The Economist, the shining star among weekly news magazines, sells more than 1.5m print copies but fully expects this figure to decline, said Tom Standage, the publication’s digital editor in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) Q&A session on Reddit. So far print circulation hasn’t started to fall, even as digital-only subscriptions grow, “but it will,” Standage asserts.

“The important thing for us is to deliver distinctive content that readers will pay for; whether it's on paper or a screen, or in audio format, is not really the point,” Standage said. “Our aim is to deliver our content in whatever form our readers want it; we are not wedded to print.”

So far, The Economist has 150,000 digital-only subscribers, and a total of 600,000 people use the paper’s mobile apps each week. Seventeen per cent of traffic comes from mobile, and The Economist is “retooling” its site to make it more mobile-friendly, Standage wrote, mentioning that “we will be doing some slightly more daring stuff shortly.”

The Summly (n. “summarized version of a news article optimized for iPhone”) might look something like this: On his 17th birthday last Thursday, Nick D’Aloisio (pictured) and his dozen-strong team relaunched Summly, an iPhone app that uses natural language processing and “rocket science” to automatically summarize the news into mobile-friendly, 350-500 character bites. In essence, the app aims to help you cut through the deluge of “drivel” that inundates the newsosphere, with as much style as Arne Jacobson’s Egg Chair – the company’s logo.

“It’s a representation of the egg chair, not the exact egg chair,” specified D’Alosio in a telephone interview with Editors Weblog this afternoon. “The idea is that chairs themselves are kind of synonymous with sitting down, relaxing and reading news, so we decided to take the concept and [give it] a slight twist, with a really modernist approach and minimalist user interface,” he said, pointing out the two S’s that lurk in the symbol.

Know your customer, wherever they are, and use that knowledge, advised Stephen Pinches, Group Product Manager for Mobile & Emerging Platforms at the Financial Times, at the 5th Tablet & App Summit last week in Frankfurt. This philosophy is why the paper decided to build its own web-based app for the iPad rather than be part of Apple’s Newsstand: because as well as taking a 30% cut of subscription revenue, Apple does not provide publishers with subscriber data.

Within six weeks of Apple’s demand that publishers offer the same subscription deals through iTunes as they do on their own site, the FT rebuilt its native app as a web app. “It has all the things you would expect from a native app,” Pinches said, but “it allows us to enact whatever business model we choose.”

“We believe that data is fundamental to build our model,” he said, and gave personalized content as an example of how to strengthen relations with readers and offer a better service. “If you are a CEO of a media company we can tell you what other CEOs at media companies are reading.”

For Android devices, the FT took the HTML5 web app and “wrapped it in a little code” to put in the Google store. The paper has already launched a Windows 8 app too.

French aggregation startup Youmag is seeking to integrate free and paid digital news content in a made-to-measure, virtual magazine format.

Co-founders Antoine Levêque, Nicolas Schaettel and Guillaume Multrier have recently unveiled versions for the web and Android, and Youmag’s free iPhone and iPad apps, launched this past June, were downloaded over 100,000 times in two months.

The concept is simple: personalised aggregation + curation and editorial intervention by a small team of journalists + a freemium model akin to that of music streaming platform Spotify = ideally, a successful company that generates 2/3 of its revenue from advertising, and 1/3 from happy readers inclined to pay for premium content (thereby making publishers happy, too).

Personalised, nuanced aggregation

Let’s say that you are the user. After logging in for the first time, you are invited to select the sections of your magazine from a carousel of themes and sub-themes.

“What really distinguishes us is the thematic approach,” Levêque told me in a phone interview last week. The selection of sub-themes is diverse and nuanced as possible "to be as relevant as possible for users," elaborated Schaettel in a subsequent conversation.