This month the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution and others have come together to commemorate Native American history.
For more information on upcoming events or to visit special archive collections, please visit the Native American Heritage Month website.
Numbers for more than 700 daily newspapers were released this morning and show decline in daily circulation in all but four of the top 25 newspapers. Editor and Publisher reports that the Boston Globe was hit hard as daily circulation numbers fell 6.6 percent and Sunday numbers dropped 6.5 percent. The New York Times showed a huge decrease in Sunday circulation numbers, however, the decrease is partially due to the Times’ recent subscription price increase.
As expected, circulation — at least paid circulation — continues to decline sharply. For the past several years, publishers, particularly those at major metros, have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers. Those papers fall into the category of other paid, which includes hotel, Newspapers in Education, employee, and third party copies.
[...]For the first time, ABC also released comprehensive “audience” data — print readership, online readership, unduplicated reach, and monthly unique users — for roughly 200 papers. The industry is moving toward numbers that take into consideration all their products, including newspaper Web sites, not just paid circulation.
View the ‘top 25’ list: FAS-FAX: Top 25 Daily and Sunday U.S. Newspapers
The National Archives announced the “discovery of two original leather bound photograph albums,” which provide documentation on looted art by the Nazis during World War II.
These albums were created by the staff of the Third Reich’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). This special unit was organized in the summer of 1940 under Reich Leader Alfred Rosenberg, initially to collect political material in occupied countries for exploitation in the “struggle against Jewry and Freemasonry.” The ERR established its base of operations in Paris in July 1940 and on November 5, Hermann Goering assigned the ERR the responsibility for the confiscation of “ownerless” Jewish art collections. On November 18 of that year, Adolf Hitler ordered that all confiscated works of art be brought to Germany and placed at his personal disposal. During the next several years, the ERR would be engaged in an extensive and elaborate art looting operation in France that was part of Hitler’s much larger premeditated scheme to steal art treasures from conquered nations.
Though it has been widely known that the Nazis, under the direction of Hitler, confiscated massive collections of art, it was thought that these particular records of note had been destroyed.
Falling revenue, the rising cost of postage as well as reduced paid advertisements have prompted Newsweek magazine, owned by the Washington Post Co., to cut paid circulation by 16 percent, equaling about 500,000 copies.
Newsweek cited rising postal and other costs in explaining its decision, according to a media buyer who has been briefed on the plan. “Obviously people are also migrating online for news and information,” said the buyer. “It’s hard to maintain current subscribers and attract new subscribers.”
Newsweek is but one of a number of publications that has decided to cut circulation in recent months. Newsweek’s largest competitor, Time magazine, cut its base earlier this year as well as others such as Playboy, Reader’s Digest and BusinessWeek.
LexisNexis, provider of information and business solutions and well known within the law community has announced it will begin job cuts at the beginning of next year. The company plans to move some of its operations overseas with the intent to “improve operational efficiencies.”
According to a statement provide by LexisNexis Thursday afternoon, the company said it is looking at ways to improve operational efficiencies through outsourcing and offshoring of “non-core product development positions,” beginning next year.
“It will result in an unknown number of positions being eliminated in our overall Dayton operations in 2008 and beyond,” the statement said.
The job cuts are expected to occur throughout 2008 and 2009, however, the company maintains that employees who are cut will be eligible for severance and benefits packages.
The South Dakota State Historical Society has recently received 136 rolls of microfilm covering more than 100 years of Indian Rights Association (IRA) history. The reels contain archives from the years 1864-1973.
“These records complement the BIA microfilms for all the South Dakota reservations which are already housed in the state archives,” said Marvene Riis, archives librarian. “In addition, the IRA Papers provide the researcher with a unique insight into Indian affairs, from the IRA, the Indian and the government points of view.”
After nearly 25 years as executive editor of the News & Observer from Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie Still now leads the Sacramento Bee. Last month, Bee editor Rick Rodriguez resigned over a dispute involving ‘differences in opinion’ of the future of the Bee.
Though changes are on the horizon for the Sacramento Bee, Still believes her new position will not effect current plans.
“That’s the atmosphere in the news industry right now. On the journalism side, it’s a time of change,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “What I want to focus on is taking the great news values that the Bee has and finding new ways to do journalism.”
World Usability Day 2007 will take place on November 8th with this year’s focus on healthcare. Started in 2005, the event is aimed at making “the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.”
The goals for 2007 include growing the number, size and types of the events worldwide. This includes: adding more events that not only provide education about usability, but work to effect change by taking the message to the average citizen, offering additional webcasting features that enable World Usability Day to be even more accessible and increasing the volunteers, supporters and sponsors for the event. In order to accomplish this, we need more event leaders and volunteers as part of the World Usability Day team.
Some issues that will be addressed are: new technologies, drug research, emergency disaster planning, functionality of hospitals, and much more.
To learn more and find information on how you can become involved, visit the World Usability Day website at http://www.worldusabilityday.org/.
This Tuesday, October 30, HighBeam Reseach will release Newser.com, a news website that creators Patrick Spain and Michael Wolff hope will change the current trend of content aggregation.
Newser stories run approximately 120 words in length, and feature photos licensed from the Associated Press as well as links to the original story source. Readers can also determine their mix of hard and soft stories through a “slider box,” which Spain hopes will introduce “different ways of how to perceive news.” The site, which was designed by Chicago-based Duo Consulting, also features the top stories of the day and categorizes news by topic and publication date.
So what makes Newser different from others like Google or Yahoo? The answer: Humans. Instead of using “spiders” or “crawlers” built off of algorithms to gather information from the web, an entire staff has been hired to contribute to content found on Newser.com.
“Nobody is really aggregating news in a meaningful way,” said Spain, 55, who ran and sold business-information service Hoovers.com. “Google in a robotic way [aggregates stories] from hundreds of brands and sources. But it doesn’t have any editorial zest.”
The topic of global warming has infiltrated the media, industry and politics in the U.S. and throughout the world. NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest online historic newspaper database, has created a special collection dedicated to global warming. The Global Warming Newspaper Archive, found at http://www.globalwarmingarchive.com/Home.aspx, allows users to search through 50,000 archived newspaper pages to find articles about global warming. The archive also includes a timeline of events relating to the Earth’s climate and a historical overview of the topic.
With the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election right around the corner, the topic of global warming is on the list of candidates’ issues to address. Regardless of the current fundamental argument – are humans causing the earth to warm? – the earth is changing and education, including the history of the planet’s climate, is important.
By searching the Global Warming Newspaper Archive, you can explore past perspectives on the “greenhouse effect” and also research what many scientists, politicians and those in the media had to say about the concept. Newspapers are a great source of information and NewspaperARCHIVE.com has released this socially relevant archive so that we can all benefit from information it contains.
