Jim Rosenberg | jerotus.

From NewKerala.com:

Kicking off its plans for a business newspaper, HT Media Ltd, today announced an editorial content tie-up with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), though not going for equity participation as of now.

“We have tied up with the WSJ for our soon-to-be-launched business newspaper. However, it is an editorial tie-up only and nothing is planned for equity participation as of now,” HT Media Business Head Rajan Bhalla told PTI here.

Bhalla said the company was currently in the process of finalising plans for launching the business paper, which can be expected in the news stands by the end of this fiscal.

He said Delhi and Mumbai were the “obvious markets” HT Media had in mind for launching the editions of the newspaper.

Asked when would the edition of Hindustan Times Mumbai, which was launched last year in the general news category, achieve break-even,
Bhalla said it would be “very soon”.

HT Media, the publisher of English daily Hindustan Times and Hindi daily Hindustan, has also recently roped in WSJ’s Europe editor Raju Narisetti for editing the business daily.

“We are in the process of understanding the market as well as team formation for the newspaper,” Narisetti said.

Under the tie-up, the company’s business newspaper and its website would publish WSJ pages that would contain business news from the journal’s print and online editions.

[link via SAJA]

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve slowed down a bit on the blogging this month. More blogging in September. Meanwhile, check out some of the things I’ve been reading:

http://del.icio.us/jerotus

Enjoy the rest of the summer (or winter, if you’re in SYD or Joburg).

–Jim

Indaba means “council” or “meeting,” and that’s exactly what Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa is hosting in mid-September. From Poynter:

Africa’s first-ever major blogging conference, The Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI), will take place Sept. 14-15 in Grahamstown, South Africa. The event is hosted by the New Media Lab (a project of the School of Journalism & Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa). It’s part of the Highway Africa 2006 effort.

This indaba aims to bring bloggers, citizen journalists, media practitioners, industry experts, and representatives from civil society all under one roof. It will feature a diverse range of speakers and media professionals from across the globe. The goal of the event is to “equip Africans with skills related to new media which empower them and the organizations they work for by creating a long-lasting and long-reaching digital voice.” The conference also will tackle issues concerning Web 2.0, citizen journalism, intellectual property rights, online ethics and activism.

This indaba also aims to facilitate networking among fellow Africans in the hope of promoting further collaboration on the continent and build a strong online community.

The East Bay Express reports on how Google’s superior ad serving technology can also act as a censor, as it avoids placing ads on pages that have contextual content that may be deemed graphic. While that makes sense for obscene sites, it also seems to apply to stories like the civilian deaths in Qana last Sunday:

The genius of Google lies in its capacity to pair advertising with similarly themed editorial content. This technique is revolutionizing the very nature of advertising, as businesses exercise more control than ever over the contexts in which their messages appear. Hardware stores, for example, can now ensure that their ads are placed next to stories about home improvement. But businesses also want to control what they don’t appear next to — automakers are displeased when their ads appear next to stories about traffic accidents. In response, in 2003, Google developed “sensitivity filters” to periodically scan the Web sites of its partners in search of violence, mature content, or other unacceptable material. “They detect sensitive content that we probably don’t want to be showing advertising beside, and show public service announcements instead,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety.