ImpreMedia, the largest Spanish-language online and print news publisher in the US, has decided to partner with behavioral tracking specialists at DailyMe in an attempt to more fully capitalize on the internet traffic passing through ImpreMedia's servers, according to a press release. The solution that has just been deployed is known as Newstogram and it combines unique profiles on more than 25 million users to improve news relevancy and personalization to engage the readers and improve their experience.

The Newstogram system operates transparently in front of ImpreMedia's news sites, tracking and analyzing the news users read at a elemental level to understand each particular visitor's tastes and purchasing patterns. The software does not gather personally identifiable details about users. The information with this process enables ImpreMedia to both offer individualized news recommendations based on each user's news interests, and to more fully understand their audience when it comes to content, e-commerce and advertising.

The candidate must monitor adherence to journalism ethics. He or she should be prepared to examine large editorial slip-ups, discrepancies and omissions and do all this in a completely transparent auditable manner open to pubic input or scrutiny. Arthur Brisbane's job description includes all of the above and a lot more (like a regular column). He has just been appointed to the role of public editor for the New York Times. Brisbane replaces Clark Hoyt whose three-year contract ended earlier this month. Brisbane is only the fourth person to fill the role since its inception as part of the response to the Jayson Blair scandal. In his first remarks as NYT public editor, Brisbane hints at some fundamental shifts in the focus of the role as he envisions it.
In the NYT today, Executive Editor Bill Keller discusses the history of the role. He writes that "[t]he general suspicion of the press has not abated in the years since Dan Okrent took the first turn at this job, nor has our determination to hold ourselves to the highest standards in journalism. Offering the readers an advocate, someone who has the experience, the skills and the license to study our work and pass impartial judgments on it, is a demonstration of our commitment to those standards."

USA Today president and publisher Dave Hunke, recently announced they would be reorganizing the paper, reports Gannett Blog. Most shockingly for the publication's staff, the reorganization will include layoffs. USA Today, which in April reported a 13.6 percent decrease in circulation over six months, has been under increasing pressure to revive their newspaper sales. Moreover, Today's advertising revenue fell 11 percent during the first quarter, while the overall decline amongst Gannett's (owner of USA Today) other papers was 8 percent.

Hunke announced the upcoming restructuring and layoffs at a staff meeting last week, however he did not include a timetable or details about the upcoming changes. One anonymous commentator on Gannett's blog expressed frustration over the manner in which Hunke shared the news, saying "either Hunke buried the lede or he has so little regard for us that he just plumb forgot to mention the fact that some of us are going to be laid off, and soon." Hunke reportedly waited until the post-meeting Q&A session to share the news about the layoffs.

Following the iPad's big splash into the tablet market this spring, today Amazon cut the price of its e-reader, the Kindle, while Barnes & Noble reduced the price of its Nook.

Both e-readers previously sold for US$259. Now, the Nook's pricetag is $199 and the Kindle is $189; Barnes & Noble has also launched a Wi-Fi-only Nook for $149. Comparatively, the iPad's lowest-priced version is $499.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com
See also Nintendo 3D game device to support digital newspapers and magazines

Bloomberg News is doing things a little differently. In stark contrast to media heavyweights such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The New York Times, Bloomberg has launched a fresh version of its business news website supported solely by ads rather than subscription fees. A free-content approach to news provision would seem to be a departure from the company's traditional revenue model which revolves around selling subscriptions to its Bloomberg Terminals data feeds at the price of $1500/month.

In addition to its free business news offerings, minOnline reports that Bloomberg is set to become "the only major news provider to make accessible online a live feed of its TV broadcasts. A TV tab from the home page lands the users on a large media player running the current programming from Bloomberg Television as well as a library of recent clips and interviews."

The San Francisco Public Press, a web-based news source, will go to print, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The Press, a nonprofit news source that has been reporting local issues online since 2009, plans to print a twenty page main section accompanied by an eight page pull out. The Chronicle notes that this move by the Public Press is "bucking a national trench whereby startup, nonprofit news Web sites sprout online and stay in cyberspace."

The Public Press is starting out slow, as this Tuesday's issue will be the last for several months. However, Michael Stoll, the Public Press' executive director, expressed a hope that the print format will one day become daily. For now, the paper does not include advertisements, but Stoll hopes that Tuesday's publication will attract more subscribers.

