Journalism Online to announce affiliated publishers in the next two weeks

Posted by Emma Heald on July 17, 2009 at 4:28 PM

Daily Finance reported that Journalism Online is to announce the identities of its first affiliated publishers sometime in the next two weeks. Daily Finance quoted co-founder Gordon Crovitz, who said that the company has been putting off the announcement for the past month, not because of difficulty in finding clients, but because the list keeps evolving so fast as new ones are added.

Journalism Online, founded in April, promises to help newspapers charge for their online content. In conversation with Crovitz and another founder, Steve Brill, Daily Finance learned that Journalism Online has not yet been rebuffed by a potential affiliate. The co-founders also pointed out that the team has not just been talking to newspapers, but also to other digital properties such as news networks.

According to Crovitz, "the more people look into it, the more they understand they can have their cake and eat it, too." The company has been presenting figures that show very favourable results, insisting that a pay wall will only slightly reduce ad revenue and will increase print circulation. Journalism Online will allow news outlets to customise their pay schemes rather than all following the same pattern, in a move that could also help avoid antitrust issues.

It will certainly be interesting to watch the progress of newspapers that decide to charge online via Brill and Crovitz's initiative. The company is promising to gather data from all its members on what works and what doesn't and distribute it, which should mean that any winning strategies become widespread fairly quickly. Journalism Online recently announced a partnership with ITZ Publishing to help affiliated small- to medium-sized news publishers to design marketing and packaging strategies for online subscriptions, micropayments and combined online/print subscription packages.

Many publishers have recently expressed enthusiasm for charging online, and Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predicted on Wednesday that almost all news organisations will charge for some online content within a year. It sounds as if which ones of these are planning to use Journalism Online for this will soon be public knowledge. When the announcement is made, will it encourage others to follow suit?

Source: Daily Finance