by Craig Wilson

The Newcastle Herald H2 section had a 2 page piece today on the problems at NEWFM titled Rock Bottom. Herald journalist Neil Jameson interviewed me for the story for advertising industry perspective on the current commercial radio imbalance in the Hunter.

The full story can be viewed here.

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AUSTRALIA’S oldest news magazine, The Bulletin, has been closed after more than a century of publishing.

ACP
announced the closure of the magazine, launched in 1880, this morning,
saying it had become unsustainable with sales of just 57,000.

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Source: AAP, The Australian

JOURNALISTS at five Fairfax regional newspapers in NSW will begin industrial action next week in a bid for more pay.

Rolling strikes and stoppages will hit the Western Advocate in
Bathurst, Dubbo’s The Daily Liberal, the Northern Daily Leader in
Tamworth, the Maitland Mercury and the Central Western Daily in Orange.

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The search engine giant is in talks with several newspaper publishers to sell space in their pages to its online clients.

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Source: Michael Bodey, The Australian

THE
first major media deal since the contentious Howard Government’s media
reform packages was introduced is one step closer to completion.

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Source: Corrie Perkin, The Australian

NEWSPAPERS have a greater chance of surviving the 21st century if they embrace bloggers, rely more heavily on readers to provide news coverage and abolish subscriber fees for use of online archive material.

Canadian blogger Cory Doctorow, the 36-year-old award-winning science fiction novelist and international champion of the digital age, said newspapers and their journalists should welcome the vast range of opinion now available on the internet, rather than fear it.

"As consumers of information, we have more tools than ever — not fewer — to discern the bias in the way information is being presented," he said yesterday. "And bias is not a product of the internet, it has been present in all media forever."

Doctorow — who is no relation to US writer EL Doctorow — said the biggest problem facing print media was "a complete failure to come to terms with what is happening to classified advertising on the internet, which is bizarre given that if there’s anyone who really should get classified advertising, it’s the daily print media who historically are masters of it".

He highlighted The New York Times as a paper that had failed to appreciate the financial advantages of linking bloggers and its own advertisers.

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Source: Lara Sinclair, The Australian

THE newspaper industry is set to become its own best advocate with the launch of a $10million press campaign.

Aimed at persuading marketers to spend an extra $100million a year on newspaper advertising, the five-month advertising push, which launches on Saturday, aims to promote the ability of the medium to tell a story and engage its readers.

It is likely to be the biggest press campaign in the market in the half-year to December, and will run in every national, metropolitan and regional daily paper owned by the members of marketing body, The Newspaper Works.

Chief executive Tony Hale said the year-old marketing body had conducted research that found media buyers had pigeonholed newspapers as suitable for retail and information-heavy advertising, but not for brand advertising and repositioning campaigns.

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Source: Richard Gluyas, The Australian

DRAMATIC changes in the news cycle and the advent of social networking websites such as MySpace meant newspaper companies had to completely reinvent themselves, News Limited chairman and chief executive John Hartigan said yesterday.

Mr Hartigan said the challenge for traditional media was to spread its brands and become part of the online scene, where consumers wanted to be part of the process and not just passive receivers of content.

"Customers are contributing their own content, and the line between the traditional content producers and consumers starts to blur," he told the annual Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association conference in Melbourne.

"We are moving from a speech to a conversation."

Mr Hartigan said the extension of print brands on to other media platforms reflected the arrival of a 24/7 news cycle that was changing the industry dynamics "forever".

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