Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo recently completed a survey of 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.

When asked to name the top 10 missions of Arab journalism, participants named human rights, political reform, poverty and education as the most critical issues, trumping hot button topics like Palestinian statehood and the war in Iraq.

"Overwhelmingly, they wanted the clergy to stay out of politics. And, aside from the ever-present issue of Israel, they ranked 'lack of political change' alongside American policy as the greatest threats to the Arab world," wrote Pintak in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this week. "Many see themselves as agents of political and social change who believe it is their mission to reform the antidemocratic regimes they live under."

The results of Pintak's research will be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July.

Source: The New York Times

The Guardian's website drew 3 million online users in April, maintaining its position as UK's most popular newspaper website, according to Nielsen Online.

But its grip on the top spot is slipping.

Telegraph.co.uk, which holds second-place with 2.7 million unique users, experienced a traffic growth of 77%, dwarfing the Guardian's 24% increase.

Trailing Telegraph.co.uk were, in order, the Sun Online, the Times Online, and the Daily Mail.

Telegraph.co.uk owes its surge in popularity to a proliferating number of "light" visitors, users who spend less than five minutes on the website, said Stephen Brooks, UK managing director of Nielsen Online. According to Nielsen, light users now constitute 81% of all traffic.

"Analysing the Telegraph's audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site's improved visibility in search results," Brooks said.

The Chicago Tribune has partnered with digital video recorder specialist TiVo, for the video service to carry content from the Tribune's TV critic Maureen Ryan.

The recommendations of Ryan will only be available to those who sign up, among the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the Chicago area. TiVo's chief executive said he was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets.

The Tribune could benefit from the deal in several ways, including increased visibility of its brand name, but also potentially additional subscription revenue.

"Maybe we'll get a few people to do the unthinkable and subscribe to the newspaper," said James Warren, managing editor for features at the Tribune. This partnership comes as the Tribune is reshuffling its TV print digest, whose value is diminishing with the rise of online or on-screen guides. "He said the TiVo partnership seemed like a no-lose proposition," reported The New York Times.

The Tribune will also get a share of revenue from newly-subscribed TiVo users, if these came through one the newspaper's advertisements for TiVo.

Source: New York Times through I Want Media

Starting on Sunday June 1, the 15th World Editors Forum and 61st World Newspaper Congress will kick off and run through Wednesday June 4.

All of next week, read all the latest news, watch the videos and get exclusive summaries and interviews from one of the industry's biggest events.

The Editors Weblog team is currently travelling to Göteborg, Sweden, for the Forum. We will continue to give a share of our regular news coverage until the end of the conference.

Copiepresse, a copyright group for Belgian newspapers, is suing Google for up to €49.1 million for displaying links to the publishers' content on Google News, the company's news search engine.

Copiepresse additionally requests that Google publish the court's ruling for 20 days on Google's Belgian website and news.Google.be. For each day Google fails to do so, Copiepresse seeks a €1 million fine.

Google News compiles links to news stories customized to fit users' searches, a service, Copiepresse complains, that allows Google to steal advertising profits away from the newspapers.

This is the second time in the past two years Copiepresse has sued Google. A February 2007 court ruling mandated that Google remove all links from its website and pay Copiepresse damages.

In related news, Google responded today to another grievance being brought against the company, Viacom's lawsuit against the Google-owned YouTube, calling it a "threat to the flow of information on the web."

Click here for further coverage of Copiepresse's lawsuit.

Welt Online, website of referential daily Die Welt in Germany, has chosen eScenic for its content management. Oliver Michalsky, deputy editor of Welt Online, will explain this choice at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, June 1-4.

"We thing that eScenic is a high performance content management system," he said.

The CMS is very fast compared to Welt Online's previous system: sometimes reporters had to wait for five minutes or more before a news item was published. "It was terrible for us," said Michalsky.

With eScenic, it is now both easy and quick to publish text stories, but also multimedia content such as videos and picture galleries, or interactive features like polls, said Michalsky.

Recent upgrades in eScenic also make it easy to manage Welt Online's community platform, where users can set up profiles and upload their own content; Welt Online began this project a year and a half ago with CMS Drupal, which offered better functionalities at the time, but will soon go through the process of adapting its community platform to eScenic.

According to Michalsky, staffers at Die Welt comfortably adopted the new CMS. It took about two weeks for all editors to learn how to use it. Not all reporters need to learn how to use it, but it has been very handy for reporters outside of Die Welt's Berlin headquarters.

