Results matching “on paid circulati 1”

In a time where newspapers seem to be losing more and more revenue, figures from Gannett Co. Inc.'s fourth quarter released today, showed potential positive results for the months ahead.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannett swung to a profit in the fourth quarter following $5.6 billion in prior-year write-downs. Lower declines in advertising sales combined with much lower expenses helped the newspaper publisher show improvement.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

A new non-profit news website has launched in Connecticut today, Poynter Online reports, with the dual aims of reporting the news and providing its readers access to resources that are hard to find online.

The Connecticut Mirror bills itself as "an independent source of news and information about our state's government, politics and public policy". It comes in time for an important state budget and an election year.

Editor Michael Regan writes that the Guide to Politics and Government his site offers provides "the most comprehensive information available any where on the state's elected officials".

The UK government may ask the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to consider the impact of local council newspapers on local commercial newspaper publishers, Print Week and This is Local London report. Or it may not, media commentator Roy Greenslade points out.

Members of parliament from the three main parties last week called for council papers to be culled. Local newspapers have long protested that council papers take away from their falling market share.

After almost four years as a freesheet, the Manchester Evening News will begin charging for copies of its newspaper distributed in the city centre, at least four days a week.

In April 2006, the paper became part-free, part paid-for. In the Manchester city centre, 50,000 copies a day were given away, while those in suburbs further out were still sold to readers. The planned changes will mean that from Monday to Wednesday and on Saturdays, all copies of the newspaper will be paid for, while on Thursdays and Fridays, its dual paid/free model will remain.

In the lead up to the Christmas, the Miami Herald is asking that the spirit of giving extend to their pages and is requesting donations from readers.  In what has been a financially troubling year for the paper the Herald has made some 200 job cuts, suffered steep losses in revenue and drops in circulation numbers.

Yesterday the McClatchy-owned newspaper began using its website to invite users to donate with a link at the bottom of each story directing them to "Support ongoing news coverage on Miamiherald.com." There, readers can donate however much they wish with a credit card and are guaranteed their money is going to a good cause.

The BBC, who yesterday announced a new initiative to grant the general public access to professional media training resources, has also revealed it will expand the content available on its news website by linking to rival sources via an aggregation-like system, reports The Independent.

The move comes after accusations headed by News Corp's chairman and CEO for Europe and Asia, James Murdoch, that the corporation, in choosing to remain free, is flooding the market and preventing competitors from expanding online and charging for their content.  The new plan would reportedly see links to commerical websites added at the end of BBC stories.  

A recent post on Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has rasied concerns over the potentially devasting impact the current financial crisis in the newspaper industry could have on the willingness of students to choose journalism as a profession.

Mutter argues that in a time where employment opportunities are shrinking and those who do manage to secure jobs are paid a pittance, a 'substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists' could be wiped out in a movement he dubs 'journicide'.

Many UK regional publishers have seen the opportunities of digital and internet publishing and have capitalized on it. But local presses are increasingly selling digital-format replicas of their print products, which is not quite the same thing as going 'fully digital.' 

After clicking on two pages of content at Variety.com, one in 10 randomly selected visitors will be prompted to register for further access. Print and digital subscribers who have logged in with a user name and password have full access to Variety.com. Nonsubscribers may access only five pages of content in any given month."

The Tindle Newspapers Group, which publishes over 200 local and regional papers in the UK, some of which are over 100 years old, has judged its various paid content experiments as successful and now plans to erect paywalls at 40 of its titles. 

With pressure mounting against Google from newspapers angered by the way it helps readers bypass their paywalls; the search engine giant has agreed to aid publishers by putting a cap on subscription websites.

The cap will limit free access to five articles per day, after which readers will be redirected to a registration page or payment screen. Previously, users have been able to continually view subscription articles for free by entering news websites via Google.

The ten per cent decline in newspaper circulation figures across the US announced last month by the Audit Bureau of Circulations could actually be misleading, reports Michael Liedtke for My Way.


The real figures could actually be much worse, and changes in the way the ABC counts electronic subscribers could have obscured just how many readers the industry is actually losing.

Editor of the London Evening Standard, Geordie Grieg, revealed the paper has managed to reduce its distribution costs from 30 pence per copy to 4p since going free, according to the Guardian.

