Newspapers in the US are on the decline right now and the entire industry is seeing explosive growth via the digital offerings. The New York Times is the current poster child of implementing a solid paywall strategy and seeing the largest gains. Currently, 20% of all newspaper circulation in the US is now digital.

The entire newspaper industry a slight decline by 0.7%, according to a recent poll by Alliance for Audited Media. The saving grace to most the newspaper industry was The New York Times, which saw a total digital subscriber base of 1,865,318 people. It had recently surpassed the USA Today in terms of the increased visibility of its brand.

» via Good E Reader

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, whose reporters organized one of the industry’s most active opposition movements against its parent company’s plans for cutbacks, will trim home delivery to three days a week and create a new digital company, the owner, Advance Publications, said on Thursday. The paper is also expected to cut more than a third of its newsroom staff.

The announcement was made to the newsroom Thursday morning at the same time it was posted on The Plain Dealer’s Web site. According to the announcement, the company is creating a new digitally focused media company called the Northeast Ohio Media Group. It will continue to print a daily newspaper that readers can buy on newsstands and elsewhere. These changes will start to take place this summer.

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This summer, The Washington Post will start charging frequent users of its Web site, asking those who look at more than 20 articles or multimedia features a month to pay a fee, although the company has not yet decided how much it will charge.

The paper said, however, that it would exempt large parts of its audience from having to pay the fees. Its home-delivery subscribers will have free access to all of The Post’s digital products, and students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces.

» via Washington Post

A copyright battle between The Associated Press and an online news-clipping service is reaching a climax, and the case could have significant implications for fair use. AP sued Meltwater Group last year, arguing the “reputation management” company had a “parasitic business model” that violated copyright. Meltwater is defending the case, arguing that it is merely a search engine.

Meltwater News is a media-monitoring service that helps corporations track what’s being said about them in press outlets online. The company boasts that it can “track keywords, phrases, and topics in over 192,000 sources from over 190 countries and 100 languages” throughout the day. It doesn’t send its subscribers full articles, but does copy snippets and headlines then provide links to full stories—like Google News.

Last week, the nation’s largest newspapers lined up to tell the New York federal judge considering the case that they support the AP. An amicus brief was filed by The New York Times, The McClatchy Company, Advance Publications, and the Newspaper Association of America, which represents 200 newspapers around the country. In the brief, they argue that Meltwater isn’t a search engine—it’s a competitor.

z» via ars technica

Many newspapers let readers donate the proceeds of their subscriptions to an education fund when they go on vacation. These funds have gone to provide newspapers and digital subscriptions to local classrooms, but now the Boston Globe is modernizing the program supplying iPads and projectors instead.

The Globe announced this week that is using $65,000 of reader vacation funds to buy 75 iPads for Boston Public Schools and Stoneham High School. The idea, according to Globe executive Saurer, is that “digital kids turn into digital adults” and that the iPad program will expose them to the paper’s content and knowledge from around the web.

» via paidContent

Google has settled a long-running dispute with Belgium newspaper publishers that accused the search giant of copyright infringement over its practice of linking to French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.

The group, Copiepresse, sued Google in 2006, alleging that the search giant’s use of headlines and snippets of Belgian newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service, and its practice of providing links to cached copies of the articles in its main Web search results, violated copyright. A Belgian court sided with Copiepresse last September, ordering Google to remove the links.

Google complied with the order, but the two parties engaged in talks that finally brought back the papers’ search results, sans cached content. After the organizations came to that agreement, the case continued on in Belgian appeals court. After the appeals court in May 2011 upheld Copiepresse’s victory, Google removed the content to be in compliance.

» via CNET