Today the House of Commons told us half of what we knew from reading the revelations made by The Daily Telegraph more than one month ago!

But the most outrageous details were hidden by the thick black strokes of a censor’s pen.

Parliamentary authorities posted details online of four years worth of legislators’ claims but thousands of pages were obscured amid concerns over privacy and security.

It was too little and too late.

The Telegraph will publish some of the uncensored documents in full on Friday.

As BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum says:
Now the Commons has released the official data on MPs’ expenses, much of the focus will actually be on what they still haven’t released – the information which has been blacked out or “redacted”.

And The Guardian launched a tool asking readers for help to review the files:

Step 1: Find a document
Step 2: Decide what kind of thing it is and whether it’s interesting
Step 3: Copy out any individual entries
Step 4: Make any specific observations about why a claim deserves further scrutiny

Yes, The Washington Post is right:

“The Daily Telegraph newspaper has caused both major parties embarrassment with daily revelations about how lawmakers have claimed for expenses such as cleaning swimming pools and moats, installing a chandelier and buying manure for the garden. The disclosures have infuriated voters at a time when Britain is in deep recession and many are losing their jobs.”

Every evening, the online edition of the Telegraph announces more revelations for tomorrow: “More to come”

It’s like a slow motion daily torture.

And if you subscribe to the Telegraph “alerts” you will be the first to know about the next discovery.

Yesterday, my local press agent in St. Davids was calling to the Telegraph distribution center asking for extra copies.

Today, I went around 11 am to buy the paper and I got the last copy.

So, the saga continues.

And the paper is sold out daily.

The Telegraph is giving us a superb lesson in order to cope with any newspaper crisis:

Exclusive news and stories always sell.

And The Daily Telegraph has plenty of them.

Readers love them.

Not the crooks.

So again and again:

Publish the news and raise hell!

This is today’s front page of the first issue of the new LA LIBRE BEGIQUE.

The editors explains (in French) in this video the main changes.

This final hybrid version is a mix of different projects: a first one done by Lucy Lacava, and a second one done by Javier Errea.

See here some pages from our model

And these are from the final remake of today.

You can see the full issue in this pdf version.

After the picture, President Obama presented the Queen with an iPod with footage of her visit to the US in 2007.

A Royal iPod!

Really trashy, full of yellow journalism.

But today they have a sad story about a wild party night for Michael Phelps in Columbia, South Carolina.

The paper claims that he was smoking a cannabis pipe, and that’s the picture of the day.

The PR machine of the Olympic swimmer wanted to stop the publication of the picture.

And the News of The World, which sometimes pays for pictures and articles about scandals, this time did what any newspaper has to do.

In their own words:

“Phelps is represented by marketing giant Octagon, which works with huge brands such as Mastercard and HSBC.

They admitted proven cannabis use would be “a major taint” on Phelps’ character.

Spokesman Clifford Bloxham offered us an extraordinary deal not to publish our story, saying Phelps would become our columnist for three years, host events and get his sponsors to advertise with us.

In return, he asked that we kill Phelps’ bong picture.

Bloxham said: “It’s seeing if something potentially very negative for Michael could turn into something very positive for the News of the World.”

Another fallen hero.

And an expected end of a life that he once described as:

“All you do is eat, sleep, swim; eat, sleep, swim; eat, sleep, swim.”

What a compelling human story to tell!

That nobody covered.

Now we will get it.

Thanks — oh dear — to the News of The World.

Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP, blogs from Davos at the Financial Times.

Bad, boring blogger.

But great FT idea.

Pure advertising.

With great insights.

Are you ready?

What about this one?

“Participant numbers should be reduced.

Security is also very tight, aggravated by the crush.

There are heavy lines and queuing, especially early in the morning.”

The new Saturday Times is here and no bloggers paid any attention to the new formula.

Well, it’s Saturday and weekends are the less newsy days of the week.

So, what a great opportunity to cover what nobody else does.

The new Saturday Times looks fine, but nothing in it is amazing.

The new broadsheet section (Saturday Review) doesn’t makes any sense inside of a still very badly designed tabloid.

The Magazine is another “pottage,” a little of this, a little of that, and … nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing impressive.

