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The 8.8 earthquake that ravaged central Chile on February 27 has also wreaked havoc on the newspapers that operate in the region. While some continued to print with borrowed electric generators and improvised newsrooms, some were forced to halt publishing for a number of days. Most of the local newspapers websites' in the most affected areas were down in the aftermath of the quake. But, even though the worst seems to be over for this battered nation's newspapers, damage to the country's largest paper factories could become a big problem for not only Chilean but also other south American newspapers.

As aftershocks still rattled central Chile, the Editors Weblog spoke to the General Manager of the Asociación Nacional de la Prensa of Chile, Ignacio Muñoz, about how the earthquake has affected Chilean newspapers and how they have coped with the difficulties of reporting under extraordinary circumstances.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

The Trinity Mirror will not implement a broad paywall strategy on its websites, according to Sly Bailey, chief executive of the newspaper group.

Bailey discussed the group's stance on charging for online access to content with MediaGuardian, confirming there are no plans to install a broad paywall. The group favors charging for more specific online services and products instead.

"We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," said Bailey. "It won't be possible for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it's free elsewhere...the BBC is an obvious one here."

After a long year of looking into the state of the press, the UK Culture, Media, Sports Select Committee has finally released its report on libel, privacy, and press standards, according to journalism.co.uk

The 167-page report completed by a committee appointed by the House of Commons offers recommendations on journalism ethnics to guarantee "a constructive way forward for a free and healthy UK press in the years to come."

According to the report's summary, this inquiry is the "product of the longest, most complex, and wide-ranging inquiry" the Committee has ever undertaken.

A British parliamentary committee issued their much-anticipated report on The News of the World today, accusing top executives at the newspaper of covering up the scale of the phone-hacking scandal.

In the 167-page report, MPs claimed it was "inconceivable" that Clive Goodman, the journalist convicted of hacking into the voicemails of royal aides in 2007, acted alone as a "rogue reporter" as the newspaper has previously argued.

T. Christian Miller of the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica recently won the prestigious 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Editor & Publisher reports that it was a collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit news outfit that produced Miller's winning report into abuses of insurance coverage for private contractors in war zones.

Just last week, the winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism - usually given to courageous and skillful reporting - were announced, NPR's On the Media explains. Among the usual big media winners was a surprising win - the anonymous Iranians or Iranian who captured the death of the 26-year old protestor Neda Agha-Soltan on tape in the violent aftermath of the Islamic Republic's contested elections of June 2009.

Carlo de Benedetti, president of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, whose publications include the daily newspaper La Repubblica and weekly magazine L'espresso, spoke in Paris about his support for paid content online and his belief that both Google and Internet providers should be pushed to share income with content producers.

De Benedetti gave a speech at SciencesPo university entitled "Internet and newspapers: the voice of democracy against populism," in which he outlined his belief that the Internet is crucial for spreading information more widely and is a force to be reckoned with, but that this does come with definite risks to democracy.

In terms of democracy, the fact that the Internet gives a clear platform to public opinion and allows any citizen to contribute to this, constitutes "extraordinary progress," De Benedetti said. However, there are serious dangers that accompany such a transformation, said De Benedetti, as such a system also gives a voice to the uninformed and the demagogues.

The importance of newspapers over other media

The vast abundance of information available online (although in many ways welcome) also leads to a complete lack of hierarchy of information. The fundamental role of newspapers, to organize and analyse the public debate, is threatened by this 'open-source' landscape.

Expanding on the importance of newspapers to a democracy, De Benedetti explained how unlike Internet or television, newspapers are capable of offering their readers not only information but the structure and context to allow them to come to their own conclusions on issues and events.

De Benedetti expressed concern and criticism about the state of television in Italy: as prime minister Silvio Berlusconi owns or controls a significant number of channels, and "commercial television imposes a kind of cultural hegemony." A citizen who stays informed only via television is weaker, he maintained, However, as De Benedetti noted, "television is already last century. It will continue to exist, but as a part of the Internet."

He does not believe that the Internet will soon replace newspapers, but suggests that newspapers can retain their traditional role as the "sherpas of information" on the Internet. "The presence of islands of quality news in the ocean of fragments of information... is absolutely necessary," he said.

