The Kindle may face stiff competition from the newly released Apple iPad, but the king of the e-reader market will not go down without a fight. New positive figures released by Amazon prove that the battle of the e-readers is far from over.
Seattle-based Amazon said Thursday that strong holiday sales sent net profit soaring 71 percent during the fourth quarter of the year to 384 million dollars while sales rose 42 percent to 9.52 billion dollars, according to AFP information on Yahoo News.

Earnings per share were also much better than expected by Wall Street analysts. Overall, net profit rose by 40 percent to 24.51 billion dollars, Amazon said in a statement.

Amazon does not tend to release sales figures for its e-reader, but as the only item that was singled out in a statement from the company, it seems likely that the Kindle has been fuelling Amazon's gains. In fact, back in October, the company said the device was the company's "number one best-selling item by both unit sales and dollars" across all product categories.

Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, said in a statement that "millions of people now own Kindles, and Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell six Kindle books for every 10 physical books."

As world leaders plan the future of the global economy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, journalists are using social media and other innovative ways to bring the discussion closer to the people.

One way big media players are covering the discussion at Davos, and how it can affect us, is establishing pages dedicated to covering the World Economic Forum through Sunday. MediaBistro reports that CNBC.com has established one of these pages, offering interviews from the conference, and blogs from reporters and presenters, as well as a behind-the-scenes Heard in Davos 2010 blog, guest articles, and daily readers' polls. MediaBistro says CNBC.com is also offering readers the chance to submit their questions directly to delegates via e-mail.

Other media giants, like CNN, and Guardian, have created pages solely devoted to covering the WEF on their online portals. CNN has created a Davos page, featuring blog entries from big-name CNN journalists and economic analysts as well as, polls, and the latest videos from the conference.

Time's James Poniewozik has suggested that the significance of the New York Times's paywall is symbolic, rather than a sign that paid online content is the future for news. "Any pricing scheme that can raise actual money risks chasing away actual readers," and this why the NYT's charging method "probably won't make much difference to the Times's coffers or its readers at first."

As Poniewozik says, there are many people who won't end up paying for an online subscription to the New York Times. Print subscribers will get free access, casual readers won't have to pay, and those directed via other websites won't pay.

Therefore, "the real significance of the plan is symbolic," it is an admittance of "vulnerability" that shows a "crack in the firmament" of the media.

The Guardian website has done it again - the newspaper's website has just announced it has achieved its second record-breaking month in a row with nearly 37 million unique users for December, according to its website.

This surpassed its November record by 3.32%, according to figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.
Mail Online took second spot with the highest month-on-month increase of 5.10%, followed by Telegraph Online.

The Guardian's News and Media director of digital content, Emily Bell, is attributing the Guardian's online portal's success to its thorough reporting. She explains that the thorough coverage of the Copenhagen climate change conference resulted in EnvironmentGuardian.co.uk seeing a 15% month-on-month increase, and an increase in average daily unique visitors from all over the world as well.

Mail Online and the Daily Mail & General's Trust's website network also experienced strong growth in December. Telegraph held steady, while Sun Online saw increases in visitors.

These increases in unique visitors only highlight the outstanding importance of news content online both for content creators and consumers. Bigger online audiences could bring in more advertising revenue for newspapers.

Newspaper publisher McClatchy is going to try out charging for content online, Editor and Publisher reports.

Chief Executive Gary Pruitt said that McClatchy will trial a pay model on one of its newspaper websites, suggesting that a number of articles could be available for free before the reader hits a paywall.
He added that the publisher will continue to focus on free online content supported by advertising, and that he believes that this will remain widespread. "We feel the model isn't broken," he said. "But we'll learn from everything - we wish them all the luck. If someone cracks the code, we'll copy it."

These comments came in the context of the release of McClatchy's 2009 online advertising revenue figures. In the fourth quarter of a difficult year, online ad revenue was up 14.9%. It now represents almost 16% of total online revenue, up from 11% a year earlier. And 44% of online ad revenue was online-only. Pruitt said that online advertising "has proven to be very profitable for us".

