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According to Mary Junck, chairman, president and CEO of the community newspaper publisher, Lee Enterprises Inc., there is a "continuing, irrational negativity about the future of newspapers". To counter this arguably unfounded pessimism, Lee is launching a campaign to convince advertisers and their own employees of the financial stability and public reach of Lee's printed and online products.

The campaign, running under the slogan, "First. Best. Today. Tomorrow", looks set to be launched in the public realm from September. The arguments that will underpin the persuasion campaign were outlined in a letter from Junk to the stockholders of Lee Inc, which discussed the company's fiscal third-quarter performance.

European newspaper and magazine publishers have presented the European Commission with a call for more copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online, the International Herald Tribune reported. A press release said that "a landmark declaration" had been signed at a meeting on 26 June in Berlin, convened by the European Publishers' Council and the World Association of Newspapers.

The joint declaration grew out of an initiative in Germany: the 'Hamburg Declaration' was introduced on 8 June and has so far been adopted by 149 German publishers. The declaration advocates "urgent improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet" and stresses that "universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost." It continues, "going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission."

USA Today has launched an application for Google's Android phone, available to download free in Android Market. The paper, like many others, already offers an iPhone application and is one of the first newspapers to embrace the newer Android platform.

The application includes headlines, a photo slideshow of the day's best images, interactive polls, sports scores and weather forecasts, tailored to a user's exact location via GPS. Articles can be shared via email, text or Twitter. Matt Jones, vice president of mobile strategy and operations for Gannett Digital said that "USA Today continues to develop innovative mobile products and services and the Android application is an excellent way to extend our reach to the latest emerging platforms."

Yesterday, the Australian reported that following a period of sustained economic growth peaking at the end of 2008, India's newspapers are beginning to show signs of economic retreat, with advertising revenue falling by unprecedented amounts.

With economic retardation sweeping the world, emerging markets are also beginning to suffer as foreign investment dries up but printing costs continue rising. "Newspaper sizes are coming down, staff are being retrenched, marginal titles closed and expansion plans put on hold," reports the Australian.

In 2008, the BBC World Service launched the "Your Story" project - taking citizen journalism to another level.  Since its launch in June last year, anyone with access to the internet can upload a story, with the possibility that it may be heard or seen by large audiences if used by the BBC World Service.

Though most of India's daily newspapers do have an online presence, Indian online publications have not evolved the same purpose and format as U.S. and European news sites. In an afaqs.com article reporter Kapil Ohri examines the reasons for Indian newspapers' failure to create profitable online ventures.

"Online editions are considered merely as an extension of the newspaper and are not treated as a separate source of revenue," says K. Srinvas, senior manager of Internet operations of Eeandu. While some online editions have tried innovative approaches to news, most Indian print dailies have not effectively harnessed the web to optimally reach and engage their readers.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

Bertrand Pecquerie wrote in an article in Le Monde yesterday that the French newspaper industry is in crisis and, worryingly, turning to the State for help. Newspapers have been subsidized in France for the past ten years and, in those ten years, the situation has not improved, it has actually worsened.

Pecquerie believes that there are four core problems facing the industry and these are not being addressed. The four core issues are method, diagnosis, objective and means.

The Telegraph site is to launch seven new TV programmes, including a weekly political talk show that will feature conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, a cooking programme and one-minute arts review.

Many people now are using social networking sites on cell phones rather than on their computers. "Almost everyone I know has a Sidekick or a BlackBerry, and I can only imagine how much they use it to check their MySpace/Facebook messages," says Long Island graphics designer Liz Degen, 21.

Think about personalized news sites as an improved RSS feed with a customized homepage design. This is basically the concept of DailyMe, one among many of these emerging sites. DailyMe opened its Beta version  to the public today, and plans to establish itself as a primary news source for online readers. Will newspapers fare down the same personalization route? Eduardo Hauser, publisher of DailyMe, talks to the Weblog.

Gannett’s move to their new model the “information center” is currently being met by curious critics. The multi-media newsroom has the potential to be the new face of journalism but some feel it may also alienate traditional journalists.

Head of the Continuous Newsdesk at the New York Times, Neil Chase, joined the speakers at the first World Digital Publishing Conference to talk about the latest innovations at what is becoming the world’s paper of record thanks to its website.

The American government is all over the foreign press. Not only does its military continue to pay American and foreign journalists to write pro-American "news" and propaganda, but now its Department of Homeland Security is funding projects at several of America's top universities through which they are to develop software that will facilitate scanning international media. 

