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All reporters at the Journal-Register Co. (JRC) will get video cameras, under an ambitious plan to bring the newspaper into the digital age, the company's 3,100 employees have been told. The company's new CEO John Paton has also told staff that they now work for a 'media company', not a 'newspaper company'. Appropriately enough, he announced the news in a seven-minute slideshow, emailed companywide, the New Haven Independent reports.

"We're not looking to make any cuts," Paton told the Independent. "We need to improve [local coverage]. We don't need to make it worse." The company, which runs 19 daily and 150 other newspapers, including the flagship New Haven Register, filed for bankruptcy last February.

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The free weekly newspaper in Edinburgh will relaunch next week with a greater focus on shopping and local listings, All Media Scotland reports.

The new-look Edinburgh Herald & Post, produced by The Scotsman's publishers, is expected to focus on the shopping and services sector in the city with consumer news and features. It will also include local listings and a picture gallery to focus on community events. The newspaper will be distributed free to households across Edinburgh from Thursday.

The Press Association, the national news agency in the UK, will send its largest-ever Winter Olympics team to this month's games in Vancouver, Hold the Front Page reports.

PA Sport sent two reporters to the last winter Games in Turin in 2006, but will send 13 this time, including, for the first time, two video journalists.

Australian public broadcaster the ABC has launched a new digital initiative called ABC Open to feature user-generated content on existing ABC local websites.

The initiative aims to develop the digital skills of local communities to tell their own stories. The reports produced through the project will be published on the broadcaster's local websites and other sites, and may also be distributed on radio, television or mobile platforms.

More than 50 editors and producers, based in local radio offices around the country, will be charged with helping communities design and develop media-rich local stories.

Local newspaper the Northampton Chronicle and Echo is today running a day-long live discussion with readers about what's going on in its newsroom.

Using the liveblogging software Cover-it-Live, which the newspaper has previously used to cover sporting events such as the away games of local teams, editorial staff plan to interact more directly with readers.

The Chicago Tribune announced yesterday that it would be implementing several changes in content and format as it prepares to roll out a narrower page size. Beginning on February 8th, the paper will become one inch narrower. The length of the broadsheet will remain the same, as will the "body type," or font size for news stories.

"There will be some adjustments such as smaller headlines and photos in places, but the content of the paper largely will remain the same," said Editor, Gerould W. Kern, in a letter to readers.

As world leaders plan the future of the global economy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, journalists are using social media and other innovative ways to bring the discussion closer to the people.

The Guardian has appointed three bloggers to its new experimental Guardian Local initiative.

Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been appointed to cover the cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively. They will take on the position of 'beatbloggers', that is, bloggers who stick to a well-defined beat or coverage area.

The Guardian website has done it again - the newspaper's website has just announced it has achieved its second record-breaking month in a row with nearly 37 million unique users for December, according to its website.

This surpassed its November record by 3.32%, according to figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.

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.

The Amaury group, responsible for both Le Parisien and L'Equipe, has given its publications a face life this week, with all 48 pages of the former appearing in colour for the first time on Tuesday, and divided into five new sections: Fact of the day, News, Local News, Sports and Leisure.

L'Equipe is set to integrate three new pages into its design, the first appearing today, the second in Thursday's edition and the third in Friday's, as a response to reader surveys. From March the publication will introduce a motoring section, which will appear every Monday- intended to deal with the production of cars as opposed to buying and selling.

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

The launch of a new London freesheet, the London Weekly, was announced in November of last year, with its website going live on 20 December. Executives at the Global Publishing Group, the company behind the title, have now confirmed an official launch date of 5 February for the paper itself, the Guardian has reported.

The London Weekly hopes to fill the gap left by the closure of the capital's previous freesheets, the London Paper and the London Lite, with a proposed distribution of 250,000 copies every Friday and Saturday.

The British international business newspaper the Financial Times (FT) has announced several appointments to its US staff, Editor and Publisher has reported.

The new staff are in the coverage areas of business, finance and markets, and will report to the US finance and business editor Francesco Guerrera.

A new non-profit news website has launched in Connecticut today, Poynter Online reports, with the dual aims of reporting the news and providing its readers access to resources that are hard to find online.

The Connecticut Mirror bills itself as "an independent source of news and information about our state's government, politics and public policy". It comes in time for an important state budget and an election year.

Editor Michael Regan writes that the Guide to Politics and Government his site offers provides "the most comprehensive information available any where on the state's elected officials".

How should journalists go about the tricky and painful business of disaster reporting? In recent days, some have argued that journalists are doing more harm than good in Haiti after the earthquake, putting more pressure on the already stretched resources there. By contrast, others have explained that reporters are arriving equipped with all their supplies, and that the need for information and communication is vital in co-ordinating relief efforts.

But the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has another concern. It has issued a press release cautioning journalists in Haiti to avoid becoming part of the stories that they are covering. Even in a time of crisis, it says, journalists have a responsibility to their audience to remain objective.

Covering major sport events is becoming more and more complex: with more "media rights" being sold every day and for every event, the straightforward businesses of news-gathering, providing news services and running commercial programmes alongside news coverage can be difficult.