Pruitt added that advertising rates for packaged buys, that is, for online and print, are generally down in the low single-digit range. He also said that the company has been more successful with smaller, local advertisers than national ones, and that online local retail rates were holding.

Hundreds of managers and executives at the bankrupt Tribune Company will get bonuses as part of a $45.6 million incentive program, under plans approved by a Delaware bankruptcy judge.

This is the largest such payment in at least 12 years and will be awarded to 720 managers. Judge Kevin Carey overruled objections by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild and the US bankruptcy trustee that the payment was too high and unwarranted, particularly considering that the company had frozen salaries for most staff. Carey found that many of the targets had already been met when he held hearings on the issue in September.
The Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and other daily newspapers as well as 23 television stations. After filing for bankruptcy in December 2008, the company posted better than expected results at the end of last year, with an operating cashflow of almost $500 million. Of course, this figure is dwarfed by the 2007 cashflow of $1.2 billion.

The bonuses total close to 10% of 2009 operating cashflow. In the past decade, the company has not paid bonuses of more than 3.3% of operating cashflow, and in 2008 paid only 1.5% or $13.4 million. "There has never been an MIP like this one: an unprecedented payout of millions of dollars to a smaller number of executives," the union said in documents it filed this week.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Mirror.co.uk has this week followed the lead of News International and blocked its content from online news aggregator NewsNow, paidContent reported. NewsNow is now the only site blocked from crawling the Mirror online.

"We're not big fans of their business model," Mirror.co.uk digital director Matt Kelly said.
Rupert Murdoch's News International recently blocked NewsNow from aggregating all its websites, including the Times online, Sun online and NotW.co.uk.

NewsNow has been voluntarily switching on and off crawling for some sites over the last couple of months, and the switch-off has had a small negative effect on some of the sites' traffic, according to paidContent.

Mirror.co.uk's preference for loyal readers over occasional visitors redirected from search engines is on record. Blocking an aggregator is part of a move to focus on gaining an audience of committed readers, which of course is valuable to advertisers as well.

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.
The site allows readers to contribute local and global news, in the form of blog posts, photo and video, via web or mobile phone. It uses proprietary technology to sort and filter reports between breaking and popular and by location. Functions are in place for fact-checking and users can both contribute related news to a story and award it a ranking. The site also features a newsfeed from various mainstream news sources and has plans to expand its hyperlocal news coverage in the US. In September last year Allvoices added Twitter data to its reports.

Newsday, the Long Island daily, has attracted just 35 online-only subscribers to its website since it was put behind a pay wall last October, according to an article published yesterday in the New York Observer.

While only a few dozen have opted for the internet specific plan, which costs $5 a week or $260 a year, that figure does not take into account the print subscribers and Optimum Online customers in New York who already have free access to newsday.com. Optimum Cable is owned by Cablevision; who purchased Newsday for $650 million in May of 2008. Newsday estimates that 75 percent of Long Island either has a print subscription or Optimum Cable.

In a statement to Paid Content, a Newsday representative explained the low figure, "Millions of Cablevision customers in the New York tri-state area and 75 percent of Long Island households, including all Newsday home delivery subscribers, now have exclusive access to newsday.com at no additional charge. Internal research shows that Newsday's web site is an extremely popular new benefit to hundreds of thousands of Long Island Cablevision households. Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday's web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option."

The British international business newspaper the Financial Times (FT) has announced several appointments to its US staff, Editor and Publisher has reported.

The new staff are in the coverage areas of business, finance and markets, and will report to the US finance and business editor Francesco Guerrera.
Mara Der Hovanesian is the new fund manager correspondent, covering hedge funds, mutual funds and pension funds. She previously worked in senior editorial roles at BusinessWeek, including as markets and investments editor and banking and finance editor.

Suzanne Kemper has been appointed banking and insurance correspondent, covering US regional banks, insurers, and mortgage associations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She will focus on the retail business of large banks, and developments in the credit card and mortgage markets. She was most recently at Fortune magazine, has covered the retail industry for the New York Post and was a London-based business correspondent for The New York Times.

Jeremy Lemer will be the new US business correspondent, covering US airlines, industrial companies, and broader trends in corporate America. He was previously London-based defence reporter for the FT.