New York Times Sells Papers

First appeared on Yahoo! News
The New York Times Co said it will sell 16 regional newspapers spread across the U.S. Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings for $143 million in cash as it looks to cut costs and focus on its most important papers and their websites.
Regional newspapers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the economy's broader travails.
The company said it will record an after-tax gain of $150 million on the sale -- expected to close in a few weeks -- in the first quarter of 2012.
"I think that it's toward the low end of what we expected. I was expecting $150-$200 million," Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur told Reuters.
"What it implies is that margins on regional newspapers were not as high as we thought, but the underlying profitability of the main New York Times is higher."
The analyst, however, said pension obligation will stay with the company and that could be one of the uses of the proceeds.
The group to be hived off has a weekday circulation of about 430,000, with newspapers such as Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Ledger, in Florida; Herald-Journal in South Carolina; and The Press Democrat in California in its stable.
Last week, the Times Co said it will sell its regional newspapers days after Chief Executive Janet Robinson announced her sudden retirement.
The group's revenue -- more than a tenth of Times Co's overall sales -- fell about 7 percent to $190 million in the first nine months of this year.
"These newspapers have been a drag on overall results due to heavier reliance on local advertising which lags national advertising growth," Morningstar's Joscelyn Mackay said.
"Without these papers, the firm will be able to focus on its flagship The New York Times and monetize its digital content."
Halifax Media owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, among other papers and media businesses across the south.
Times Co shares, which have lost a fifth of their value this year, closed at $7.76 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

NY Times Investigating Plagiarism Allegations

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times is looking into the work of one its reporters following accusations that he plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal and other sources.

The newspaper published an editor's note online Sunday and in papers Monday that said reporter Zachery Kouwe "appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations."

The Times said Journal editors pointed out similarities between a Journal story from Feb. 5 and Times pieces later that day and on Feb. 6. The Times said that a search found similar examples taken from media outlets such as Reuters and that an investigation was ongoing.

Kouwe declined to comment on Tuesday.

The Journal's letter listed six examples from a story about Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff's relatives.

Among the examples was a sentence from Journal reporter Amir Efrati that read, "Mr. Picard said the family received about $141 million in the six months leading up to Mr. Madoff's December 2008 arrest." The letter pointed out that Kouwe's version read, "Mr. Picard said the family received about $141 million in the six months leading up to Mr. Madoff's arrest in December 2008."

The Times said that a search of Kouwe's work didn't turn up any indications that his stories had any inaccuracies. The newspaper declined to comment on any penalties Kouwe could face.

However, the Times reported on its Web site Tuesday night that two people speaking on condition of anonymity said Kouwe resigned at a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with representatives of the Times, The New York Times Co. and the Newspaper Guild of New York to discuss possible disciplinary action.

"The Times has dealt with this, as we said we would in our Editors' Note, consistent with our standards to protect the integrity of our journalism," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said.

In 2003, Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned from the paper after it became clear that he had engaged in plagiarism and fabrications in his work.

Google Labs Creates 'Living Stories'

LA Times

Google today said it has developed an experimental news site that it calls "Living Stories."

The idea, jointly developed with the New York Times and the Washington Post, is to pool together the many disparate stories a newspaper writes on a single topic, such as healthcare reform, into a single Web page.

Readers can customize pages based on the topics they wish to read. Each page automatically updates to include new stories on the topic, and remembers what the reader has already viewed to serve up newer or related stories and photos.

Living Stories was launched today in Google Labs, an area reserved for products that are not yet ready for prime time. The page currently has stories only from the Post and the Times, which worked with Google to develop the prototype.

"This project is a pilot," said Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News, in an interview. "The idea is to make improvements based on the feedback we receive, then make those tools more widely available."

The concept of grouping articles by topic isn't new. Yahoo came up with its version, called Yahoo News Topics, two years ago. Here's Yahoo's page on "Google," for example. What's different is that Google sees publishers using Living Stories on their own websites, not just on Google. Here's an example from the Times of what a page about the war in Afghanistan looks like.

Publishers have no lack of options when it comes to digital distribution models as they cast about for a way to make up for the losses in print circulation and advertising. Just today, a group of five major publishers announced they would jointly build an online storefront for readers to buy magazines and newspapers. You can read more about that announcement here. Many see the effort as a response to Amazon.com's Kindle model, which pays publishers 30% of the revenue generated from the sale of periodicals.

So what's the benefit to publishers of going with Google?

Cohen said it's a happy union of developing a reader-friendly experience while maximizing a website's rank with search engines that can drive traffic to a publisher's website.

A page containing links to many stories on the same topic tends to rank higher with search engines than a page with a single story. This explains why Wikipedia is often at the top of a search results page on any given query.

"On the search side, there’s a single page to point to," Cohen said. "Instead of thousands of links, there is a single point of reference. And that’s helpful for users as well."