London's major afternoon daily dropped its 50 p cover price in mid-October and went free, a move that has seen the paper's circulation more than double from 250,000 to some 600,000.

The Wall Street Journal will launch its anticipated Japanese-language website next month, reports Media Asia. Japan.WSJ.com is expected to reproduce Japanese translations of the english WSJ edition as well as content from other Dow Jones publications.

The website, which is the result of a partnership with Japanese financial services provider SBI Holdings, will officially launch on 15 December and a preview edition was put up earlier this week.  

Two German entrepreneurs are setting up a new kind of home delivered newspaper among worldwide news print failures. On November 16^th the brave young businessmen are venturing into the industry with an innovative newspaper service - the first of its kind in Europe - at arguably the worst time, and for a limited Berlin-only market. But its very unorthodoxy, the essence Wanja Oberhof's and Hendrik Tiedmann's Niiu personalized newspaper, could be its saving grace.

Niiu Beginnings

The Niiu started with an idea, two and a half years ago, ultimately about information convenience. Having grown up in a newspaper-reading household, Mr. Oberhof became used to reading multiple papers to pursue the news and information he was interested in.  Having to juggle multiple national, local, and international papers to find one's interests would inevitably become a chore, especially vis-à-vis the speed and convenience of internet news. The same behavioral phenomenon is in fact the very reason why the internet seems to be ruining traditional newspapers; people, especially young adults and students, are tending find their news and information from a variety of sources on the internet rather than a single source that marked the newspaper's monopoly and success in the 20^th century. 

Oberhof's resulting idea was simple and clear: an individualized newspaper, composed of selected pages and sections from papers, delivered each morning to one's door just like a regular paper. This combination of paper format and internet convenience and accessibility found Oberhof a business partner in Hendrik Tiedmann, who shared the same idea. Together they founded InterTi GmbH, Niuu's parent company, funded out of their own pockets, and began doing their homework.

"The whole idea was based on our own behavior research and experience; [as young people] we're used to very different information sources. The main idea was to combine all the varying sources of news and information, because it is normal for young people who have grown up with the internet to have not one source of information but many," Mr. Obherof said in a telephone interview with The Editor's Weblog. But why a newspaper format? Surely a less risky and lower-cost alternative would be setting up a personal news aggregator.

Oberhof disagrees. "We asked this target group which is the most comfortable and which is the best distribution channel; is it an e-paper, is it only on mobile, is it printed or online? The feedback was that for now, paper is still the best distribution channel." Hence the simple combination of the internet and printed paper that is the essence of Niiu.

Interestingly, the founders have no particular allegiance to print, it just happens to be the currently favored distribution channel. "The vision that we offer is all the information that is relevant for the reader. As a next step it is the reader's choice which distribution channel they will use, whether it's a mobile phone, e-paper, the internet, or whatever else." Their focus is information amalgamation and distribution, the particular channel being largely irrelevant and ultimately the client's choice. This is quite an unusual position for a company entering the print industry, which these days seems to require a great deal of faith.

What Niiu is and How it Works (The Technical Bit)

On the client's side the process is very simple. After signing up for a short-term subscription (more on that later), they have until 2 p.m. to choose their news sources for the following morning's paper. On Niiu's website they can select from a wide variety of publications and online sources; from national, local or international newspapers like the New York Times, or internet news sources and blogs. A 24-page personalized paper, researched from and composed of their choices, then appears on the subscriber's doorstep the next morning.

"At this first step, for the reader it is only possible to select whole pages or sections," says Oberhof. From newspapers the readers can select pages or sections, from the internet providers they choose from over 600 very diverse rss feeds, from "Women's tennis blogs to local garden pages, we have lots of special interest content available." Clients currently cannot access their personalized paper online, as this would basically defeat the purpose of the delivered print format.

On Oberhof and Tiedmann's side, however, things are a bit more complicated. It is no easy feat to compile, print, and distribute thousands of individual papers. Over the past two years, InterTi GmbH has had to create a specialized software for compiling sources and setting the layout, arrange digital printing deals, close licensing contracts with news sources, attract advertisers, create a new business model and work out delivery schedules. So how did they do all that?

