Bloggasm

“Yes, we will need to lose some people and will try to do it in a voluntary way,” [Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger] told BBC Radio. “We will need to lose significant numbers but we don’t need to do it tomorrow. We can do it over the next couple of years and have a civilized conversation about that.”

He said the company needs “to reduce the cost base” in order to hire more digital developers, as it has watched its print advertising revenue recede.

The Guardian’s ‘digital-first’ push means ‘significant’ layoffs, editor-in-chief says

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Google has been ordered [by a Belgian appeals court] to remove any and all links to articles and photos from all Belgian newspapers (in German or French — as the article notes, the Flemish papers have no apparent problem with Google News). Google execs seem understandably bewildered by the decision.

Belgian Appeals Court Says Google Must Pay Up For Linking To Newspaper Websites

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[The print circulation number] is gone — optics do count — but more importantly the nature of ad buying has changed dramatically in that same period. Newspaper ad revenues have been halved while online ad revenues will approximate newspaper ad revenues this year or next. While halved to $25 billion annually or so, newspapers, with the new ABCs, have made a directional shift to satisfying those advertisers; recall that even the New York Times, the digital leader with 25 percent of its ad revenues being digital, still depends on the print for three-quarters of its dollars.

So The Number is all but gone. Sure, there’s still “Total Circulation,” and that’s led some to do apples-to-apples comparison to the last set of numbers from last fall. It’s not a fruitful exercise, given the magnitude of the changes.

The newsonomics of the new ABCs of journalism

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The Wall Street Journal is facing a backlash from web security and privacy experts over its WikiLeaks-inspired whistleblowers’ site, SafeHouse.

SafeHouse, which launched on Thursday to allow anyone to upload documents to the Journal, has been described by one encryption analyst as a “total anonymity failure” that could compromise the security of whistleblowers.

Wall Street Journal faces backlash over WikiLeaks rival

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“SafeHouse will enable the collection of information and documents that could be used in the generation of trustworthy news stories,” Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, said in a statement.

While news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian have worked with WikiLeaks to obtain such information in the past, they learned that it was no picnic in the process. If the WSJ site and several others like it prove effective, its likely that more of them will appear.

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In their ongoing struggle to get readers to pay for content, some media companies have implemented paywalls, while others have hitched their wagon to Apple’s app store and are trying a subscription model. But what if, instead of trying to charge everyone for the same content, publishers could come up with something similar to what business class achieves for airline passengers: a premium experience. Would people pay for that?

Can Publishers Create a Business Class For News?

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Asked to comment on The Daily’s performance, Carey says it’s a work in progress, which lost $10 million last quarter. Then, in the background, someone — most likely CFO Dave DeVoe, mentions “800,000 downloads”.

News Corp. Revenue, Earnings Miss; MySpace Still Burning Money

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