More bad news for the freebie sector: paidContent:UK reports that up to 30 redundancies are planned for Metro’s regional arts and entertainment sections. Parent company DMGT declined to comment.
“Sources close to the paper say it is cutting back drastically on its Metro Life sections – the regionalised arts, entertainment and food pages produced by journalists at Metro’s offices in Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle, Birmingham and Bristol.”
It was fascinating to watch the Michael Jackson rumours hit Twitter late last night (BST) and the mixed reaction to the initial TMZ.com report. An AOL/Telepictures Productions entertainment news site and renowned for having its finger on the pulse, but not quite big or well-known enough to risk the re-tweet or the MSM endorsement? Should we trust it, should we not? The links and telling tweets are reproduced here:
TMZ.com breaks news of the death first:
“We’ve just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50.”
Many journalists were playing it safe, even with their own personal tweets. Even the ‘semi-journalists’:
Then… a few comments about the weird news culture we live in. Compare the way you heard about Princess Diana to this, for example. This from Meg Pickard, the Guardian’s head of social media development:
But were people being unduly cautious? Ashley Norris – of Shiny Media fame – offered this:
The Sun (by an unnamed ‘online reporter but it has now been updated and by-lined) and the Metro (by a by-lined reporter but the link is now dead) – and others too no doubt – tentatively go with ‘reportedly dead.’ And actually attributed TMZ. Then, phew, a mainstream media source finally gives us likely sources to cling onto. The LA Times.
Around 23.35 BST (22.35 GMT):The BBC goes for it on TV. In its special breaking television news report on BBC1 after BBC Question Time, and before This Week, they say that Jackson is reported to be dead: citing the LA Times as the main source, then TMZ.com, and then add that the Associated Press is also reporting the death.
Now everyone’s sure that he is dead. The Guardian gets this wonderfully comprehensive tribute article up very quickly (23.26 BST).
TMZ were the winners of the night with publicity all round. Check out the quote from Alan Citron, founding manager for TMZ but who now works for Buzz Media in an email to Beet TV last night:
“TMZ has drifted into a lot of juvenile satire lately, but Harvey’s [Levin, managing editor of TMZ] still the best when it comes to serious celebrity news reporting. It’s highly likely that TMZ will own this story.”
This lovely tweet from @PJButta says it all:
More views on TMZ and trust on Twitter.
As for the print? According to Paul McNally,
One more link-to-print here: the Guardian’s newspaper front page slideshow (presumably a later edition for the Sun).
What have we left out? Leave links and comments below, if you’ve got anything to add.
Metro International shares have plummeted on news of increased losses and a prospective bid falling through, but CEO, Per Mikael Jensen, remains optimistic.
“It was not a good quarter, but we could have done much worse,” Jensen told me, after the company posted grim financial news this morning.
Its net losses for the first quarter (Q1) of 2009 more than doubled compared to the same period last year, from 6.4 million euros to 15.3 million euros, and year-on-year net revenues decreased 24 per cent to 55.6 million euros from 73.4 million euros in Q1 2008.
The freesheet giant also announced that a mystery bid, which led the company to postpone seeking a rights issue to raise more capital earlier this year, had been stranded on the bidder’s inadequate financing arrangements.
The news caused Metro shares to fall sharply, but when I talked to Jensen, he professed to take comfort in the share doing better than before the bid emerged in February.
“I think people were calculating on a divestment,” he said, adding that he was not sure if the timing of the rights issue, which will now go ahead, would be any worse than two or three months ago.
In January, Metro shocked the market by closing its fully owned operation in Spain, which published the free daily newspaper Metro in seven Spanish cities, with immediate effect. However, in the last few months the company, which has 81 editions in 22 countries, has launched titles in Moscow and Mexico’s second city, Monterrey.
“It’s been our expressed strategy to grow in Russia, Asia and Latin America, markets that are not as mature as the European, for some time now,” Jensen said.
Read more about the consequences of the recession for free newspapers here.
To mark the 10th birthday of UK freesheet Metro, Steve Auckland, head of the paper’s free division, and Roy Greenslade, journalism professor and media commentator, discussed the impact of the the free newspaper on news consumption and the print industry on this morning’s Today programme (available at this link until March 23).
Steve Auckland, head of the free division at Associated Newspapers, succinctly explained the paper’s remit as a commuter’s newspaper.
“We’re there for a 20-minute read,” he explained, adding that stories outside of the lifestyle section are kept to around five paragraphs to facilitate this.
“I think we’ve just brought in a fresh group of readers who had been lost to the industry before. Those paid-for papers hadn’t been attracting younger readers,” argued Auckland.
