Results matching “sun the freesheet wa”

Daily Mail & General Trust free newspaper Metro, distributed in the morning, announces further job cuts as a response to the financial turmoil that is affecting the industry as a whole. The number of redundancies is still unknown, but regional staff working on the Urban Life listings and the reviews section may be affected.

A local newspaper in Ireland is taking up the freesheet model. From next Friday The Offaly Independent in Tullamore will no longer be available at newsagents and will instead 15,000 copies will be distributed free of charge throughout homes and supermarkets in Offaly.

This is the latest in a series of changes at the Celtic Media title, The Offaly Independent changed its publication day from Wednesdays to Fridays, and it previously began distributing free copies to the newer areas of the county in an effort to boost circulation figures.

The launch of the new full-colour 48-page Offaly Independent will include a revamp of the paper's website.

The move is due to a restructuring within the company and will result in the loss of two full-time jobs following internal deployments elsewhere.

Celtic Media also publishes the Westmeath Independent, the Westmeath Examiner, the Meath Chronicle in Navan and the Anglo Celt in Cavan. It employs a total of 200 people.

Source: Greenslade in the Guardian.co.uk and Sunday Tribune

Metro International is looking to increase original content in its international editions by creating a centralised "content agency". Metro will recruit up to 12 journalists to run the content hub, which will focus on global material.

Per Mikael Jensen, the company's CEO, said: "They will be looking at issues that are truly global, such as environment, health, beauty and celebrity".

The recently announced job cuts at the company's headquarters in London's Fleet Street are strictly non-editorial.

This move is controversial for the company as Metro recorded an 83 per cent fall in year-on-year quarterly operating earnings and weak advertising sales.

Per Mikael Jensen said: "When competing in the freesheet market you need to make sure you are the paper people pick up first. To accomplish this you need quality. What we are doing is adding content that it will be difficult for our competitors to get, simply because we can offer a truly global newspaper audience. If someone like Al Gore does one interview with us, he'll reach over 23 million people, and that is hard to match."

Source: Journalism.co.uk

A second daily freesheet will launch in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires: La Mañana will be released August 1 with an initial circulation of 250,000.

Its publisher, Sergio Szpolski, is the owner of several other Spanish-language publications, including the Spanish version of Newsweek and Buenos Aires Economico. La Razon, published by the Clarin group, is the only other freesheet currently available in Buenos Aires.

La Mañana is the latest freesheet to debut in South America. The Brazilian freesheet Destak Rio was recently launched in Rio de Janeiro.

Source: NewspaperInnovation.net through IFRA Executive News Services

Destak, a freesheet that debuted in Sao Paulo two years ago, will launch a similar version in Rio de Janeiro. Destak Rio will launch next Monday, and will be distributed at subways, schools, hospitals, and other public areas.

The Rio edition will have a print circulation of 80,000. Destak Sao Paulo has a circulation of 150,000. Destak is owned by Brazilian entrepreneur André Jordan and Portuguese media group Cofina.

The freesheet form is gaining prevalence in the newspaper world. Check out some stories related to the freesheet:

New Trinity Mirror freesheet
Canadian journalists protest by publishing freesheet
Thailand's first freesheet

Source: NewspaperInnovation.net through IFRA Executive News Service

Trinity Mirror will consolidate two of its weekly papers - The Wrexham Mail and the Wrexham BuySell - into one, the Wrexham Chronicle, to be distributed for free beginning next week.

The Chronicle will feature the combined staff of the Mail and the BuySell, and will circulate 25,000 papers in Wrexham: 22,000 to homes, 3,000 to newsagents.

"Wrexham is a town growing in confidence, rightly proud of its improved economic performance and stature in North Wales," said new editor Kevin Hughes. "It deserves a newspaper like the new Wrexham Chronicle to reflect that success."

The Chronicle will join the ranks of Trinity Mirror's Chronicle brand, which has been in existence for over 233 years. Chronicle papers have a distribution figure of more than 110,000 copies.

Source: HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk

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

For the last fifteen months, former journalists from the Journal du Québec have been publishing a rival free paper, in order to protest against the paid-for newspaper's plans for integration and the additional workloads of multimedia journalism.

The paid-for tabloid, Journal du Québec, published by Québecor, has enjoyed a comfortable situation in the sometimes grim North American print market. It has no website, a daily circulation that ranges from 105,000 copies to 200,000 copies, and churns out a few million dollars in yearly profit.

Since last year though, the paper's plans to - finally - build a website and turn its reporters into multimedia journalists (and increasing working hours from 32 to 37.5 with no additional pay) have been the cause of internal upheaval.

In winter 2007, a group of journalists from Journal du Québec prepared to roll out a competing freesheet, dubbed MediaMatinQuébec.

"On the negotiation table, we saw the requests and the attitude of management. We wondered how we could counter this. We couldn't imagine going on strike indefinitely (...) so we had the idea to launch this free daily," said Denis Bolduc, editor of the free paper.
 
