Newspaper publishers, in their latest plea for regulatory reform, want to be allowed to collectively lobby Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for story payments. It was amongst a litany of woes Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall, Johnson Press CEO John Fry and Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey - sitting at the same table together - reported in evidence to the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee’s inquiry on the future of local and regional media on Tuesday. Newspapers have made the Google-should-pay case before but this is the first time publishers have publicly discussed collaborating on how to tackle the Google problem and it says everything about how pressing their problems are. —Google: Bailey joined in the bashing of “superdominant Google News”: “That’s our copyright, and they don’t spend a penny on journalism at all—they just make money from ours.” Fry: “It’s like the music industry: in the end you’ve got to pay for content otherwise you won’t have any.” McCall: “Because of competition law, we [publishers] cannot get together around a table and talk about aggregators. Can we go together to talk to Google? We have to come to select committees and do this because it would be deemed anti-competitive.” The subtext: to lobby Google together, the government would need to back their joint efforts as a consortium. Could we soon see a UK version of the hushed-up meeting of US newspaper proprietors last month? —BBC: Having seen off the perceived threat of BBC’s local video project through some heavy-duty lobbying, publishers are still anxious about Auntie. McCall told the committee the Beeb was now a “global Colossus” and wasn’t very good at local media anyway, making a pitch for newspapers to provide public service regional news broadcasting if ITV (LSE: ITV) stops doing it in 2012—stick with the BBC and “we will get one-dimensional coverage”, she said. Fry echoed the much repeated newspaper gripe that news.bbc.co.uk’s regional sections rip off local papers’ reporting—and argued that neither the BBC’s local reporting nor Google News could survive without “us creating that bottom level of the pyramid”. —Regional prospects: The publishers agreed that when the regional newspaper industry does recover (and for them it is a question of “when”) it will be smaller: fewer staff, fewer papers, less revenue. McCall said: “I don’t think the prospects for recovery are strong ... a recovery of advertising will not really solve the problem of regional papers.” But Bailey admitted that “you only need to look at the trading statements to see this industry is in crisis…” but otherwise stayed true to her usual optimism, predicting that “post-recession the majority of media companies will be coping well with structural change.” Disclosure: paidContent:UK’s parent company ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

UK newspaper publishers, in their latest plea for regulatory reform, want to be allowed to collectively lobby Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for story payments. It was among a litany of woes Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall, Johnson Press CEO John Fry and Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey—sitting at the same table together—reported to the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee’s inquiry on the future of local and regional media on Tuesday. Newspapers have made the Google-should-pay case before but this is the first time publishers have publicly discussed collaborating to tackle the Google problem, and it says everything about how pressing their problems are. Lots more on our sister site PCUK.

Newspaper publishers, in their latest plea for regulatory reform, want to be allowed to collectively lobby Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for story payments. It was amongst a litany of woes Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall, Johnson Press CEO John Fry and Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey - sitting at the same table together - reported in evidence to the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee’s inquiry on the future of local and regional media on Tuesday. Newspapers have made the Google-should-pay case before but this is the first time publishers have publicly discussed collaborating on how to tackle the Google problem and it says everything about how pressing their problems are. —Google: Bailey joined in the bashing of “superdominant Google News”: “That’s our copyright, and they don’t spend a penny on journalism at all—they just make money from ours.” Fry: “It’s like the music industry: in the end you’ve got to pay for content otherwise you won’t have any.” McCall: “Because of competition law, we [publishers] cannot get together around a table and talk about aggregators. Can we go together to talk to Google? We have to come to select committees and do this because it would be deemed anti-competitive.” The subtext: to lobby Google together, the government would need to back their joint efforts as a consortium. Could we soon see a UK version of the hushed-up meeting of US newspaper proprietors last month? —BBC: Having seen off the perceived threat of BBC’s local video project through some heavy-duty lobbying, publishers are still anxious about Auntie. McCall told the committee the Beeb was now a “global Colossus” and wasn’t very good at local media anyway, making a pitch for newspapers to provide public service regional news broadcasting if ITV (LSE: ITV) stops doing it in 2012—stick with the BBC and “we will get one-dimensional coverage”, she said. Fry echoed the much repeated newspaper gripe that news.bbc.co.uk’s regional sections rip off local papers’ reporting—and argued that neither the BBC’s local reporting nor Google News could survive without “us creating that bottom level of the pyramid”. —Regional prospects: The publishers agreed that when the regional newspaper industry does recover (and for them it is a question of “when”) it will be smaller: fewer staff, fewer papers, less revenue. McCall said: “I don’t think the prospects for recovery are strong ... a recovery of advertising will not really solve the problem of regional papers.” But Bailey admitted that “you only need to look at the trading statements to see this industry is in crisis…” but otherwise stayed true to her usual optimism, predicting that “post-recession the majority of media companies will be coping well with structural change.” Disclosure: paidContent:UK’s parent company ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

