Starting May 4, the Guardian Weekly will follow the Guardian’s lead and shrink from tabloid to half-Berliner format.

The masthead, headlines, and text, will follow the Guardian as well in changing to a light typeface. To compensate for the smaller format, the Weekly will average 48 pages rather than the current 32-36. The Berliner format retains broadsheet proportions but allows easier handling and reading. Content will remain the same except for a minor shuffling of puzzles and games.

The Guardian switched to a full Berliner format in 2005 and has seen increased circulation since.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Last night, two Los Angeles billionaires put in a last-minute bid for the Tribune Company, outbidding real-estate tycoon Sam Zell and most likely pushing back even further a decision on the company’s fate.

Ronald W. Burkle and Eli Broad offered a deal based on employee stock ownership, as did Zell, but offered a dollar more a share and $500 million of their own money compared to Zell’s $300 million. Before this new offer, Tribune Co. planned to decide by Saturday and seemed close to selling to Zell.

The employee stock ownership model, used in both offers to make employees the majority owners, has worked for small companies but has rarely been used for larger ones in the last 20 years.

While Zell has said he would keep the company intact, Burkle and Broad have both separately expressed interest in acquiring only the Los Angeles Times, though their joint plans are not yet known.

Source: The New York Times

A Poynter Institute study released yesterday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) conference in Washington found that perhaps American newsreaders’ attention spans aren’t so short; online readers read an average of 77% of a story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

The Eyetrack survey studied 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers using electronic eyetracking equipment on readers while they read broadsheets, tabloids, and online editions of newspapers. Here’s what else they found:

-Two-thirds of online readers, once they chose a particular story to read, read all of the content.

-As for the notion of an audience who doesn’t read past a story’s jump, tabloid readers read an average of 68% of a story’s jumped content, while broadsheet readers read 59%.

- Readers could be categorized as either methodical (top to bottom; no scanning around, used drop-down menus and navigation bars online) or scanning (scanned headlines and display elements, read part of story then jumped without ever going back, jumped around screen when reading online).

-Seventy-five percent of print readers were methodical readers, who read a higher percentage of text than scanners. Online readers were divided - half scanning, half methodical- but read about the same amount of text.

McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper publisher in the US, has announced that later this year it will begin providing international news coverage and commentary to Yahoo Inc.

McClatchy reporters will provide news from four international bureaus in Beijing, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, in addition to news analysis and commentary in blogs. Many of the stories will also appear in McClatchy newspapers.

McClatchy Co. is not the first news organization to partner with Yahoo and its content will supplement that of the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Press.

“It's a natural marriage,” said Howard Weaver, McClatchy's vice president of news. “We think we will be bringing something to the party that Yahoo doesn't have, and they will bring something to the party that we don't have.”

Source: Finanz Nachrichten through Ifra Executive News Service

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Evan Williams as a project for Obvious Corporation, San Francisco. Twitter enables any user to publish for free mini-postings or comments from their mobile, instant messenger or online. This new feature could not only change personal communications but could also be used by newspapers online, to increase feedback and interactivity.

Twitter is an interesting social networking website that allows anybody to communicate at all times, by asking the questions “Where are you? What are you doing?” This innovative tool makes it easier to exchange - trivial - ideas, thoughts and feelings.

At this moment, there are about 80,000 Twitter users. It isn´t possible to send messages of more than 140 characters, so users have developed new words. For example: twittering means send a message; twitterrhea means a lot of twittering; twittermaps is a technology to find maps.

The Financial Times analyzes the impact of Twitter and seems still uncertain as to its potential use. “Opinions are divided on whether to love or hate Twitter and whether it is full of useless minutiae or useful information.”

On the other hand, Twitter already counts its share of fanatics.

Ariana Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com is planning to recruit large groups of citizen journalists from around the US to cover individual presidential campaigns for the 2008 election.

"Each volunteer reporter/blogger will contribute to a candidate-specific group blog -- offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video," she said.

The content produced will be shown on both HuffingtonPost.com as well as Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net. Around 40 or 50 people are expected to track individual campaigns with up to 100 covering the frontrunners. In the spirit of pro-am journalism, editors will review work as it comes in to find the most interesting content.

"Our volunteer reporters will aim to provide an authentic counter-narrative to the lockstep consensus we often get from the mainstream media," Huffington said.

