Agence France Presse Settles with Google; Zell Riles Things Up

Important Details: Agence France Presse (AFP) and Google have settled a two-year-old lawsuit over the leading search site’s use of AFP headlines, story summaries, and photos. The suit had been contentious, and a focal point in the ongoing question of whether search aggregator sites have a ...

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Topix Gives Up News Aggregation to Focus on Local Community

Important Details:   Building on its experience with user forums, news aggregator Topix gave itself a near-complete makeover this week. Out: the busy, headline-packed, “all-kinds-of-news” news aggregator site that allowed readers to localize by zip code or topicalize by vertical ...

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Tribune Sale Concludes in $8 Billion Deal

Important Details: Another outsider has bought into the US newspaper industry. In this case, investor Sam Zell becomes both the newest and most significant new face in an industry undergoing rapid ownership change. Zell and The Tribune Company agreed to his purchase of the company in the wee ...

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Free French Daily Provokes Debate

Important Details: It’s a simple idea, with a twist. Publish a Monday through Friday daily and hand it out free to readers, avoiding the obstacle of paid circulation. Metro newspapers, with 81 dailies stretched out across the globe, has built a big business, and Clarity Media Group has ...

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McClatchy and Yahoo Partner on “International Voices”

Important Details: From Cairo, from Beijing, from Baghdad and from Jerusalem, McClatchy’s global bureau reporters will now offer news and perspectives, some of it exclusively through Yahoo! News. The new joint venture is named International Voices.  As part of the initiative, ...

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Online Advertising Slowly Moves Local

Important Details: Online advertising is growing quickly, but the challenge of getting smaller businesses into the online advertising mainstream is still a work in progress, according to several speakers at this week’s Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local, 2007, held in Santa ...

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Disney Launches Family.com

Important Details: This week Disney announced it is launching Family.com, aiming to be a one-stop resource for parents — especially moms — on the web. It’s an ambitious product, resonating with most of the bells and whistles you’d expect in a 2007 launch. For instance, ...

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News and Social Publishing Meet and Match

Important Details: You know what USAToday.com does. And you kind of understand what MySpace does. Now the very definition of news and social networking sites is blurring as they move closer to each other. Take recent developments: USAToday.com launched a major effort to bring the audience into ...

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News Ad Production Moves to Pune

Important Details: Ads, ads, ads. That’s much of what people in the news industry talk about these days, as paid circulation and subscription revenues dwindle and ad revenues are challenged on several fronts by a variety of competitors. But there’s another side of ads: the cost ...

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News Publishers Move into College Markets

Important Details: MediaNews, now the fourth-largest news publisher in the U.S., has announced its first niche distribution partnership in the college market. The company is partnering with AfterCollege. The initiative: upsell classified recruitment customers who want to reach college ...

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