobain says, "There are so many matters where we feel that we cannot report on them because someone is about to go on trial."

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Wall Street Journal launched a glossy lifestyle magazine, WSJ., today.

WSJ., with a global circulation of 960,000, will appear on Friday, September 5, in The Wall Street Journal Asia and The Wall Street Journal Europe and on Saturday, September 6, in the U.S. Weekend Edition of the Journal.

The magazine will cover cars, fashion, property, philanthropy, personalities and travel.

The 104-page premiere issue of WSJ. in the U.S. (80 pages in the Europe and Asia editions) is launching with 51 advertisers, 19 of whom are new to The Wall Street Journal franchise. WSJ. will have a circulation of 800,000 in the U.S. and 160,000 outside the U.S.

WSJ. content will also be available for free online at www.wsj.com from September 6. The magazine will remain as a quarterly publication in 2008 but transition to a monthly magazine in mid-2009.  

Source: Dow Jones and Company

Google unveiled a new Web browser on Tuesday, with which it hopes to lure users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Google's Chrome browser, launched just a week after Microsoft presented an updated version of Internet Explorer, is designed to be faster, easier, more stable and more secure. This is supposed to aid users who use the Web to run complex applications, such as watching videos and running sophisticated programs that were once housed exclusively within a PC's hard drive.

The Chrome browser has a single box to type in keywords and Internet addresses. It's designed with "tabs" at the top of the page that access individual Web sites independently, so if one stalls it does not cause the others to crash. Furthermore, like the new version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it offers an "incognito" feature that lets users surf online without storing cookies or a history of which sites they visited.

Source: MercuryNews.com via IFRA Executive News Service

Lowell Bergmann is a ground breaking investigative reporter, a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series "Frontline" in the US and spent 14 years as a producer with CBS's "60 Minutes".

Bergman shared a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The New York Times in 2004 for "A Dangerous Business," (which detailed a record of egregious worker safety violations coupled with the systematic violation of environmental laws in the iron sewer and water pipe industry) and is a Professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Furthermore, he is a co-founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and a consultant at ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

The story of Bergman's investigation of the tobacco industry for 60 Minutes was chronicled in the 1999 Academy Award-nominated feature film "The Insider", in which Bergman was portrayed by Al Pacino (below left).

The Editors Weblog contacted Lowell Bergman - who was an early adopter and advocate of the multimedia model - to discover his views on the key issues facing investigative reporting and its future.

EW: What do you see in the future for investigative journalism? Do you still see it as having a home at newspapers?

LB: Investigative journalism in America has always been done by magazines and in books as well as in newspaper. For many years newspapers were not doing much of it. It was a 'freelance' occupation usually with writers like I.F. Stone and others who left newspapers because they were too restrictive. Personally, I have been using the web and been 'online' for more than a decade.

But it remains true that it is newspapers and traditional news organizations that produce almost all the new information everyday.

Pure web based operations with a few new exceptions recycle information they get from those organizations. We will see web based sites becoming the providers of more and more news and quality information in the future, but the transition will take time.

EB: What do you see as the key issue facing your profession?

LB: I am not sure it is a 'profession' in the traditional sense. In this country it is open to everyone. It is not licensed. Right now the transformation of the media endangers the collective experience of news people who chose to make gathering, investigating and presenting quality information their life work. That is why non-profits and educational institutions [Universities] will become more and more important. They do not have the same pressures. Its a time of transition, a kind of "Middle Age", that will not see a resurgence of real reporting until the economic questions are resolved.

EW: How has new media changed the way you work?

LB: Obviously, the availability of databases, newspaper archives and all sorts of information on the Web makes many things easier. But the old techniques and standards have not been replaced. To do investigative or in depth reporting you have take the time to meet people, and not meet them in a chat room.

Confidentiality on the internet is virtually impossible. It depends on trust. And trust is the weakest link in terms of the reliability of information offered up on the Web by so called 'new media'.

EW: Do you think there is more pressure from editors with the advent of the 24-hour news culture? Are investigative journalists getting the time and resources necessary?

LB: At a certain point you are a stenographer, if you don't have enough time to do the kind of reporting that advances what we know. This is not just true of 'investigative' reporters.

All good reporting involves asking some skeptical questions and not assuming what you are told is true. When I think of 'investigative reporting' I mean reporting in the public interest that looks deeply into a subject or story. Often it involves developing sources or hunting for documents or both and having the time to explore what they mean. At the same time in the best of all world's your editor is happy if you come back and say there is no story, or the story you originally went in pursuit of changed.

So, in answer to your question the pressure of a failing economic model by definition means there is less time. Prior to the decline of newspapers, broadcasters in the U.S. freed from the strictures around licensing that once forced them to present programming in the public interest along with operating with the threat of punishment created worldwide news gathering organizations. They had the incentive to do documentaries and present them even if the ratings were far below those of entertainment. That is no longer the case so you have less in depth reporting on the air as well.

EW: Is the law now having an impact on your profession? Is the law becoming more restrictive for journalists in general, and investigative journalists in particular?

LB: Not really. There has been a squeeze on the confidential source privilege, but it appears that Congress and a new President will sign a federal 'shield law'. The issues surrounding what is called national security reporting and/or criminal cases where a prosecutor or defendant has no where else to turn for information are unlikely to be resolved by the legislation. It is more of a question of the attitude/discretion of the prosecutors.

EW: Do you feel protected by the law?

LB: I never expect 'protection'. My sources do.

EW: How do you think an editor should best manage an investigative reporting team or reporter?

LB: Briefly, they should provide insight, encouragement and support, especially when the going gets tough.

EW: Who are the main competition to newspaper investigative reporters now? What are your thoughts on groups such as ProPublica?

This work is non profit. I have even called it 'anti-profit' by its very nature. So ProPublica, I am a consultant, or the Center for Investigative Reporting, I am one of the founders, are non profits working the public interest. Basically, that is what a very good newspaper newsroom does: report stories without fear or favor, and without considering the resources needed to do that. It is at its root a non-profit activity.