Source: Market Watch

World Editor’s Forum (WEF) President George Brock recently said that thus far, mobile companies have been “extraordinarily inept” at forming partnerships with established media brands, but hopes that the next few years will change this relationship.

Brock’s comments came in response to a question on WEF’s Newsroom Barometer Survey. The question asked what respondents thought, in their community, will be the most common way of reading news in 10 years. Of 435 editors and news executives that answered, only 11 percent believed mobile devices were the future.

Editors’ opinions, Brock said, probably reflect the history of mobile companies’ “failing to create effective partnerships with truly established media and journalism brands.” He looks to the future as an opportunity for change.

"My personal opinion is that there will be quite a lot more journalism on mobile and quite soon,” he said. Though obtaining news on mobile devices often costs money, Brock believes that people are getting used to reading journalistic content on PDAs and mobile phones.

The Parisian counsel has recently expressed its desire to establish a ‘code of good conduct’ between mobile freesheet distributors and Parisian news kiosks. The code could eventually prohibit distribution of free papers within a zone surrounding the kiosks.

Many newspapers in Paris are still sold in specialized miniature newsstands.

“Interrogations about the future of kiosks persist as the paid-for press is still struggling,” commented the counsel’s report.

In five years, freebies have revolutionized the press landscape in France. Metro distributes 880,000 copies in 10 cities and 20 Minutes distributes 870,000 copies in eight cities.

Faced with the expansion of the freesheet giants, it seems the Parisian counsel is trying to save – or to prolong – the existence of one of the city’s typical charms.

Source: AFP Mail

The American Journalism Review recently took a look at the Examiner free daily’s editorial model as the paper tries to hone itself as a solid journalistic endeavor while remaining a quick read.

The Examiner, owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz and published in San Francisco, Washington, and Balitimore, “is trying to take a news-lite model as its foundation and build a decent journalism reputation on it,” says AJR.

But is it succeeding?

In 2005, the Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the Washington Examiner compared with three tabloids and the front-section stories in three broadsheets. The paper offered more staff-written and longer-running articles than tabloids, but fell short of them in offering stories with more than one viewpoint.

Stephen Smith, executive editor of the Washington Examiner, thinks that the paper is doing just fine in establishing its place. "When it comes to our model in a strictly journalistic sense, I think it matches up with a kind of sensibility that is in part shaped by the Internet age and in part shaped by just the hurry-up pace of modern life," Smith says.

As the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) 2007 World Young Reader Conference and Expo continued yesterday in Washington, DC, speakers from many news organizations offered tips on marketing news to young people, especially children.

Mhairi Campbell, executive editor of BBC Learning said that the key- which may seem obvious- is to talk to one’s audience, even though they are children. "Children are better equipped than we are," she said. “They navigate with impressive confidence, talking about their favorite web sites…and the brands that make up their purchase repertoire."

Paul Farrell, group marketing manager of the Irish Times Group, took an interesting viewpoint. "Age is becoming less and less relevant as a primary segmentation tool," he said, and recommended thinking about overall business objectives rather than trying to market to one particular audience segment.

“Younger customers in particular will see through promotional initiatives or buy into them solely on the basis of the deal as opposed to any long term affinity or relationship,” he added, stressing that traditional marketing campaigns will not work and that campaigns must embrace new media to pull in youth.

Mark Glaser of MediaShift is back with a follow-up to his recent argument that serious journalism will not die with print; this time, he offers practical advice on how newspapers will operate online.

This list, he says, should help newsrooms make the transition to digital “in both deed and mindset.”

- Include outside, community voices in every phase of newsgathering, reporting, and follow-up – Have blogs and forums available to discuss possible subjects to cover, and allow replies to stories to continue dialogue and fix mistakes. Databases of citizen journalists can help you find sources. Don’t just ignore follow-up comments and concerns; actively take part in the conversation.

- Give each regular topic of coverage its own website with a “Topic Chief”, a paid editor/reporter who will run a main blog and watch over tiers of contributors, ranging all the way to citizen journalists.

-Look for multitasking staff - One person can write stories, blog, and go on camera for video pieces. “Topic Chiefs” should be multimedia experts.

- Think in multimedia – Post photos and video whenever and wherever possible and relevant. “What were once called ‘web extras’ will now just be ‘web stories’ complete with the extras baked in,” says Glaser.