Paid online content

De Benedetti is a strong supporter of paid online content. Consumers need to pay for news, he argued. Without the readers who were paying €1 each day for the print copy of La Repubblica, the paper would not have been able to carry out its ten questions to Berlusconi campaign, to which the prime minister eventually responded in November, hence proving its validity, De Benedetti said. "News that is free is worth nothing," he said: if you want your content to be valued you have to charge for it.

He admitted that what people require from a newspaper is changing, and that newspapers must embrace these changes and adapt their offering. "Now news is a commodity. You don't buy a paper to learnt what has happened: rather to understand why it has happened."

 "The news that goes deeper, that explains clearly, that verifies sources and adds context, is news that costs and as such, must be protected... whether on paper or on the web, on television or on the radio," De Benedetti said. Although the web has allowed newspapers to reach a large number of readers, continuing to offer news free of charge will soon "annihilate" daily newspapers and all quality news, he maintains. "Anybody can understand that paying for a good product is reasonable, even if it is online."

However, to make online content work, payment must be simple, De Benedetti stressed, something like Apple's iTunes. "Simplicity and 'automisation' of payment is absolutely key," he said. Journalism Online's Press+ has potential, he believes, as "it is difficult to imagine that consumers will willingly purchase content from multiple publishers who all use different platforms," and Journalism Online is offering a single payment system.

Charging online might have to be a gradual process, he explained, first involving making users pay for content that is not currently available online, and for content that is specially created for this aim, "if possible exclusive and elite."

Contributions from search engines...

Publishers should take a strong stance against search engines, De Benedetti suggested. "Google cannot exploit the content created by others without giving anything in return," he argued. "Aggregators do not respect the rules which protect intellectual property rights."

He pointed to the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency's scheme as something which could serve as a model for the industry regarding obtaining proper compensation for copyrighted content. The NLA works on behalf of the UK's newspapers and licenses businesses organisations to make paper and digital copies of newspaper content, its website explains. The collected fees are distributed to the publishers.

... and internet service providers

It's not just Google who should have to share revenue with publishers, believes De Benedetti, but also internet service providers, who he said "continue to exploit - just like the search engines - the traffic generated by quality news content." Paradoxically, he added, "the more content that is free, the more the revenue of internet operators increases, and the more that of the publishers who created this content decreases." Publishers must seek to persuade telecom companies to share some of their revenue linked to Internet access.

De Benedetti's views on the necessity for paid online content seem clearly in line with those of several other publishers as charging consumers online seems to be becoming an increasingly more attractive and feasible option, as the New York Times and other smaller newspapers jump on board.. L'Espresso group's star newspaper, La Repubblica, currently offers free online access, however, charging only for e-editions and archives. The paper just started to charge for its iPhone application, offering subscriptions for €4.99 per month or €44.99 per year.

His interest in coming to some kind of revenue sharing agreement with search engines and aggregators is also something which is shared by other publishers, some of whom are demanding more control over their content. As De Benedetti noted, Google has recently been presenting a more conciliatory face to publishers, by making its 'First Click Free' scheme more flexible, for example. The Internet giant also offers newspapers a revenue-sharing opportunity on Google News in the form of Fast Flip, and more user-friendly ways to display news, such as Living Stories or Timeline. But it seems unlikely that the company is planning to offer any direct cut of its main ad revenue to publishers in the near future.

Suggesting that ISPs also have an obligation to pay content providers appears more controversial, but it is an idea that has arisen before. Last year in France Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, suggested a kind of tax on ISPs which would then be distributed to content producers. The UK National Union of Journalists proposed a similar measure to support public service broadcasting in April 2009. Such legislation would be likely to face significant opposition, however.

USA TODAY is teaming up with Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Día to launch a USA TODAY Puerto Rico Edition. The newspaper will be produced and written by El Nuevo Día journalists and will start publishing on Monday, February 22, 2010, according to a company press release.

In addition to the News, Money, Sports and Life sections, the Puerto Rico edition will include two pages that will offer a unique perspective of the local events in the area, like politics, economy, society, sports, entertainment, and the Puerto Rican tourism experience. The newspaper will print from Monday through Friday and will be available in hotels and in the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico.

Two newspapers from Germany and one from the US have been awarded the title of World's Best-Designed for 2009, in a competition run by The Society for News Design. The awards went to der Freitag of Berlin, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and The New York Times.

