The offer was limited to the first 60 eligible employees that accepted it. Workers had to be at least 50 years old and have worked at the company a minimum of 10 years. The offering included cash payments based on service and enhanced retirement benefits.

There will be less than 60 positions cut as a result of the offering as some jobs will need to be refilled, Kevin Mowbray, publisher of the Post-Dispatch and a vice president of Lee, said in a statement.

Beginning next year, The Wall Street Journal will begin publishing a monthly glossy titled Pursuits, which covers the lifestyles of the rich and famous. According to The New York Times, which first reported the news, WSJ columnist and blogger Robert Frank is the most likely candidate to become editor.

The magazine will be distributed in September 2008 as an insert in the paper's Saturday edition that is delivered to subscribers. Their magazine will also have a branded presence on the WSJ Web site. News Corporation is said to have approved the concept.

Also on Monday, the New York Post announced plans to launch a new weekly Page Six Magazine inserted in the paper's Sunday edition, beginning next weekend. As the title indicates, the magazine will include an expanded version of the newspaper's popular "Page Six" gossip column. The magazine, with a staff of about 20, will be edited by Margi Conklin. Conklin was formerly editor of Harper's Bazaar and New Woman. The new magazine may also feature writing by two other well-known Post gossip columnists: Cindy Adams and Liz Smith.

Numis Securities analyst Lorna Tilbian said any move by Murdoch to make wsj.com free has to put pressure on Pearson, while Dresdner Kleinwort's Usman Ghazi estimates a potential hit of up to six percent on earnings per share.

"You can resist if you don't want growth," Tilbian said.

Wsj.com is one of the Web's most successful subscription businesses with a $99 (49 pounds) annual charge and making it free would be aimed at lifting online ads from an anticipated jump in readers.

The latest forecast: From just 2.8 percent in 2002, the internet will soar to just shy of 14 percent of all global advertising expenditures by 2011. That's according to ricewaterhouseCoopers and its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2007-2011.

And just how big is 14 percent? It will place the internet ahead of radio, out of home and even magazines in its share of the total global advertising budget.

Driving it all is the wider adoption of broadband, which allows users to do so much more online.

"Online advertising is growing explosively in each region, fueled by rising broadband penetration and the growing use of the internet for social networking and as an entertainment and media center." says the report. "Continued growth in broadband subscribers and increasingly fast broadband speeds will fuel internet advertising."

In 2006 alone, global internet ad spending soared by 37.9 percent, to $31.6 billion, according to PwC. And from 2007 to 2011, PwC expects internet ad spending will then more than double, to $73.1 billion, for an annualized growth of 18.3 percent.

As part of the change, the paper will trim its circulation territory to 73 counties, centered on metro Atlanta. The pullback will take effect April 1 and means the print version of the AJC will no longer be available in Alabama, South Carolina, Florida and many parts of Georgia.

The paper also will overhaul its Thursday community editions, cutting them from 13 to four. The zones that remain will be larger than previous publications, focusing on the most populous areas of metro Atlanta -- Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. The AJC's Home & Garden will be shuttered and replaced with a new section, HomeStyle, which will be carried in the community editions.

The changes come as the AJC, like other newspapers, grapples with big shifts in news consumption and advertising spending.

The changes were announced Thursday after months of planning. "We have to transform the organization," Publisher John Mellott said in an interview.

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

"The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we're leading there," he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It's a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn't see a black void ahead.

But we have a great opportunity to do more, now in concert with our new partners, a consortium of more than 150 U.S. newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Newspapers have always represented and connected local communities and their ability to bring physical communities online is a great complement to the virtual communities Yahoo! brings together.

But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo.

In that way, local news - one of the pillars of the newspaper business - would become part of a large information network that would increase usefulness for readers and value to advertisers.

The King County Journal will put out its last issue Jan. 21 and 40 full-time employees will lose their jobs, the newspaper's new owners told employees Thursday at a meeting in the Kent newsroom.

Circulation of the Journal, which has been losing money since 1994, has fallen to 39,100. It is the region's fifth-largest daily paper. The newspaper's parent company, Black Press Ltd., plans to focus money and attention on the daily's sister publications, six of which will begin publishing biweekly beginning Jan. 24.

Black Press, a Canadian publisher, bought the Journal and its nine sister publications in November from Kent-based Horvitz Newspapers Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

"We looked at several business models over the last month to see if there was anything we could do to save the daily, because closing it was our last option," Don Kendall, general manager of Black's newly created King County Publications Ltd. division, said in an interview. "This is the most difficult day of my career, and I've been in the newspaper business more than 30 years."