"We outsource everything," says Oberhof. "We don't have an editorial team, we don't have the printing machines, we don't have a delivery structure; we have partners. First we had to create software, so we got a partner with a Swiss web and print specialist service. They produced our software that combines all the pages and articles and news for each reader into a print-ready .pdf that is sent to the digital printing machines from the Netherlands, and a German copy house takes care of the actual printing. Then we have an agreement with a Berlin delivery service that delivers all the international newspapers that will also now deliver Niiu." Given all this outsourcing and subcontracting, one wonders whether circulation revenue will cover the costs.

Luckily there is another revenue source, the very one that is ruining traditional papers, and where the Niiu shines most brightly: it offers a space for highly targeted advertising, something already optimistic advertisers will pay dearly for. At first, during the 'trial phase' of the first few months, advertising will be more general because the Niiu is new and won't have a large circulation. But with an expanded subscriber base ads will become more targeted, focusing on neighborhoods their corresponding socio-economic groups.

Oberhof is confident of his advertising model. "We have had large amounts of positive feedback from advertising clients, and they have several different ideas such as at first only distinguishing between male and female readers, then differentiating by neighborhood and age in Berlin. Some big German car players are interested and have said 'different cars for different people' based on the interests of the readers, like the family man being interested in the new X5 or the young student being shown the BMW 1." Who the people are and more particularly what their interests are would be clear from their choice of news sources for their Niiu's composition.

Ignoring that their proclaimed audience is exclusively young students and not old people and family men, this raises some questions about whether using personal information for advertising violates some privacy protections. But this is doubtful as various advertisers and distributors have used similar techniques for years: think about those supermarket coupon promotional catalogues, also known as 'junk mail,' which you might get at your front door. They differ per neighborhood using the same concept (in my experience, I got Pioneer Supermarket rice coupons up in Harlem, while my friends downtown got brochures for Citarella).

Of course, a paper cannot live on adverts alone. In terms of subscriptions, Niiu continues to be innovative. The subscription packages are aimed towards young readers and students, the paper's perennial target audience (and probably one of the more difficult market sectors to enter, especially in media and technology).

Mr. Oberhof explains: "We have several different packages, not a traditional subscription but a pre-paid system. You load up money for packages, like the one-day trial, or the longer-term packages over 25, 75 or 150 days. It's not a classical subscription at all, that's an important point for us, because many young people, according to our feedback, don't want a subscription for a year because they do not know where they will be in the near future, whether studying in a different city, or doing an international internship or living at home, so they want short-term packages." Currently Niiu is priced at €1.80 per issue, €1.20 for students.

Is this really a good way to build subscriber loyalty? There is a risk of high turnover, potentially running through the market potential before they get established. However this model makes sense for their target demographic. Personally I find this an appealing arrangement. Not really knowing where I will be in six months has prevented me from subscribing to my publications of choice, so I read online news while I would prefer the print editions.

Challenges

One of the biggest questions I had for Mr. Oberhof was regarding the licensing and use of articles and content from news providers. In the context of the current debate over paid online content and the associated problem of the cost of news and journalism, this is quite a pressing concern and I was most interested in what Niiu's arrangements were. Surprisingly, it was unsurprising and rather simple.

Niiu has a contract with each newspaper and online provider, in which "we have a little license fee which we pay for every used page," Oberhof explains. The licenses, and thus the copies of Niiu itself, are based on pages: "we pay a fixed fee for each page we use...because we take one-to-one pages from each newspaper," meaning the pages of Niiu are exact replicas of the original page from the source. This setup will be the working model for the first few trial months.

"The newspapers give us access to everything they have. That means every page and article that is used in the New York Times we can have the next day in Niiu," although details on how blogs and internet sources would be presented are a bit fuzzy. It would be safe to assume that they would appear in Niiu as they would in your browser, albeit reformatted and resized.

An obvious question regards how newspaper publishers feel about Niiu and why they would allow access to their articles, when this could very well cannibalize their own sales. While some certainly think so, the majority of publishers approached by Oberhof and Tiedmann have embraced the idea and accepted licensing contracts.

"Most of [the news publishers] think it's an interesting new project for a target group which doesn't read much newspapers. The young people, the students, in Germany don't read that much newspaper so for [the newspaper publishers] it's an experience; they want to have a look at the feedback and to test it out. Most of them also don't think that we will take the long-term single paper reader away from them, since our audience is the reader who doesn't know which paper is right for them or likes a variety of news sources," Oberhof asserts.