An international panel of judges selected the winners from hundreds of entries from around the world. Overall, the judges said: "The overview of news design in 2009 is a fascinating mixture of bad news with good. The reality of distress in our business is obvious. There are many signs of reduced resources, including smaller news holes with crowded words, less local news, an abundance of feature stories on the front page, a continued shortage of good photojournalism and more use of stock illustration. An overall feeling of looking a little confused and perhaps a bit stuck, prevails."

"But wait. The good news is that far from going away or giving up, we saw much earnest effort towards reinvention." "We find the most successful results are those that went back to newspaper basics," they continued. "Rather than competing with the Web by mimicking it, the smarter route seems to partner with it while offering what the Internet can't provide." The judges also said that they found the newspapers outside the US generally appeared healthier. They added that advertising was important and should be seen as part of newspapers' product and visual strategy.

As companies slash newsroom budgets, they are also scaling back on one of their civic duties: legal battles to gain access to government information, reports The New York Times.

But while many regional newspapers are choosing to cut expenses on lawyers, asking them to work pro bono, another trend paints the opposite story, say press advocates and First Amendment lawyers.

Some companies including Hearst and The Associated Press have been quietly stepping up their legal efforts, by doing more of the work in-house, utilizing their in-house lawyers and being more aggressive in states where they can recoup legal fees and the federal level, which also allows plaintiffs in such access cases to sue for legal fees when they win.

6 and a half years ago, Michelle Leder was a business journalist running an obscure website with juicy tidbits about the financial disclosures that publicly held companies are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, Michelle Leder is a businesswoman: she sold her website to Morningstar, the giant, Chicago-based publisher that sells nearly $500 million a year in research and advisory services to large and small investors.

As Alan D. Mutter from the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reports, her story shows that a modern journalist no longer needs a job at a major media outlet to build a satisfying and remunerative career. All he or she needs is a dose of entrepreneurial journalism and time.

In a move to step up its social feature repertoire, Google Inc., released its new social media product, Buzz, this week. This new networking tool that mixes some of the programs Google has created over the years and could prove very useful for journalists, according to Poynter Online.

However, these enhanced capabilities could come at a price for news outlets.

More details have been released about the MediaNews paywall plans, which will charge for investigations and analysis but not for breaking news, Poynter Online reports.

Vice president for content development Howard Saltz said that investigations, enterprise, analysis, columns and reviews will be behind the paywall. "The kind of content that goes behind a wall is the kind of content that paid, professional journalists do," he told Poynter, "the kinds of things that you really couldn't count on bloggers and Web enthusiasts to do."

Articles will be free if it's necessary to remain competitive with other news sources, including breaking news and multimedia, he said.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.

Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking ones.

The launch of Apple's iPad has garnered much optimism in the newspaper industry, driving hopes that the innovative tablet computer will be able to breathe some new life into an industry battered by an advertising downturn.

Much speculation has placed very high hopes on the capacity of the iPad and a slew of new generation e-readers to revamp the industry and bolster its business model. But, as Poynter Online's Bill Mitchell reports, the iPad will probably not be the solution to all of the newspapers' woes, but this sleek electronic device could play a substantial role in the migration of users from a cost-heavy past to a more efficient future.

In what seems to be the latest move in the battle of the e-readers, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch screen technology, to possibly update its Kindle e-reader so it can better compete with Apple's iPad.

The New York Times reports that Amazon will merge Touchco's technology and staff members into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, based in Cupertino, California, a source briefed on the deal said on Wednesday.

Newspapers have not only lost significant advertising revenue in the last couple of years, they have also been losing government support in the form of subsidies in the last forty years, concludes a new study by the University of Southern California.

According to Poynter, a new study of historic subsidies and emerging trends tracks various tax breaks, reductions in postal subsidies first enacted in 1792, and upcoming cutbacks in public notices that government regulations have traditionally forced into American newspapers. The study provides valuable insight, if not clear-cut recommendations for print media to follow, about the thorny issue of government funding for media.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

Everyblock is betting on hyperlocal once again.

Just this week, Everyblock announced the release of Notify Your Neighbors, a new service that will allow people to share updates of what is happening in their neighborhoods and on their blocks, as a press release from the company explained.

The newest addition to Everyblock's services will be available on everyblock.com and as an application for the iPhone and iPod touch, too. The free application will allow consumers to send and receive updates from any location.

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.