The Wall Street Journal Europe is to launch a redesigned newspaper on November 17, according to a press release. Changes to the WSJ's Europe-focused website will also be carried out, and the company has announced a new conference strategy for Europe.

The redesigned edition will include new analysis features, new columnists and a new front page design, said the release. Layout will be simplified and navigation made more straightforward, and it will be more colourful. A new series of eight-page special reports will be launched, "designed to provide executives with detailed information and insight on topics and themes of European concern." As of November 16, the US edition of the WSJ will no longer be printed and distributed in London, and its subscribers will be offered the European version instead.

Europe.wsj.com, the paper's region-specific website, will reflect the changes to the paper and will offer additional online-only content, blogs and daily emails.

Church-funded and with a minimal reliance on advertising, The Christian Science Monitor enjoys a small circulation but loyal readership. Some seven months after putting an end to its print edition, the Monitor is still an ever-growing source for breaking news.

In a phone interview with Ponyter Online's Rick Edmond, Monitor Editor John Yemma stated that "93 percent of the 43,000 subscribers of the printed daily agreed to switch to a new weekly print magazine," and in the publication's short history, its circulation has increased to "67,000 fully paid subscribers (at $89 a year). And another 18,000 trial subscribers are paying a reduced rate."

With its web site now up and running at full pelt, page views have also crept up by a considerable 20 percent and monthly unique visits have increased by an even higher percentage, Yemma said.

More than half the Monitor's budget, roughly $20 million a year, is derived from income on an endowment and a subsidy from the Church of Christ, Scientist - much greater than philanthropy-supported start-ups such as ProPublica , whose outgoings this year are expected to be around the $9 million mark. According to Yemma, the money saved on printing, paper, distribution and a reduced staff balances the lower circulation revenue.

So what are the factors behind the publication's growth?

Singapore media company MediaCorp has launched an integrated newsroom called the NewsHub. It aims to group journalists across news platforms to produce local content which is then tailored for print, online, radio or television, reported ChannelNewsAsia.com, part of MediaCorp.

The 'one-stop shop for news content' will produce content for platforms including ChannelNewsAsia, TODAY and 928LIVE. One email address - mediacorpnewshub@mediacorp.com.sg - will provide one point of contact for anyone with news to report to get hold of the team.

Channelnewsasia quoted Dr Chitra Rajaram, director of MediaCorp NewsHub, who said: "You can sense the new dynamism and see the synergies in the midst of editors and reporters shouting across to each other in the newsroom." She continued,"for us it's synergies, it's optimizing, it's efficiency of services, efficacy of service. For the journalists, a new facet of reporting the news has been opened, and all of them will become conversant in more than one medium. And at the end of the day, when you look at what journalism is all about, it's about telling a story."

The New York Times plans to use a nonprofit public news service, the Chicago News Cooperative, to provide commentary and news stories for the NYT's two pages of Chicago local news to launch as a 'Chicago Edition' on November 20th.

The CNC is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and will have its own newsroom, but is part of the nonprofit that operates the public TV broadcaster WTTC 11.

The Cooperative will be paid to produce content for the NYT, while launching its own subscription news site in 2010, the Chicago Scoop.

This is great news for everyone interested or involved in the nonprofit model, like the Bay Area News Project.

Long Island-based daily Newsday is to start charging readers for online access starting later this month, the New York Times and others reported. The paper is owned by Cablevision, and subscribers to the pay television provider will get the site free, as will subscribers to the print edition of the paper.

Newsday.com is planning to charge $5 a week, or $260 a year, which is a steep price compared, for example, to the Wall Street Journal, which costs $149 a year for an online-only subscription. And as 75% of Long Island households already are print or Cablevision subscribers, according to Newsday, so the market at which this initiative is targeted is presumably not large. Publisher Terry Jimenez said in a letter to readers that Newsday.com has been undergoing a transformation to become a "more dynamic multimedia resource," and promised to "continue to add features designed to provide you a more useful, personalized experience that makes newsday.com an even greater resource for you to get the information you want and need at anytime."

