From the Newspaper Society

The INM newspaper launched its redesigned website a month ago and it has seen a 29% jump week on week in page impressions - pretty impressive!

It’s a nice site, a huge improvement on the old one and much more user friendly. It does follow the INM formula pretty much to the letter though.

The first of the Huffington Post’s local news sites launched today. The Chicago site is the first step in a broader strategy to set up a network of local news aggregation sites across the US.

It will be interesting to watch this site over the coming months.

More from Jemima Kiss here

Newspaper publisher Gannett has confirmed today that it is cutting 1000 jobs.

According to WSJ.com the group will lay off 600 newspaper staffers and the remaining 400 will come through retirements and positions being left vacant.

The cuts will be made across 84 of the 85 daily newspapers (but not at USA Today which is in a separate division to the other daily papers) 100 websites and hundreds of non-daily papers.

Jim Hopkins over at Gannett Blog says staff were notified yesterday and today the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky was the first to announce lay offs.

Tomorrow RTÉ.ie presents a special series about technology in the developing world.

Joe Zefran, RTÉ.ie News Editor and I have put the cross-media series together.

Joe traveled to India and I went to Rwanda and Kenya where we reported and shot our own video for three reports on three programmes, including the Irish charity Camara, which are using three different approaches to reach the same goal: educating the world’s youngest citizens.

The series looks at how children in the slums of New Delhi are linked to the larger world, how one experiment wants to make sure every child in the world has their own laptop, and how an Irish charity is changing the lives of people in Kenya.

There will be full-length text features, web-exclusive interviews and a photo gallery on RTÉ.ie/globalclassroom.

Plus, for the first time at RTÉ, RTÉ.ie will produce a three-part television series that will air on the Six One News and News on Two.

My reports will air on Monday and Wednesday and they focus on Camara and One Laptop Per Child.

This has been a very exciting project and I look forward to doing more like it in the future.

Really looking forward to seeing how this works out.

Read more about it here

Boomtown has reported that Guardian News & Media is to announce it has bought Content Next, which owns paidContent.org, later on this morning. As Kara Swisher notes this is quite the new media coup for GNM.

The New York Times’ has reported that The Washington Post has picked Marcus Brauchli, a former top editor at the Wall Street Journal, as its new Executive Editor.

For the NYT article click here

The Washington Post’s press release (including Brauchli’s biog) click here

Yesterday it was announced the LA Times is to cut 250, the majority of these are editorial positions.

Today, AFP reported that the newspaper’s editor, Russ Stanton said the cuts reflected the paradox of the Internet revolution.

AFP reported that the Stanton memo said:

Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.

Read the full story here

Via journalism.co.uk

Hyperlocal news mapping website Everyblock has announced that it is launching in Charlotte, North Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Charlotte map will include library information, updating listings with new titles available locally and chart all local 911 calls to the police and ‘significant police events’ in the city.

The location of series crimes will charted on the Philadelphia map along with areas mentioned by the local authority’s Streets and Services agenda bodies.

Everyblock also has maps for Chicago, San Francisco and New York.

I wish this service had existed when I spent my first summer in Chicago back in 2000! I hope the current crop of J1 students heading stateside this year have found it.

And you can see it here.

As I said, thoughts on this will follow later.