Tag Archives: peter preston

Thelondonpaper – what everyone’s saying

A quick round-up of the weekend and Monday morning comment on the fate of the londonpaper:

“thelondonpaper is closing – with a pre-tax loss of £12.9m last financial year on £14.1m turnover. Maybe if they’d sorted out their SEO strategy, they’d have got more website visitors and sold more adverts?”

“Let’s assume, then, that when James Murdoch says he’s concentrating on his ‘core’ responsibilities henceforth, he means no more fishing in Metro ponds. That phase is gone. News International has retired hurt. But what does this mean for London itself, apart from much less waste paper?”

“Free newspapers funded by advertising are a volatile business model in any downturn, let alone a recession. While freesheets are unlikely to disappear altogether, in closing the London Paper the Murdochs have underlined their belief that charging for news is the way forward.”

  • Stephen Glover (the Independent, 24/08/09): ‘A vicious press war with no real victors
  • “[T]he supposedly invincible media mogul has raised the white flag. He is closing thelondonpaper. In my view, of course, he should never have launched it in the first place. It was an expensive distraction that contributed little or nothing to good journalism.”

“News International’s decision to close its only freesheet highlights the newspaper industry’s move towards charging for content in print and online and away from the focus on ‘free’, which gave us the London Lite, Metro, thelondonpaper and City AM, the morning business paper.”

and from last week:

“[The decision] shows just how much the axis of publishing has shifted: just as proprietors are growing weary of readers enjoying their online news for free, there is not nearly the same confidence in the free print model there was three years ago and publishers are reverting to ways of maximising user revenue in all media instead of giving it away for nothing. And, more fundamentally for News International, London’s free newspaper war was just costing too much.”

Journalism Daily: Changing business models for photographers and branding for journalists

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On the Editors’ Blog:

Peter Preston: Advertisers needs transparency in metrics to move online

“[P]art of the answer to not enough advertising revenue lies in serving the advertiser better,” writes Preston, referencing last week’s results of an inquiry into reporting of newspaper bulks as a step towards greater transparency of circulation figures.

But there isn’t an international standard for web traffic measurement to news sites and the difference between current methodologies (e.g. those of Nielsen in the US and the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK) could leave advertisers feeling lost, he says.

“It ought to be simple. The information is there online. But if you can’t extricate it, how do you expect more than a few categories of internet advertising to break through to good prices in great quantity?”

Full post at this link…

Observer: An internet licence fee could aid newspapers

Peter Preston proposes an internet licence fee to aid ailing newspapers and the BBC – both of which face challenges in the multi-platform, free content world.

“Split the licence in two. Lump conventional TV and radio into one package that, until a few years ago, would have been the only package around. Then create a second fee package for cyberspace,” writes Preston.

Full article at this link…