1. USA Today: 2,269509, (-1.3%)
2. The Wall Street Journal: 2,043235, (-1.9%)
3. The New York Times: 1,086,798, (-3.5%)
4. Los Angeles Times: 775,766, (-8.0%)
5. The New York Post: 704,011, 5.1%
6. Daily News: 693,382, 1.0%
7. The Washington Post: 656,297, (-3.3%)
8. Chicago Tribune: 576,132, (-1.7%)
9. Houston Chronicle: 508,097, (-3.6%)
10. Newsday: 413,579, (-4.9%)
11. The Arizona Republic, Phoenix: 397,294, (-2.5%)
12. The Boston Globe: 386,415, (-6.7%)
13. The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.: 378,100, (-5.5%)
14. San Francisco Chronicle: 373,805, (-5.3%)
15. The Star Tribune, Minneapolis: 358,887, (-4.1%)
16. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 350,157, (-3.4%)
17. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland: 336,939, (-0.6%)
18. The Philadelphia Inquirer: 330,622, (-7.5%)
19. Detroit Free Press: 328,628, (-3.6%)
20. The Oregonian, Portland: 310,803, (-6.8%)
21. The San Diego Union-Tribune: 304,334, (-3.1%)
22. St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: 288,676, (-3.2%)
23. The Orange County (Calif.) Register: 287,204, (-3.7%)
24. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 276,588, 0.6%
25. The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee: 273,609, (-5.4%)

The study, released by the Newspaper Association of America, underscores the Internet's importance to papers beset by falling circulation and advertising revenue in their print editions.

The average number of unique visitors to online newspaper sites in the first half was more than 55.5 million a month, the study said. That compares with 42.2 million a year earlier.

Those numbers come from Nielsen//NetRatings, which tracks Web audience usage data.

"Newspaper Web sites have become a significant addition to the print product, and are driving large audience growth," said John Kimball, the association's chief marketing officer.

The number of page views at newspaper Web sites rose by about 52 percent in the first half, the association added.

1. New York Times
2. Washington Post
3. USA Today
4. Wall Street Journal
5. Los Angeles Times
6. Boston Globe
7. San Francisco Chronicle
8. Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer
9. Chicago Tribune
10. Houston Chronicle

The Los Angeles Daily News has launched valleynews.com - a new citizen journalism site covering 40 city neighbourhoods.

Valleynews is a series of interlinked sites that serve the San Fernando Valley, Burbank, Glendale, Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley areas with neighbourhood specific pages that allow users to upload photos, stories, events, blog and search for information.

The Daily News - part of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which runs half-a-dozen dailies in the city and surrounding area - is trying to tap in to some of the 17.5 million people in the LA news market by engaging them in neighbourhood affairs.

Video clips of Carroll describing her experience in detail.

Video interviews with Carroll's family members and Monitor staffers who worked for her release.

A map of where she was held throughout her captivity.

Information about a fund to help the family of Alan Enwiyah, Carroll's translator who was murdered when she was abducted.

Free archive: All archive stories back to 1980 are, for the time being, completely free. Only content from the historical archive, stories published between 1908 and 1980, requires a small fee.

Better search: Your searches of csmonitor.com content should result in far more accurate and thorough results.

New story page design: We hope you find articles easier to read because the pages are less cluttered.

The two Philadelphia papers are being bought by a group led by advertising executive Brian Tierney and Bruce Toll, co-founder of luxury home builder Toll Brothers Inc. The papers are among 12 currently owned by Knight Ridder that McClatchy plans to sell.

McClatchy and the investor group said in a statement that they intend to complete the deal around the same time that McClatchy closes its deal for Knight Ridder, which is expected this summer. McClatchy will receive $515 million in cash, and the investment group, Philadelphia Media Holdings, will assume $47 million in pension liabilities.

Once McClatchy closes its purchase of Knight Ridder's remaining 20 papers, it will become the second-largest newspaper company in the country following Gannett Co.

The deal returns the Philadelphia papers to private ownership for the first time since 1969, when Walter H. Annenberg sold the papers to Knight Newspapers Inc. after being named U.S. ambassador to Britain.

The perfect news Web site won't be just a Web site. "It will literally be in the palm of our hand," wrote one reader. Today, millions of people retrieve news over cellphones or Blackberry devices, but that's just the start. The next generation would have a hard drive, a bigger screen and a better "input device."

Another reader foresees news sites morphed into directories of information: "Instead of clicking on pages, there will be a hierarchy of news by section (world, national, regional, business, sports, lifestyle)."