In a blog post, Al Neuharth, founding editor of the leading US daily USA Today, reassures newspaper editors and publishers: 225 years after the first daily newspaper was published in the US, the newspaper is still a robust news medium (see a recent study) - despite current struggles in the newsroom.

A lot of doom and gloom reports about the newspaper industry have come from newspapers themselves.

"Sure, the slumping economy has made times a little tough for them. But most still have profit margins well above most other businesses," wrote Neuharth.

There are still a whopping 1,422 dailies and 6,253 being published in the US, and USA Today's circulation is at about 2,28 million copies daily, increasing every year in its 25-year history.

The Wall Street Journal is second, with just over 2 million copies. (Neuharth noted: "Under new owner/boss Rupert Murdoch, it's the most improved newspaper in the country and likely to show significant sharp future increases.")

The transition to the digital age isn't easy, but newspapers are embracing it. Said Neuharth:

The Journal and the Durham Times were the big winners at the 27th Tom Cordner North East Press Awards.

The Journal, a Newcastle paper, was named Newspaper of the Year for the second consecutive year. The paper also won six other prizes, including Magazine of the Year and Picture of the Year. The Durham Times, barely a year in print, was named Weekly Newspaper of the Year.

In other awards, the Northern Echo (picture left) won News Website of the Year, a new addition to the ceremony.

According to their website, the Tom Cordner Awards are the "largest regional media awards operation in the UK." The awards cover "newspapers, magazines, and their associated websites from North Yorkshire to the Scottish border."

Source: holdthefrontpage.co.uk

Guardian News and Media is merging operations of its online and print outlets, The Guardian, Guardian.co.uk, and The Observer. The move replaces the traditional "funnel" structure of the newsroom - all stories going through one editor - with a new layout, dubbed "pods in a matrix" by Guardian Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

"The jargon is now, I'm told, we're a 'matrix' organisation. That means you will have to get used to the fact that you are working for two people [a section head and a head of news, sport and business]," Rusbridger says.

The new system will preserve some of the traditional positions in a newspaper, such as an overarching editor, but not all reporters will have to pass their stories through the funnel. Journalists working in "pods," or groups covering a common subject, will publish directly online.

"I've always thought that news editor on a newspaper is an impossible job - all your correspondents are trying to get the attention of this person. And in the end all their copy has to come through this tiny, narrow funnel.

"That's what I mean about releasing the creativity, so these people don't go home pissed off because they didn't get their story in the paper," Rusbridger says.

Although the Chinese government has promised journalists the unrestricted right of expression, avoid any preconceptions, warns the Guardian's Phil Harding. This past month, news about the earthquake in China and angry protesters have tended to overshadow the issue of press coverage during the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics.

In an article Monday Harding speculates whether the government can keep its word.

"In a country that keeps such a tight grip on its own media and which severely restricts access to its markets by foreign media companies...it is a guarantee that has been hotly disputed," Harding writes.

Harding quotes several journalists who echo this skepticism, including BBC Sport's Head of Major Events, Dave Gordon, whose network plans to film certain events with its own unilateral cameras in preparation for any media suppression.

"We don't want any editorial decisions made for us," Gordon says.

Harding is most curious about how the media will cover events off the field, and how the Chinese government will respond to any such scrutiny.

"If the Olympics are portrayed as a well-organized success, the media will be accused of falling for a Chinese propaganda exercise. On the other hand, if there are protests and they are properly covered, there will be accusations from the Chinese that the actions of an unrepresentative minority have been magnified out of proportion."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recently come under the press' fire, after he and his party criticized AFP coverage. But political dissensions should by no means lead to inaccurate journalism, which is exactly what the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur did when it attributed these words to Sarkozy, during an informal meeting with a group of journalists:

"(expletive) guys, it's hot, let's go the terrace!" When asked about his visit in Tunisia and journalists there, the Nouvel Obs reported that Sarkozy had answered: "Don't give a damn, anyway, they're only a bunch of (expletive) who ask (expletive) questions..."

This would be crunchy content, especially knowing of Sarkozy's previous ethical missteps (a video shot by Le Parisien of Sarkozy insulting a citizen drew a million viewers in a day).

The problem is that this information was inaccurate, and that the Nouvel Observateur later admitted this information hadn't been verified and presented its apologies.

In fact, there wasn't even a Nouvel Obs reporter at the time of Sarkozy's meeting.

Let it serve as reminder to the press as a whole, in France and elsewhere, that a necessary degree of partisanship and political contestation shouldn't lead to inaccurate journalism.