Disappointed Parisian newspaper readers are yet again scowling in the direction of Presstalis today, as the distribution company’s striking workers have blocked a third title this week from appearing in the kiosks that dot the city’s sidewalks.

This afternoon, it is French newspaper Le Monde that can’t be found among the shelves; yesterday it was business daily Les Echos, and on the weekend Sunday title Le Journal de Dimanche was similarly absent.

Far from ruining breakfast, these repeated disruptions strike at the heart of the news distribution industry, and pose a grave threat to the country’s print newspapers.

Presstalis, the primary player in the distribution sector, is in charge of the delivery of 90 French and international dailies and 3,300 magazines to over 29,000 points of sale across France, with a high concentration in Paris, reports Newsring.

Hotly anticipated by the news media industry since it was first proposed as a rival for The Economist and The Financial Times, Atlantic Media’s new online business magazine Quartz finally went live yesterday. The launch was always going to be a closely scrutinised affair thanks to Quartz’s mobile-first, digital-only direction, and journalists have been quick to highlight the publication’s decision to shun native apps in favour of an app-like site.

A simple, uncluttered homepage greets visitors to qz.com. Rejecting the much-adhered-to practice of producing news website layouts that resemble newspaper front pages, Quartz features a single story on its main page with a bar on the left side of the screen that leads readers to "top," "latest" and "popular" stories. The navigation bar at the top of the screen is, as promised, categorised according to "phenomena," "not beats."

The topic of audience measurements is of great importance to the news publishing industry in a time of multiple channel publishing. Being able to show an accurate figure of the combined reach of print, online and mobile would be most valuable. Also for WAN-IFRA this is an important issue to put on the agenda. One international forum where measurement issues for all medias are discussed soon, is the I-COM Global Summit, taking place in Rome 15-18 October.

The I-COM is an industry backed international forum for exploring Data & Measurement issues facing the Digital Marketing Industry, with the goals of showcasing meaningful innovation and working toward consensus on best practices.

The theme of Global Summit this year is ‘Big Data: Game Changing Strategies that drive your Brand’. The Big Data trend and its particular significance to Digital Marketing will be discussed and the event will also cover key Data & Measurement topics such as Social, Mobile, Multi-Screen, Advertising Effectiveness and Man vs. Machine.

WAN-IFRA members benefit from a special member price of 20% off the regular fee. Read more and register here: http://i-com.org/global-summits-2012-pricing

Two weeks ago when the SFN blog examined the National Readership Survey (NRS)’s report on print and online news consumption, we suggested that encouraging digital figures for quality titles could be of great interest to advertisers. Looking at the same figures, The Guardian’s Investigations Executive Editor, David Leigh, had an altogether more radical idea: a £2 pound levy on broadband services.

Thanks to the BBC’s free-to-access, taxpayer-funded news website, British news consumers will always have access to reliable, up-to-date news reports. This, Leigh argues, means that the paywall model will “never really work in the UK context.” 

The noted investigative journalist reasons, in an article posted to MediaGuardian, that the simplest and most effective means of solving the financial dilemma faced by British news publishers is a “small levy on UK broadband providers [that] could be distributed to news providers in proportion to their UK online readership.” Brits are not particularly inclined to pay for online news, Leigh continues, but almost 20 million UK households are, and will continue to be, willing to pay for essential broadband subscriptions.