A video from French citizen journalism website Citizenside is expected to generate €100,000 (£75,285) of revenue after being sold to Paris Match, the Editors Weblog reports, with a commission rate of between 50 and 75 per cent going to the amateur creator.
The footage from Citizenside, which recently signed a partnership with Agence France-Presse, was of the newsworthy former Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel signing a statement at a police station, according to the report.
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.
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is to launch a ‘Facebook-like’ community for its online readers, the Media Culpa blog reports.
According to the site, readers will be given user profile pages on which they can leave comments about articles – a feature not currently available on the main site
It is hoped that the service, which has been delayed by security issues, will be launched in two months.
The 2008 Municipal Videotour will see three mobile studios providing coverage from about 50 cities.
A victory in a European court last year against Google has encouraged newspapers in Belgium to take action against the European Commission over links on two agency sites.
According to the Times, a Brussels court has been asked by a group of French- and German-language newspapers to examine its claim.
It’s hard to feel sorry for a newspaper company that boasts sales of eight million for its morning and four million for its evening editions, so when Atsushi Sato took to the stage at the Beyond the Printed Word conference, in Dublin today, to say that his company’s mobile sites were suffering and that newspaper circulations were down, there weren’t too many tears shed.
Sato, deputy manager of the digital division of Japan’s Asahi Shimbum newspaper company, told delegates that the Golden Age for mobile news sites, in Japan, was on the way out.
Most of delegates are still waiting for mobile news in their respective markets to move out of the primeval swamp and climb into a clattering carriage marked ‘destination: the Gold Age of Mobile News’, so it was something of a surprise to hear that the problems that rancour some in Europe and are keep their mobile operations down to a very minimum are the very same reasons, according to Sato, that the Japanese Golden Age is coming to an end.
And what’s the problem? Why the mobile operators.
Sato said that the machinations of shifting price tariffs amongst the three mobile companies that run the Japanese market – NTT Docomo (53 per cent market share), VIDDI (30 per cent) and Softbank (17 per cent) had caused many Japanese to switch operators and thus break the subscriptions through which they pay for access to mobile news sites.
He added that operators had been developing free content portals, which had been deflecting more and more traffic away from the paid-for services, and operators were also, effectively, blocking links to his paid-for sites with their portals.
The reticence of young people to pay for online content and people viewing free web pages designed for PC viewing on mobiles was also adding to the problems.
Sato did, however, outline the strategy that has brought Asahi such great success. The first mobile site, Asahi NikkanSports, was launched in 1999. It now boasts 700,000 to 800,000 subscribers.
The company’s strategy was to then spin similar satellite sites off the successful site, using its own content and that gleaned through partnerships, then link and promote from the original.
So spawned – amongst others – Asahi Lifeline news, for emergency and traffic news, using 15-second video stories, Nikkan Geino for entertainment news and a site dedicated to supplying electronic books and comics.
Asahi Shimbum operates 12 mobile websites, he added, with around one million subscribers paying monthly for access to one of the sites – with each site being run by a staff of six.
This contributes to the digital division of Asahi Shimbum making $33 (US) per year – a whopping one per cent of total company sales.
Oh, how the other delegates yearned for his millions-of-mobile-dollars problems…
Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, told the AOP conference, in London today, that the Post would be focusing its attention on developing its mobile offerings as a way of expanding its audience.
“We’re really far behind in mobile compared to Europeans, that’s one area that we are really focusing on right now,” she said.
“Not just on mobile phones but also being able to read stuff on your Blackberry or iPhone, or whatever else. We are really far behind. It’s an area that we are really pushing forward on.”
During a Q&A session she was asked if the Post was looking actively at other markets internationally.
“We are in the UK, we have advertising offices here. But in terms of editorial, we’re not looking at hyper-local content outside of our market.
“You have to do what you know, but we would like to do more in Europe and we have some plans to do that.”
The Post, she added, is planning an entire redesign in the Spring next year.