Uh-oh. There were likely some very sore heads around town on Wednesday morning (and we know who you are!). The Association of Online Publishers held its annual awards at Old Billingsgate on Tuesday night, congratulating winners in 17 competition categories. If the night’s celebrations have been pushed from memory by hangover, we have the photographic evidence in this here slideshow, courtesy of AOP. You all look gorgeous... paidContent:UK was nominated in two categories (Specialist Digital Publisher and Digital Publisher - Business); we even got a namecheck of sorts from compere and comedian Hugh Dennis, but that was our only victory - congrats to the winners. —Community contributors must be properly rewarded: Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) is paying local correspondents with school diplomas; CN Group offers them a share of online ad sales. But the returns are miniscule, and won’t incentivise contributors to write more. Why not collaborate with them on commercial, as well as editorial? While you wouldn’t necessarily want community bloggers acting as ad sales reps, online sales team are missing a trick by not using correspondents to find new sponsors and classified ad customers. —City papers should stop competing with nationals, return to their neighbourhoods: The relaunched Evening Standard still offers very little on a local, district level online. In a city made up of inter-connected but often distinct boroughs, it surely makes sense to offer Londoners something relevant to the specific areas they live in. The Standard should become an umbrella for local blogs and news start-ups—a platform for local people to write news about their area. When I floated this idea on Twitter the other day the Standard‘s deputy political editor Paul Waugh gave it a warm reception. So we look forward to hearing of progress on that one… —Pro-ams should work together to reach scale: If mainstream publishers won’t help local start-ups, then the start-ups need to work together to help themselves - William Perrin of the Talk About Local site suggests just that. While there is a loose-knit community of London local sites, a firm, national consortium of publishers, collaborating on technology, commercial strategy and advertising, surely has a better chance of success than a disparate assortment of sites. Rob Powell runs Hyperlocal.co.uk and Greenwich.co.uk and has devised his own listings platform which he says could be exported to other local sites if it proves to be successful. Powell also hosts affiliate links to things businesses like the O2 Arena and New Look—something other local sites could financially benefit from with hardly any cost involved. Budding local publishers should consider giving him call… —Realise readers already have direct-data news: Much is made of journalists’ role in shaping democracy and informing the public, but there are now online tools provide more detailed local information about people’s lives than any newspaper. I follow my MP’s actions on TheyWorkForYou and report problems in my neighbourhood on FixMyStreet, two MySociety projects. I can keep up with planning applications, local news and event listings with HopHive, a free local aggregator. They’re the kinds of information local papers used to enjoy a monopoly for the processing and reinterpretation of - but, thanks to these new tools which place the reader in control, nowadays people have direct access to much of the same raw data that reporters rewrite. Local papers must acknowledge that and augment the upstarts with complementary, not competing, offerings. Just like embracing outside bloggers can add a cheap new range of authoritative voices, so too can showing readers the source of a story free an editorial team to focus on interpreting and investigating news elsewhere.