This week's news of a year on year 2.6% average circulation decrease in American newspapers is unsurprising to say the least. But as the paper product dives, many are quick to point out that visits to newspaper websites are high and rising. With many papers claiming more online readers than print readers, the criteria for circulation by Audit Bureaus need to change to reflect the shift to the screen.

There have been many discussions about the contradiction between the huge profits that media giants demand and their newsrooms' role of producing quality journalism. Journalists feel that their publications, and their communities, are suffering greatly because of newsroom staff cuts which their corporate benefactors deem necessary in order to increase revenues as much of their audience and advertising migrates to new media, especially the Internet.

The Internet also furnishes a platform for journalism, but it has not yet been determined if it will be able to provide society with the kind of reporting it needs to remain informed.

In this respect, journalism is caught in a tug-of-war whose opposing sides are the old guard, which is seemingly cannibalizing it, and new media, which isn't quite yet sure how to embrace it. Depending on which side wins, either a brand new news model will emerge or journalism will be torn apart in the fight?

The Los Angeles Times’ experiment with wikitorials continues to develop, as LA Observed reports that the paper has taken down its first wikitorial entry from its website. The Times explained, “Unfortunately, we had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material. Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.” It is rumored that someone kept posting child porn on the website. Instead of functioning efficiently like a true wiki, a website on which the facts posted by readers are then refined, the wikitorial experiment unraveled into a war over its existence. On another note, in Sunday’s opinion section, one LA Times editor promised that the new design would soon be reveled.

Source: LA Observed

This is a very convincing article on how newsrooms' staffs need to understand the new business model of the newspaper industry. Thanks to Robert Niles and the Online Journalism Review for this analysis: "Technology that allows advertisers and readers to better connect continues to drive economic changes in the news business. The Internet hammered the newspaper classified business over the past decade, and now new technology for placing display advertising on Web sites promises to challenge remaining news industry business models. Many journalists don't give much thought to what happened on the other side of "the wall." But advertising pays the bills – including reporters' salaries – in almost all news organizations. And changes that interrupt the flow of money from advertisers to publishers ultimately result in less cash for newsrooms.

"If a newspaper had umpteen million dollars in revenue from employment advertising, which was the most lucrative category of advertising at newspapers, bar none, and that category has dropped by 40, 50, 60, 80 percent -- that has a significant impact on everything at the newspaper," said industry analyst Peter Zollman, founding principal of Advanced Interactive Media Group...

This is a very convincing article on how newsrooms' staffs need to understand the new business model of the newspaper industry. Thanks to Robert Niles and the Online Journalism Review for this analysis: "Technology that allows advertisers and readers to better connect continues to drive economic changes in the news business. The Internet hammered the newspaper classified business over the past decade, and now new technology for placing display advertising on Web sites promises to challenge remaining news industry business models. Many journalists don't give much thought to what happened on the other side of "the wall." But advertising pays the bills – including reporters' salaries – in almost all news organizations. And changes that interrupt the flow of money from advertisers to publishers ultimately result in less cash for newsrooms.

"If a newspaper had umpteen million dollars in revenue from employment advertising, which was the most lucrative category of advertising at newspapers, bar none, and that category has dropped by 40, 50, 60, 80 percent -- that has a significant impact on everything at the newspaper," said industry analyst Peter Zollman, founding principal of Advanced Interactive Media Group...

This is a very convincing article on how newsrooms' staffs need to understand the new business model of the newspaper industry. Thanks to Robert Niles and the Online Journalism Review for this analysis: "Technology that allows advertisers and readers to better connect continues to drive economic changes in the news business. The Internet hammered the newspaper classified business over the past decade, and now new technology for placing display advertising on Web sites promises to challenge remaining news industry business models. Many journalists don't give much thought to what happened on the other side of "the wall." But advertising pays the bills – including reporters' salaries – in almost all news organizations. And changes that interrupt the flow of money from advertisers to publishers ultimately result in less cash for newsrooms.

"If a newspaper had umpteen million dollars in revenue from employment advertising, which was the most lucrative category of advertising at newspapers, bar none, and that category has dropped by 40, 50, 60, 80 percent -- that has a significant impact on everything at the newspaper," said industry analyst Peter Zollman, founding principal of Advanced Interactive Media Group...

Technology is driving or enabling profound changes in how individuals access, assess and respond to information. These changes, and emerging technologies that will propel them further, are visible now.
We see the mobile lifestyle becoming dominant in Asia and Northern Europe; around the world we see online news, social networks, blogs and other forms of participatory journalism challenging newspapers, television and all forms of traditional media – both for revenue and for audience time and influence on consumer purchasing decisions.