In response to this, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN) has set up a special Master Class to help news executives navigate complicated "media rights" issues and avoid legal red tape when providing coverage of the 2010 football World Cup and other events.

The Master Class will include the expertise of a sport news executive, Juan Ignacio Gallardo, Deputy Editor of the Spanish sports daily Marca, who can catalogue the numerous restrictions he and his team face on a daily basis in covering sports events, along with the contribution of Andrew Moger, Executive Director of the News Media Coalition, an expert in media rights with long-standing experience as a journalist, who will describe the current regulations and help participants deal with the current rules and issues

The IASN Master Class will be held on 5 February next at the state-of-the-art Olympic and Sport Museum in Barcelona, Spain. Full details can be found at http://www.press-iasn.org, or email Rosarita Cuccoli (rcuccoli@press-iasn.org).

On January 12 last year GlobalPost was launched, a new international news service focused on getting the context behind the headlines, hoping to combat diminishing foreign reporting in the US. Its number of foreign correspondents is second only to the Associated Press and they are expected to provide both text and visual reports.

A year on, and the news outlet has made considerable progress in terms of covering a wide range of international stories, establishing a significant audience, and implementing a successful business model. The Editors Weblog spoke to President, CEO and co-founder Philip Balboni about his first year at the helm of this project.

Balboni was clear that he considered GlobalPost's first year a success. "It has been an extraordinary year, it has exceeded any reasonable expectations that I could have had when I started out on this journey," he said.

"To a large degree, the stories on GlobalPost are ones that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere," said Balboni. As one of GlobalPost's aims was to fill the gaps in the reporting of traditional outlets, this must be satisfying.  The news outlet has also remained true to its original stipulations: its reporting has broad geographic diversity, and consists of a wide range of types of stories and topics.

And much of this reporting has had the potential for considerable impact. Balboni highlighted a recent story on how the Taliban have been taking a cut of funds supplied by the Indiana National Guard to local Afghan contractors for development projects in Afghanistan's Khost province. The issue of the Taliban skimming American aid in Afghanistan is one to which GlobalPost has dedicated much coverage over the past few months.

Such investigative pieces are accompanied by more entertaining reporting, such as an article from Paris about how the French are rediscovering the joy of wearing berets. Correspondents also write ample blog entries.

GlobalPost adopted a relatively unique correspondent model, hiring country-based, part-time reporters who could produce one article a week. The compensation level - a monthly salary plus shares - has proven "very successful" and working for GlobalPost seems to be a popular job: the news service now has correspondents in more than fifty countries and "we have far more people who would want to work for us than we could possibly hire."

The correspondents work with regional editors based in Boston and Balboni said that so far this system has been functioning "with a remarkable degree of smoothness."

Building an audience from scratch

Developing an audience is "really more important than anything else," said Balboni. "We could have the most spectacular content in the world but if you can't build an audience for it then you can't succeed, right?"

The news outlet's highest-traffic month this year was November, when more than 750,000 people visited the site. This exceeded Balboni's goal of 600,000, set before the launch. In addition, "we are retaining more than 50% of all the visitors," he said.

The target for 2010 is to top one million unique visitors, and Balboni mentioned the company's "very sophisticated marketing strategy" aimed at audience building.

Prize partnerships

Building a brand on the web with no support from legacy media has been a considerable challenge, and GlobalPost's partnerships with other high profile brands have been very helpful in doing this, and "particularly important in the validation of GlobalPost as a brand," Balboni said. Such partnerships have helped present the outlet's content as authoritative, and often "raising our visibility is more important than any compensation we might achieve." From the beginning, GlobalPost has sought to present itself as a complement rather than a competitor to newswires and newspapers.

The partnership formed with CBS in September, for example, is a syndication deal, with CBS paying GlobalPost for help with foreign reporting. But having a broadcast news partner was also something that Balboni and his team considered a high priority in terms of brand-boosting, and such a deal "certainly goes beyond" purely syndication. He sees the recent partnership with PBS NewsHour as a "significant achievement" and mentioned that GlobalPost has upped its video production so that it might have the chance to forge other broadcast partnership. 

Compensation is obviously an important consideration, however, and syndication is one of GlobalPost's major revenue streams, the other two being advertising and subscriptions. Currently, advertising comprises about 70% of GlobalPost's income, but Balboni hopes that over time this share will fall to around 50%, with syndication and membership rising to make up the other half.

Passport to premium services

The most unusual of these revenue streams is the subscription, or membership, scheme called Passport. For $99 a year (discounted to $50 for students, academics or seniors), readers can have access to conference calls with GlobalPost reporters, the chance to suggest stories, global and country briefs and newsletters. There is also the option to commission custom research projects, something Balboni said he was "very excited about." One client, for example, has ordered a series of ten reports for the coming year. "It takes careful shepherding but it's very interesting and I think it could scale up to be a meaningful part of our Passport financial strategy," he said.

