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

In a letter addressed to Rosie Winterton, the Minister of State at Communities and Local Government, the Newspaper Society has laid out its concerns about the competition that free newspapers create for local paid newspapers. With council newspapers often covering many of the major events that local newspapers would normally report on, many commuters might be skipping the paid local papers due to feeling that the free ones are informative enough.

“Unfortunately, an increasing number of local councils across the UK are actively competing with local newspapers for readers and advertising revenues,” wrote Lynne Anderson, the Newspaper Society’s communications director.

Anderson also went on to point out that local newspapers are “vital to the functioning of any healthy local democracy, scrutinising the effective operation of local authorities, examining how council taxpayers’ money is spent, and holding elected representatives to account.”

While arguments about the government not providing competition are unlikely to hold much water with anyone outside of the Newspaper Society, the role of local newspapers in keeping local governments in check is an important one. Larger regional or national newspapers are unlikely to investigate the abuses of local governments, but local newspapers will often make this their bread and butter.

Free council newspapers certainly have their benefits, such as keeping the local population aware of special events and government projects, but they are unlikely to be critical of the local administration. It is unlikely that councils will stop publishing free newspapers if they are an effective way of getting out a message, but the role of council newspapers could certainly be better defined in order to avoid direct competition with local for-profit publications.

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.

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.

With newspaper revenues having taken a massive hit in recent times, the GMG may convert The Observer to a news magazine format in order to cut costs, with the new publication being published Thursdays rather than Sundays. This plan is reportedly being challenged by members of the Scott Trust, however, which is a charity that owns the GMG. With a history dating back to 1791, some of the trust’s members may be thinking that it would be regretful to throw that away when other cost cutting measures may be all that are necessary.

The GMG is in a dire position, though. It has been estimated that The Observer has not turned a profit since its sale to The Guardian in 1993, and that it has been costing more than 10 million pounds per year recently in order to continue operations. Additionally, the GMG has reported a pre-tax loss of 89.8 million pounds in the last year, down from a 306.4 million pound profit for the year before. In such circumstances, The Observer is an expensive luxury indeed.

If The Observer is not changed to a magazine format, then it is likely that it will suffer many layoffs and other cost cutting measures. It would seem that regardless of what the Scott Trust and the GMG decide, The Observer is almost certain to be published in a reduced form in the years to come.

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.

L’Espresso and La Repubblica both released tapes on their websites that purportedly feature the Italian Prime Minister in conversations with call girls. These tapes include phone calls as well as an exchange between call girl Patrizia D’Addario and the alleged voice of Berlusconi where he asks her to wait for him on the bed a he takes a shower.

Berlusconi has denied these tapes as having any authenticity. The call girl that is meant to feature in these tapes, D’Addario, is being investigated as part of a case involving a businessman who allegedly paid young women to attend Berlusconi’s parties.

Berlusconi has been under consistent attacks regarding his fidelity and use of call girls this year, defending himself against claims he had an affair with a teenage model and having to explain the group of girls in bathing suits that attended his New Year’s party.

Owning many of Italy’s major newspapers and television channels, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has a firm grip on much of the country’s media. This makes it quite surprising that any newspaper would release tapes to discredit him. His political and media power combined make him a dangerous person to get offside, so either this scandal forces him out of office, or else L’Espresso and La Repubblica may find themselves in deep water.

Late in June, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed what has been called the Hamburg Declaration stating, essentially, that universal access to their content should not necessarily be free access. The declaration focuses mainly on control of the intellectual property rights of the signatories through changes in intellectual property laws. Google has responded to this by informing the aggrieved newspapers that they can easily prevent indexation of their content, and that changes to copyright law are unnecessary to protect their content in this way.

This may be a practical way to block indexation, but it seems far more likely that the publishers are just fine with Google indexing their news. What they really want is money for it, due to a belief that Google is making money from their content. Most would suggest that the relationship is actually two-way: Google needs content to be searched, the content providers need a centralised and effective search tool. While many online newspaper groups would suggest they already have their own search functions, this is disingenuous, as people are interested in a search of as many publications as possible in as short a time as possible. Perhaps some of the publishers will take Google’s advice and either block Google’s index spiders or else learn to adapt their business to the realities of the modern Web.

The NLA charges news monitoring and PR companies to reproduce print articles originally published by its member newspapers. With the growth of news aggregator sites online, which scrape news sites for stories, the NLA believes that some news aggregators should be paying royalties for the use of its clients’ content.

Initial concerns from blogging groups about the agency trying to charge people for linking to articles of its members have been assuaged, as the NLA apparently only looks to target commercial use of articles from member news sites and links to them, for private commercial purposes. This means they are not looking to take on bloggers or search engines, but rather PR sites that generate traffic and revenue from the content of NLA members.

The NLA apparently wishes to target sites such as Meltwater and Moreover, which both offer massive amounts of scraped content from online news sources. Moreover has responded to this by threatening to sue the NLA. Meltwater is a service that lets users search over 90,000 news sources from 110 countries in more than 50 languages. Moreover offers a similar services and believes the NLA changes are a direct attack on Moreover’s business model.

Monetisation of online content has remained a difficult issue, with many news sources frustrated by how easily others can benefit from their content without paying for it, and while avoiding their advertising revenue streams. UK newspapers in particular have to consistently look for ways to monetise their news sites as the number of people buying newspapers decreases by the year as readers turn to online news sites and news aggregators to find the news stories they are interested in.