Having spent a few days in the UK and reading all the UK national newspapers again, The Guardian is by far the best product during the weekdays, plus its excellent The Observer on Sundays.

The Telegraph is suffering from the broadsheet format.

And The Times still has to improve its current low-class tabloid design.

The Independent is almost dead after redesigns and redesigns.

My St. Davids newsagent asked me the other day: “What newspapers do you want Mr. Giner?”

My answer was: From Monday to Saturday just send me The Guardian, add the Saturday and Sunday Times during the weekend, plus The Observer on Sunday.

Jeff Jarvis and other media bloggers report about print newspapers that go online – not to to die, because they were dead already.

My comment to one of Jeff’s recent posts:

These are dead bodies in dead markets.

Like the papers in Detroit.

So, going online will not solve their problems.

If you were not able to make money in print, how you are going to survive online?

If you didn’t get enough readers and advertisers, how are you going to get them online?

Only print newspapers making money, having readers and advertisers, and investing online will survive.

If you were not innovative in print, how I can believe that you will be online?

These newspapers are not casualties of the Internet, but print failures.

These are not the papers of the future.

They are the losers.

So, let’s focus on what The Guardian does or what The Daily Telegraph, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, Politiken, Aftenposten, O Globo, Zero Hora, The New York Times, USA Today, 20 Minutos, Il Corriere della Sera, Dagens Nyheter, Berlingske Tidende, La Nación or La Tercera do …

Yesterday and today, the U.S. stock market went down.

But The New York Times (NYT) shares went up.

Why?

The reason is here.

They are working with Facebook … so the value of the newspaper company improves.

A good lesson for mono-media companies.

A few months ago, Africa Israel USA, a unit of Africa Israel Investments, paid $525 million for the landmark building that has served as the headquarters for The New York Times for the past 94 years.

Tishman Speyer purchased the building from the newspaper company in 2004 for $175 million.

And now, Tishman has been able to sell the building for triple what it paid the Times only three years ago.

So, real estate is not the expertise of The New York Times’ top business management.

Investors know better, and today, the shares of the newspaper company are at $18.64

The value of the company is now half of what Rupert Murdoch paid for Dow Jones.

This is an interesting picture by Jin Lee for Bloomberg News:

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. chairman and publisher of The New York Times Co., departs the company’s shareholders meeting at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 … using a back exit door.

Just in case.

New York Times Co. shareholders, led by Morgan Stanley, withheld 42 percent of their votes from directors to protest the Sulzberger family’s control over the company.

Five years ago, The New York Times stock was $51.88 (July 5, 2002).

This Friday, the same shares were traded at $18.87.

Not the best financial performance for a first-class newspaper.

The Sulzberger family has a problem.

They need money.

But Wall Street is not listening.

The stock is so cheap that almost any rival could buy all the available shares for next to nothing.

You don’t need to be a Google to buy all this stock.

The problem and the solution here is, again, the family.

They belong to the same company.

The last time that I visited them, they were in the same building.

Yesterday they had the same front page picture.

As you know, the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post exchange their front pages every night …

They belong to different companies and they are in different cities.

In Vancouver, these two papers are together, but, as you can see, they are two separate worlds.

Another example of lack of communication inside, yes, communication companies!

“Trying to assess the true importance of the Internet now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage Miles,” said The New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.

Sorry, but Yahoo!, MySpace, Google, Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, for example, are quite mature developments and the slow response of many traditional media publishers shows that they are not the Wright brothers of the Internet.

Today, The New York Times stock is lower than ever.

Around $18 right now.

Going down again and again after Morgan Stanley sold its nearly 10.4 million shares in the newspaper.

The newsroom is producing a first-class product, but the business management is doing a third-class job.

If you are a fan of Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and economics professor at Princeton University, here is his new blog.

In a surprisingly strong move, the Federal Reserve unanimously voted to cut its overnight interest rate target by a half percentage point to 4.75% Tuesday, citing turmoil in financial markets as a threat to economic growth.

And here you have how a few U.S. newspapers presented the news.

The most striking thing for me is that only a few papers did something dramatic.

That said, some of them did it very well with strong graphics and, more important, with what’s next, why, and what it means to you stories.