What the paper isn’t doing, however, is helping to encourage these younger, freesheet readers to switch to paid-fors later in life, as Greenslade suggested:
“What is dificult to divine is whether they are converting to paid-fors (…) They are stuck on the idea that all news is free (…) and they are not graduating, as was thought to be the case, from a free newspaper to a paid-for newspaper later.”
While Metro has had a negative effect on sales of regional dailies and tabloid titles, he added, it has helped, but is not the major reason for the long-term decline facing the newspaper industry.
Greenslade said he sees free titles, such as Metro, as part of the news mix for future consumers, with short, sharp news ‘bullets’ in print supplemented by news, opinion and analysis online.
“As far as I’m concerned we will continue to grow Metro (…) many of the [other paid-for] papers are well-resourced operations and they’ll ride out this recession,” added Auckland.
It’s hardly like newspaper jobs were all that secure anyway, but this month’s financial situation (something about a recession) hasn’t helped things either over the last couple of weeks.
This week news broke that two of the UK’s biggest-selling regional daily newspapers will cut 135 jobs.
The family run publishers Midland News Association are looking to merge their publications, the Express and Star and the Shropshire Star, with the aim of reducing costs by around £3 million a year.
After a decline in advertising revenue, the publishers considered it a necessary move, as reported over at the Guardian. There are plans to merge some parts of classified advertising, production and finance.
Press Gazette reported that despite the merger, both publications will maintain their individual identities, while also keeping separate editors and reporters.
In the last session of the WAN/World Editors Forum 11th Readership Conference the speakers looked at shaping the future of the newspaper (information courtesy of WAN conference updates).
While Karen Wall, assistant managing director of Metro in the UK, focussed on good old print, arguing that the free newspaper model was growing, Christian Ortner the editor-in-chief of the regional newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten, in Austria, took the WAN audience through his newspaper’s decision to become the ‘Yahoo for local search’ in their area.
“Today Google has taken over search,” said Ortner. “Down to the small restaurant, Google is serving the local market.”
But he believes that “what happened in search need not happen for local news, services, parties, classifieds, restaurants, videos and other content.”
Vorarlberger Nachrichten Online is now aggressively pursuing online opportunities, forecasting that half its revenue will come from its digital platforms by 2011.
Here’s what the paper is developing, as told by Ortner:
Roy Greenslade writes about the response to a letter by an anonymous Telegraph journalist that he published last week.
Norwegian media giant Schibsted this morning announced that it’s paying £30m to take a 35 per cent stake in the Swedish edition of Metro International’s free newspaper.
In what is a key freesheet market the former rivals have forged a partnership to collaborate on advertising sales with the new company offering advertisers the chance to reach 4.2 million readers across the Metro and Schibsted paid-for dailies Aftonbladet and Dagbladet.
In February, Metro International CEO, Per Mikael Jensen, discussed his company’s strategic goals with Journalism.co.uk saying that consolidation and online innovation would be key for the development of his newspapers, in what he called the ‘freesheet 2.0 phase.’
“We are entering a freesheet 2.0 phase where we are consolidating our core business and looking at more ways to attract readers,” said Jensen, who succeeded Pelle Törnberg as head of Metro in 2007.
In Sweden, this consolidation will mean Schibsted will stop publication of its free paper Punkt SE with immediate effect so that the new joint venture can focus print advertising around a single free title.
The deal has similarities with the one Metro struck at the end of 2007, when it sold 60 per cent of its Czech operation to its competitor Mafra.
The freesheet giant is currently undergoing a strategic review, and when Journalism.co.uk spoke to him, Jensen said we could expect more deals of this nature.
Today, Jensen refused to rule out further consolidations when questioned by Danish media and said he expected dramatic changes in the Danish newspaper market in the coming months (but refused to go into details).
“We do not just sit there and wait for the strategic review to be completed, but implement strategy from day to day. Strategy is something we evaluate each month. Those who believe the strategic review we now are in the middle of will become some sort of bible, will be disappointed,” said Jensen in the interview with Journalism.co.uk.
In addition, Metro is looking to attract more readers online. It’s launching new versions of its websites in all its markets – it recently launched online for the first time in France – and will consolidate some of its editorial activities by creating an internal news agency in London which will serve all its editions.
Jensen is behind Metro’s new developments and alliances but he remains as pessimistic as ever about the future of paid-for printed newspapers.
“I would be very surprised if more than 25 per cent of today’s paid-for newspapers exist in ten years. Of the newspapers that will survive, many of them will be published online only, or make its paper edition free,” Jensen said.
The two newspaper giants may have forged a partnership in Sweden but they remain embroiled in a head-to-head competition over their market leading freesheets in France and Spain.
However, Metro International still has a lot of work to do to convince investors that its business model – the company is still loss-making even though it narrowed its first quarter net loss to £5.1 m – has a profitable future.