The Associated Press announced Thursday that it suffered serious losses in revenue and profit in 2009, but it also underscored the fact that it won't take the declines lying down. During its annual meeting the news agency announced the expansion of its AP Gateway initiative through the launch of their News Registry and a niche website for college football fans.

The bleak financial records included a nearly 10 percent drop in revenue, now down to $676.1 million, and a 65 percent fall in net income, bringing it to $8.8 million. Much of this was the result of offering lower rates to its member newspapers, who were also suffering from reduced revenue as a result of the media crisis.

To alleviate some of the pressure created by falling revenues, the AP cut staff and dropped its payroll expenses by 10 percent last year, and managed to cut debt by $1 million in 2009. But as the Board of the AP announced on Thursday, it also plans to innovate to find new sources for revenue.

The AP hopes to take better advantage of search engines and lessen its dependence on third-party sites by making its product more versatile and easily distributable across a wide range of media.

Times Online and Sun Online have stopped disclosing their traffic information mere months before Murdoch initiates his paywall. In unrelated news, Variety saw pageviews drop 40 percent since it's initiated its paywall. [paidContent, MediaPost]

General Secretary of the UK National Union of Journalists Jeremy Dear says that to save journalism, it's not the funding that matters, its the political will. [Journalism.co.uk]

To raise awareness--and to strengthen that political will--the National Union of Journalists is reinstating its regional press awards. [Guardian]

Here are some handy online tools to add data-based visuals to your news website. [Online Journalism Blog]

Newspaper turf wars seem to be popping up all over the U.S. lately, and the spirit of competition has most recently struck Washington, D.C.'s nationally respected Washington Post. Once known as the national newspaper for political news, the Washington Post has begun to lose ground to newer competitors since the proliferation of political blogs and websites made possible by the internet. In a move that some say directly challenges political coverage competitor Politico, the Washington Post launched its new PostPolitics homepage today.

According to Washington Post national editor Kevin Merrida, PostPolitics.com aims "to collect and organize our great political reporting and analysis on one dynamic destination." The motivation behind the politically-branded site, however, is competition. Paul Volpe, national innovation editor of the Post, told Neiman Lab that the Washington Post needed to redefine itself as a go-to spot for politics.
"The challenge that we face was we were fighting for space on our own front page," he said. "We have competitors that can devote their entire homepage to politics."

If you're interested in learning how some organizations are implementing user-generated content in the newsroom, The Poynter Institute is offering Editors Weblog readers $10 off its upcoming online broadcast, Stretching Your News Budget with User Content. This half-day online broadcast takes place on Thursday, May 6 from 1:15-5:30 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, and it is part of a two-day conference at The Poynter Institute, Stretching Your News Budget with User Content: A Poynter Conference.

During the broadcast, participants will be able to watch the event live online and chat with other online participants as our panel of experts explores the benefits and drawbacks of enlisting citizen contributors to news reporting. Hosts for the afternoon sessions include Amanda Michel, director of distributed reporting at ProPublica; Poynter faculty members Rick Edmonds and Kelly McBride; Jan Schaffer of J-Lab and Susan Karol from the Suburban Newspapers of America Foundation.

For more information and to register for the conference broadcast, visit Stretching Your News Budget with User Content. Your $10 discount code for the event is: PWEFPRO10

The Tribune Company-owned Los Angeles Times will soon begin adding e-commerce links to selected stories and blog posts, as "both a reader service and a revenue opportunity for the company," editor Russ Stanton told staffers in a memo yesterday, LAObserved reported.

The e-commerce links will be highlighted in green with a double underline and no blue editorial link will be replaced with an e-commerce link. Each article or a post that includes an e-commerce green link will have a disclaimer at its foot stating: "Clicking on Green Links will take you to a third-party e-commerce site. These sites are not operated by the Los Angeles Times. The Times Editorial staff is not involved in any way with Green Links or with these third-party sites," Stanton stated in the memo, posted on LAObserved. "These post-publication links to sites such as Amazon and TicketNetwork will serve as both a reader service and a revenue opportunity for the company."

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

A year after Reuters began investigative reporting the news agency announced its plans to increase its reporting efforts as a result of consumer demands. Jon Pompeo from the Business Insider's The Wire, recently discussed Reuters investigative reporting efforts with Jim Impoco, the agency's investigative reporting editor.

According to the agency's online news editor, Keith McCallister, reader's have been "eating [investigative journalism stories] up." McCallister stated that the investigative stories are read more frequently than any of the agency's other articles by a factor of 10.

