Readers and Viewers

NEW DELHI — Extra! Extra! Researchers have discovered a place where the newspaper, a threatened species in some parts of the world, is still thriving. That would be India, home to 1.1 billion people. And not only is the press in robust health, it's breeding at an astonishing rate. From 2005 to 2006, nearly 2,100 newspapers made their debut in India, joining 60,000 already circulating. Here in the...

After more than 50 years American Heritage, the magazine that furnished not just the minds but, in its original hardcover format, the dens of generations of American history buffs, is suspending publication, its editor, Richard F. Snow, said last week. The bimonthly magazine, which is owned by Forbes Inc., has been for sale since January, and in the absence of a buyer, Mr. Snow said, the...

The chorus of disapproval for newspapers has become a global trend. These days it is nearly impossible to find a media analyst who actually reads a newspaper or who can see anything other than doom and gloom for the industry. I can present a different perspective. Let's start with circulations, which continue to grow - and not just in India and China. Paid circulation grew globally by 1.9 per cent...

LONDON — British tabloids typically send out paparazzi to poke into the lives of the royals, soccer coaches and supermodels. Lately, however, two free newspapers fighting a circulation battle on the streets of London have turned the cameras on each other. One of the papers, London Lite, sent a video recently to media buyers that showed distributors ostensibly dumping 2,900 copies of its rival, The...

Global newspaper circulation rose nearly 2 per cent in 2006 and the number of newspaper titles also increased significantly, according to provisional data revealed today by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). Paid-for newspaper circulation went up 1.9 per cent year-on-year to more than 510 million paid-for copies in 2006 and the number of new paid-for titles grew to more than 11,000 for the...

Having read last week's rant by Stefano Hatfield, editor of thelondonpaper, on the afternoon free newspaper market in London, I couldn't help thinking that instead of reminiscing about the Maxwell era, his company might be better served if it spent more time concentrating on the here and now, particularly the failures of its own paper. We at Associated can have no objection to other titles...

One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry's current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service. Not many years ago if someone wanted to find out what was in the newspaper they had to buy...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Belgian French-language newspapers were back on Google on Thursday after agreeing that the search engine can link to their Web sites, the first signs of a thaw in a bitter copyright dispute. But neither has so far settled on a key part of the dispute: the use of newspaper story links used on Google News. In February, Google Inc. lost a lawsuit filed by the newspapers that...

The amount of traffic leaving news and media sites for multimedia sites has risen 196% from April 2006 to April 2007, according to an online competitive intelligence service. Major events, like the execution of Saddam Hussein and the death of crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, have driven the increase, according to a Hitwise analysis released Tuesday. The amount of news traffic going to video Web sites...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. newspaper circulation fell 2.1 percent as of the end of March, according to data released on Monday, illustrating the migration of readers to the Internet and publishers' efforts to trim less valuable discount subscriptions. The decline reflects an ongoing movement of readers from paid print editions to mostly free online papers, but experts said it also shows an effort...