Journalism Online and ITZ Publishing announce partnership

Posted by Emma Heald on June 30, 2009 at 4:12 PM

Journalism Online has announced that it has retained ITZ Publishing to lead its efforts in working with small- and medium- sized newspaper companies to maximize their online revenue opportunities. ITZ will help Journalism Online's affiliated news publishers to design marketing and packaging strategies for online subscriptions, micropayments and combined online/print subscription packages.

It will do this by assessing audience usage patterns and hence helping the newspaper companies to build appropriate pay strategies through Journalism Online. "Greg Swanson and the ITZ Publishing team have been market leaders in developing breakthrough solutions for news publishers," Journalism Online's Co-founder Steven Brill said in a press release. Another of the co-founders, Gordon Crovitz commented that "The marketing and data analysis expertise of ITZ Publishing will be especially valuable to publishers in retaining a large number of unique visitors and page views online while converting many free users to paying subscribers."

Journalism Online launched in April with the basic aim of helping newspapers charge for their online content. As well as actually creating a payment method, it promises to help publishers discover the best way to charge for individual papers and conduct extensive research. This partnership with ITZ is presumably part of this goal. The company also plans to aggregate knowledge and data from the publishers involved with the scheme.

The start-up has been in talks with many different publishers but as yet none have publicly declared their involvement. There seems to be growing enthusiasm for charging for online content amongst publishers such as News Corp, MediaNews Group and the New York Times Co, and other third parties such as ViewPass and CircLabs also have proposals to help.

Source: Journalism Online press release