Still another idea would make news sites portable - with content moved easily, by the user, onto other sites, such as those of brokerage firms. "Instead of having to duplicate my holdings all over the Web so I can get customized news from various sources, I would login to my secure [brokerage] account and there I would find, alongside my portfolio, links to WSJ news and articles."

There's just one thing: If news sites are going to turn increasingly to video, they are going to have to pay attention to appearances. "By 2016 we will doubtless see more 'pretty faces' in the pressroom than we do today. ... I predict that Dow Jones & Co. will be adding cosmetic surgery to the roster of employee benefits."

Both the New Orleans and Biloxi newspapers were praised for the depth of their reporting of Katrina which was conducted in the face of severe logistical problems.

The Pulitzer Committee particularly praised the Times-Picayune for its "heroic, multi-faceted coverage" which carried on even though the paper's print works had to be abandoned due to the flood waters.

The city editor of the Times-Picayune, David Meeks, told the BBC he was delighted with the recognition.

"This is a great day for the paper, obviously we'll never lose sight of the tragedy that spawned this recognition but we're very happy to be honoured this way by our peers," he said.

Pulitzer prize winners each receive $10,000, except in the public service category where a gold medal is awarded.

A study being released Monday by the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group, found that one in three Internet users — 55 million — visit a newspaper website every month.

Also, unique visitors to newspaper websites jumped 21% from January 2005 to December 2005, while the number of page views soared by 43% over the same period.

The study coincides with the NAA's annual convention in Chicago. Top of mind for the publishers attending was the looming sale of 12 Knight Ridder Inc. newspapers by The McClatchy Co., which is acquiring the storied publishing company in a $4.5 billion deal that will reshape the landscape of American newspapers.

Strategies for coping with the rapid transformation of consumers' news consumption habits due to the Internet was also a big topic at the three-day conference, which began Sunday.

The Chronicle was a runaway choice for top blogging newspaper. "The wizards of blogging in my opinion," Andre Henry says. Points-wise, it wasn't close. (128 to 69 for the second site.) The Chronicle is not the most adventurous in what it blogs about (exception: Bar Tab) but the site does everything well, starting with its Blogs main page, which features—before you get to any staff blogging-a section called Chron.commons, "Blogs from our Readers." (They weren't the only ones to do this.)

"This had pretty much everything I was looking for," wrote Jessing-Butz. "It's very evident that people read these; they comment on them. The page is easy to find and easy on the eyes. The writing is fun and clear." Krase: "The Chronicle makes access to archived blogs easy."

1. Houston Chronicle (128 points)
2. Washington Post (69 points)
3. USA Today (38 points, 1 honorable mention)
4. St. Petersburg Times (29 points, 2 honorable mention)
5. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (23 points)
6. San Antonio Express-News (22 points, 1 honorable mention)

Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the United States, has agreed to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, the two companies announced today.

The combined company plans to sell 12 Knight-Ridder papers, including both its papers in Philadelphia - The Inquirer and the Daily News - along with The San Jose Mercury News in California, Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

"I regret that we'll be selling them and that the employees have to go through another period of uncertainty," he said. "But we had to be clear-eyed about this and apply our longstanding acquisition criteria," the pillar of which is to go into high-growth markets.

Pruitt said the company would keep 20 other Knight-Ridder papers, including The Miami Herald, The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram and The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. He said the expanded company would have 32 daily papers with a combined daily circulation of 3.2 million.

A survey by the market research business Outsell Inc., which echoes other recent studies, determined that 61 percent of consumers look to their newspapers as an essential source for local news, events and sports, followed by television (58 percent) and radio (35 percent). About 6 percent turn to the major Internet search engines for local news and information.

The survey of 2,800 consumers' news habits found that television is consumers' top choice for national news. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they rely on network, cable and satellite TV as primary or secondary sources of national news. Thirty-three percent choose their local newspapers first or second for coverage of national events, followed by 28 percent who access sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News. Eleven percent of consumers are relying regularly on their daily newspapers' Web sites, the survey said.

The editorial stated, in part: "Spare Change News advocates for social justice, and having freedom of speech -- even that which makes fun of religion -- is one of the rights all people should enjoy. Yes, the cartoons were in poor taste. The Danish newspaper probably should not have published them. But adults in civilized societies do not murder and pillage whenever their sensibilities are offended. ...

"The mainstream media have also surrendered their duty to the public -- and to the truth. ....Many of the images in question are indeed disgusting, and SCN would never reprint any of them except under these extraordinary circumstances. But now that the images are newsworthy in and of themselves, the mainstream media have a responsibility to inform their audiences, in the most accurate and impartial method possible, of why the rioters are angry."

• Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, first published the cartoons in September, 2005.
• Germany's Die Welt
• Germany's Berliner Zeitung
• France Soir (details here)
• Al Fagr, an Egyptian newspaper (details here and here)
• Italy's La Stampa (details here)
• Italy's Corriere della Serra (details here)
• Spain: Barcelona's El Periodico and Madrid's El Mundo (details here)
• Courrier International in France
• New Zealand's Dominion Post (details here)
• The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Australia (details here)
• Rockhampton's Morning Bulletin, Australia (details here)
• The Shihan in Jordan (details here)
• Philadelphia Inquirer (details here and here)
• New York Sun (details here)
• Daily Press in Victorville, California. (details here.)
• Wyoming Tribune-Eagle in Cheyenne (details here)
• French magazine Charlie Hebdo printed the cartoons along with a new original Mohammed cartoon. (details here)
• Spare Change News (details here)

A "rolling comment site" will be the biggest part of this, said Rusbridger, "drawing on the strength of our existing comment and analysis writers, but going more broadly than that". He also spoke of allowing readers "more of a say and more of a chance to generate content".

Rusbridger cited US celebrity blogging site Huffington Post as an example of what can be achieved with comment on the net.

He said: "It's an example of how, in six months, people can do really significant things with comment on the internet that a year ago no-one would have anticipated.

Ricky Gervais is another example of something that took everyone by surprise."

The Office star's podcasts for Guardian Unlimited topped the iTunes chart in Britain and the US with two million downloads.

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners."

Web sites like Google and its specialised Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers' own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.

"They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content," Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.

"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

VNU, which owns market research firm AC Nielsen and publishes trade titles including Computing and IT Week, said it believed the Inquirer - noted for its irreverent tabloid approach to the technology industry - was a valuable addition to the company's existing titles.

"We're really exited about it - the Inquirer really slots into our commercial and editorial portfolio," said Paul Briggs, the associate publisher of the company's online arm, VNUnet.

"I saw a group of people coming as if they had come from the sky," recalled Ms. Carroll's driver, who survived the attack. "One guy attracted my attention. He jumped in front of me screaming, 'Stop! Stop! Stop!' with his left hand up and a pistol in his right hand."

One of the kidnappers pulled the driver from the car, jumped in, and drove away with several others huddled around Carroll and her interpreter, said the driver, who asked not to be identified. "They didn't give me any time to even put the car in neutral," he recounted.

The onslaught of Gulf Coast hurricanes, notably Katrina and the deadly flooding which devastated New Orleans, was overwhelmingly picked by U.S. editors and news directors as the top story of 2005 in The Associated Press' annual vote.

The hurricanes received 242 first-place votes out of 288 ballots cast. No other story received more than 18 first-place votes.

The death of Pope John Paul II, and the election of Joseph Ratzinger to succeed him as Pope Benedict XVI, was the No. 2 pick, followed by the situation in Iraq, where news of violence and politics vied almost equally for attention throughout the year.

Iraq was voted the top story in 2002 and 2003, and was runner-up in 2004 to the U.S. election in which President Bush won a second term.

1. Hurricane Katrina
2. Papal Transition
3. Iraq
4. Supreme Court
5. Oil Prices
6. London Bombings
7. Asian Quake
8. Terri Schiavo
9. CIA Leak
10. Bush's Struggles

Both the overall number and percentage of Internet users visiting newspaper Web sites hit all-time highs in September, according to a new report by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America. The data, which takes into account home and work Internet usage, shows that over 47.3 million people visited newspaper Web sites in September, the most in any month since NAA began tracking online usage in January 2004. That represents almost a third (31.9 percent) of all Internet users, and is up 15.8 percent from 40.9 million for the same period last year. While the report does not track traffic to specific online content, the spike was most likely bolstered by the high level of interest in coverage of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"Newspapers are continuing to attract readers whether they're reading the traditional printed newspaper, a newspaper Web site, a free daily paper or another newspaper niche product," said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. "Not only is the overall audience growing for newspaper Web sites, but NAA studies have shown that they are often the leading local news sites in their markets. It's clear that newspapers' longstanding position of trust as part of the communities they serve has only strengthened, not weakened, in the Internet era."

Village Voice Media and New Times Media, the nation's leading alternative media companies, today announced that the United States Department of Justice has closed its investigation and cleared the merger of the two companies. The merger is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006.

Following the close of the merger, the new entity, to be called Village Voice Media, will have a weekly audited circulation of 1.8 million papers and 4.3 million readers. Village Voice Media will have papers and Web sites in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, St. Louis, Orange County, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City, Nashville, the East Bay including Oakland and Berkeley, and the Ft. Lauderdale/West Palm Beach area.