Gannett Company’s USA Today is planning to start an electronic edition of their newspaper.  USA Today has the widest circulation of any other newspaper around the nation with 2.11 million copies delivered every weekday.  The newspaper started in 1982.

The electronic version of the newspaper will be available for a monthly fee and will be delivered through e-mail starting August 3.  USA Today publisher David Hunke said that the company is currently seeking alternative ways to make money as the media is dealing with declines in advertising.

Access to the main website will most likely not have a charge anytime in the near future.  The company may even charge for a USA Today iPhone application.

[via Associated Press]

Mogulus has decided to rebrand themselves under a new name: Livestream.com.  The last time I wrote about Mogulus was around July 2008 when they raised $10 million in funding from Gannett.  As part of the funding, Mogulus had to provide online broadcasting services to all of Gannett’s properties.

This week Mogulus decided to rebrand themselves into LiveStream.com.  The company signed up about 1,000 accounts that are paying $350 per month for online broadcasting services.  Livestream has about $12.7 million in reserves.  Mogulus had raised $1.5 million in Series A from private investors in January 2008.

When the company decided to rebrand, they acquired the Livestream.com domain name for about $100,000.  Through advertising opportunities with ScanScout and Google, the company is nearing profitability according to NewTeeVee.

Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) has bought 10% of CareerBuilder.com from Tribune Company for $135 million. After this acquisition, Gannett now owns 50.8% of CareerBuilder. Based on the equity acquisition, CareerBuilder is worth about $1.35 billion. CareerBuilder’s rival, Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:MNST) is worth about $2.37 billion based on it’s market capitalization.

“CareerBuilder is a terrific company, with great growth potential that just keeps delivering more for Gannett and our partners,” stated Craig Dubow, Chairman, President, and CEO of Gannett Co., Inc. “We were delighted when the opportunity arose to acquire more of the company while maintaining a good, solid relationship with our partners.”

Tribune Company has been struggling to pay off $13 billion in debt. A lot of the debt was accumulated by taking their company private and from a decrease in advertising revenue. Some of Tribune Company potential strategies for paying off their debt includes selling the Chciago Cubs and Wrigley Field. Tribune is even debating whether to sell off the Chicago Tribune Tower and the L.A. Times.

Tribune Company now owns 30.8% of Careerbuilder.com. Other owners in Careerbuilder includes The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI) at 14.4% and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at 4%.

For additional details, check out the press release.

Live broadcast company, Mogulus has raised funding from Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI).  Gannett’s investment in Mogulus also extends the commercial agreement between the two companies to provide broadcasting services on all of Gannett’s properties. 

Several Gannett subsidiaries have successfully used Mogulus for live video coverage.  The Indianpolis Star (www.indystar.com) to provide live editorial coverage of an interview with Senator Barack Obama.  AZCentral used Mogulus to live broadcast the press conference for the announcement of hosting the 2012 Super Bowl.  And ArgusLeader.com used Mogulus to live broadcast an interview with Senator Hillary Clinton.

“Mogulus adds a new and exciting dimension to Gannett’s already broad-based multimedia journalism efforts. Our reporters and photographers in the field are equipped with video cameras, laptops and broadband wireless connections to enable timely and relevant news delivery to the Web. Now, with Mogulus, all our journalists – including print and Web reporters – can deliver live, multi-camera broadcasts of news events to our customers,” stated Craig A. Dubow, Chairman, President and CEO of Gannett.  “Live internet broadcasting tools are essential in this new media age. We believe in the space and in the ability of Mogulus to deliver.”

Mogulus offers several tools for any television station or amateur videographer to get their footage online.  There are built-in multiple camera and editing tools on Mogoulus.  Anyone can create their own channel.  And there are embeddable Mogulus players that can be added to social networks and other websites.  Mogulus’ traffic has doubled every 60 days for the last 10 months.  Currently the company receives 200 million uniques per month.

“This investment from Gannett is a terrific partnership which will not only give us the financial resources to secure Mogulus as the leading live broadcasting service but also gives us our first major Mogulus Pro customer,” stated Max Haot, co-founder and CEO at Mogulus. “Our immediate priority is now to accelerate our product development to launch Mogulus Pro, recruit senior executives in the areas of service sales and advertising sales and deploy the Mogulus Pro service deeper within Gannett properties and those of other customers.”

Although the round of funding was undisclosed, TechCrunch reports that this round of investment was $10 million.  This brings Mogulus’ total funding to roughly $13 million.

Related Links:
1. TechCrunch
2. Mogulus blog

Topix.net, a news aggregator will be announcing today that they have received another $15 million from already existing stakeholders in the $72 million-valued Palo Alto, CA based company. By upping the ante of investment into Topix, Gannett Company Inc. and the Tribune Company will now hold a 33.7% share of the company each. The McClathy Company owns another 11.9% of the company, thus making 79.3% of the Topix.net company being held by investors.

What makes Topix.net unique from other news aggregators such as CNN, Google News, Live Search News, etc? Topix aims to provide customized news aggegration based on user needs. Topix.net’s patent pending NewsRankâ„¢ technology allows its users to select from over 360,000 categories or from over 32,500 U.S. cities and towns to bring them the news they want to hear. Not only that, but users can backtrack news articles produced since the last year using the Topix.net search engine.

In August of 2006, Topix.net added a couple of impressive features which include a case-sensitive enabled search and a click-o-gram histogram chart in which users can select at what point in the timeline that they would like to read archived news about certain companies, celebrities, sports, etc. Check out the screenshot that I have of the histogram below when I searched for Detroit Tigers, one of the worst teams in the MLB until this year when they moved all the way to the World Series in one of the biggest turnarounds in MLB history. Notice how the news aggregators picked up on the Detroit Tigers in October during The World Series?

Currently there are 25 people working for Topix.net and with the new funding, Chris Tolles, VP of Sales and Marketing of Topix.net plans on hiring and marketing aggressively as well as finding other ways to monetize from Topix services.

As I was writing this article and referring to CNET, I also noticed that a similar post went up on GigaOM about an hour or two ago and had several comments added right away which I thought I would mention since they suggest improvement for Topix. Louis Gray stated: “Topix is a great site, and does a strong job of searching archived news releases. Despite this, for some reason, they just aren’t on my list of ‘go to’ sites. Topix is NOT a destination site in the way that Digg and Slashdot and Google News are.” Om Malik, founder of GigaOM stated: “I use it to track telecom and its various subsectors.they could do a better job of the user interface.”

Given what it sounds like from these Topix testimonials, the site is finding a hard time being “sticky.” However, since the site is now backed by another $15 million, I’m sure that they will find ways to take away marketshare from Google News, Digg, and Slashdot.