"I am very bullish on the membership aspect," Balboni said, "I think it's the hardest one but if you want to point to one thing that could be a potential salvation for quality journalism then it's that." He always wanted to encourage a subscription or membership scheme, but explained that as a new little-known media brand it would have been foolish to put up a paywall immediately.
 
Passport does not offer pure paid online content, rather additional editorial services. "My hope and my expectation is that GlobalPost will remain free and open to all but we need to find more effective ways to get all of the people who are most engaged to help support our mission," he said, specifying that GlobalPost was likely to continue to ask for, rather than to require, reader contributions. He does think, however, that it would be "entirely fair" for a news organisation to demand payment.

So far, Passport has 450 - 500 members: "just not enough," according to Balboni. He hopes to increase this by making "a strategic shift in how we market our membership" and by using some new technology starting this spring that will help the membership base and subsequent revenue to grow. Currently, visitors to the GlobalPost site can read about Passport but there is no chance to test it out first and they have to "take a leap of faith" if they want to subscribe, Balboni said.

From a purely financial standpoint, 2009 was "a decent year," especially given the global economic recession. Balboni specified that the $1 million revenue figure that was reported in November was not accurate, but described the amount as "consequential." The company's original business plan projected profitability in 2012, and Balboni thinks this is still likely.

What's next?

GlobalPost seems to have demonstrated that there is an audience for more international news and has set up a structure to cover this that works. As Balboni explained, its challenges now are to build that audience into the millions and (like almost every other news organisation) to shift its business model so that it depends less substantially on advertising.  

Conflicting reports came out of San Francisco over the weekend regarding the future of the Bay Area News Project, the non-profit local news station housed in the city's public broadcasting network KQED and bankrolled by Warren Hellman.

According to B-Net, the much reported multi-media deal combining the reporting expertise of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the radio and television capabilities of KQED finally collapsed after negotiations stalled. B-Net's David Weir alleged that infighting over resources and leadership at KQED and the GSJ's lack of clout in San Francisco made an already complicated merger just too difficult - leading Hellman to withdraw his $5 million contribution.

However, Neil Henry, Dean of the GSJ, was quick to refute those reports: "The Bay Area News Project is alive and well and ready to start business. The first board meeting will be conducted next week. We have secured an outstanding CEO and an extraordinary editor in chief whose names will be announced later this month. The only change since our announcement in September is that KQED will not play a role as a founding partner, but we look forward to its active participation."

Working closely with advertisers can help newspapers to establish a good brand image, says Paz Alvarez Sanchez-Arjona, Market Intelligence director of Marca/Unidad Editorial in Spain, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

She has worked closely with marketing and advertising teams. This was satisfactory for the advertisers because the campaigns were distinctive and became well-known. This created loyalty and gave her brand a good, dynamic image, as well as revenue.

Marca is the leader among newspapers in terms of readership in Spain. It has 2.8 million readers, far more than any other newspaper in Spain. There are 40 million people in the country, with four national sports newspapers. Marca is located in Madrid and focuses a lot on Real Madrid and football, although it covers all the sports. In the last few years, a number of local papers have popped up, focusing on local teams. These detract from Marca's readership.

As the latest news from Tuesday's earthquake outside of Port-au-Price trickles in to the mainland, newspapers have faced many of the same logistical challenges as rescue crews as they struggle to cover the scale of destruction wreaked on this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation.

With only one foreign correspondent based in Haiti, Jonathan M. Katz of the AP, many major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal struggled initially to get their journalists on the ground. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake had destroyed what little infrastructure Haiti already had, razing government buildings, hospitals, and homes. Telecommunications and power lines have been unreliable if present at all.

When newspapers run community events, it's important to stay committed to the convictions of the paper, says Marcin Gadzinski, editor of Sport.pl/Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'. Get that right first, and profit will follow, he adds.

His paper, which runs some sporting events, is no. 2 in Poland in terms of circulation, and likes to get involved in social issues and public advocacy campaigns. People all around Poland work for the paper, so it's helpful to use their contacts to organise activities.

They were not very successful when putting sports content on the web, he says, so in 2007 Sport.pl was launched, a strictly internet sports brand. They added online-only features rather than seeing it as a way to promote newspaper content. In 2009 the paper jumped from the number 5 to the number 2 sports website in Poland, with 5 million unique users a month. Plus, every Monday the paper publishes a Sport.pl-branded section.

Is sports coverage news or entertainment? "Everyone in this room would say both," says Larry Kilman, Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs for WAN-IFRA, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

The traditional partnership between sports and media is collapsing, he says. Sports organisers aim to extend intellectual property rights to their matches, which will affect news coverage, and what is paid and what is free. If newspapers become betting companies, the lines are blurred, he adds.

Can an event be copyright? French draft law would give sports organisations extra copyright protection, and a French court has ordered Unibet to pay the French Open tennis event €300,000 in recognition of ownership rights. Proposed British legislation calls for stricter licensing as sports bodies want the government to ensure a fair return for them. And the Sports Rights Owner Coalition, composed of international and national sports bodies, is lobbying for sport-specific intellectual property protection.