So, in theory, there is no direct competition because they target different audiences. However, the Niiu provides the same service as the internet but in print form; it is hard to see why publishers who would blame the internet and the news aggregators (which is basically what Niiu is doing) as the newspaper's bane would embrace that service in their own industry.

Some industry experts are not so optimistic. Joachim Blum, a digital media consultant, voices 'considerable doubts' over Niiu's future. He says the idea is interesting, but it just won't work because the target audience has left paper behind: "People who read newspapers are office workers, not students," Blum tells Spiegel Online. This is similar to the problem discussed above, where it seems that the assumption has been made that students who are used to getting news quickly and for free online will suddenly start paying for it to be physically manifested; they surely won't be paying for the service, as they can do it themselves. They would therefore be paying for the physical product, the newspaper, and its aesthetic appeal. But we all know how fickle young people and students are when it comes to aesthetics.

Another issue is more topical as to how Niiu relates to traditional newspaper and the internet, its status in between and bridging these media forms. For all its supposed innovation, "Niiu shares the same dilemma of print journalism in the age of the Internet: every paper you read in the morning only contains yesterday's news," says Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. "The Web offers news every second and gives the option to link to blogs and other websites. Why would people read and even buy a story or information, which they select on the Internet the day before? It's old-school journalism," he tells Time. Again, the same underlying problem is pointed out; the combination of paper and internet has great potential, but it also combines the weak points of both and confuses the primary audiences of both mediums.

Time will tell whether these criticisms will stand or whether Niiu will live up to its potential.

The Future!

For the time being it seems like the main challenges for Oberhof and Tiedmann have been surmounted. They are looking forward to the November 16^th launch, for the time being to serve Berlin only. The circulation scope for now is limited because of the high quality but rather slow digital printing. "You can't compare it to a classical offset machine that could print 200,000 copies of Niiu in an hour; our digital printers can only do about 2000 in an hour," Oberhof explains. "That means it is not possible to deliver from one printing machine to several cities, so we start in Berlin. But obviously it's planned to expand to other cities in Germany and Europe," if the paper gets off the ground with the aim of around 5000 subscribers by the first 6 months.

However Oberhof knows there is much to be done, and that the work is far from finished. "For the next month the biggest challenge will be whether the whole work flows as we want it to. The first actual non-test paper will [hopefully] have around 5000 subscribers and this will be a lot to handle since every newspaper is individual. We might not actually know or can't imagine what the real work flow will be, what will come, and that's definitely the hardest thing." Meanwhile, he already has plans for future products and services once Niiu gets going and is established in the market.

Oberhof and Tiedmann's mission is more about giving the market what it wants, i.e. providing whatever information the reader desires in whatever format they prefer, rather than innovating the newspaper industry (which seems to be a side effect of their project). So if the market preference shifts, so will their products and services.

Having recognized that newspaper may only be around for so long, InterTi GmbH is planning "to offer an e-paper as a second step, probably by the end of this year," Oberhof revealed. Other editions are in the works, but no plans have been formally announced given that the formal launch is still a few days away. "For the future, I think that things like the Kindle will be very interesting for our product developments, but for now its not actually enough, not many people use e-readers at all," Oberhof confides. However, given the company's service-oriented vision, we can reasonably expect an e-reader version once the market for them takes off.

Whether you think newspapers are doomed or just in a rough spot right now, there is no denying the simple ingenuity and appeal (however limited) of Niiu. Its combination of the strengths (and unfortunately some of the weaknesses) of printed news and online news could make it a product to be reckoned with, even for those newspaper publishers who feel no competition from it. The potential for newspaper innovation through individualization is huge, and it remains to be seen whether Niiu will capitalize and profit from that potential

The Editor's Weblog wishes the best of luck to Oberhof and Tiedmann. It is now up to the Berlin public to decide the fate of Niiu.

Mr. Wanja Oberhof will be speaking at the WAN 2009 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderabad

Sources: Personal interview with Mr. Oberhof.

Spiegel Online

PrintWeek

Time

The report is quite detailed, and includes various examples and covers many topics, but focuses on local news and the value of quality journalism. Beginning with a history of the newspaper industry that culminates in its weakness in the face of internet news, Downie and Schudson explain the importance of investigative and accountability journalism for a democracy, holding it as a public good. 