In April 2007, two days after the staff of Journal du Québec went on strike and Québecor called for a lock-out, Bolduc and his team launched MediaMatinQuébec.

Against all expectations, the free paper has now strived for 15 months, boasting 40,000 copies in daily circulation.

"In the US, when there was the integration of print and online, there were debates, but never a conflict like this," said Florian Sauvageau, director of the Center of media studies at the University of Laval.

It is "difficult to think that journalists will accept to work more hours and online," he said, but they "must accept that in 10 years newspapers will be online."

According to Agence France-Presse, Québecor's profits have yet to be hindered by the rival free paper. Yet the giant publishing house is reportedly preparing the launch of its own freesheet, to compete against MediaMatinQuébec.

Source : Voilà.fr through IFRA Executive News Service
 

Metro International SA, a freesheet publisher, announced yesterday plans to consolidate its efforts in Western Europe and North America, and to expand in Russia, Latin America and Asia, Bloomberg News reports.

According to chief executive Per Mikael Jensen, Metro, which currently publishes in 21 countries, is targeting 30 new markets, focusing primarily on "franchise partnerships." Jensen also expects "double-digit growth" in Russia, Latin America, and Asia.

Metro was launched in 1995 and targets commuters in big cities. Its revenue is generated solely through advertising. Metro extended its operation to the US approximately four years ago, but has struggled to turn a profit.

Source: Bloomberg News through I Want Media

Norwegian media group Schibsted has bought a 35% share of Metro International's Swedish edition for 350m Swedish kronor (€38m).

Schibsted's Aftonbladet paper will form a joint advertising venture with Metro Sweden. The new company will offer advertisers the chance to reach 4.2 million readers, reports The Guardian.

Schibsted, the publisher of Norway's biggest-circulation paper VG, said in a statement it would get two seats on the board of Metro Sweden. Aftonbladet will also close its freesheet Punkt SE immediately at a cost of 65 million kronor (€7m). Punkt SE, which had been posting losses, is only one of the many freesheets that are starting to see their revenues tail off.

Source: Guardian (here and here) through IFRA Executive News Service

Though there are economic strains on the journalism industry, Paul Myners, chairman of Guardian Media Group, remarked that journalists are not driven out of the industry, but instead are working on other mediums, such as blogs, radio, and local television, which reinforces a previous statement by Mediashift.

"The type of people doing work which might broadly be described as journalistic, may not have necessarily decreased to the extent of the proportion who are working in the newspaper industry," said Myner.  "Someone who was previously described as a journalist who sat at a typewriter, now podcasts, now speaks to video, now blogs online. It is a more challenging and appealing job.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said otherwise: "The plight of staff in the newspaper industry should not be overshadowed by increased new media opportunities for journalists."

He argued that staff "are spread ever more thinly across more media" and that there are "a lack of resources and understaffing." with a smaller number of journalists trying to deliver more content in more platforms.

Concurrently, the U.S. has suffered the biggest staff drop this year. Our colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors has captured the hard times through images here and here.

However, Myners noted that in the last 12 months, the Guardian Media Group appointed 60 new journalists to its national titles in order to further their digital content, since their readership is moving online. According to Myners, more people read the Guardian's US website than read the print versions in the UK, Guardian.co.uk  was the most popular UK newspaper website in February with 19,519,923 unique users, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

"We have gone from being a provincial newspaper... to an international, liberal voice on the web," he said.

He added that "the proportion of journalists at the Observer and Guardian covering international news has increased."

But Myners cautioned that the declining economy will lead to more regional newspaper mergers and more free sheets, which does not rule out the Manchester Evening News from being completely free in the city center yet being sold on the outskirts.

"It is an economic model which accurately reflects the cost of distribution," Myners said.

However, the freesheet model does not seem to be doing significantly better than traditional newspapers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk ,Press Gazette

Mulhouse has a new weekly freesheet, launched by newspaper group L'Alsace-Le Pays. With an anglicized name, Cit'in, the free paper aims to capture the younger local readership.

"We decided about a year ago to launch a free weekly newspaper, that will benefit from the quality standards and credibility of our newsroom," said L'Alsace-Le Pays president Jean-Dominique Prétet.

Cit'in can also be downloaded for free in PDF format at www.citin.fr.

Source: L'Alsace (link in French)

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 

DirectMatin Plus, the joint freesheet by Le Monde and the Bolloré group (until recently named Matin Plus), will be increasing its circulation to 450,000 copies soon, nearly a year after being launched.

The free paper currently distributes 400,000 copies.

Vincent Bolloré also announced that editions would be launched in Strasbourg and Toulouse.

Source: Tarif Media

20 minutes reports positive revenues for 2007, a first time occurrence for the French freesheet.

A tiny note: 20minutes.fr, the eponymous freesheet’s site, has been available on iPhones since late last December, in preparation for the launch of a mobile site mid-January. Articles are pre-loaded to enable users to browse without being connected.