BRIEFS.

*Ottaway out of here: Dow Jones & Co., a division of the media behemoth News Corp., said last week that it was renaming its community newspaper group Dow Jones Local Media Group Inc. Even before being sold to News Corp., Dow Jones had de-emphasized the unit's traditional name, Ottaway Newspapers Inc. The Ottaway business dates back to 1936, when James Ottaway Sr. bought a semi-weekly newspaper in Endicott, N.Y., The Bulletin. Dow Jones bought out the Ottaway family in 1970, with Ottaway's descendants helping to run the business through until the 1990s. "Changing our name won't change our core values," said Patrick Purcell, executive chairman of the unit. "Our local media franchises will continue to operate independently to cover the communities they serve." The group employs more than 1200 workers and is operated out of its flagship Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. In addition, the company has seven other dailies, 15 weeklies and a collection of magazines and Internet sites in six U.S. states. When News Corp. purchased Dow Jones in 2007, the company had said it would sell the Ottaway group; a downturn in the newspaper business dashed those hopes.

"New daily to start in Detroit? Two brothers who have specialized in printing daily newspapers when the locals were on strike said last week they are planning to launch the Detroit Daily Press within the next seven weeks. Mark and Gary Stern, originally from Detroit but who now live in Georgia and Florida, said they were in the process of contracting for delivery drivers and press capacity and plan to home-deliver a seven-day-a-week paper. The city's two existing dailies, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, have scaled back home delivery to only Thursday, Friday and Sunday, the three traditionally most profitable days in the week. "There is a definite need here," Mark Stern was quoted by The Associated Press as saying at a news conference in the Detroit suburb of Southfield last Tuesday. "People are used to having a newspaper in their hand. ... That's what we're going to do -- provide a newspaper." The duo produced dailies during newspaper strikes in Detroit in 1964 and 1967, in New York in 1968 and in Minneapolis in 1980.

*Still no cross-ownership decision: The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift a six-year-old stay that would modify the rules surrounding ownership of broadcast stations on Friday, Broadcasting & Cable magazine reported. Chief Judge Anthony Sirica told the interested parties -- which include the Newspaper Association of America, Media General Inc., Tribune Co., News Corp., and Gannett Co. Inc., as well as other broadcasters and newspaper owners -- to return with status reports in October. The case stems from changes sought back in 2003 by the Federal Communications Commission for a variety of ownership issues under then-chairman Michael Powell. The December 2008 loosening of cross-ownership rules -- which allow one owner to have newspapers, radio and TV in the same market -- by the FCC's last chairman, Kevin Martin, are also being held up by the Third Circuit. The FCC's acting general counsel, Michele Elison, told the court that a majority of the existing commission does not support the 2008 rule change. "The Commission at this time supports keeping the current stay in place with respect to the revised newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule," Elison wrote.

*AP to distributed non-profits' work: The Associated Press said on Saturday that it was launching a pilot project to distribute the work from four non-profit investigative journalism groups to its entire 1500 member-newspapers. The wire service said that starting July 1 it would send out the work of the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in Berkeley, Calif., ProPublica of New York City and the Center for Public Integrity and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, both based in Washington, D.C. The material will be distributed on The A.P.'s web-based system, AP Exchange, and neither member papers nor the non-profit groups will be charged. "We're seeing exciting growth in foundation-supported and other non-profit journalism organizations that are producing public service journalism, which is at the heart of A.P.'s news values," said the A.P.'s Sue Cross, a senior vice president. "As a news cooperative that enables its members to share content and provides them with a variety of choices, we want to foster an exchange that helps them easily access this journalism."

*WashingtonPost.com makes some moves: The web site of the Washington Post made two announcements last week regarding new technologies that it will be adopting. The site said that it has become "the largest major news site" to launch Facebook Connect, which will allow Facebook users to share Post content among themselves and to sign onto the Post's site using their Facebook user and password. "Facebook has more than 200 million active users worldwide," said Goli Sheikholeslami of Washington Post Digital. "Our long-term strategy is to move toward creating an increasingly personalized experience for our users, allowing them to carry their social network onto our site." In another announcement, the site said that it and its sibling -- the on-line magazine Slate.com -- are offering a new section called "Innovations in News," and that the section highlights new technical features, including a 3-D video navigation tool, photo mosaics and special data-driven tools.

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