Archant will delay its geotagging personalised online news feature for its regional newspaper sites by months, the UK media group's business development director told the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Dublin Thursday.

Plans to relaunch the Web sites, which would have allowed users to prioritise news based on postal codes, have been delayed until mid-2008 due to technical problems, Ian Davies told conference delegates.

Archant had planned to launch the sites at the end of 2007, Journalism.co.uk reported.

To make the sites work, reporters at Archant's 80 newspapers in East and South East of England will need to gather geographical information to form part of the data to be added to each story, Davies said.