Several factors might explain Reuters success at investigative reporting when so many other news agencies have cut back on the service. Impoco believes that part of its success is a result of having "lots of boots on the ground." Pompeo notes that the international news agency employs 2800 reporters in more that 200 bureaus worldwide.

South Africa's Cape Times plans to redesign and relaunch just before the World Cup takes place in June, GrubStreet.co.za reported.

"We're hoping to achieve a livelier product, taking into account media trends around the world and more partnership with online," Chris Whitfield, editor-in-chief of the Cape Times, told GrubStreet.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com.

Also, UK tabloid The Sun plans to release a special 3D edition on June 5 in advance of the World Cup.

With the advent of online news media and the recent crisis in publishing, newspapers are struggling to find their purpose in an ever-shifting news landscape.

The internet has opened the door to anyone and everyone with an opinion on the news, and this move has left newspapers wondering how they should adjust their offerings, if at all. Some offer journalists the opportunity to provide more commentary on their beats, blurring the line between unbiased reporting and opinionated commentary. Others, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, feel that it's important to balance all opinions with an opposing opinion.

"If we have a view to the right, (our readers) want a balance of a view to the left," said Journal-Constitution editor Julia Wallace to NPR. "And they want us to be transparent about how we go about our work."

Wallace's comments led Slate's food writer Dan Mitchell to question if its really in the best interest of consumers for newspapers to offer them issues that are "dull, useless, and full of mush."

"It's like our newspapers are being run by drugged out, brainwashed cult members," he writes. "They really believe that the less newspapers appear to have been written and edited by humans, the better."

WAN-IFRA and NEWSPLEX would like to invite you to join a select group of publishers, CEO's and senior news executives on a study tour to leading multimedia newsrooms in Europe. The tour, from 16 to 21 May, will comprise of visits to publishing companies at the forefront of multimedia.

In the UK we will visit Archant Ltd. and its regional titles Eastern Daily Press & Evening News in Norwich. The formerly separate newsrooms have been integrated in a completely new way to deliver editorial content for a quality title and a tabloid title as well as series of weekly titles and sites with different target groups. A workshop on newsroom reorganisation, led by our Newsplex team, will be also part of this visit in Norwich.

The Bild Zeitung in Berlin is one of the most successful newspapers in Europe concerning reach of print and digital and has a long tradition of embracing digital in a very dynamic tabloid style publication. User generated content, "user-generated promotion" and the use of branding on various non-publishing products ("Volksprodukte") are quite unique concepts in most parts of Europe.

The Blick in Zurich has just launched its new title-integrated newsroom, where three print titles and the digital platforms work in a newly built newsroom environment, which uses a central decision place and a specifically designed media-wall to plan and produce the content for all titles.

Hyperlocal blog network ChicagoNow is finding success, offering other such models hope that they can be part of the future of journalism.

The website offers readers 350 blogs written by community journalists based in Chicago, with each covering niche topics from across the city. The bloggers are paid $5 for every 1000 local page views, and though the site employs editors, the content is entirely produced by the network of blogs.

Editors of the site help blogs take advantage of hyperlinking and SEO tools, and ChicagoNow has started to offer its bloggers educational seminars to help them create better content. The bloggers cover topics from crime to public schools to local politics, and they all offer a bio and a picture, giving the blogs a personal quality that many larger newspapers lack.

Rather than purchase an already established hyperlocal news site, the Chicago Tribune Co. created ChicagoNow from the ground-up, and it recently received 1.5 million unique visitors and 15.5 million page views in March alone. Although other hyperlocal news ventures are entering the city--the Chicago Cooperative provides content to the New York Times, and Patch.com will be coming soon--ChicagoNow seems to be here to stay.

Source: TechCrunch

The UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism hopes to fill in the holes left by the recent media crisis and subsequent corner-cutting that has taken place over the past three years, reports Journalism.co.uk.

The Potter Foundation-backed venture employs 17 freelancers and full-time staff members and boasts a budget of £2 million to support multimedia investigative ventures. Managing editor Iain Overton claims the bureau has a collaboration agreement with the Financial Times, a commission from Channel 4 News, and interest from at least three other news venues, including television and radio.

One of the main goals of the bureau, said Overton, is to provide freelancers with fiscal support to pursue investigations that mainstream media organizations may have an interest in but are unable to support.
"There are new opportunities in terms of creating ways in which journalists collaborate and bringing print journalists and broadcast journalists to create a multimedia offering," he told Journalism.co.uk. "The challenge is persuading the editors that they can allow this to happen."

Not only will the bureau create connections between journalists from different media, but it also aims to improve the technology available to journalists to help them engage in investigative reporting.