OJR winds up website

After a decade, the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of the website, Online Journalism review (OJR). In his final post at OJR, Robert Niles said that the archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles. He continued:

"One of OJR's goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I'm pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

So... in that spirit, I suppose that I will borrow a classic sign-off from the world of journalism, one that's been borrowed by another recently:

Good night, and good luck.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200806/1515/

India, world's 2nd largest newspaper market

Looks like more people in Asia read newspapers than in the rest of the world. Guess which is the country with the largest number of newspapers? China. And No.2? India. No. 3? Japan. Seventy-four of the world's 100 best-selling dailies are published in Asia. India, China and Japan account for 62 of them.

According to latest research by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the four largest markets for newspapers are: China, with 107 million copies sold daily; India, with 99 million copies daily; Japan, with 68 million copies daily; and the United States, with nearly 51 million.

Growing literacy and new technology have resulted in India emerging as the second largest newspaper market in the world. Indian newspaper sales increased 11.2 per cent in 2007 and 35.51 per cent in the five year period. Newspaper advertising revenues in India were up 64.8 per cent over the previous 5 years.

The research found that newspapers are facing hard times, but circulations worldwide increased by 2.57 per cent in 2007, taking global daily sales to a new high of over 532 million copies.

The global paid-for circulation rose 2.57 per cent year on year and 9.39 per cent over the past five years. However, when free dailies were added to paid-for daily circulation, global circulation increased by 3.65 per cent year on year to 573 million copies.

Free dailies now account for nearly 7 per cent of all global newspaper circulation. Print remains the world's largest advertising medium, with a 40 per cent share.

Timothy Balding, chief executive officer of WAN said "Newspaper circulation has been rising or stable in three-quarters of the world's countries over the past five years and in nearly 80 per cent of countries in the past year. And even in places where paid-for circulation is declining, notably the US and some countries in western Europe, newspapers continue to extend their reach through a wide variety of free and niche publications."

WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. For more on WAN, visit http://www.wan-press.org/index.php3

Are book reviews in newspapers dead?

The incredible vanishing book review

Writing in the online magazine Salon, Kevin Berger, the executive editor of San Francisco magazine, feels that in the age of market research, newspaper editors have decreed that their readers just don't care about books.

He writes of ''the Chronicle's action, two months earlier, to do away with its pullout, 12-page book section and demote book reviews to the back of its Sunday entertainment section, a tabloid called Datebook. The book editor at the time, David Kipen, was shifted to "book critic," responsible for reviewing two books per week, and Oscar got the job of overseeing Sunday's seven book pages, which now fall between "Dining Out" and "Get Together," the personals.

''The Chronicle's Sunday circulation is a little over half a million, making it the most widely read paper in the Bay Area. And it's not the only metropolitan daily to trim its book coverage this year. The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation's most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages, resulting in the loss of six "In Brief" write-ups and one full-page review.

''The reason for the cuts is not exactly front-page news. In our "age of corporate newspapering," as the American Journalism Review calls it, the $60 billion-a-year newspaper industry is "now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidating of newspapers."

Read more, at Salon: http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2001/07/19/book_reviews/print.html

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