Author Archives: Paul McNally

Telegraph: IPTV joint venture YouView delayed until next year

YouView, the IPTV joint venture billed as the new Freeview, is to miss its July target launch date and will go live in early 2012 instead, the Telegraph has revealed.

YouView chief executive Richard Halton said it was important the development was “not rushed”. When it launches, the box will offer a seven-day TV catch-up service and other on-demand web TV services. Analysts are concerned that the delay means the product will already be obsolete by the time it is ready.

Screen Digest head of broadband Dan Cryan told the paper: “With more and more TV catch up services, such as the iPlayer, coming to the living room TV set using the browser, YouView risks becoming irrelevant.”

The initiative is a joint venture between the major terrestrial broadcasters, BT, TalkTalk and transmissions giant Arqiva.

AllMediaScotland: Glasgow local paper closes after 14 years

A free monthly newspaper in Glasgow has ceased publication after struggling to generate enough advertising revenue.

Local News Glasgow founder Grace Franklin told AllMediaScotland: “If I had been a hard-nosed business person, I would have wrapped it up a long time ago. Towards the end, it was the love of it, rather than money, that kept it going.”

Full story on AllMediaScotland at this link.

Crains: Mail Online to open New York office

Associated Newspapers is to open an office in New York to house journalists for Mail Online.

According to Crain’s New York Business, the news group has signed a four-year lease and will move in next month.

Mail Online receives 65 per cent of its traffic from outside the UK – 35 million unique users in December out of a total of 53.9 million, according to ABCe.

Full report on Crains New York at this link.

Future reports substantial progress online

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.”

Cakes, crows, bees: celebrating the strangest newspaper names in the world

What do cakes, crows and mosquitoes have in common? They all have local newspapers named after them.

The BBC has asked readers to suggest some of the strangest and most distinctive newspaper titles in the world. Highlights from the UK include the Banbury Cake (“the work of a complete lunatic or a marketing genius”), the Royston Crow and the Falmouth Packet, not forgetting the Arran Banner – “the only newspaper named after a potato”.

It’s not just a UK phenomenon: the United States does well with the Sacramento Bee, the the Youngstown Vindicator, the Carlisle Mosquito and the Unterrified Democrat.

Here’s the full list.

AP: Huffington Post sale boosts newspaper stocks

Shares in some of the big publicly quoted American newspaper groups rose yesterday on the back of news of AOL’s £195m acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Gannett rose 2.8 per cent yesterday and the New York Times Company 2.7 per cent.

According to the Associated Press, the flurry of trading activity shows that investors are still interested in news companies. “The [Huffington Post] deal raised the value on leading branded digital properties,” one analyst told the newswire.

Fonts in Use: A detailed look at the Daily’s typography

Designer and typographer Stephen Coles has taken a comprehensive look at the fonts used in Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily.

“It does have the look of a fairly serious weekly news magazine,” he writes. “Much of this posture comes from steering clear of ultra-modern or casual typefaces.

“My guess is that the style guide is still being written, staff are still getting comfortable with the format, and everyone is still learning what’s possible in this new medium.”

BBC’s iPlayer iPad app to launch this week

The BBC will launch an iPlayer app for Apple’s iPad this Thursday, the corporation’s interactive operations manager Geoff Marshall has announced on Twitter.

Users can browse the catch-up TV and radio service listings using a 3G connection but will need WiFi to watch or listen to programmes.

It will initially be limited to the UK, although the BBC is working on a subscription-based international version for the iPad that is expected to launch this summer.

James Cridland: TalkSport web traffic soars

UTV Media’s TalkSport has claimed a seven-fold increase in traffic to its website following a relaunch last August – with 1.7 million unique users and 9 million page impressions in January, according to unaudited figures seen by radio futurologist James Cridland.

Cridland says the site, which used to be “derided within the industry”, is now beating its closest broadcast rival BBC Radio FiveLive, which had an average of 191,000 weekly unique users in September 2010 (the last available figures), even though FiveLive has double TalkSport’s broadcast audience.

The site has been buoyed by closer editorial collaboration with Sport magazine and two big stories at the end of last month: football transfer deadline day and an exclusive interview with Richard Keys, the Sky Sports presenter who resigned in a controversy over sexist remarks.