News

The loneliness of the profit-making broadsheet

Besides the FT, the Daily Telegraph and its now full integrated stablemate, the Sunday Telegraph, remain the only profitable ‘quality’ or broadsheet paper in the UK. On a recent WAN-IFRA visit we asked how the newsroom supports this (and how come so many people still wear ties?)

Worldcrunch Impact bets on Kickstarter to launch ‘solutions journalism’ initiative

Worldcrunch, an English-language global news startup launched two years ago in Paris, is embarking on a new project, ‘Worldcrunch Impact’, with the ambitious aim of healing the ills of journalism as it currently stands – that is, changing the fact that digital media covers news in a manner that is “too fast, too thin, too loud.” The project’s launch depends entirely on the success of its Kickstarter funding campaign.

6 talking points from our visit to BuzzFeed UK

Last week our WEF study tour group dropped into the newly opened BuzzFeed UK offices in London to chat with Luke Lewis. Everybody is talking about BuzzFeed – but what do you really need to know?

Our interview with Arianna Huffington: an excerpt

Arianna Huffington’s spreading the word. She wants to start a new conversation. It’s what she and the Huffington Post do better than most in the news media industry. This time it’s all about redefining success. “We need a third metric, beyond money and power, that places value on our well-being, wisdom and our ability to make a difference in the world,” she says.

French newspapers catch on to ‘augmented reality’

“Augmented reality” is a digital concept that the news industry has been familiar with for some time now. Already tried and tested by a host of national newspapers in the US and UK including The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph and The Los Angeles Times to name but a few (see previous Editors Weblog article on the varying ways in which these newspapers have been using AR), the past few weeks have seen a flourish of French newspapers hopping on board, embracing this new technology as a useful way to bridge the gap between their print and online content.

Paywall imminent for Axel Springer’s Bild.de

Germany’s Axel Springer publishing house, which in December instituted a metered paywall for mainstream title Die Welt, will follow up with a paid-content offer for Bild.de by the end of May, according to media site Horizont.net.

DME: To charge online, think consumer-first

Identify what you can offer that others can’t, and pay attention to what your customers want, was the key advice from the paid online content panel at Digital Media Europe 2013 in London.

SXSW: David Carr on business models

“Content has always been subsidized,” said David Carr, media reporter at The New York Times, in a SXSW session on paid digital content called Gates of Heaven, Gates of Hell.

Spain’s infoLibre offers new independent source of news

infoLibre, a new Spanish site partnered with French company Mediapart, launched last Thursday in an effort to create a free and independent news source in Spain. In addition to the website, a monthly magazine called Tinta Libre will premier this Friday.

Video is essential to online news – just ask Brightcove

“Consider a page without video as a naked page”