Newspapers are regaining strength in recruitment and property classified advertising both in print and online, but are weakening in their share of automotive classifieds, according to the World Association of Newspaper’s third annual Digital Classified Survey.
The survey, contained in a new Strategy Report from WAN’s Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, showed that newspapers in developed countries increased overall revenues by 4.2 percent in 2005 from a year earlier.
Revenues from print classified advertising increased by more than 5 percent during the period, a major improvement compared to the decline of 12 percent reported last year, when overall revenues grew by more than 4 percent.
“The overall figures mask a major contrast between the growth in recruitment and property advertising on the one hand, and the collapsing categories of automotive, travel and private party advertising on the other,” the report said. “The data suggests that the growth in recruitment advertising was not only cyclical, but for the first time newspapers have increased their overall market share in this category. This reversal underscores a promising change for the long-term health of the industry.”
The survey found that 6.8 percent of all classified advertising revenue came from online activities and that two out of three dollars earned by newspapers online are revenues from classified advertising. But, in terms of revenue, the migration appears slower than expected.
A new study shows that teenagers who read the newspaper continue the habit as they get older — sort of. According to the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 75% of those surveyed between the ages of 18 and 24 who said they read the a newspaper when they were younger (13-to-17) now read their local paper at least once a week. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said they read the local Sunday paper in the past four weeks and 66% said they read it last Sunday. MORI Research conducted the study on behalf of the NAA Foundation. More than 1,600 18-to-24-year-olds were surveyed. The research was released today during the NAA Foundation’s 2006 Young Reader Conference and is a follow-up to a 2004 study that involved newspapers in the classroom.Taking the studies together, the idea is that newspapers should have content aimed at teenagers. The foundation estimates that only 220 newspapers across the country have special teen sections, many written by teenagers. The study also noted that roughly 800 papers carry some sort of syndicated youth content for all ages.
Source: Jennifer Saba, Editor & Publisher
Over at Mediawatchwatch the write: Just when you thought it had all quieted down - AP reports that the Mosque of Paris has filed a suit against the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.The newspaper published all 12 of the original Jyllands-Posten Mo-toons on February 8, in an issue devoted to Islam. Its front page boasted a huge image of a weeping Mohammed, titled “Mahomet débordé par les intégristes” (Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists). He is saying “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons” (It’s hard to be loved by morons).
More: Link
A Romanian foreign ministry spoof website launched by two journalists of the daily newspaper “Ziua” (”The Day”) was closed down at the government’s request on 15 June 2006 by the privately-owned host company CHML, which also gave the authorities information about the journalists, in violation of personal confidentiality laws.
“It is astonishing that Romania, a future European Union member, has not respected free expression and the confidentiality of personal information in this case, although these rights are guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights and Romania’s own Law 677-2001,” the press freedom organisation said.
“We appeal to the Romanian government to reconsider this decision and to ask CHML, the host company, to immediately reinstate this website, which contained no illegal information,” Reporters Without Borders added.
“Ziua” foreign affairs specialists George Damian and Victor Roncea created their spoof site after writing a series of articles about the dismissal of a senior official at the foreign ministry, known by the acronym MAE in Romania.
The ministry’s web address is http://www.mae.ro/. The address used by the journalists for their site was http://www.mae.haos.ro/, because their aim was to highlight the “chaos” and instability within the ministry. They copied the ministry site’s layout closely but clearly indicated in the heading at the top of the page that it was a spoof intended to make fun of the ministry.
Claiming that the spoof site’s content was designed to destabilise the government and damage its reputation, the foreign ministry asked CHML to close it down although it has no power to do this. CHML also complied with the ministry’s request for personal information about the two journalists although this is banned under Romanian law.
The Israel Association of Journalists decided on Thursday to suspend its membership in the International Federation of Journalists to protest the association’s condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television network. (Website down)
In a strongly worded letter, the Israeli journalists accused IFJ general secretary Aidan White of “cowardice” for not retracting the organization’s condemnation of Israel and said White deserved a “badge of shame” for calling the Hizbullah propaganda tool “free press.”