—BSkyB—Virgin Media: BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) could be looking to bolster its digital TV portfolio by splashing out on seven channels from its close pay TV rival Virgin Media: according to FT.com, Sky is offering a so-far unbeaten £160 million for VMED’s VMtv content division, including Living and Bravo. VMED has been considering selling the VMtv division for months and a sell-off looked especially likely after the sale of its shopping channel business Sell-off TV and the exit of content division CEO Malcolm Wall. Sky’s bid is thought to be well above the money offered by other interested parties, including Channel 4, Five owner RTL, and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX). VMED and Sky only patched up a bitter row last year over offering access to each others’ digital channels—the resultant deal made Virgin pay Sky £38 million a year for the carriage of channels such as Sky News. —EMI-Terra Firma: After writing off half the value of its €2.6 million (£2.27 million) investment in EMI, Guy Hands’ private equity house Terra Firma has now been forced to plough another big cash injection into the major label after it failed to reach targets set in its banking covenants. FT.com reports, citing unnamed sources, Terra Firma injected £28 million into EMI in March and that another payment is imminent—despite improved 2008 results that saw pre-tax profit rise from £51 million in 2007 to £163 million due to severe cost-cutting (though the unaudited accounts didn’t show the real cost of those cuts). FT.com suggests those earnings were not compliant with the debt-to-profit ratio set by Citigroup, which loaned the company £2.6 billion as part of the PE takeover in 2007. —National Readership Survey: The paradox continues: as sales of UK newspapers continue to go south—the only risers propped up by aggressive price cutting, expensive giveaways, ad campaigns or all three—newspaper readership appears to be on the up. The six-monthly National Readership Survey shows that all 13 mainstream national newspapers increased their readership year on year during 2008 and that an average of 21.2 million British people read at least one newspaper a day last year. NRS data should be treated with caution: the survey has no stable sample base which makes period-on-period comparisons unreliable. But again the survey strongly suggests that more people are sharing fewer copies of the dead-tree media. —Dawson News: Hard times for the printed newspaper and magazine distributor Dawson News: as expected, the company today confirms that its £65 million contract with Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) will not be renewed when it expires at the end of the year. That follows the loss of contracts with Comag, Telegraph Media Group and and Associated Newspapers. The company also today announce an operating loss of £16.7 million for the 26 weeks to April. Release.

—7Digital: British iTunes rival 7Digital has launched its mp3 download store via a BlackBerry app due for release either late this month or next month. BlackBerry users will be able to browse and download the site’s thousands of DRM-free tracks from the big four major music labels and a host of indie labels. For playback, the app will automatically change sound quality depending on whether the phone is in 3G or wi-fi coverage. More details and a video of the app in action at Crackberry.com. —Spinvox on iPhone: iPhone users can now convert speech to text emails using nFinity’s QuickVoice app, using an API from voice-to-text platform Spinvox. The app was updated yesterday to include the feature, which can be used to create text versions of spoken audio. Spinvox says 400 developers applied to be part of its API developer programme but only 20 were chosen. Release. —- *Virgin Media*-Bebo: *Virgin Mobile UK* is to launch a new line of hansdsets in partnership with the AOL-owned social network Bebo. Virgin has joined Bebo’s Open Mobile programme which lets telcos create phone with in-built chat and messenging functionality from Bebo.com. Telecom New Zealand also joined the Open Mobile programme in March. From Gomonews.com. —Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) mobile games: UK newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror has signed an exclusive mobile games deal with Manchester, UK-based developer Million-2-1 to provide games for its roster of national newspaper websites and mobile sites. Million-1-2, a subsidiary of IGT-UK, says it is carrying out the deal “on behalf of” Trinity’s long-standing mobile partner Bluestar Mobile. Release.

—7Digital: British iTunes rival 7Digital has launched its mp3 download store via a BlackBerry app due for release either late this month or next month. BlackBerry users will be able to browse and download the site’s thousands of DRM-free tracks from the big four major music labels and a host of indie labels. For playback, the app will automatically change sound quality depending on whether the phone is in 3G or wi-fi coverage. More details and a video of the app in action at Crackberry.com. —Spinvox on iPhone: iPhone users can now convert speech to text emails using nFinity’s QuickVoice app, using an API from voice-to-text platform Spinvox. The app was updated yesterday to include the feature, which can be used to create text versions of spoken audio. Spinvox says 400 developers applied to be part of its API developer programme but only 20 were chosen. Release. —- Virgin MediaMobile-Bebo: Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) Mobile is to launch a new line of hansdsets in partnership with the AOL-owned social network Bebo. Virgin has joined Bebo’s Open Mobile programme which lets telcos create phone with in-built chat and messenging functionality from Bebo.com. Telecom New Zealand also joined the Open Mobile programme in March. From Gomonews.com. —Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) mobile games: UK newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror has signed an exclusive mobile games deal with Manchester, UK-based developer Million-2-1 to provide games for its roster of national newspaper websites and mobile sites. Million-1-2, a subsidiary of IGT-UK, says it is carrying out the deal “on behalf of” Trinity’s long-standing mobile partner Bluestar Mobile. Release.

