Results matching “of london freesheet war”

From today, a new partnership between Associated Newspapers' free titles and PageSuite will see the group's online newspapers including Metro, Metro Ireland, London Lite and 7Days published by the digital publishing solutions company.

The Metro's operations director, Stuart Wood, said: "Our electronic editions provide a convenient way of accessing our content. We are focused on delivering a first-class customer experience and PageSuite's market-leading product helps us achieve that."

With Metro UK celebrating its 10th birthday next week Stephen Brook of the Observer has examined the effect its launch has had upon the newspaper industry in London and the rest of the UK.  Although slow starting, the Daily Mail General Trust owned publication is now distributed in 16 cities, and its success and impact upon the circulation of paid for titles eventually prompted a reaction from rival companies.  "Ultimately, its success came at a cost for DMGT", writes Brook, as it prompted the launch of News International's evening rival the thelondonpaper.  Although DMGT did manage to launch their evening freesheet the London Lite just days before the NI launch, both have had a considerable detrimental effect upon sales of DMGT's Evening Standard.

Metro "which reportedly achieved annual profits of £8m a year during the good times, gave itself over to advertisers in a way that no self-respecting paid-for newspaper would".  However, the exclusive contract which allows Metro UK to be distributed in London Underground stations and is so essential to its popularity, is up for renewal next month.  The merits of free newspapers are debatable: they have a derogatory effect on their paid for counterparts, yet the manner of their distribution attracts younger readers to reading news in print - DMGT's decision to launch Metro UK was apparently partly due to the sight of "young commuters reading a newspaper, rather than staring into space" in Stockholm.  Either way, Brook believes that when "media historians cast their eye over the past decade", the freesheet trend will be a defining one.

Source: The Guardian

The swan song of the subeditor is growing louder: City AM is striking its entire subeditorial team, the Guardian reports. The London business freesheet will cut eight jobs in total, 2 sales jobs and six subeditors. Journalists will now write and sub their own copies.

According to a City AM spokesman, the job losses were not a cost cutting-measure; the paper is considering expanding its night editorial team to compensate for the cuts.

"City AM is undertaking a reorganization that will see it move away from a combined editorial and subeditorial model to focus on frontline journalism," the spokesman said.

Some experts believe the position of subeditor will become obsolete in the age of digital journalism. Click here to read more about the vanishing subeditor.

Source: The Guardian

Thai newspaper The Nation is launching Daily Xpress, Thailand's first-ever free daily newspaper.  

Daily Xpress is published in English, and will have a circulation of 100,000, making it the most-circulated English-language paper in Thailand. The editor of Xpress Tulsathit Taptim said the publication was aimed at "the younger generation of sophisticated readers," a market he said was untapped by Thailand's English media, reports Asia News Network.

Designed by Mario Garcia, Daily Xpress will follow a similar format to London freesheet London Lite, in focusing on metro news, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle topics.

According to Pana Janviroj, president of The Nation, the parent newspaper is also undergoing changes in both content and design. There will be an increased focus on business and political information, and the publication is working with Xpress designer Garcia to create a more user-friendly design and navigation of news items and features.

Source: Asia News Network 

A new kind of freesheet now circulates in central London. The Notes from the Underground doesn’t deliver any news but only short stories, poems and cartoons.

Nine and a half tons of free newspapers are being cleaned out of the London Underground each day on just three of its 12 routes by the London transit authorities.

A new London freesheet, Notes from the Underground, a creative writing publication aimed at providing readers with a more intellectual publication than traditional freesheets. The publication will be distributed fortnightly beginning next month.

The Project Freesheet group is lobbying the Prime Minister in its battle to ban the distribution of the London Paper and London Lite freesheets. It has posted petitions online and posted a video on the Friction TV site.

Freesheet Metro confirmed news that it will increase its circulation in the UK by 250,000 copies, starting on Oct. 1. Its total print run will amount to 1.35 million copies daily.

Newspapers and their editors have slowly come to embrace user-generated content, or citizen journalism, as necessary components of their journalistic products. In less than a year, Dutch citizen photojournalism venture Skoeps has made a profit by collecting user-generated content and selling it to news agencies, thanks to an online platform that enables users to submit content from their mobiles.

After decreasing its cover price to 20p in London, The Sun will be trying new distribution methods by setting vendors throughout the city during the morning rush, and from 11:30am to 2:30 pm, before thelondonpaper begins its own distribution.

Freesheet Metro is to distribute an extra 250,000 copies per day, which would consolidate its position as the fourth largest daily newspaper in the UK.

The Westminster council threatened The London Paper and The London Lite with a new set of restrictive measures, in hopes of reaching a voluntary agreement on cleaning up discarded copies.

Network Rail has invited publishers and other interested parties to explore the launch of a new free afternoon or evening newspaper to be distributed at the Manchester Piccadilly station.  With the somewhat aggressive freesheet war already raging between The London Paper and its rival The London Lite, the addition of this new freebie will expand the competition outside London’s city limits.

Growing rapidly in popularity, newspaper websites are revolutionizing newsrooms and the entire industry more than any other medium ever has. But how are they affecting design? Art Director (NI) Projects at The Times of London and the designer behind News International’s freesheet, thelondonpaper, Al Trivino, will address the 14th World Editors Forum in Cape Town to discuss how webpages and the new media world are influencing the layout of newspaper front-pages.

The Netherlands has three successful freesheets: Metro, Sp!tz and Barneveld Vandaag plus the promising new arrival of De Pers. Despite legal issues which would set most papers back, launched on 23rd January and has been received well. Editors Weblog talks to two leading newspaper experts in The Netherlands to find out more about the new freesheet and whether there really is room for the planned freesheet from publishing company PCM in May…

In the last five months, Londoners have become used to freesheet distributors nagging them, at the start and end of each commute. The Guardian interviewed Stefan Hatfield, editor of the London Paper, about the ongoing rivalry and his view on free papers.

Editor of the London Evening Standard Veronica Wadley says that readers are returning to the paid paper, after a period during which they read and evaluated London’s other freesheets.

A new London daily freesheet, Newsstand, is to be launched at the end of March by former Daily Express editor Richard Addis.

These are the latest ABC audit numbers on UK’s press for the month of December 2006. They give a slumping but sturdy image of the industry, and underline one noteworthy marketing mistake.

The Daily Record has announced that their afternoon edition, Record PM, will now be distributed as a freesheet in four cities. This move is in direct competition to News International’s Scottish Sun after it overtook Daily Record sales in July last year in an aggressive price war.

News International is extending the gap between its evening freesheet thelondonpaper and Associated Newspaper's London Lite. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations latest figures it has added 12% to its circulation during November from 377, 525 in October to 425,508 in November.

The effects of the London freepaper wars are being felt within the newspaper industry. The institution, The Evening Standard, has seen dropping circulation numbers while the battling nightly freesheets, the London Lite and Thelondonpaper distribution continues to go up.

News International’s TheLondonpaper won the contract to be distributed at ten Network Rail stations in London, including Paddington and Waterloo.  The freesheet will be distributed from Monday to Friday from 3pm, reaching up to 1 million commuters a day.  The contract will be a deep blow to the paper’s competitors London Lite and the Evening Standard.

Source: Brand Republic