News Surfers' Changing Habits
A new study finds that news site surfers' habits change throughout the day, with profound implications for the online news industry. "By morning, our users are almost as interested in news — breaking, local, national, business and sports — as they are in e-mail," says Rusty Coats, whose MORI Research conducted the 2002 Online Consumer Study for the Newspaper Association of America. "By afternoon, with the importance of news waning, entertainment-category features such as movie times, maps and directions, and offbeat news are on the rise. In the evening, our ability to connect users with jobs, cars and homes becomes central, along with our ability to facilitate their online-shopping needs — from researching products to actually purchasing products." Coats points out that the findings could help online news sites become as important to nighttime, at-home users as they currently are for daytime, at-work users, and reports that many companies already have begun to redesign their Web sites based on these findings. [1/8]

So Much for Freedom of the Online Press...
Tehelka.com, the Indian online news site once lauded for exposing corruption in India's political and military establishment by capturing on video defense officials accepting bribes for arms contracts, is now "virtually defunct" and owes nearly $1 million, The Guardian reports. According to The Guardian, Indian authorities retaliated after the scandal by jailing the site's investors, scaring away other potential backers. "The saga is a depressing example of how the Kafkaesque weight of government can be used to crush those who challenge its methods," The Guardian's Luke Harding writes. You can still read the full transcript of the video and officials' reactions to it on this page on Tehelka.com -- at least for now. [1/8]

Songs from the Grave
When a famous singer dies, posting audio clips with the obituary is a good idea, as The New York Times did when The Clash's Joe Strummer died. [1/7]

Spanish News Web Sites
New York daily El Diario/La Prensa is one of American's oldest and most respected Spanish-language newspapers, but didn't have a Web site until  last week, when it launched eldiariony.com. "People were like, `Finally!' " said Rossana Rosado, El Diario's publisher for the last three years told The New York Times. The site stacks up pretty well against its primary U.S. competitors: El Nuevo Herald of Miami; La Opinión of Los Angeles; and El Diario's main local competitor, Hoy. [1/7]

HotBot vs. Google
The new HotBot now makes it incredibly fast and easy to search all four of the best search engines on the Web: Google, FAST, Inktomi, and Teoma. But not all users are thrilled. Here's a look at the new HotBot and at what some users think. [1/7]

WSJ Online Not Laughing Anymore
WSJ.com thought it was pretty clever when it launched an ad camapign called Biz-O-Rama mocking its free counterparts. But The New York Times reports that the Journal appeared to have lost its sense of humor when MarketWatch tried to place an ad on The Journal Online that asked, in a preliminary version, "Where does The Wall Street Journal advertise — when they need to reach the online business audience?" The ad's answer: CBS MarketWatch. Dow Jones not only rejected the ad, but then pulled its Biz-O-Rama ad from MarketWatch.com. The curious will be able to find the ad next week in the online and print editions of Advertising Age. [1/6]  

Online Polls Skew GOP
Keen observers of online news polls have noticed the results tend to skew toward conservative answers. Now there's proof of that. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to participate in online surveys, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, in cooperation with the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Half of those who said they like to take online polls were Republicans, while one in five were Democrats and just one in four were independents. The survey also reported that percentage of Internet users who went online for election news in 2002 was 22 percent, up slightly from 15 percent during the last midterm congressional election in 1998. [1/6]

You've Got Advice
Nonprofitable news sites are not failures because they help grow subscribers, revenue and commerce, argues AOL News Director Gary Kebbel in a Q&A with E&P. But they can be made profitable, he says. Media companies should break down the the walls between online sites and newspapers. They should deliver what no other competitor can: targeted local information like alerts about school closings or sports scores. Searchable classified ads. "In other words, I would use the medium's capabilities to create products that cannot be delivered anywhere else or by anyone else. The more unique and targeted those products are, the greater the chance they can become premium services for which the news organization charges." [1/5]