Felix Dennis, the man behind Dennis Publishing and magazines Stuff and The Week, is planning to launch an Australian edition of The Week in October.
Future plans also involve editions for India and Canada.
“I don’t care if I’m investing in a so-called sunset industry. The sun is setting very, very slowly. And there are only two types of businesses: the well run and the badly run. The well run will survive a recession,” he said.
Niche online publisher LOUD3R is to launch a series of new sites, as part of its plans to create 10 new websites a month on its network.
The new additions include: PREGG3R, for pregnancy; SHUTT3R, for photography; and SUMM3R, for the Olympics.
The semantic engine automatically aggregates and filters multimedia content from a ’source list’ of websites selected by editors. A glossary of terms is created to teach the engine how to identify that content.
The existing network of 25 sites recorded 200,000 unique users over 30 days, according to a press release from the publisher.
The Wall Street Journal wrote this week that the 162-year-old Associated Press (AP) is ‘beginning to fracture’ as the newspaper business in the US breaks up.
The AP last week announced a new set of ‘wire’ tools and cash back options to sweeten newspaper clients that are becoming disenchanted with the fees it demands and its increasing focus providing news and information packages for web publishing and non-traditional customers like Google and Yahoo.
However, its members have already started to seek alternatives to the AP for syndicating their stories and picking up relevant content for their publications from other news providers.
Journalism.co.uk detailed in April how eight of the largest newspapers in the US state of Ohio had begun bypassing the AP and forged an alliance to share their top stories.
The Columbus Dispatch, The Toledo Blade, the Cincinnati Enquirer, The Akron Beacon Journal, The Plain Dealer are amongst newspapers making up the membership of the Ohio News Organization (with the unfortunate acronym, OHNO).
Rather than relying to the Associated Press to decide at the end of each news day whether or not to distribute their stories, the papers now post content to private website – accessible only to those eight newsrooms – from which partner organisations will be able to select pieces to use and publish while the stories are still hot.
But it seems that OHNO is not alone in taking this kind of stance against the AP. According to the WSJ piece, Five Montana newspapers owned by the newspaper concern Lee Enterprises have also begun sharing content. In addition, editors in Texas, Pennsylvania and Indiana have inquired about how the Ohio cooperative works.
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.
German publisher Bertelsmann AG is planning to publish what could be the first in a series of yearbooks whose content is derived from entries on Wikipedia.
According to the Associated Press, the company said it is planning a “One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia” starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.
Newmediabytes has some good pointers for those journalists and subs looking to get their online headlines perfectly attuned for the search engines to home in on.
Main points (click through for detailed definitions)
– Be clear and concise
– Plan headlines for searchers
– Include appropriate keywords and keyword phrases
– Include FULL NAMES of people and places where applicable
– Include DATELINES
– Keep headlines under 65 characters
The site also has a video of DetNews.com web editor Leslie Rotan talking about some things to remember when writing headlines for the web.
Good Stuff.
Journalism.co.uk has today launched PressGo, its new service for targeted distribution of media releases to the journalism community.
PressGo enables journalists to subscribe to RSS feeds spanning 37 different subject categories and create their own customised feeds based on keyword searches.
By purchasing a subscription public relations (PR) companies and other organisations are able to publish an unlimited number of media releases directly on the PressGo areas of Journalism.co.uk. They can also tag or keyword their releases to aid search engine optimisation and smart filtering.
Links to the latest press releases will also appear in Journalism.co.uk’s daily email newsletter.
Each press release page features viral social bookmarking tools and with the aim of highlighting the best examples of PR craft, Journalism.co.uk has introduced a feature that enables journalists to rate each individual release.
“PressGo is an obvious move for Journalism.co.uk, given that we have one of the largest online journalism communities in the UK, including a substantial community of freelance journalists,” said John Thompson, publisher of Journalism.co.uk.
“We understand that journalists do not want to be bombarded with badly targeted material. PressGo puts journalists back in control, allowing them to filter the noise to suit their needs.
“That also means organisations can get their stories across in a much more targeted way, while at the same time taking advantage of our high visibility online to reach journalists and publications they might not have otherwise been aware of.”
Over the coming months, Journalism.co.uk aims to further build bridges between the PR and journalism industries by publishing guidelines on best practice from both sides of the fence.
Ien Cheng, publisher and managing editor of FT.com believe that newspaper websites need to be more responsive to the whims of the web and act like technology companies – adapting to the almost constant changes of the online environment.
Guardian PDA highlights Cheng’s strategic approach:
– Improving the development of new editorial products
– refining the subscription model
– changing the way the business works internally
A near ten per cent drop in print advertising revenue has caused the New York Times Co to register a loss in the first quarter – further highlighting the continued sharp decline of the US print newspaper industry.
The Times lost $350,000, or less than 1 cent per share, after recording a profit of $23.9m, or 17 cents per share, during the same period a year earlier – the FT said.
The company attributed the losses to a slowing economy compounding the overall struggle the newspaper industry is having as readers and advertisers migrate to the internet.
Digital publishers in the UK saw a 52 per cent growth in total digital revenues last year, according to the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) annual census of its members.
The figures show the industry to be in ‘a bullish mood’ despite holding concerns over the economy’s impact on the industry, said Ruth Brownlee, director of the AOP, in a press release.
With regards to the future of the industry, members said high speed broadband provided the greatest opportunity for their businesses, while competition from non-traditional outlets is perceived as the biggest threat.
When questioned on content distribution 64 per cent of respondents said publishers should make their content available on third party websites, as well as a range of other platforms.
The figures suggest support for this distribution model with increased investment in IPTV (up 30%), mobile (20%), vodcasting (22%), podcasting (17%) and RSS feeds (9%).
The key findings from the census include:
Just over half of those questioned were in favour of a standard online measurement system – which would be a focus of the AOP’s working groups, Brownlee said.