The Newspaper Society is concerned that councils are damaging their local newspaper industries with freely available council newspapers.

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In a somewhat shocking turn of events, Condé Nast, the publisher of magazines such as Vogue and GQ, has to find ways to cut back on expenses due to falling advertising revenues.

Management consultants McKinsey & Co have been retained to provide guidance for cost-cutting measures that can keep Condé Nast profitable in the recession. As its magazines are known as the high-end publications of their respective markets, it is somewhat surreal to think of publications like Vanity Fair having to tone down their expenses. Much of the success of these businesses has been based on living and reporting on the high life, so it will certainly be a challenge for McKinsey & Co to define what constitutes unnecessary expenditure.

This news is particularly interesting when compared to the falling advertising revenue coming in to newspapers. Many have speculated that it’s the news element of print newspapers that has caused it to suffer with the rise of Internet news sources, so papers are devoting more of their pages to lifestyle sections and the like, in order to appeal to those after more timeless content. This strategy may be ill-advised, however, if magazines are set to fare just as badly in the future as newspapers feel they are faring now.

People may not yet be entirely used to the idea of blogs acting like columns, but they are becoming more comfortable with reading opinion pieces online. Online magazines have often been failures in the past, with people somewhat unwilling to pay for online content, but there are some examples of successful online magazines. Newspapers may need to focus more on building better business models for the online realm rather than trying to simply retool their dying print editions.

The Advertising Standards Authority has expressed extreme concern with advertising tactics of Express Newspapers. Apparently some advertorials have been disguised as features, which the ASA believes is an attempt to circumvent advertising code practices.

In its findings, the ASA noticed that some articles about products were featured on the same page as advertisements for the products, while being unusually favourable. They found that the articles read as “always and uniquely favourable to the product featured in the accompanying ads and contained claims that have been or would be likely to be prohibited in advertisements.”

Additionally, the ASA found that the Daily Express has run almost identical articles on a select group of products on multiple occasions. The Daily Express has been instructed to clearly label advertorials and to refrain from ever again making the claims made in those allegedly suspect articles already published.

Google announced last year its project to digitise old newspapers and make them searchable, with reportedly millions of articles available when it launched. It has now apparently quadrupled the number of newspapers in that archive, adding articles from the Halifax Gazette, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Village Voice, the Manila Standard and The Nation.

Included in this new swathe of digitized newspapers is the 2 June, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette. News reported in that edition includes an earthquake in Antigua, the loss of a French Sloop, counterfeit coinage in Boston, and a calling to muster of a local militia in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It really is remarkable to read these older newspapers, though some knowledge of older forms of English is necessary.

This expansion of the archives could see newspapers complaining more about Google profiting off of their content. They may be providing a public service by archiving the newspapers, but Google still makes money from AdSense clicks, with contextual advertisements served to readers as they browse the archived newspapers. As much of the content is quite old, however, newspapers may simply view the archive as a helpful research tool for historians as well as journalists.

The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper and the sister publication of The Guardian, may be in trouble with the Guardian Media Group (GMG) considering closing it down.

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In a move that could be a sign of Zimbabwe opening up to more media freedom, the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe has been given leave by the government to resume its operations.

After a five year ban, the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe has had its operating license reinstated by the Information Ministry. The government has also eased some of its restrictions on the BBC, which is definitely a step toward more transparency in the Zimbabwean government.

This easing of restrictions is likely the result of pressures on the unity government formed by Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai earlier in the year. Due to economic and humanitarian pressures, the Zimbabwean government has had to demonstrate commitment to political reforms in order to receive foreign aid. Part of these reforms has been the establishment of the Zimbabwe Media Commission, which will oversee the implementation of new policies concerning media accreditation in Zimbabwe.

This is the best news for newspapers in Zimbabwe for a long time, with strict licensing laws having been enacted in 2002 by Mugabe’s government. The exact situation in Zimbabwe has been difficult to report on for many years now, so it will be intriguing to see what the newspapers will report on, as they may be concerned about the possibility of getting shut down once more.

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Readers of The New York Post are set to become little Shakespeares, with a new online service encouraging them to create new words. Whether this will be a case of a million monkeys at a million typewriters creating Hamlet is yet to be seen.

The New York Post is introducing the Addictionary service, which asks users to create words and then define them. Other users may then rate and comment on those words. More popular words could potentially end up in common usage, especially if large swathes of New York Post readers become exposed to them.

Addictionary has been used successfully on some other websites, such as the Comedy Central site and at Dictionary.com. What The New York Post and SpectrumDNA, creators of the Addictionary platform, hope the service will do is increase the word-of-mouth knowledge of the newspaper. With many newspapers struggling in the current economy, finding ways to get people talking about your newspaper has become a focus of many of the bigger newspaper companies.

The hope is that greater awareness of The New York Post and its website will lead to more traffic and thus more temptation for advertisers. Newspapers rely on advertiser revenues, which have gone down tremendously in the current economy. Finding ways to increase circulation can allow newspapers to charge more for their advertising space.

This tactic of getting users to make up new words seems a bit too gimmicky to be helpful in raising advertising revenue, but as The New York Post intends to release various merchandise based on Addictionary in the future, it may also be looking to expand into new revenue streams.

With rumours abounding about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi having parties with call girls, two Italian newspapers have released tapes that allegedly contain audio of Berlusconi talking to call girls.

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As Google is possibly the largest and most widely used news aggregator on the planet, newspapers have been trying to put pressure on it to pay aggregation payments for some time. Publisher overtures to lawmakers recently have Google slightly puzzled, as the Google News manager Josh Cohen has suggested that news sites who do not want Google to index them should simply block the Google spiders with two simple lines of code.

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The Newspaper Licensing Agency apparently has plans to expand its mandate to cover online use of news articles, angering the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

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