"The public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers. The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won't be able to inform clients when their company is mentioned in the Times."

"There's a heated turf war going on inside the New York Times over the iPad, pitting print die-hards against people focused on the Times' digital future. The outcome will determine pricing for some marquee content on Apple's tablet."

"The bad news for Murdoch is that it truly confounds him — keeps him up at night. It’s a nuisance he can’t shake. It confounded him when he bought it (the original plan was to buy a gaming company, but then he got talked into MySpace), telling people (anyway, he told me) he was in the “stalking business.” Then, his wife Wendi’s interest in the company meant he had to hear about it all the time, which bored him, and, worse, she was constantly traveling in her various positions with MySpace (Murdoch himself was never sure what she did), leaving him at home with the children (quite a reversal in his historical marital role). Perhaps most unnerving were the constant rumors — which he had to embarrassingly discuss with his PR people — that Wendi was having an affair with DeWolfe.

"This new generation of digital magazines, if and when they happen, should regard themselves as home-pages, or bases from which their readers can make excursions into the web. They are somewhere to focus a particular interest, to provide relevant material, and signposts to exploration. They’re also a place to return to later on."

"Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%."

"We will end up with one and a half cities in America — Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not a really good piece of fiction" — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry."

"The Chicago Tribune and other Tribune Co. newspapers plan to utilize as little content from the Associated Press as practical during the week of Nov. 8. The goal, as the papers review costs and needs, is to see whether severing ties with the news cooperative next fall is a viable option, the Chicago-based media company confirmed Monday. The trial is scheduled to be conducted almost 13 months after Tribune Co. gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010."

"Bloomberg LP, the global financial data and news empire created by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is the winning bidder for BusinessWeek. Terms of the offer will not be disclosed by Bloomberg and BusinessWeek parent McGraw-Hill Cos. But knowledgeable sources say that Bloomberg’s cash offer is in the $2 million to $5 million range and that it has agreed to assume liabilities, including potential severance payments."

"Here's why: go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like "Obama wins Nobel" into Google's search box. What do you get? Headlines and very brief teasers linking to news stories from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that news site, where you can read the story, which is surrounded by that site's ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this scenario? If you don't click on the link, you don't see the story. If you do click on the link, you see the story on the originator's Web site."

"Sir Harold Evans has been voted by his colleagues as the all-time greatest British newspaper editor and has enjoyed a flourishing high-profile career in publishing in the United States. His new memoir, "My Paper Chase", looks at his early days as a reporter, his award-winning journalism at the Sunday Times through the 70s, and his new found life in America."

"To be a journalist in the UK right now is a scary vocation. Cost-cutting, down-sizing and job losses are happening to many news corporations across this fair isle, so to even have a hallowed position within the industry is seen as a blessing, not a right. But as the resources dwindle, the expectations on reporters is certainly increasing."

"In America, serious newspapers are held up to be public paragons of objectivity existing above the fray of human affairs, unbiasedly funneling paragraphs of absolute truth to their readers. This accounts, of course, for the pinching seriousness of papers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. And it also explains why these newspapers are constantly targeted by the braying mob for their supposed liberal and conservative bias."

"A week ago Friday, lawyers for the company, which publishes The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and owns other newspapers and television stations, were in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Delaware suggesting that the proposed 2009 bonuses were critical for the health and survival of the company."

"The most important subset of numbers are 155 and 5. They refer to £155, the worth of an average reader to a paid-for newspaper a year in 2008. It breaks down to £90 a year from purchase price and £65 from advertising. Annual revenue from newspaper online totals just £5."

Speaking today in Athens at Stream 2009, the annual invitation-only technology and media conference organised by WPP Digital, Sir Martin said: “[Rupert] Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people paying for content – it is critical for traditional media businesses as there is not enough advertising to support these models anymore. Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find those areas.”

"The poll, conducted by Wired, the influential technology magazine, found that 84 per cent of respondents said they would be willing to pay for online content and 61 per cent said we are living in a golden age of media. The survey of over 500 respondents said newspaper (65 per cent) and magazines (60 per cent) are still important sources for new content, ahead of blogs at 55 per cent."

"But most importantly: people on Twitter don’t actually seem to care about the story (or the Sun has very few readers on Twitter) – this is evident in the only 60 odd tweets (equally split between pro- and anti-Sun) in the 24 hours since the Sun’s I’m Feeling Blue Campaign was launched – the campaign invited people to tweet in support of their endorsement using a #feelingblue hashtag."

"We're not going to e-mail our co-writers with every new lead and minute detail we dig up. But if we're sharing a virtual notebook, we can scan through … or search the newest findings as they're logged, make comments and highlight our favorite bits. Then, when it comes time to write, we can rearrange and discuss the story's flow in the same software. Thanks to the openness of Wave, collaborative pieces between bloggers could become more common."

"There are lots of good headline writers these days, but there's more to the story — "consider the war on editing from the bosses. Or time-pressed, short-staffed. Or, my best bet: The rise of search engine optimization for online headlines, where the drill is to be specific as possible."

"The WSJ doesn’t need to do this, but Murdoch does: it’s in his blood. A Murdoch paper without punchy headlines which grab you by the throat is pretty much a contradiction in terms. Readers of the WSJ will have to get used to trusting the stories more than the headlines, or the implicit news judgment which governs where they’re placed. The WSJ’s journalism seems to be much less scathed than the headlines have been."

"Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., said third-quarter earnings should far outpace expectations despite a narrow shortfall in revenue, as layoffs and falling newsprint costs help offset weak advertising sales. Tuesday's announcement gave a sharp boost to Gannett's and other newspaper stocks."

"Nobody in their right mind believes the future of the news business involves paper and ink rather than pixels on a screen. We all know where the news business is headed, and what's more, we've known it for at least a decade. So why on earth are people talking about a bailout for newspapers?"

"The National Union of Journalists is claiming a small victory in its dispute with The Guardian over the payment of re-use fees. It says it has agreed a licence deal for contract photographers contributing to the newspaper, which pays re-use fees ‘on a sliding scale for a five-year period after the end of the contract’."

"At Condé Nast, it is consultants versus car service. A three-month McKinsey & Company project advising the publisher how to reduce costs is drawing to a close, and several magazines have been told to cut about 25 percent from their budgets. The company’s editors and publishers have already been under pressure to reduce costs this year, as advertising has plunged, and Condé Nast has closed two magazines in 2009, Domino and Condé Nast Portfolio."

"If you would like to spare yourself a bunch of hazy, crazy soliloquizing by me, you can skip everything below and just follow this link. It goes to “Take a Stand,” a smart, brave piece by Brent Cunningham, managing editor of the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review. Cunningham posits what he calls a new “way forward,” basically a new mission and a new attitude, for mainstream journalism."

"With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age."

"When paper journalism was king. The headlines and the people behind them."