—7Digital: British iTunes rival 7Digital has launched its mp3 download store via a BlackBerry app due for release either late this month or next month. BlackBerry users will be able to browse and download the site’s thousands of DRM-free tracks from the big four major music labels and a host of indie labels. For playback, the app will automatically change sound quality depending on whether the phone is in 3G or wi-fi coverage. More details and a video of the app in action at Crackberry.com. —Spinvox on iPhone: iPhone users can now convert speech to text emails using nFinity’s QuickVoice app, using an API from voice-to-text platform Spinvox. The app was updated yesterday to include the feature, which can be used to create text versions of spoken audio. Spinvox says 400 developers applied to be part of its API developer programme but only 20 were chosen. Release. —- Virgin Mobile-Bebo: Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) is to launch a new line of hansdsets in partnership with the AOL-owned social network Bebo. Virgin has joined Bebo’s Open Mobile programme which lets telcos create phone with in-built chat and messenging functionality from Bebo.com. Telecom New Zealand also joined the Open Mobile programme in March. From Gomonews.com. —Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) mobile games: UK newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror has signed an exclusive mobile games deal with Manchester, UK-based developer Million-2-1 to provide games for its roster of national newspaper websites and mobile sites. Million-1-2, a subsidiary of IGT-UK, says it is carrying out the deal “on behalf of” Trinity’s long-standing mobile partner Bluestar Mobile. Release.

—7Digital: British iTunes rival 7Digital has launched its mp3 download store via a BlackBerry app due for release either late this month or next month. BlackBerry users will be able to browse and download the site’s thousands of DRM-free tracks from the big four major music labels and a host of indie labels. For playback, the app will automatically change sound quality depending on whether the phone is in 3G or wi-fi coverage. More details and a video of the app in action at Crackberry.com. —Spinvox on iPhone: iPhone users can now convert speech to text emails using nFinity’s QuickVoice app, using an API from voice-to-text platform Spinvox. The app was updated yesterday to include the feature, which can be used to create text versions of spoken audio. Spinvox says 400 developers applied to be part of its API developer programme but only 20 were chosen. Release. —- Virgin Mobile-Bebo: Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) is to launch a new line of hansdsets in partnership with the AOL-owned social network Bebo. Virgin has joined Bebo’s Open Mobile programme which lets telcos create phone with in-built chat and messenging functionality from Bebo.com. Telecom New Zealand also joined the Open Mobile programme in March. From Gomonews.com. —Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) mobile games: UK newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror has signed an exclusive mobile games deal with Manchester, UK-based developer Million-2-1 to provide games for its roster of national newspaper websites and mobile sites. Million-1-2, a subsidiary of IGT-UK, says it is carrying out the deal “on behalf of” Trinity’s long-standing mobile partner Bluestar Mobile. Release.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is set to cut up to 30 staff from the UK advertising sales team for its Nokia Interactive Advertising group, which debuted a year ago. The handset maker claims 100 million eyeballs and 10 percent click-through rates for its Nokia Media Network, which is served up through publishers including Telegraph, Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) and Reuters and some of Nokia’s own online services including Nokia.mobi, MOSH and Widsets. But its statement (via NMA) suggests it’s finding it harder to win advertisers or new publishing partners in the down economy: “As part of its ongoing business review, Nokia has decided that the Nokia Interactive Advertising division should refocus its ad sales and other activities solely on Nokia services, together with some major third-party publishers. As a result of this there will unfortunately be some job losses in the UK office. The worst-case scenario in the UK is that up to 30 people will go, and that’s over half the head count. Nokia is reviewing its business needs and focusing on core needs.” Trinity Mirror told NMA it’s still on board with Nokia, which isn’t getting out of the advertising business altogether:  “Nokia continues to believe that advertising will remain a key revenue generator for the future of internet services, and Nokia Interactive Advertising will continue to offer brands ad opportunities across a growing range of Nokia services.”