Results matching “points for newspaper buy”

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The MediaNews Group has released details of its plans to charge for content online, announced in November last year, Bloomberg reports. The publisher will adopt a metered system similar to that planned at The New York Times.

Two newspapers, the Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania, and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, will start charging in May. They will give users access to up to 25 'premium' articles a month, after which they will be required to pay a fee. Print subscriptions will include access to the website. Premium content may include some columns and investigative reporting, MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic said.

The Newspaper Guild of New York has accused Thompson Reuters of imposing illegal pay cuts, the New York Times reports. The news comes just two months after the agency made clear its plans to cut some 240 jobs in its legal divisions across North America.

According to a complaint filed by the union on Friday, the news service is wrongly cutting the pay of some 420 employees by an average of 10 percent through various measures, including no longer contributing to staff retirement plans, health care, out of pocket expenses, as well as increasing the number of hours staff members must work in order to receive overtime. Automatic annual pay increases will also no longer be guaranteed.

Following a week of much speculation over whether the new London freesheet existed, and if so, if it would launch at all, the London Weekly is finally here, says Guardian.

The launch of the new freesheet was announced in November of last year, with its website opening in December. Executives at the Global Publishing Group, the company responsible for the publication, initially announced the freesheet would launch on February 1st, but later pushed back the start date to February 5th.

Staff members at The Guardian have voted to oppose proposed changes to their pay and conditions, including cuts to sabbaticals, and instead claimed a pay rise for editorial staff.

The Guardian reported that the local branch of the National Union of Journalists for The Guardian, The Observer and website guardian.co.uk voted against proposals to outsource technical support and some work involved in the production of sponsored supplements.

Parent company Guardian News & Media (GNM) also has plans to cut rates paid to casual staff and to end journalist sabbaticals, currently set at a four week paid break for every four years of service. Union members opposed these proposals.

Jake Dobkin, co-founder and publisher of the local New York blog, Gothamist, gave New York Times' executives an idea of what to expect during their Thursday morning panel discussion with him with some provocative comments published via his Facebook page last Tuesday.

In preparation for the panel, the moderator, the Times' media critic David Carr, sent Dobkin the following question in advance: "Jake, you've competed with the NYTimes in the metro space. It has formidable resources, but how do you see the newspaper landing in the local market? Do you think that the incoming cohort of consumers see the Times as a credible editorial resource in New York political and cultural affairs?"

There's more fuel for the debate over council-run newspapers in the UK today, with one local newspaper revealing that its council-supported rival costs taxpayers almost £28,000 a month.

In the town of Salford, near Manchester, the council magazine Life in Salford competes with newspapers the Salford Star and Salford Advertiser. The Salford Star filed a freedom of information request to determine the cost of producing the council magazine. It determined that the council spends £27,797 per month, or an average of £333,564 per year.

By contrast, outside advertising income for the paper totaled just over £19,000 for eight issues.

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.

It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

In a time where newspapers seem to be losing more and more revenue, figures from Gannett Co. Inc.'s fourth quarter released today, showed potential positive results for the months ahead.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannett swung to a profit in the fourth quarter following $5.6 billion in prior-year write-downs. Lower declines in advertising sales combined with much lower expenses helped the newspaper publisher show improvement.

Online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, according to a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group. The study's full findings will be reported in coming weeks, and may mean the newspaper industry needs to decide even faster how to make its online offerings economically sustainable, Dorian Benkoil reported in Poynter Online.

Young people aged 18-24 were the only segment that recorded a year-on-year drop for any digital media category, specifically for online newspapers. In 2008, around 64% of those surveyed said they had read a newspaper online in the last year, while by 2009 that figure had fallen to 54%.

Nieman Lab's Johnathan Stray has created a paywall calculator, Paywall!, that aims to juggle the different factors that could go into building a paywall and find the best combination that could generate maximum revenue. He takes the New York Times' proposed payment model as a basis: a certain number of articles per month can be viewed free, and after that readers will be asked to subscribe.

