The Australian reports:
“Sydney-based Fairfax Media, publisher of newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review, said underlying earnings could fall to around $600 million, before depreciation, amortisation, interest and tax, and assuming no further deterioration in advertising markets.”
UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph has outsourced some of its production work to Pagemasters, a company based in Rhodes, western Sydney.
The company, owned by news agency Australian Associated Press, will copy edit and layout raw copy for the Telegraph’s travel, motoring and money pages as well as parts of The Sunday Telegraph.
The move is intended to “save on night and overtime penalties for workers in Britain and get more expensive staff off its books”, writes the Herald. Full story…
Fairfax has reportedly bought up a series of domain names covering new areas of Australia and variations on its existing sites for Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.
Time Out has this week launched a new listings and entertainments news website in Kuala Lumpur and plans to launch a similar site in Hong Kong next month.
The online launches coincide with sister print title launches in the territories. Developments in Hong Kong will bring the total number of international Time Out web/print publications to 24 in 18 countries including Sydney, Kiev and New York.
Time Out, which also launched in Barcelona in January, plans seven further launches in 2008, including titles in Belgrade, Budapest, Bangkok and Jakarta.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s your news selected and filtered with artificial intelligence from Tiinker.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi I’m Alex North. Tiinker has been developed by Deep Grey Labs. We’re a young start-up in Sydney, Australia, focussed on bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning technology out of academia and into products and services people can use.
There’s masses of information published online every day – way too much for any individual to track. Tiinker lifts some of the burden by filtering and exploring to find content that’s interesting to you as an individual, hiding irrelevant or uninteresting stories.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Tiinker is great for keeping up with news in one or a number of interest areas. It gathers stories from thousands of news sources and picks out the interesting ones based on which articles you have previously found interesting.
Although you could visit all the sources individually, each one probably has only a few stories of real interest. Over time, Tiinker will learn to pick these out for you.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Tiinker has much more to come. We’re working now on some features to help you share stories you’ve found on Tiinker with friends and colleagues, and continually improving the content selection algorithms.
4) Why are you doing this?
From a broad point of view, we want to help apply the amazing research that goes on at our universities into things people can actually use. More narrowly, tiinker addresses the growing problem of information overload – something which affects us all in some way and will continue to do so unless we bring computing to bear on the problem.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Nothing, it’s free.
6) How will you make it pay?
Eventually with targeted advertising running on the site, but right now it’s ad-free as well.