North Europeans prefer newsprint to web versions

Europeans are less loyal to particular newspapers online compared to the print market, according to Forrester Research. "Some 66 per cent of online Guardian readers visit its online site, but 19 per cent also visit The Sun's site -- a newspaper that only seven per cent of them read offline."
(From Europemedia )

ABC considers change to circulation reporting

The United States version of the Audit Bureau of Circulation is considering requireing daily newspapers to report their average circulation for each separate day of the week, rather than the curent method, which provides averages for weekdays and for weekend days. The move could be harmful for papers that are strong on particular days of the week, bring up their overall average.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Al Gore appointed to Apple board

Apple has appointed former US vice president Al Gore to the company's board of directors. "I have been particularly impressed with the new Mac OS X operating system" says Al, who is also a "senior advisor" for Google. Apparently he's a big time Final Cut Pro dude. Gore is infamous in the net community after telling CNN "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet". This was widely reported as "Gore claims he invented internet".
(From Apple)

Guardian joins IAB council

The Guardian has joined the Interactive Advertising Bureau's leadership council. It is expected to develop best practices for integrating markeing campaigns across multiple media.
(From Brand Republic)

Internet Censorship Explorer

The University of Toronto's Internet Censorship Explorer looks at the world from behind national or organisational firewalls and shows what you get if you type in a given URL from inside. For example, you won't get through to www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/ if you're in Saudi Arabia. The project includes a summary of the kind of censorship being exercised by each country (e.g. Myanmar: Opposition Websites; Pornography; Jordan: News) and what technologies are being used to achieve it.
(From Wired)

US news customers turn to foreign news organisations

Wired reports how non-American news websites are seeing vast increases in traffic from readers in the US. Guardian Unlimited is given as a prime example: in January 49 per cent of GU's 1.3 million unique visitors came from the Americas. "While news websites in general saw a 3 percent increase in traffic between December 2002 and January 2003, the Guardian saw a 10 percent increase in visitors," says Nielsen/NetRatings's Richard Goosey. At the same time CNN saw a slight decrease in traffic.
(From Wired)

Everyone's a photojournalist

Steve Outing's latest Stop the Presses is on digital cameras and "photophones" and recent moves by news sites such as the BBC, Dallas Morning News, and the Providence Journal to invite readers to submit photographs for publication online. What does it mean for picture editing? A point to bear in mind: the lunatics didn't take over the asylum when textual communication went digital.
(From Editor & Publisher)

That Memo: did GNL's publishing system provoke an international crisis?

The Register's take on the furore following the Observer's publication of the "dirty tricks" email last week. The Register wants to know why we would retype an email. They provide various possible explanations. One of them: "We're not sure what kind of computer system the Observer uses, but we know that its sister paper, the Guardian, at least used to run on an electronic publishing system from hell where sometimes retyping really was the quickest way to get something into the system. ('You've got it on a Mac disk? A what disk?')".
Here's Stephen Pritchard's Reader's Editor piece.
(From The Register)

BBC ramps up mobile content

The BBC is about to relaunch its WAP site and is drawing up guidelines for how it will work with third party SMS providers to deliver SMS content, according to New Media Age. The moves come part of a big review of the Beeb's mobile strategy.
(From New Media Age)

Sansui installs big InDesign site in Kerala (reg required)

The Malaya Manorama is installing a 300-seat InDesign production system made by Sansui. The publisher produces magazines and books in addition to a 50(!)-edition newspaper. The system is heavily integrated with Lotus Notes. Versioning and archiving is managed by and SQL database. All stories are tagged with NewsML, which is routed to the website's Vignette content management system. The output system is PDF based. (This story is printed in the current Seybold Report.)
(From Seybold Report)

The Economist's gloomy survey of newspaper business

The Economist's analysis of the British newspaper industry makes miserable reading. It notes that overall newspaper readership has dropped by a fifth since 1990, and that newspapers' share of advertising spend across media has dropped from 21 per cent in 1985 to 19 per cent in 2001. It observes, "most troubling of all", that young people don't buy newspapers: the number of readers under 24 has shrunk by a third since 1990 -- a significantly higher drop than in older readers. It cites that news consumption habits have changed (as, by the way, has our ability to concentrate) from "sitting down to a good read" to "news-grazing". The only papers retaining a youthful readership don't carry news: the Desmond bracket.
(From The Economist)

CV thievery

Recruitment sites such as Monster make significant revenue out of their CV databases. However, posting your details online can leave you open to ID thieves who can get hold of your email addresses etc. They've even been known to post fake jobs and tell applicants to submit credit card details, social security numbers etc.
(From Wired)

Internet traffic will continue to double yearly

The amount of data transmitted over the internet will continue to double annually for at least the next five years, according to research by IDC. Traffic will increase from 180 petabits (that's 180,000,000,000,000,000 bits) per year in 2002 to 5,175 petabits in 2007.
(From Macworld)

$1.3 billion spent on online content in US in 2002

US consumers spent $1.3 billion for subscription services online in 2002, a 49 per cent rise in the market, according to a study commissioned by the Online Publishers Association. Most of it wasn't on news, of course. Online dating sites were the big winners, accounting for $302 million. Micropayment grew by 707 per cent, but still only accounted for less than 1 per cent of the total revenue.
(From CNet News.com)

Pearson "won't sell FT"

Dame Marjorie Scardino has vowed not to sell the loss-making Financial Times. "It is one of [Pearson's] greatest brands," she said. "We want to invest in the FT."
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

76 XPress 6 screengrabs

ThinkSecret have compiled 76 screen shots of the OS X-friendly QuarkXPress 6.0 beta. Not much to report: looks like a Carbonised version of 4.1 plus the various HTML/XML tools introduced with avenue.quark and 5.0. There are one or two additions (such as "New Project", layer locking, bleed settings) that have been widely discussed elsewhere.
(From ThinkSecret)