"The key to paywall revenue projections is to understand how different portions of the audience are affected differently," says Stray, and his model breaks the audience into five groups based on their number of page views per month: fly-by, occasional, weekly, daily, loyal. Depending on how many articles are offered free, it is unlikely that a huge number of visitors will be affected by a paywall, Stray points out, but the ones that will be are the loyal readers.

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.

Fox News and Tribune Newspapers have overtaken The New York Times in the latest rankings for most visited current events websites, Editor and Publisher reports.

Yahoo! News was the most popular news and current events website, with over 39 million unique users, according to the Nielsen December figures for top news websites. It was followed by the CNN Digital Network, the MSNBC Digital Network, and then AOL News.

The Fox News Digital Network took out fifth place and Tribune Newspapers was sixth. The Times came next at seventh. It had been in the fifth spot in November.

The UK government may ask the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to consider the impact of local council newspapers on local commercial newspaper publishers, Print Week and This is Local London report. Or it may not, media commentator Roy Greenslade points out.

Members of parliament from the three main parties last week called for council papers to be culled. Local newspapers have long protested that council papers take away from their falling market share.

Tom Boswell's usually revered sports column fuelled a not insignificant number of outcries from WaPo's most fastidious readers back in November, when it graced the publication's website littered with errors and typos. At the time the Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, explained such occurrences as an undesirable side effect of tighter deadlines and fewer copy editors, after recent jobs cuts and a total of four buyouts since 2003.

But despite complaints from agitated readers, Boswell's typo strewn offering has been by no means an isolated case, and eagle eyed grammarians have been quick to point other errors as and when. Many ask pertinent questions, such as Phillip K. Cohen: "If they don't care about basics like grammar and spelling, how much do they care about factual accuracy?"

The Kuwait Journalists Association on Monday criticized a series of proposed amendments which would impose stricter punishment of press offences. The group of journalists along with prominent newspaper and television editors called on parliament to reject the new measures, even agreeing to boycott the lawmakers responsible for them.

"We urged MPs to reject the government plan to amend the press law," an official statement released by the KJA said.

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.

The mobile offerings of L'Equipe are profitable, says Sébastien Valere, VP Marketing and Operations of L'Equipe 24/24 in France, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

91% of the French have a mobile phone, with the operators including Orange, SFR, Bouygues and Free. 25% of mobile subscribers access the network through 3G, which means easier access to mobile data and surfing. He expects that two years from now, 75% of the population will have a smart phone, up from 35% now. The iPhone has been successful in France, and more devices will arrive on the market. Unlimited access subscriptions are offered, with subscriptions available for around €60 per month. Smart phones translate into massive content use.

L'Equipe is a global media brand, with a daily newspaper, a website with 5 million unique visitors per month, as well as offerings in television, radio and mobile. It has 18 million customers a month, mostly male, and reaches 50% of the upper-socio-professional advertising category. Usage peaks at night, although the goal is to reach people throughout the day.

It was hardly a festive run-up to Christmas for Dorset-based View From publishing group's staff of 25, who all faced unemployment as the company filed for administration.

In a stroke of good luck however, the ill-fated publisher of five West Country titles, narrowly escaped an almost certain death as it received an offer from a last minute mystery buyer.

Morning freesheet Metro Herald, created by the merger of freesheets Herald AM and Metro Ireland, has launched in Dublin today.

The merger, announced last summer, was widely expected as both papers were believed to be running at a loss, according to The Guardian.

The Guardian's new iPhone app sold 9000 units in its first two days, in a development that may point to a key future source of revenue for newspapers.

The app was launched on Monday, and it was uncertain whether or not consumers could be prepared to pay the £2.39 asking price. Many news apps are free, including those offered by The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

It's not just the UK tabloids that saw a fall in circulation in November, as News of the World and the Sun dropped below 3 million copies each. Quality daily newspapers in the UK are suffering falling daily circulation as well, Peter Preston reports in The Guardian.

Circulation for national dailies is down 4.2% this year, while Sunday papers are down 7%. Circulation for The Guardian is down 14.8%, the Independent is down 7.2%, the Times has fallen 9.4%, and the Financial Times has dropped 9.2%.