Liberal media watchdog Media Matters announced yesterday that The Wall Street Journal had, “following criticism of its disclosure practices,” revealed the political affiliations one of its op-ed writers.

Max Boot is one of ten contributors to the Journal’s opinion pages whose views the newspaper has published without mentioning the writers' links to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to Media Matters.

“In a total of 23 pieces, the op-ed writers attacked President Obama or praised Romney without the paper acknowledging their Romney connections,” the organization asserted in a September 27 report.

“Op-ed writers aren’t supposed to be objective or to have no stake in the subjects they’re writing about,” Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg is quoted as saying. “But when a writer does have a particular relationship to his subject that is not immediately apparent to the reader, it is important to disclose that so the reader can evaluate the argument intelligently.”

On September 28, below a book review by Boot (published in the print edition on September 29), the Journal included the following bio line: “Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to the Romney campaign.”

And, in a country that doesn’t favour paid on-line content, it is behind a pay wall.

“We have unique content and we believe it should not be free,” says Knut Engelmann, Managing Editor of Wall Street Journal Germany, making a case at the annual WEF Newsroom Summit for offering quality content for a price.

“If you use online for a dumping ground for cheap and undistinguished content, you will not succeed,” he says.

Though specialised publications like the Wall Street Journal have unique content that readers are willing to pay for, general publications can also find such content. Mr Engelmann recommends looking deeply into reputation, outlook, focus and uniqueness to determine what might be monetised.

“Every news organisation has to identify the quality content on their own,” he says. “It doesn’t matter where you find it. All that matters is its distinctiveness, its uniqueness.”

“Our success, tentative as it may be at this time, lets us leapfrog beyond objections you might have for this model,” Mr Engelmann says. “Our business in the digital age is not dead, but what is dead is the notion that if it is online, it’s got to be free.”

The conference, which drew editors from around the world to Hamburg, continues Thursday and Friday. The conference programme can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/events/11th-international-newsroom-summit.

Sunday is not a day of rest when it comes to newspaper sales in the US. The newly published annual Pew report on the state of the American media has highlighted that despite the problems that print newspapers are facing in the US, Sunday print editions are continuing to do relatively well. Sunday circulation has stabilised and has even gone up at some papers. What’s more, Pew writes that as print ad revenues plummet, Sunday preprint insert advertising has proved comparatively resilient.

Presumably to capitalise on this trend, the Wall Street Journal has established a partnership with 62 local papers, which each weekend publish between two and four pages of content about business and personal finance produced by WSJ writers. Jeff Roberts writes for paidContent that the articles are not reproduced from the Journal, but written specifically to target a wider, lower-earning audience.

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The Washington Post has started to produce a daily minute-long video compiling latest news headlines, that it posts on its homepage on weekdays at noon. Called '59 Seconds,' the segments include coverage of "politics, policies, sports, personalities in Washington and more," the paper says on its website.

The video show is presented by Ylan Mui, a staff writer at Wash Post who writes about consumers at the economy, and the segment is a mix of Mui speaking directly to the camera from the paper's newsroom, and a mashup of videos and photos. Currently, the videos begin with a 15-second pre-roll ad from Conoco Phillips, the launch sponsor.

"Our goal is to give readers a snapshot of news that reflects Post coverage in a way that's easy to digest and available at the same time everyday," said Andrew Pergam, director of video for The Post. "This is the first of more video products in the pipeline focused on reaching people in ways that are unique to The Post and the region."

The Washington Post already offers a video section of its website featuring the latest videos from WaPo journalists.