The FT Group, publisher of the Financial Times, recorded a 12% year-on-year revenue increase in 2010 - as Press Gazette reported - according to its parent company Pearson.
Pearson said that FT Group drew £403m in revenue in 2010, with underlying growth of 9%, and its operating profit increased 54% to £54m.

Also the Financial Times website registered a 79% increase in registered users year-on-year in 2010, taking the total to more than three million, as Journalism.co.uk reported, citing preliminary results published by Pearson.

The article also said that Feb 28's results also show a 50 per cent increase in digital subscriptions on 2009, with 207,000 registering, and 900,000 downloads of FT apps on mobile phones and tablet devices for the period.

The Guardian reported that, announcing the results, chief executive Marjorie Scardino has raised some concerns about the terms Apple is demanding for print app subscriptions, arguing that as competition increases publishers will no longer have to cave-in.

"I think we're at the beginning of a new era, a time of reconnection," says Ken Doctor, author of "Newsonomics" and an industry analyst who believes 2011 offers the newspaper industry another shot at succeeding in the digital world.

This is the year the paid content model will really be tested, he says. "By July 1, we will have six or seven dozen, pushing toward 100, tests of paid content in the United States and Europe." Mr Doctor was speaking at WAN-IFRA's 21st World Newspaper Advertising Conference, which took place in Malta from 24-25 February.

The New York Times' metered model, to be introduced shortly, will be watched by the industry with great interest. Mr Doctor described such models - which ask for payment from those who access many pages but leave occasional users with free access - as "making peace with fly-by traffic."

The Times has 30 million readers online, so even if they get just 3 percent to pay, they'll equal their paper subscription number. In general, 10 percent of readers provide a third to one half of all page views, Mr Doctor says.

"Are men still dominating journalism?" wonders the Guardian. Yes, as Roy Greenslade said, reporting on a Women In Journalism's seminar that will be held next week. According to new research, WIJ site says, women are still underrepresented in Britain's newspapers.

CNN has won a prestigious UK journalism award for its innovative use of Twitter to cover the 2010 World Cup, as Lauren Dugan reported on Mediabistro's All Twitter.
The Royal Television Society has acknowledged CNN in the "Innovative News" category of its annual TV journalism awards. CNN teamed up with Twitter during the 2010 World Cup and showed both web and TV audiences just how social media was being used during the games. They created an interactive visualization of the conversations pertaining to the World Cup on Twitter, enabling audiences to see how people were using social media to discuss the events.

The Daily Mail's website Mail Online continues to attract more and more visitors: the latest ABCe figures show that the paper had just over 56 million browsers in January, more than 3 million a day. This puts it up 56% on last year, reported Press Gazette.

Second in line is the Guardian, with 39.5 million, and behind that the Telegraph with 32 million. The Guardian is up 10.1% compared to last year and the Telegraph up just 0.7%.

Lingering well behind are Mirror Group Digital (12.9 million), the Independent (12 million) and Metro (5.8 million). The former two attracted significantly more visitors than last year, however, up 21 and 24% respectively.

Press Gazette noted that Mail Online now only has the BBC to beat, which, according to industry estimates, has about 60m unique users a month to its journalism websites.

Trinity Mirror's regional web sites were the fastest growing in the regional sector, Press Gazette also reported, with a year-on-year increase of 46% across the network of sites.

The International Press Institute (IPI) has just launched the IPI News Innovation Contest with funds of $2.7million offered by Google. The contest aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Via these grants, IPI is supporting projects from not-for-profit and for-profit organisations that revolve around online news that advances press freedom, the development of more sustainable business models and the training of journalists.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Emad Mekay discussed the "fierce battle between Colonel Qaddafi's supporters, who were using the state-run news media, and Libyan protesters, who were turning to social media and the foreign news media, to win over hearts and minds, inside and outside Libya." He concluded that, "Whichever side wins this media battle will probably be well on the way to ruling the country."