The New York Times unveiled its Bay Area Report last Friday, a two-page spread of local news designed to raise readership numbers and test the advertising market in San Francisco. The new section, boasting the logo: 'The world and the Bay Area. You'll find it all in the New York Times,' was announced last week and will now be published every Friday and Sunday. The spread is expected to pave the way for an entire San Francisco edition later in the year.

The Bay Area Report's debut coverage included three key stories: a profile of Oakland's new police chief;  a story on tax property assesment and a piece on local restaurant wine lists.

The stories and columns appearing in the section will also be available online at NYTimes.com where the Times will also introduce a complimetry blog called 'The Bay Area,' designed to build on the print pages by offering a space for conversation about the top stories of interest to people in the region.

Scott Heekin-Canedy, Times president and general manager, told paidContent in an interview that the expansion was a way to ensure the vitality of the paper and to 'make the print edition more valuable to subscribers and possibly convert some single-copy buyers': "In doing this, we have reason to believe that it will strengthen our subscriber retention, perhaps result in a little bit of circulation growth, but we don't have big ambitions there," he said. "By itself, it's not going to be a reason to purchase the Times or subscribe to the Times."

Rather, Heekin-Canedy says the Times has always contemplated adding coverage to various editions as part of improving the publication as a whole, but it wasn't until recently that the timing and opportunity matched. Given that the Times now sells more papers in San Francisco than anywhere else outside the Northeast (40, 080 daily) and already has a 10 person newsroom set up there- it seemed a good place to start. "That was helpful with regard to the timetable we had in mind for launching. We have the newsroom staff resources in the Bay Area to jumpstart this," said Heekin-Canedy.

London's major afternoon daily the Evening Standard dropped its 50 pence cover price and went free yesterday. The paper, 75.1% of which is owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev (described by the Guardian as 'the spy who loves media), has been a paid-for daily for 182 years. The remaining percentage was retained by the Daily Mail and General Trust.

The move is an attempt to address declines in circulation and distribution will be upped from from 250,000 to around 600,000 in the hope that increased advertising revenue will make up for lost of income from the cover price. 

After 180 years as a paid-for publication, the London Evening Standard will become a freely distributed newspaper on the 12th of October.

Owner Alexander Lebedev, who bought a 75% share of the Standard in January, has announced that the 50 pence price of the daily paper will be dropped and issues will be freely distributed in the streets of London. It is expected that the paper's circulation will more than double, from 250,000 to 600,000.

Lebedev is confident that the paper will succeed with this unexpected business model, which comes as quite a surprise as more publishers turn towards paid content and since the closure of the free paper thelondonpaper in September, which many held as marking the end of the free print model, at least in the UK.

"The Standard has been producing exceptional journalism since 1827 and that is not going to change under my ownership. The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow," Lebedev says.

Hardly a week goes by in media news without gloomy forecasts for the future of print from Murdoch's corner, or floundering US titles being forced to go online only or shut up shop altogether - but one publication at least, the French website Bakchich, is going against that grain, the Financial Times has reported.

The launch of Bakchich Hebdo (which takes its name from the Arabic for bribe, and the French meaning 'Weekly',) a paper edition of the popular satirical website, comes in response to the strong French demand for parody in print. The country holds a long-standing tradition of lampooning its leaders publicly and although in economic terms the segment may be small, the appetite for satire remains big.

Yesterday we commented on the first three parts of the paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll on newsreaders' willingness to pay for online content, and today the fourth and final set of results are available. Following general feedback that very few would be willing to pay for online content (5% of 1,188 UK adults) and that annual subscriptions were the overwhelmingly favorable method of payment, comes the somewhat more encouraging data indicating that if online content were bundled with a discounted or free print subscription, a total 48% of respondents would be willing to pay. However they still remain a slight minority against the 53% who still would not pay.

This suggests that the value of a physical product, the printed news, has a higher economic value than digital news, presumably because of people's awareness of production costs and the aesthetic pleasure of reading and holding the printed word. Furthermore, publishers can use this openness to bundling to expand their core readers, who seem to currently be their best and possibly last hope. Although the study was only conducted in the UK with a relatively small sample size and the numbers don't necessarily match up to American statistics (see our previous article), publishers could use people's willingness to pay for digital/print bundles to push print sales and circulation, potentially killing two birds with one stone. The result could be a larger core audience, more loyal readers, and higher value advertising targets.

Source: paidContent:UK