The publication is described as"grassroots," with its contributors being primarily local journalists who are "frustrated by what they see as the diminished Bay Area news coverage." The first issue will include 70 stories including several opinion pieces. Public Press volunteers will distribute the paper on street corners and in BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stations where it will cost $2.

The eight largest newspapers in Ohio have recently joined forces to research the state's public pension system, reports Editor&Publisher. By coming together, the newspapers were able to identify thousands of public employees who are collecting pensions while still working and receiving paychecks, a procedure known as "double dipping." The study found that about 32,000 state and local employees collected more than $1 billion in pensions on top of their paychecks. The beneficiaries of "double-dipping" are mostly school superintendents and highly paid educators.

However, this is not a new move for Ohio newspapers, which have collaborated in a similar fashion in the past. Rather than using an expensive newswire service like the Associated Press, Ohio newspapers previously decided to form their own cooperative, called the Ohio News Organization. The eight participating newspapers are the Akron Beacon Journal, The Blade of Toledo, the Canton Repository, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Columbus Dispatch, the Dayton Daily News, the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, and the Vindicator.

Iceland has passed a package of legislation that intends to make the country an international safe haven for investigative journalists, it was reported by the AFP and the Independent among others. The new laws, created with the help of Wikileaks, were passed unanimously in the Icelandic parliament at 4am on Wednesday last week.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative was first proposed in February, by which time Julian Assange, founder and editor of whistleblower site Wikileaks, had already been consulting with MPs for two months on the proposal to implement some of the strongest protection in the world for the press and its sources. The idea is that the new package will also help bring an end to libel tourism, and make it much harder to censor stories before they are published.

The Huffington Post has recently acquired Adaptive Semantics, company whose software provides "learning and sentiment analysis" to the HuffPo, reports PaidContent. HuffPo had already been working with Adaptive Semantics to make online comments sections safe for advertisements by filtering offensive language and patterns of behavior used to evade censors. However HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau assures that this acquisition (HuffPo's first) does not signal a future buying spree for the company. "We'll be opportunistic," says Hippeau. "We're not looking but if there are things that are important to us, as demonstrated with Adaptive Semantics" HuffPo would consider it.

In May, the HuffPo reported their website had produced 2.8 million comments. Clearly, Adaptive Semantics technology will be important to the future of the HuffPo as its comments sections continue to expand. "We have built a whole road map for continuing the develop capability," Hippeau says. However, Hippeau added that he does not intent to offer Adaptive Semantics' technology commercially, although he will maintain any pre-existing commitments to clients.

It is no secret that sales of classifieds in print publications has been spiraling down for many years now, and with no end in sight. That is precisely why our sister site, SFN Blog paid careful attention to the news that a group of U.S. newspaper and broadcast TV news websites have allied to create a national online listing and auction site, boocoo, which is aimed to compete against Craigslist and eBay. The Editors Weblog got in touch with Tony Marsella, president of boocoo's parent company, Ranger Data Technologies, to find out what this new revenue model might mean for the newspapers and classified advertising sales.

Upon logging in to the boocoo preview website (a sneak-peek account details at the bottom of this article) users are greeted with a very clean, intuitive interface that will feel familiar and easy for anyone who has bought or sold items online before. The one key difference in terms of aesthetics is that once the site goes live, there will be customized, branded pages that will ease users from their local newspaper's website onto the boocoo site. The revenue model employed here is to license zip-codes to more than 300 newspaper publishers, such as The Boston Herald and Austin American-Statesman, with a total print audience of 22 million readers.

The University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute has recently announced the inauguration of WellCommons, a site designed to improve community communication about health issues. Jane Stevens, Director of Media Strategies at the Institute, hopes that WellCommons will connect health reporters to the public to more effectively communicate health reports. Moreover, she believes that WellCommons is a good example of successful journalism in a social media world. In describing her new site, she says "some people say it's a touch of WordPress, a little bit of Ning, some Facebook and Twitter, all embedded in a safe place and a trusted source, which is what journalism is supposed to be for a community."

Stevens writes that the site is unique in 5 ways. To begin, it integrates social media with journalism. Both reporters and community members post on the website and communicate with one another via messages. Moreover, Stevens maintains that the site allows for users to determine the credibility of the article they are reading by looking at the sources section. Stevens' approach appears to be like a sort of checks-and-balances system where the format itself will hopefully ensure that the majority of posts on the site are coming from legitimate sources. Also, she argues that WellCommons' approach to health reporting is community-based and solution-oriented.