Magazine publisher Future has said it is “considering a wider range of strategic options” for its US division in light of “challenging” conditions for the business.

In pre-close trading update the publisher said its position in the US “is significantly more challenging” than the UK. In July Future announced plans to “accelerate the transition of Future US into a primarily digital business”.

But this week, in a report preceding full-year earnings in November, the group said trading conditions in the US “reflecting ongoing weakness and decreasing visibility at newsstand” means the board is now considering a wider range of strategic options. PaidContent reports that the language used suggests the company “now may look to sell its business there”.

The publisher also confirmed that 10 per cent of its workforce has been cut in the UK and worldwide, which equals around 100 jobs, as part of its restructure to focus on digital and print efficiencies.

The company also claims in the latest report that the trends identified in its Interim Management Statement, published in July, have continued.

Revenues for the twelve months ending 30 September 2011 are expected to be down 6 per cent on last year, in constant currency.  The Board remains comfortable with market expectations of results for 2011, subject only to any period-end adjustment required in relation to US newsstand returns, beyond those already announced and incorporated into fourth quarter estimates.

• Future: Digital ads going from strength-to-strength
• Future reports substantial progress online
• Digital revenue helping magazine publisher Future get back on track
• Trinity Mirror reports 10 per cent drop in advertising revenue
• New figures show ad revenue decline slowing at Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror

Bloomberg reported late on Wednesday (28 September) that News Corporation’s iPad-only newspaper the Daily has been averaging around 120,000 readers a week, said to be “less than a quarter of the number the company said it needs to make money”.

The figures came from advertising executive working with the publication.

News Corp., whose Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch personally introduced the publication about eight months ago, may have even fewer paying subscribers since people can read the Daily free for two weeks. The 120,000 figure is for so-called unique weekly visitors, which includes people who pay and those who don’t, said John Nitti, executive vice president of Publicis Groupe SA (PUB)’s media-buying division Zenith Optimedia.

Bloomberg adds that Murdoch had said in February the publication, which was launched in February, would need 500,000 subscribers “to break even”.

Read the Bloomberg report here.

• paidContent: News Corp’s ‘iPad paper’ the Daily to launch on 2 Feb
• Bloomberg: US publisher Gannett trialing paid-content model
• Poynter: Five ways to turn traffic spikes into return visits
• Bloomberg View will be ‘consistent with the values of the founder’
• The Cutline: Steve Jobs to join Murdoch on stage for unveiling of new iPad publication

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has penned a long piece for the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog about the newspaper’s tax status and its relationship with funding bodies the Scott Trust and Guardian Media Group.

It makes for interesting reading for anyone curious about the tax issues facing large, loss-making media organisations, or the affiliate revenue streams that keep them running, or the measures in place for making sure editorial content is not unduly influenced by the business dealings that provide for it.

Individual columnists – and even leader writers – may well disagree with some aspects of how the parent company has run itself over the years. Commercial colleagues may likewise fundamentally disagree with the views of the paper and its writers. The point of the trust is to allow each to operate independently. It seems an odd argument that individual Guardian journalists, who have no part in business decisions, should refrain from covering tax avoidance, or should feel inhibited in expressing their views.

Full post on Guardian.co.uk at this link.

• Scott Trust chair calls for bylined leader articles
• BBC Trust launches ‘its largest’ TV service review – into BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four
• Record web traffic for Northcliffe Media’s regional titles
• #wmf: Guardian will target international audiences as ‘untapped business’
• BBC Trust’s dilemma over local video plans

A decline in print advertising at specialist leisure publisher Future has been more than compensated by strong growth in digital, the group announced today.

Print ad income fell 10 per cent year on year in the last quarter of 2010, but digital grew by 25 per cent over the same period.

Online now makes up a third of Future’s total advertising revenue and the company said income from digital magazine subscriptions was also increasing “substantially”.

Chief executive Stevie Spring said in today’s trading statement: “We expect the trading environment to remain challenging throughout 2011 but our progress online and in tablet and mobile development is pleasing.”

• #ftmedia12: FT content revenues could overtake advertising in 2012
• Future: Digital ads going from strength-to-strength
• Digital revenue helping magazine publisher Future get back on track
• Future websites attracting over 11m unique users per month
• NYT second-quarter operating profit more than twice 2009 figure

A survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute of more than 1,600 iPad users has found that more than half of print newspaper subscribers who spend around an hour a day reading news on the iPad are “very likely” to cancel their print subscriptions within six months.

paidContent reports on what these figures could mean for news publishers.

…as the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) prepares to put its digital content, including its revamped iPad app, behind the metered paywall next year, and companies like Gannett (NYSE: GCI) debate whether to keep its USA Today app free, the study shows how far publishers might be able to go in terms of getting readers to pay more for their content.

The Reynolds survey is the first phase of a multi-year research project to understand how Apple iPad users consume news content.

• Forbes: Gannett to introduce metered access for 80 newspaper websites
• Independent: Ten years of FT’s metered pay model
• Paywall subscribers worth a quarter of print counterparts, claims survey
• iPad news: would you pay more?
• Slovakian media goes behind the paywall

As paidContent:UK reports, Norwegian media group Schibsted has come up with what can only be described as a very original new revenue stream. The Aftenbladet publisher now owns 97 per cent of Swedish money lender Lendo.se.

Lendo visitors fill in a web application form to borrow up to SEK 350,000 (£31,770) at interest from 3.93 per cent. It’s about as far from the core of a newspaper business as you could imagine.

Full story on paidContent:UK at this link.