Well done! And shame to the 99% that were, as usual, sleeping.

This quality popular tabloid from California has excellent poster front pages.

And the headlines are quite good.

The Wall Street Journal, surprise!, goes soft and calm with a sober chart that doesn’t explain too much.

The Record’s graphic approach was very different and asked an excellent question: Are there more cuts to come?

The same graphic idea but with a full package of what’s next journalism.

Brilliant!

A less dramatic presentation but a meaningful one from North Carolina.

The New York Times did a “sushi graphic” that works and headlines for interesting analysis pieces.

The European newspapers couldn’t elaborate too much but at least the Financial Times in Germany did a good job with this well-planned in advance graphic panel that only needed to add the percent of the final cut.

WSJ Stops Charging for Access to Its Web Site.

Any doubt?

No.

So, the Financial Times is next.

As Jeff Jarvis says in a terrific post:

It’s the relationship that is valuable.

It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution.

That is the essential media moral of the internet story.

It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it.

That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

Jeff also tells this great story:

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in.

In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

(Illustration by Vince Natale/NYT)

An amazing slideshow about pollution in China with pictures by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.

How can a newspaper with content like this have such bad management?

Another example of how the management of The New York Times was wrong.

Read today’s internal memo trying to explain the shift on TimesSelect:

Our TimesSelect experience has provided us with many valuable lessons that have helped us turn NYTimes.com into an even more informative, community-oriented, interactive and entertaining site.

We welcome all online readers to enjoy the popular and powerful voices that have defined Times commentary – Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof.

And we invite them to become acquainted with our exclusive online journalism – columns by Stanley Fish, Maira Kalman, Dick Cavett and Judith Warner; the Opinionator blog; and guest forums by scientists, musicians and soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq.

All this will now reach a broader audience in the United States and around the world.

We want to thank everyone who has contributed to TimesSelect.

You should be very proud of what you accomplished, creating one of the Web’s outstanding opinion forums.

Yesterday marked the 156th anniversary of the first issue of The New York Times.

Our long, distinguished history is rooted in a commitment to innovation, experimentation and constant change.

All three themes were plainly evident in the skillful execution of TimesSelect; they will be on full display as NYTimes.com becomes entirely open.

Sincerely,

Vivian Schiller, Andy Rosenthal and Jonathan Landman

TimesSelect was launched in September 2005 and, two years later, had approximately 787,400 active subscribers.

Approximately 471,200 received TimesSelect free of charge as a benefit of their home-delivery subscriptions, while 227,000 paid for online access and another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses through TimesSelect University.

Forbes magazine is trying to sell its building in Manhattan for $140 million.

The New York Times not only sold the old headquarters in Times Square for $525 million, but also its former printing plant for $11.5 million.

Is this a trend?

Yes.

Sell all your non-core business assets.

Including printing presses.

And invest all this money in the digital transition.

As soon as possible.

Period.

Clark Hoyt, the new public editor of The New York Times, is right:

The New York Times has been very soft covering the Sulzberger family, and very agressive covering the Bancrofts.

The lead of his great column:

HERE’S a story I’d like to read — and I’ll bet you would too.

One of America’s leading companies, a world-famous brand, has hit a rough patch.

Its revenues and profits are declining, its debt rating has been downgraded, and a leading Wall Street house has advised investors to dump their shares.

With sales of its core product falling, the company is raising the price and investing heavily in new technology that is slow to pay off.

A major outside shareholder has been agitating to end the stock structure that has allowed one storied and powerful family to run the company for four generations. Another family in the same troubled industry appears ready to throw in the towel, will this family be able to stick together and find new success?

This is dramatic and important stuff.

And it’s the kind of story you often read on the front page or the Sunday Business front of The New York Times.

But you haven’t read this one in full, sweeping style because the company is The New York Times, and the family is the close-knit and extraordinarily private Ochs-Sulzbergers, descendants of Adolph Ochs, who came up from Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1896, bought the failing New-York Times and put it on the path to greatness.

Hoyt is a former Knight-Ridder editor.

I met him several times in the past and I’m sure he is going to be a good public editor.

Newspaper ombudsmen are always controversial figures.

Clark Hoyt is going to be one of the most controversial ones.