In an interview with Dow Jones, reproduced by the Morning Star, Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Doepfner says customers will be willing to pay for ‘online quality content’ within the next five years.
Significantly, Doepfner adds: “However, our business cases aren’t based on a breakthrough of paid content but will work anyhow.”
The chief exec plans to generate 50 per cent of Axel Springer’s sales from online operations within the next 10 years, according to the report.
Peter Mandelson had to be a last minute addition to the list because the magazine had already gone to press: being offline seems to be a recurring theme for the London Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential Londoners list, out this evening.
Can we get an online version? Can we heck! After time wasted going round the editorial houses through the Evening Standard switchboard, Brighton-based Journalism.co.uk is getting sent a print version.
So in the meantime (till the print copy arrives) here’s the online media and general media types we’ve spotted on the list of 50 that are featured on the website. And it looks like new media gets a fairly good representation.
The little ‘see new media’ under the names almost had us thinking we could click on links… no chance. Well, we’re not in London; we don’t really exist, clearly.
Shiny Media’s three founders are included – and quoted as being “highly influential in the UK online world”. They aren’t among the very top 50, but you can see a scanned in bit of the list on the Shiny blog.
Media/Online types from the top 50:
Outside of the big 50 we’ll have to rely on the Guardian’s Media Monkey for information:
“…chief exec James Murdoch, Ashley Highfield, chief exec of the Kangaroo on-demand TV project and, drum roll please, Evening Standard owner Lord Rothermere, chairman of DMGT! Who’d have thunk that thisislondon.co.uk was such a groundbreaker?
Other media bods on the list were Paul Darce, Rebecca Wade, Ed Richards, Mark Thompson, Simon Cowell, Simon Fuller, Nick Ferrari, Emily Bell, Eric Huggers, Evan Davies, John Humphrys, Jay Hunt, Peter Horrocks, Alexandra Shulman and Gok Wan.”
Former New Statesman editor John Kampfner has been named as chief executive of the press freedom magazine Index on Censorship.
“As a leading journalist and broadcaster John brings the vision and leadership skills needed to place Index at the centre of the debate surrounding freedom of expression and champion this vital human right nationally and globally,” said Jonathan Dimbleby, chairman of Index on Censorship, in an announcement on the Index on Censorship’s website.
Internal and external candidate are being considered in preparation for Sir Crispin’s departure next year.
A redesigned Daily Mail website – rebranded as Mail Online – is to be officially launched after a period of beta testing.
The old site will be shut down over the next couple of days as the new design is brought in, an announcement on the site said yesterday.
The revamp introduces a navigation bar with drop down previews of section headlines, a central picture gallery and a wider page format.
A bookmarking function to allow users to save stories on a personalised page is another new feature, while the right hand column of the homepage has been given over to articles from the newspaper’s popular Femail section.
Speaking to the House of Lords communications committee today, Charles Sinclair, chief executive of the Daily Mail and General Trust, said the paper had been ‘quite late online’.
“With one or two honorable exceptions the newspapers around the world were not making a good job of putting newspapers online,” he said.
“So the Mail has come to this rather late – in the last 18 months, but having decided what to do, it is now doing it rather well.”
The narrowing gap between audiences for the Mail website and Guardian.co.uk showed the success of its online strategy despite coming to the web relatively recently, Sinclair said.
The most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) put the Mail website at 17,972,153 unique users to the Guardian’s 18,703,811.