Following its purchase of The Huffington Post, AOL is shuffling executives, reported AllThingsDigital's MediaMemo.

How can journalism call for accountability and transparency from those in power if it can't prove itself to be accountable and transparent?

The story of Buffalo Beast's editor Ian Murphy and its improper behaviour in obtaining journalistic information might remember us that A comes before B.
As the Milwaukee - Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reported, Ian Murphy, pretending to be the conservative billionaire businessman David Koch, a financial supporter of Gov. Scott Walker, had a recorded 20-minute phone call with the governor and obtained governor's reflections and strategies for dealing with protesting union workers and trying to lure Democrats boycotting the state Senate back to Wisconsin.

The article described the call as a prank.

The concept of "going it alone" and "every man for himself" may have worked for traditional news organizations that viewed each other as pure competition, back when reporters used typewriters and a scoop required days of investigation before a story was written and to press. But the Internet has required a rapid quickening to news-making, where the time given for gathering and disseminating stories feels almost instantaneous.

Technology helps reporters to keep up, but a bigger problem now exists: being everywhere, all the time, as the Internet is, and as the public expects and helps stimulate through its own citizen-driven websites, blogs, forums and comment threads. It's become a matter of re-evaluating whether the traditional structure of division between news organizations has become outmoded by the model provided by the Internet, a horizontal system of communication that is networked and duly leveraged, where news sources might be able to, at some level, break from the historically competitive model and attempt to actually work together.

Essentially, it's a kind of Foursquare++, where local meets the Internet universe of location-based services (LBS) application with digital check-ins, badges and leaderboards for loyal users via handhelds. What distinguishes The Cincinnati Enquirer's application from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, however, is the bacon, according to Poynter.

"Bacon" is a tab within The Cincinnati Enquirer's new LBS application, Porkappolis, in reference to the city's hog packing history, which provides relevant geo-targeted information to the user. The newspaper believes that this is information most effectively gathered and served by a trusted local news authority like The Enquirer.

"I can pull up 'bacon' and click a button and see where all the [closest] happy hours are," said Brian Butts of Cincinnati.com to Poynter. The tab will also include location-aware restaurant listings, news and a calendar of events from the newspaper's website. "It reeks of Cincinnati," he said, "but in a good way."

Detroit Media Partnership is offering $5,000 to an individual or group of non-employees with the winning idea for helping The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press increase their audiences or better serve the community. The contest, called IdeaQuest, also will give another $5,000 for a winning employee idea. The entries--due by March 31--will be winnowed down to five finalists through an online vote. To learn more, click here.

Gotcha! The Spanish sports newspaper, AS, has been accused of airbrushing an Athletic Bilbao defender out of a picture to make a Barcelona goal look offside. The paper was forced to make a humble apology after a before-and-after screengrab of the contentious goal appeared online, showing the extent of AS's Photoshop skills. For the story in The Guardian, click here.

It was the Merriam-Webster dictionary's word of the year in 2004 and only seven years later, some are saying that it is already dying...

Blog: what is the future of blogging?

In an interesting article on Gigaom, Mathew Ingram commented on a story appeared that on the New York Times and claimed that "Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like Twitter".

The NYT article was based on a Pew Research Center study which argued that blogging is on the decline, particularly among young people, as the usage of blogs among those aged 12 to 17 it fell by half between 2006 and 2009 and among 18-to-33-year-olds it dropped two percentage points in 2010 compared to two years earlier.

The theory put forward in the study is that blogging is being replaced by sites like Facebook or Twitter, where people could post their photos, links and share ideas more easily and more quickly.

Against a backdrop of historic political change for the region that has brought the country to the brink of its own revolution, The International Partnership for Yemen today releases findings from its joint mission that expose the critical situation facing the media.

The Partnership, a coalition of press freedom and human rights organisations including ARTICLE 19: Global Campaign for Free Expression, The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), International Media Support (IMS), and The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), visited Yemen in a week-long advocacy mission in November 2010.