For the first time, the digital arm of the Spanish publisher Grupo PRISA which prints El Pais, has turned a profit. The division's revenues were up 47.3% to 14.28 million Euros and operating profits came in at 0.06 million euros after losing 2.99 million last year.

Source: El Pais

American sports editor Greg Bowers writes on Editor & Publisher of a revelation he had not too long ago concerning how sporting news is transforming because of the Web. One day when he was deciding what the next days layout would be, his wife, not really a sports fan, mentioned the days two top stories. and then it hit Greg; why should I print these stories in tomorrow's paper if everyone already knows what happened?

"Sports journalism, actually journalism in general, is in a state of paralysis. Two things that have been constant companions in journalism through the years, have split apart.

"The first thing is reporting, getting out the news. The second is telling good stories, interpreting the news. They once went hand in hand -- news and writing. Now the first one is out and about before the second one can get its coat off.

"Getting information to consumers has become a race. And it's a race that newspapers, by definition, are losing."

So instead of repeating the same news in the next day's print edition, Bowers realized that newsrooms needed to tell the story behind the news. Journalists must find the information that the public wants to know and give "depth. Perception. Interpretation."

Said bower, "The truth is, newspapers are in a particularly good position to play this new game. They just haven't realized it yet."

After the French news agency AFP sued Google for $17.5 million in damages last year, Google agreed to stop posting AFP content on its news aggregator. But as it turns out, AFP is still there.

A journalist for MacWorld did a search on the Google News, typing in "Agence France Presse," only to find that indeed articles with an AFP byline were still listed, even one from the New York Times' website. The results of a quick search on the French version of Google News proved similar.

Doing a quick search myself, I was also able to find a few bylines and photos from AFP even from the GoogleNews homepage. Although they weren't listed as coming from AFP on the homepage, when clicking through, there was the AFP credit. Surely there are many more than the few I was able to find in 5 minutes.

Google is not of yet legally obliged to eliminate all AFP content from its site, but morally, especially because it purports to not be "evil," Google's promise to eliminate content from publishers who ask to delist themselves should be upheld.

But in reality, is this possible?

Jeff Mignon at Média Café asks this pressing question about the state of the French press noting that the costs of producing the top national French dailies continues to outweigh revenues from advetisements and paid copies. If it weren't for subsidies and generous investors, Mignon wonders if these papers would have made it this far.

He asks what the advantages of a French national are, questions that could be applied to most papers in the world:

"Exclusivity? Less and less. We find almost everything... on the Net and for free.

"Speed of information? Paper has become the slowest medium.

"Volume of information? There is 'a thousand times' as much on the Web.

"Quality of analysis and explanation? It is without a doubt the last big advantage of paper. But the Web is beginning to challenge its dominance.

"Vehicle of quality advertising? Apparently advertisers still believe this. A little less. But very little. However, paper remains a medium through which the efficiency of advertising is hard to guage. The Net, on the other hand, is the surest tool for calculating effectiveness.

"Price? Paper is one of the last sources of information for which the consumer must pay."

We've been hoping for some time that the "bloggers vs. journalists" debate would just go away. We finally may have reached that point. A report done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 66% of people maintaining blogs don't label their acts as journalism. The other 34% considered their blogging as journalism because they engage in journalistic functions like fact-checking and linking to sources.

At the same time, more than 40% said they never quote sources and 61% said they never ask for permission to reproduce copyrighted material.

As so far as transparency goes, 55% of the bloggers surveyed said they use pseudonyms whereas 9 out of 10 welcomed comments from readers.

37%, said that they use their blog for recording personal experiences, 11% for politics, 7% entertainment, 6% sports and 5% news.

Source: Reuters

Reuters mobile services, until now subscription based, are to become completely advertisement supported. Vice President of emerging media at the London-based news agency said, "Instead of trying to fight the trend toward advertising we're embracing advertising as the business model for our services." Readers can sign up for the service here.

Source: AdAge

The New York Times Company released its second quarter results yesterday showing a 0.5million increase in net income from the same quarter in 2005. Total revenues were up 1.6%, including a 1% increase in ads and a 0.6% increase in circulation revenues.

"Other" revenues increased 12.3% thanks to TimesSelect and higher commercial printing.

Ad revenues on the company's websites increased 25% bringing its overall Internet business to 7.7% of revenues, a 1.9% increase year-on-year.

Costs were up 2.9%.

TimesSelect now has well over 513,000 subscribers, 37% of which are Internet only subscribers. The service will add more features including extra video as it approaches its first anniversary which will be accompanied by a publicity campaign.

Source: Editor & Publisher (here and here)

A day before releasing its quarterly results, the New York Times announced that it will be cutting 250 jobs and cropping the width of its page size by an inch and a half. The cuts will include the subletting of a printing plant and the consolidation of others. To make up for a loss of news space which would have been 11%, the paper will add more pages to make up for 6% of that loss.

Other papers such as USA Today, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have already shrunk their page sizes while the Wall Street Journal has plans to do the same.

NYT executive editor Bill Keller said of the changes, "“It’s painful to watch an industry retrench. But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau.”

Source: The New York Times

After cutting 51 editorial positions, the Financial Times announced on July 14th that it had launched its project dubbed the "new newsroom" that will "create one of the most integrated multi-media newsrooms in the world."

Press release:

"The 'new newsroom' plan is based on a radical re-working of the FT's current newsroom structure to interweave online and print editing, reporting and production. It includes:

• Creating single newspaper/website news desks
• Creating an FT Interactive content team
• Deepening writers' multimedia skills
• Creating a new production structure capable of integrated print and online publishing
• Streamlining newspaper editionalisation

The newsroom restructure may result in around 50 redundancies. The Financial Times is today entering a 30-day consultation period with the NUJ aimed in particular at keeping redundancies to a minimum. A voluntary redundancy programme is part of the consultation process, and this launches today.

"Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, commented:

When a news aggregator that has existed for five years regularly beats all major long-established traditional news organizations, some radical, permanent changes must be rippling through the media landscape. Now, with their eyes wide open to those changes, major newspaper companies are in discussions with Web portal Yahoo (whose YahooNews claims the largest news traffic on the Net) over what can be done about the future of news.

What newspaper publishers are most perturbed by is the advertising revenue being siphoned by their publications from search results, the most lucrative form of advertising on the Web and one from which newspapers do not profit.

MediaNews CEO W. Dean Singleton has said previously, "The industry needs to come together to find a search-engine model so that we begin to monetize news," while another newspaper executive declared news search to be the "long-term future" of newspaper revenues.

Supposedly, the talks could result in some sort of agreement through which Yahoo would share search revenues.

Other business models being discussed are online classifieds, means of online distribution of content, and micropayments.

Newswatch India reports that newspapers in India have no reason to be worried about dwindling circulations like their Western counterparts. From '04 to '05, 1,948 new papers registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India and copy sales increased by over forty million.

The total number of dailies is 1,834, which sold over 78 million copies, a jump of 7% on the previous year and of which 799 are Hindi-language papers and 181 are English-language.

The Hindustan Times is the largest daily selling over 1.17 million copies daily, followed by Ananda Bazar Patrika with 1.13 million copies and the Times of India with 1.1 million.

Source: Newswatch