It has been years since the news industry started to wonder about the future of journalism in the digital age and how to make the transition from a printed world to a digital one.

"How to be profitable online? To charge or not to charge? Integrated or separated newsrooms?"
All these kind of questions have dominated the news media's thoughts.

Well, there is a weekly magazine in France that didn't asked itself all these questions and simply remained the same as it has been for about the last 90 years.

It's the weekly investigative-satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné and things there seem to go be going pretty well.

Printed in only two colours, the eight-page broadsheet "carries no photographs or advertising, its articles are unsigned and the newspaper shuns the web - yet somehow it manages to outsell rivals such as Le Monde. Just how does it do it?", wondered the Irish Times.

The article noted that while France's newspapers are facing misfortune, as the western print media industry generally is, Le Canard is thriving, enjoying an abundance of three things every newspaper craves: readers, influence and profit.

Four main journalism research centres and labs in France have decided to form a unique centre, the GIS Journalisme (Groupe d'intérêt scientifique).

They believed that academic research in the media and journalism fields in France was too dispersive and fragmented within different disciplines, from sociology to political science to communication and IT domains.

The main aim,- explains Eric Lagneau on the AFP MediaWatch - is to unify their efforts and their knowledge, make exchanges of ideas easier and enhance the results of the studies and researches conducted.

The four centres are CARISM (Centre of media analysis and interdisciplinary researches) of the University of Panthéon-Assas, CRAPE (European Political Science Research Centre), University of Rennes 1, ELICO, Research centre of University of Lyon and GRIPIC, the Paris - Sorbonne research team on information and communication processes.

Guardian reports that in preparation for its June paywall, the Times, will be reducing its editorial budget by 10% and implementing a number of voluntary redundancies that could leave up to 50 journalists out of work.

In a lunchtime meeting at the Times last week, editor James Harding revealed that sister publication, the Sunday Times, would also be cutting its editorial budget by 10%, which could lead to the elimination of 30 jobs. The grand total of redundancies could reach 80. Staff at the Times have two weeks to apply for voluntary redundancies, this is the only News International publication to offer these, and those who decide to take the offer, would receive four weeks' salary for every year worked plus a four-month notice period.

The Sunday Times staff will also be hearing about the paper's cost saving plans soon, which could be cutting £4.5 million from the current editorial budget of £42.5 million a year, would go into effect on July 1st. It is estimated that The Times and the Sunday Times lose up to £240,000 per day. The company has blamed these losses on an advertising downturn.

New York Times journalist Martin Fackler has written about the "failure" of the news media to press Japanese prosecutors for answers in an ongoing political scandal.

In March, Tokyo prosecutors arrested an aide to a prominent opposition political leader and sparked a damaging scandal which led to the resignation of Ichiro Ozawa, head of the opposition Democratic Party. Many Japanese have been vocal in their criticism of the prosecutors' actions, which appear politically motivated, but "you would not know that from the coverage by Japan's big newspapers and television networks," said Fackler.
He points out that what the media "mostly reported" was a "stream of anonymous allegations, some of them thinly veiled leaks from within the investigation, of illegal campaign donations from a construction company" to Ozawa. Despite "a rare outpouring of criticism" directed at the prosecutors, including accusations of political meddling and concerns about the arrest's timing. The Democratic Party's lead in the polls was eroded following the incident. It is a particularly "crucial moment" in Japan's democracy, reported Fackler, as the country's Liberal Democratic Party, which has dominated government for the past 50 years, could be defeated and subsequently replaced with more competitive two-party politics.