• Media Release: Schibsted titles to livestream Norwegian football matches
• MediaGuardian: DMGT records second highest ever profit
• How the Guardian and Telegraph overtook the Mail in latest ABCe traffic report
• paidContent:UK: Newsagents see 14 per cent decline in newspaper revenue over a decade
• paidContent:UK: News aggregator may take legal action against NLA copying levy

Mark Colvin of Australia’s PM radio programme has an interview up today with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. It focuses on the recent publication of figures from behind the Times and Sunday Times paywalls and finds Rusbridger as determined as ever to keep his paper free and champion open online journalism.

Comparing the Times’ new ‘slimmed-down’ online audience – which Rusbridger estimates to be about 30,000-50,000 users a month, against 37 million for the Guardian – he says the two newspapers’ digital operations now represent “two completely different ideas of size, scale and ambition”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing the Guardian editor has to say concerns the effect of the paywall on print sales, which he was expecting to rise when free digital access disappeared. The Times print circulation hasn’t plummeted since, but it certainly hasn’t shown significant gains: circulation fell by 14.81 per cent year-on-year in September, second only to the Telegraph and higher than the 12.3 per cent average for quality titles. August saw the Times’ average daily circulation slip below 500,000 for the first time since 1994.

As Rusbridger points out, the digital arm of the newspaper, rather than acting as a plain substitute which draws readers away from the print edition when free and drives them to it when paid, may serve to promote the whole brand. It may well act “like a sort of marketing device for the newspapers”, he says.

If you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.

Rusbridger continues to be one of the industry’s most vocal objectors to the paywall. As he says here, he believes that “the journalist organisations that are best placed to survive are the ones that are going to go with the technology rather than decrying it and fighting it”. To that end, his “overwhelming aim is just to keep on producing the Guardian in a form which will suit whatever technology people invent”.

Colvin asks Rusbridger about the Guardian’s increasing digital revenue – “we’re up well over 50 per cent year-on-year and last year we earned about £40 million”, Rusbridger claims – but not, disappointingly, about the paper’s tactics in any detail, its success at bringing in money in through affiliate projects for example. Tim Brooks, managing director of Guardian News and Media, landed a blow for the Guardian’s approach earlier in the week, putting the Times’ new paywall revenue in a particularly unflattering context: “We’re probably making more money from our online dating service”, he told the MediaPro conference.

No mention of the Guardian’s own losses from Colvin or Rusbridger though. Despite the paper’s continued growth of digital revenue and laudable approach to online journalism, they are still running pretty high.

Read the full interview at this link…

• NYT second-quarter operating profit more than twice 2009 figure
• Beehive City: Alan Rusbridger on the Times, paywalls and industry in-fighting
• Should we ‘pay the wall’ to maintain quality journalism?
• Beehive City: Alan Rusbridger vs John Witherow on BBC Radio 4
• Zeit Online: Alan Rusbridger interview – ‘I’m an economic realist’

Should bloggers making money from their site have to pay a business tax?

It’s a question that’s been doing the rounds in the past week, following what commentators have been labelling a “tax amnesty” in Philadelphia. Thousands of online writers have reportedly received letters from local government reminding them that if they make money from their site, they must pay up.

Any bloggers earning revenues from their online publishing – through display advertising or services such as Google Adsense – will be asked to pay $300 (or $50 a year) for a Business Privilege Licence. Alternatively, they can remove any advertising or other money-making means and have their blog classified as a hobby.

The renewed efforts by the city council to ensure everyone eligible to pay does so have sparked wide debate and commentary across the web, from the Washington Post and Reuters to technology news site Mashable, who say the fee will only have limited impact.

The Atlantic Wire offers a neat summary of the main arguments, from Technorati’s post arguing that a $300 tax is “outrageous” for bloggers who on the whole make little returns, to New York Magazine’s suggestion that bloggers should shun advertising services, rather than hand over the small profits they make.

• Mashable: Reuters frees content with new API
• Is CNN about to buy Mashable?
• Dan Mason: The ‘pathetic tirade’ over council newspapers
• Salford Star: Council newspaper costing £27,797 a month – what impact on local news?
• Tweet stream of the #cfund debate: ‘New business models for media’

RWW looks at MLB.com’s iPhone app, which has just added a feature to stream live video.

At $10, fans of the sport are downloading the app to gain access to stats and data – a new revenue stream for other media?

“The emphasis on statistics, the extensive reporting infrastructure that baseball already has built out and the ‘wow factor’ of the iPhone’s interface are all things that other established media outlets have an opportunity to emulate,” writes Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Full story at this link…

• #jpod – How the social media community can shape the news agenda
• Monday Note: Why paid news on mobile could work
• International Herald Tribune launches iPhone site
• Nieman Journalism Lab: News content is ‘a stream’
• New Media Age: Mail Online launches paid-for mobile app

From the Observer Media Diary: evidence of a print newspaper model that seems to be, wait for it, reducing its losses.

“City AM, London’s free financial paper, continues to confound the sceptics.

“It filed accounts for 2007 earlier this month, which revealed accumulated losses of just over £7m – but that reflects start-up costs, and sources close to the title say that, after several years of losing well over £2m, it will post a loss of just few hundred thousand pounds this year.

“Revenues are up 22 per cent and the title is on course to make money in 2009, at a time when more established titles are likely to plunge into the red.”

• Rusbridger: Guardian paywall ‘has not been ruled out’
• FT.com: GNM considers Observer’s future in digital age
• Sunday Sport founder expected to relaunch paper
• Freesheet closures: axe falls on Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror titles
• Reasons to be cheerful? Seattle paper, Roanoke Times and magazine publishers turning a profit