The latest UK ABCe figures showed that three national newspaper websites attracted more than 30 million unique users for the first time in September, reported the Guardian. Guardian.co.uk's count was the highest, with just under 33 million, up 23.62% from August and showing a 36.25% year on year increase.

The Telegraph's website was up 24.83% from August to over 31 million uniques, a 35.17% year-on-year increase. And the Daily Mail just topped 30 million, up 67.71% from a year ago and up by 4.74% last month. Overall, the figures seemed more positive than September's print sales, as recorded by ABC.

"Breaking 30 million users is another milestone for guardian.co.uk. We are delighted to see a healthy interest in online news across the board," Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News and Media, told the Guardian. "Both our global and UK success can be attributed to our sustained investment in web content. The newly launched environment site attracted a significant number of new users and our new TV site, offering user-friendly listings, has encouraged repeat visitors and increased engagement."

Twitter, the microblogging service, which asks users to anwser the question 'What are you doing?'in 140 characters or less, announced it has made deals with both Microsoft and Google yesterday. The agreement now makes 'tweets' searchable on the respective search engines.

Early yesterday, Paul Yiu, head of newly rebranded Microsoft search engine, Bing, wrote on a blog: "Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous."

Continuing, he said: "Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter ... You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favourite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today."

The blog post was confirmed in the afternoon when the company officially announced the agreement at the 2009 Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco.

The European Parliament narrowly dismissed a resolution to rebuke Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi over media freedom in Italy, just as a Reporters Without Borders report noted that press freedom in several European countries, including Italy, has suffered dramatically in the past year.

The issue of press freedom in Italy was debated at the European Parliament plenary session in Brussels on 7-8 October, after some MEPs expressed concern over what they see as a climate of media intimidation due to the prime minister's control over large sections of the media. The resolution that was brought before the parliament yesterday aimed to get the EU's executive commission and fundamental rights agency to launch probes into media ownership and control, according to the Associated Press. It was backed by Liberals, Socialists, Greens and Communists, but opposed by conservatives in the assembly's largest group, the European People's Party. Many viewed it as an attempt to interfere in national politics. The final vote was 338 for, 338 against.

"The Reconstruction of American Journalism" is a 100-page report on the state of journalism in the United States. Written by Leonard Downie, the VP of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, it describes changes in the news media industry (i.e. the 'happening' of the internet) and its ultimately detrimental effect on traditional media news outlets, of course newspapers especially. Here we will briefly summarize some points, and there is a lot of material in the report that merits an in-depth read of the whole thing.

The report is quite detailed, and includes various examples and covers many topics, but focuses on local news and the value of quality journalism. Beginning with a history of the newspaper industry that culminates in its weakness in the face of internet news, Downie and Schudson explain the importance of investigative and accountability journalism for a democracy, holding it as a public good.

In less than one months time, the daily edition of the Birmingham Post will be a thing of the past, with its weekly edition set to roll off the printers every Thursday from 12 November, the Guardian has reported.

Last year the business paper underwent a revamp, switching from a broadsheet format to a tabloid, and moving with the Birmingham Mail and about 40 other Trinity Mirror daily and weekly titles into a brand new multimedia newsroom.

Yet this did little to help Trinity Mirror crawl out of its £388m debt, which has since caused the company to cut 1,200 jobs, close 27 newspapers, and sell four titles.

Alongside the 152-year-old daily newspaper's transformation into a weekly, the Birmingham Mail - currently an afternoon paper - is set to become an overnight morning title, as of next year.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's recent encounter with prior restraint and legal gagging has reinforced his belief in 'mutualized' news, he writes at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Rusbridger seems to claim that uproar over the gag transmitted over Twitter forced the Trifagura lawyers at Carter-Ruck to drop the ban. He is obviously grateful for this, and uses it as an example of the 'mutualized' newspaper:

"Our readers have become part of what we do. They write commentaries for our Comment is Free site--they have helped with investigations into tax avoidance and police brutality. They form communities around individual reporters and issues, lending a hand with research and ideas, bringing us up short when we get things wrong. They have collaborated on big projects needing resources beyond our scope. We have done things that would have been impossible without them."