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The Editors Weblog is closed for the next two weeks. We'll be back providing you with the best newspaper industry news and analysis on August 24th. Enjoy the summer holidays!

An independent study will be conducted to review the governance of the Press Complaints Commission, it was announced by the body's chairman, Baroness Buscombe. The review, the first of its kind since the PCC was established in 1991, will serve to reflect on the workings of the organisation and to identify areas where transparency and efficiency could be improved.

According to the PCC website, the study will focus on the dynamics of the body's board, sub-committees and the secretariat; investigate if the autonomous accountability mechanisms Charter Commissioner and Charter Compliance Pane require further attention and if there is  room for improvement in the PCC's Articles of Association.

Rupert Murdoch has reiterated his intention to charge online at all News Corp-owned newspapers in the near future. Speaking on a conference call with analysts about News Corp's earnings, he said that the goal is to start charging within the next financial year, ending in June 2010, reported paidContent's Staci Kramer.

News Corp reported a $3.4bn net loss in the last financial year to June. "Quality journalism is not cheap," the Guardian quoted Murdoch as saying. "The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites." He declared himself willing to take the risk to lead the industry in switching to a paid model, the Guardian reported, and said that he believes others will follow. PaidContent said that he suggested that WSJ.com will be a model for charging on the other news sites.

The new Mayor of Doncaster has closed the city's council paper, deeming it no more than a platform for "council propaganda" and "an exercise in distorting unpalatable truths". A similar move was made by local authorities in Cornwall, who have pulled the plug on the costly state paper, Your Cornwall.

The Mayor of the Yorkshire town, Peter Davies, scrapped the paper on his first day in the job. He told the Doncaster Free Press that he plans to keep citizens informed about local government activity through local news organisations, including the Free Press.

Sony is set to launch two new e-reader models next month, which should act as rival products to Amazon's Kindle, the biggest name in the scene, and the forthcoming slim-line Plastic Logic.

The Sony Reader Pocket Edition has a 5-inch display and is priced at $199, which according to a Sony statement, makes the product the least expensive device on sale. The Reader Touch Edition, which boasts a touch-screen, will be sold at a $299. Sony's current e-reader devices are priced at $279 and $349. The pricing is obviously of immense importance for the commercial viability of the product, particularly as it seems that its "affordability" is being used as its greatest asset in comparison with the dominating Kindle. Amazon last month cut the cost of the standard model to $299, while the larger screen Kindle DX costs $489.

The Internet is not to blame for the demise of newspapers, says Michael Hickins of The Faster Times. Rather, he believes there are two reasons: the overinflated salaries of editors and online content-makers, coupled with "fraudulent circulation numbers." Articles which have appeared both in print and online blaming free content of the web have often suggested that "even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat from the rise of the internet," (Paul Starr, for The New Republic) and that "the Internet is killing newspapers," (The Economist, May 2009 print edition).

Hickins argues that the news has always been free, citing Jeff Sonderman's theory that the public has never actually paid for the content of a newspaper. Therefore, the fact that consumers are not paying for online news should not be a problem, he claims.

In a similar vein to his examination of UK newspapers and Twitter, blogger Malcolm Coles has analyzed the website traffic of his country's papers to find out which is best at engaging visitors. His conclusion: The Sun wins both for the average number of pages readers view daily and the percentage of readers viewing more than one page.

The overall average of daily page views is 2.5. Sun readers, by comparison, visit four pages each day. Viewed another way, the overall average percentage of readers who only visit one page (what Coles terms the "bounce rate") is 62.8 percent. At the Sun, just 48.5 percent of visitors click away after viewing one page.

The New York Times has interviewed the senior researcher of Media Cloud, Ethan Zuckerman, who is based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, about his project which tracks news and archives the information in a searchable form. Its aim is to create a "comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time," according to the NYT. It will be available to the public.

Media Cloud's website explains that it builds an archive of news stories and applies automated content analysis data and language processing. It then offers the public ways to analyse and visualise the data, and suggests sharing research ideas by asking "who is covering what?" 

The cover of today's edition of Florida's St. Petersburg Times emphasised a correction to the ill-founded comments made by columnist Eric Deggans. In his Sunday piece, Deggans had stated, incorrectly, that Fox News presenter, Bill O'Reilly had said that President Obama was racist.

The front-page correction clarified:  "Bill O'Reilly has not accused Barack Obama of racism. An article in Sunday's Perspective section about the National Association of Black Journalists incorrectly included the Fox newscaster in a list of commentators who have publicly accused the president of racism."