“Al Manar gets its budget from the same people firing upon us,” said the Israeli representative on the IFJ executive, Israel Radio broadcaster Yaron Enosh.
“They are not journalists, they are terrorists and I won’t be a member of the same organization as terrorists.”
Enosh told The Jerusalem Post that the IFJ’s defense of Al-Manar was the straw that broke the camel’s back after three years of repeated IFJ condemnations of Israel. He said the organization made no comment when five Israeli and foreign journalists were harmed by Hizbullah fire.
Source: Gil Hoffman, The Jerusalem Post
Amnesty International has accused three of the net’s largest players, among others, of violating the Universal Declaration on Human Rights by cooperating with China’s censors.
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, and others, are colluding with China’s efforts to censor the internet and are in denial over the human rights implications of their actions - and ignore their own stated commitments - Amnesty said, according to a Reuters report. The rights group said the three companies are in violation of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says everyone should be guaranteed freedom of expression.
From Marketingvox.com
Despite a pledge to the contrary made 16 months ago, Google is still returning links to Agence France Presse (AFP) articles in its Google News Web site.
The French news agency sued Google in March 2005, alleging copyright infringement over the inclusion of AFP content in Google News, a news search service that aggregates links to online articles and accompanying photos from about 4,500 news outlets.
Days later, Google announced it would scrub Google News clean of AFP content, including text, thumbnails of photos, and headlines linked to articles in external Web sites. However, a Google News search for “Agence France Presse” done mid-afternoon (U.S. Eastern Time) Monday shows that AFP articles are still being indexed by Google News.
In the first two pages of results, the English-language version of Google News returned links to several recent AFP-bylined articles, including one that appeared this weekend on The New York Times’ online edition headlined “Uganda Says Rebels’ Words Threaten Talks.” Meanwhile, AFP-bylined stories also came up after doing the same search in Google News’ French-language version.
Source: Juan Carlos Perez, IDZ News Service via MacWorld
Police detained Al Jazeera crew members three times in 24 hours, the last time being on Monday. The official cause for their brief arrests was suspicions that the crew reported the location of rocket strikes in order to assist Hezbollah. Other TV networks, including Israeli news services, filed similar reports without suffering from police intervention.
On Monday police detained Al Jazeera manager Walid al-Omri for reporting rocket hits in the Upper Galilee village of Kfar Yasif. Al-Omri had also been detained late on Sunday.
Also on Sunday police detained for questioning Al Jazeera correspondent Elias Karam and the team working with him in Acre. The team was released after an hour of questioning.
Al Jazeera said, after the arrest of Karam’s team, that Israel Radio’s Reshet Bet is inciting against the Qatar-based TV network.
Reshet Bet reported Sunday morning that Al Jazeera aired live footage of the scene of Hezbollah strikes on Haifa, and that it had positioned its cameras to overlook the refineries in the city’s industrial zone, explaining that “with such broadcasts Hezbollah has no need for spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Source: Yoav Stern, Haaretz
The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.
The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs.
Several other American broadsheets reduced their size a few years ago, and many are planning further shrinkage to cut costs as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.
The Times, which made the announcement last night on the eve of its quarterly earnings report, said it would sublet its plant in Edison and consolidate its regional printing facilities at its newer plant in College Point, in Queens.
That consolidation will mean the loss of about a third of the total production work force of 800.
Source: Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times
Yahoo and a consortium of newspaper publishers are considering a partnership that will include Web classifieds, local news, and content packages based on general themes like travel, a Reuters report said.
The Reuters report, quoting BusinessWeek, said the move could drive more traffic to Yahoo’s help-wanted HotJobs site.
Executives from Hearst Newspapers and MediaNews, which run daily papers near Yahoo’s headquarters, are spearheading the discussions along with other participants, the magazine reported.
