A buyer for Reed Elsevier’s B2B publishing arm RBI is expected to be announced in October, a memo from Marianne van Leeuwen, the chief executive of Reed’s Dutch operations, has said.
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.
The website for the wine and spirits industry Harpers.co.uk is relaunching with a new name and expanded coverage of the industry.
The Nexus Business Media title will be called TalkingDrinks.com from July 24 and will include a range of new interactive features, such as blogs and forums, a press release from the publisher said.
Breaking news will continue to lead the site, but the new features will build an online community for the industry, David Shrimpton, Nexus Business Media digital managing editor, said.
Future plans for the site will bring more photo and video content and a personalised MyTalkingDrinks section.
“We don’t do magazines online. We make great magazines, and great online business experiences,” Neil Thackray, Nexus’ chief executive, added.
A restructuring of the publisher into four ‘market-focused’ divisions has made Hughes’ role redundant.
Future publishing’s portfolio of websites, which includes TechRadar.com and GamesRadar.com, are attracting over 11 million unique users per month, figures released today suggest.
GamesRadar alone attracts three million page views a day, according to the publisher’s financial report for the six months to March 31.
The report also stated that revenue from digital advertising now accounts for 19 per cent of the group’s total advertising revenue – an increase from 15 per cent last year.
“Our digital strategy, which attracts the lion’s share of our investment in new product development, is at a very exciting stage. With the launch of MusicRadar and TechRadar networks earlier this year, we now have pillar online properties in each of our specialist sectors,” Stevie Smith, chief executive of Future, said in the release.
However, operating profit for the publisher fell from £7.7 million over the same period in 2007 to £5.2 million.
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.
The Financial Times‘ parent company Pearson has agreed to sell its 50 per cent stake in Financial Times Deutschland to publishing firm Gruner + Jahr, stating that the German paper ‘no longer fits’ with their plans to develop digitally.
As part of sale, which is expected to complete by the end of the first quarter, FT will continue to ‘licence’ content to FT Deutschland, a statement from the company said.
“The FT Group is increasingly focussed on the worldwide expansion of the Financial Times and our digital financial information businesses. FT Deutschland no longer fits within that strategy, but we are very pleased to have found such a good home for a great newspaper,” Rona Fairhead, chief executive of the Financial Times Group, said in the release.
Speaking at Ofcom‘s annual lecture this week, Ed Richards, the regulator’s chief executive, made some fairly non-committal comments about Ofcom’s role in regulating content on the internet.
Understating the matter he noted that there was ‘quite a bit of content’ on the web that was ‘very nasty’.
More usefully he volunteered that in previous incidents where harmful content has been found ‘a voluntary takedown policy’ has proved ‘ineffective’.
“What we need is a policy response that is based on the data and evidence of the prevalence of this kind of content and of the potential harm it causes,” Richards said.
He added that more conclusions on internet content regulation could be drawn when the government’s Byron Review of internet content is completed at the end of November.
While this may be more of an admission to involvment in internet regulation than Ofcom would have made a few years ago, there seems to be an uncertainty over what responsibility the organisation has in this area.
The Communications Act 2003 describes one of Ofcom’s special duties as:
Applying adequate protection for audiences against offensive or harmful material
These duties apply to ‘television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services’ – Ofcom’s domain. Yet no provision is made by the act or in the regulator’s principles for where these areas cross-over with the web.
Perhaps Ofcom should take its lead from the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which has adapted its code to include regulation of audio and video content produced online by newspaper and magazine sites.
Yet, as this addition to the PCC’s code states:
Some websites cannot be categorized as “on-line versions” of newspapers and magazines. Some material – such as syndicated news broadcasts or radio programmes edited by third parties – may already be regulated on-line or off-line by another body …All such material will continue to fall outside the jurisdiction of the PCC.
While regulation offline may be possible in some cases, to prevent content from going unregulated Ofcom needs to more clearly (and quickly) define where exactly its responsibilities lie when it comes to video and audio content online.
Hyper-local sites have to be driven by news the chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive told the AOP conference.
“Some of the hyper-local sites that have failed, in my view, there isn’t any hard data there, there is just people commenting or talking to each other,” Caroline Little told delegates.
“If it’s not structured around something that is changing then it may as well be on Facebook or email or something else. We need to provide something to make it interesting.”
Speaking about the databases and Google Maps mash-ups that drive the Post’s Loudoun hyper-local site, she added:
“Publishing news is important to people locally, even if it’s a crime database, what happened last night on what street, people want to know that.
“We also have local bloggers who live in the community. But I believe without that local news piece, which is fresh and updated constantly, you’re just not going to build habit locally.”