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After much delay, a deal is said to be on the horizon for the sale of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday to Alexander Lebedev.  Although The Times claimed on March 5th that its sources said a sale would happen that day, a finalized contract has yet to be seen.

Today, the UK's Office of Fair Trading declared that it would not be necessary to investigate the deal for competition issues, offering another green light to a deal that has been in the works for months.

Though The Guardian claims talks between Independent News and Media (INM) and Russian billionaire Lebedev have been going on since March of last year, The Independent only admitted to these talks in December.  Since then, the deal has hit many roadblocks, partly because, as Steve Busfield of The Guardian has said, "Lebedev drives a hard bargain."

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently announced that the January earthquake in Haiti resulted in the "disappearance under the rubble" the nation's sole Creole paper, Bon Nouvel.

The loss of the monthly newspaper to the earthquake, which decimated the small island nation, is seen as a "real blow" according to the newspaper's director, Rev. Jean Pierre Nzemba.

Despite promising growth forecasts made by many in the industry, staffing cuts at news organizations big and small indicate that the news media industry is not yet out of the woods.  

Today, Journalism.co.uk reported that BBC's Global News division is undergoing restructuring that will result in the elimination of a number of management positions.  And smaller but still significant Channel M, the Manchester regional TV station owned by Guardian Media Group (GMG), will be losing 29 positions--a reduction of 88 percent.

The BBC will be losing a laundry list of high-level positions, including the directorial positions of BBC World News, BBC World Service and BBC World Service English.

Jonathan Stray from the Nieman Journalism Lab recently conducted an analysis of the amount of original news content found in news articles through Google. In conducting the analysis, Stray took a major headlining article in the news and then tracked how many articles pertaining to the subject contained original content.

The end result of a collaborative six-month project between USC's Anneberg Journalism School and the Center for Investigative Journalism will premiere March 19th. Entitled "Hunger in the Golden State," the project is a three week-long multimedia series documenting California's growing social issues in light of the economic crisis. A press release from the Annenberg School noted that more than 20 multimedia stories will be released online, over the radio, and on television.  

The results of the UK Association of Online Publishers' 2010 census, released today, show a surprisingly optimistic growth forecast for 10 percent growth in revenue over the next year coming from more than half of its 37 respondents.  The census results come at a time when the industry is beginning to stabilize, with losses in ad revenue slowing and many publishers working to create new revenue streams.

With members such as Channel 4, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group, and Financial Times, the AOP's annual census, now in its seventh year, offers a clear depiction of trends across the publishing industry.

Tim Faircliff, AOP's Chairman and general manager of consumer media at member organization Thomson Reuters, sees the census as a good indicator of the reality in the market today.

Mecom, the European newspaper publisher most prolific in Denmark, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands, released its online paid content strategy today along with dismal fourth quarter results.  Despite a total 28 percent fall in profits for 2009, David Montgomery, Mecom's chief executive, is optimistic about the company's future.

"This last year has been an advertising crisis, not a newspaper crisis," he was quoted as saying, going on to emphasize the need for more online advertising revenue.

Montgomery's outlook is reflected in their pay strategy, which aims to increase revenue from paid online content and online advertisements by 100 million euros over the next three years.  In addition, Mecom hopes to increase unique users on its websites by about 20 percent by the end of 2012, vastly increasing its current unique usership of 32 million.

The European Fund for Investigative Journalism, or Journalismfund.eu, launched in February 2009 with a plan to raise funding for investigative reporting that involved cross-border collaboration in Europe.

"In Europe we can see that politics, business, even organised crime all cross borders, while journalists and their coverage are often focussed purely on a national target group and are reluctant to cross borders," director Brigitte Alfter explained in an interview last year.

Just over a year on, two investigative stories have been published and eight more are currently being researched, with groups of two to six journalists working on each. The money raised by Alfter goes towards travel, advice, time and making freedom of information requests. 

Print media may not die if the printing press is put in the hands of the consumer.  It's this idea that drives the Newspaper Club, a London-based startup that allows members to print small runs of their own newspapers at low cost. 

The venture began when a group of friends decided to compile their friends' best blog posts and photos and print it as a newspaper titled Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet.  Because printing presses sit idle for most of the day, a small run of newspapers turned out to be remarkably cheap--about 364 euros for 300 copies.  The small price led the friends to form a company and start marketing the printing option to others.