The Financial Times will make 51 people redundant in its newsroom, it announced Tuesday, drawing strong condemnation from the National Union of Journalists, which insisted it would oppose any compulsory job losses. The move comes as the FT merges its online and print operations to create what it called ‘one of the most integrated multi-media newsrooms in the world’. The newspaper, owned by international publisher Pearson, said redundancies would be across the newsroom, including reporters and subeditors. It said it had launched a 30-day consultation with the NUJ and would look for voluntary redundancies. But in an email sent to his 500 editorial staff, FT editor Lionel Barber said there could be compulsory job cuts if the voluntary programme was unsuccessful. Barber’s announcement was said to have been very badly received by FT staff, although a spokeswoman for the paper said people had known for some time it was coming. Some 46 out of the 51 cuts will be in London. Analysts estimated the cuts could cost the FT about GBP 2m (EUR 2.9m), but said they would increase operating margins at the paper, which have fallen from a high of about 27 per cent in 2000 to just 1 per cent last year. (Media Guardian,July 12, 2006)
Endless jargon translated by monotonous interpreters characterised most of Tuesday’s first ever web-streamed EU ministers’ meetings. The meeting on Tuesday was the the first to be broadcast live on the internet, after EU leaders last month decided to inject more transparency in the meetings of the EU council - the member states’ decision-making body. But few of those citizens taking a peek into minister’s discussions probably sat out the full length of the one and a half hour finance ministers’ gathering. They are likely to have been made dizzy by the swirl of EU jargon dominating the meeting like ‘multilateral surveillance’ or ’second assessment reports’ and ‘horizontal items.’ Cameras were switched on only for the two least sensitive items on the ministers’ agenda. But just before ministers were to tackle the much more thorny topic of the EU’s stability and growth pact - the rules underpinning the euro - Finnish finance minister Eero Heinaluoma announced ‘I now end the public session of this council.’ Dutch finance minister Gerrit Zalm told reporters after the meeting that the webcast topics were ‘not attractive enough’ to get people interested. (EU Observer,July 12, 2006)
This just caught my attention. EthicNet is a Databank for European Codes of Journalism Ethics maintained by the Journalism Research and Development Centre at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, Finland.
The codes differs a lot from country to country. Russia has 10 rules, Moldova 22 and Austria only 5. The Italian charter is many pages long and includes chapters about children and weak people and advertising while the french is just a simple bullet list adopted and nearly unchanged since 1918.
Take a look at the EthicNet here. All codes have been translated to english.
Online auction site eBay has banned its buyers and sellers from using Google’s recently launched online payments service, Google Checkout, in a move that seems designed to protect its own PayPal operation. Any seller caught offering Google Checkout to prospective buyers faces having their listings cancelled, forfeiting their fees or even having their entire account suspended. The decision to exclude Google’s newest venture is yet another indication that Google is encroaching on areas that other companies consider to be their turf. Having created the web’s most widely used search engine, Google has moved into email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, price comparison and now payments. Companies from AOL and Amazon to Microsoft and now eBay are finding Google on their patch. Google started marketing its payment service to online retailers last month, having previously made it available to buy adverts from the search engine or videos from Google Video. But eBay has updated its accepted payments policy to specifically exclude Google Checkout. It joins a host of other online payment services that eBay does not allow including AlertPay.com, AuctionChex.com, eHotPay.com, Moneygram.com, neteller.com, ecount.com, and xcoin.com. (Media Guardian,July 10, 2006)
Egypt’s independent and opposition newspapers were not published on Sunday to protest against a draft press law which the government bills as a reform but journalists say puts new limits on press freedom. The government-drafted bill, which won preliminary approval in parliament on Saturday, eliminates imprisonment as a penalty for some media offences, but continues to allow judges to impose jail terms for journalists in many others. Chief among the objections of opponents of the law is a provision allowing the jailing of journalists who allege financial corruption by officials or state employees. Several hundred journalists and activists, surrounded by riot police, protested against the law outside parliament before marching to the Journalists Syndicate, blocking traffic in central Cairo. A total of 25 daily and weekly papers observed the boycott. State-owned papers went to print as normal. The government says the law is a step forward for democratic reforms. (Reuters,July 10, 2006)
