Glamour, the popular glossy magazine for women, is relaunching its Web site after completing an overhaul of its operations, MediaWeek.co.uk reported today. Like other recent news content relaunches, the new online version is aimed to be more cohesive with the print version, while also making the best of enhancements made possible by being digital.

"This redesign offers greater synergy with the tone and character of the print magazine, and will deliver on all the expectations of our readers, offering unbeatable fashion, shopping, beauty and hair content - no one will make style decisions without our help again!" Jo Elvin, editor of Glamour, owned by Condé Nast, told MediaWeek.
The changes introduced on the newly designed Web site include large scale visuals, eight content channels for fashion, shopping, beauty and hair, celebrity, style, blogs, introduction of an e-commerce element and a new section called "Do's and Don'ts."

"The release of this new version of Glamour.com highlights our ongoing programme of investment, including a significant increase in the editorial team," Emanuela Pignataro, country manager for the Condé Nast Digital Britain group told MediaWeek. The re-launch of Glamour.com marks the fourth significant investment by the group in just more than a year, beginning with redesign of Wired.co.uk in April 2009, soon followed by CNNtraveller.com at the end of last year and GQ.com in February.

Zimbabwe is celebrating a victory for press freedom, as the government decides to issue licenses to four new dailies, CNN reported. Those titles include the "Daily News," which was previously banned in 2002. These papers will be the first privately owned in the market in six years.

"This is very exciting and it's a huge time for Zimbabweans and it's an opportunity for change," Trevor Ncube, one of the most powerful publishers in southern Africa, talked about the approval of the newspaper license to CNN.

Photo: The Daily Maverick

"We're clearly in a period of transition and this newspaper will play a role to empower Zimbabweans," he added.

The Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) was formed in December 2009, in order to spearhead media reforms, such as licensing new press, radio and TV outlets, BBC News reported.

Currently, the market is dominated by state-run media, while the independent press faces severe restrictions.

"We are here to allow Zimbabweans access to media," according to Reuters news agency quoting ZMC's chairman Godfrey Majonga.

With today's introduction of Apple's iPad to Europe and parts of Asia, a slew of applications have appeared on the market to deliver information directly into the hands of iPad users. The iPad, Apple's much-anticipated version of a tablet computer, has the capacity to download applications, programs designed by third parties which iPad users can download for free or pay a typically low price. Given the popularity of the iPad, news sources have been quick to take advantage of the direct communication that the iPad provides.

In particular, Thomson Reuters has produced two different iPad applications, which the company hopes will increase news consumption. Meanwhile, Condé Nast Publications has recently developed a completely new version of their Wired magazine specifically designed for iPad.

For more on this story visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

The Irish News has turned its paywall technology into a revenue generating opportunity by selling it to other news publishers, Journalism.co.uk reported yesterday.

The page-turning service was developed in-house, and the Belfast-based regional title is offering to sell other publishers a subscription and digital edition service as product packages. Starting at £465, the service includes server resources, bandwidth and video streaming for digital editions.
"When the paper was available for free, apart from the cost of running the website, we were losing readers of the paid for paper to the free online model, which was economic madness. Now readers have a clear and equitable choice, pay for a printed newspaper or pay for the same paper online," Liam McMullen, systems and resource manager, told Journalism.co.uk. He also noted that creating their own in-house paywall technology has helped the group to have greater control over the product and offer more a customised personal service to its readers.

The service has so far been well received by its readers and the newspaper has no plans to bring down its paywall and re-introduce free content, McMullen told Journalism.co.uk. He added that the newspaper isn't stopping there with its technology, and will continue to try and serve advertisers better by targeting advertising around news on its Web site, and optimising potentials of the mobile medium.

Last week, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content, a company with which Yahoo! had been developing a relationship for several months. Associated Content is a news source that provides localized articles through the contributions of mostly non-journalist individuals with knowledge of local information. Luke Beatty, founder of Associated Content, claims that AC's personalized style and Yahoo!'s incredible size allow for both news sources to be more effective when working together.

AC delivers to Yahoo! localized content that will hopefully provide more personalized content to Yahoo's 600 million users and allow it to gain a level of relevancy that could change the that way news is reported on the web. Meanwhile, Beatty claims that Yahoo!'s large audience will motivate his news contributors by giving them access to a larger audience. As part of the acquisition, Yahoo will be opening a new office in Denver.

For more on this story visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Demand Media has entered into a partnership with Hearst Group to produce content for two of its publications, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, Erik Sherman reported last week in a Bnet.com article. The move, in which Demand will create articles and videos for SFGate.com's real estate section and Chron.com's small business section, advances the company's reach into traditional media.

Sherman reported that the normal rate offered by Demand for a few hundred words of outsourced article is US$7.50 to the writer and about $3.50 for copy editing, but Mike Taylor, an author on the MediaBistro Blog reported that Demand actually pays an average of $15 to $20 per article, with price variations depending on the kind of work and level of distribution. Demand pays $30 for videos.

"At Demand's current pay rate, I'd be making almost a buck an hour," The New York Times' David Carr wrote.

In an interview yesterday with AllThingsDigital's Peter Kafka, New York Times spokeswoman Stacy Green attempted to allay concerns over the impact the NYT's forthcoming paywall on bloggers. A new study on news and social media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that 80% of blog entries link to one of just four news sources: the BBC, CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Thus if the NYT's proposed paywall shuts out bloggers, the newspaper stands to lose an enormous portion of its Web traffic.

In downplaying fears over a fundamental shift to a 'closed web', the NYT spokeswoman reiterated an explanation of the 'metered model' underlying the NYT paywall. In essence, users will be able to read a number of articles free of charge, and only after exceeding their quota will they be prompted to pay for content. Furthermore, surfers who arrive at a given article from a blog link will not have that session counted against them.

For more on this story visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Online news aggregation and content distribution service Publish2 has announced the launch of a product it hopes will replace The Associated Press, or, as the company terms it, "Craigslist it." As in, "kill the AP's main income stream by offering an open, efficient alternative," TechCrunch explained yesterday.

The Publish2 News Exchange product, announced at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference, will aim to help publishers reduce content distribution costs associated with The AP for distributing high quality and free content from around the Web, VentureBeat.com reported. Instead of buying AP content, Publish2 would connect online publishers with print publishers, offering brand syndication alternatives to web publishers, while acting as a news aggregator for online journalists and bloggers.

The AP content distribution network is an "obsolete inefficient monopoly, ripe for disruption," Scott Karp, CEO of the News Exchange platform initiative wrote in a post on the Publish2 Web site. "The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news distribution platform. We're enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web, and from the efficiency of content production on the Web."

When it comes to getting a brand message to the public, growing digital spaces, like social media, are exciting new channels, and using them correctly is important - "correctly" being the key word, a new campaign by Sweden's Dagens Industri points out.

The newspaper, Scandinavia's largest business daily, has created a "cautionary tale" of what can happen when a media outlet works too hard to deliver brand messages on just one platform, the Newspaper Marketing Agency Ltd. reported. Dagens Industri's video, posted on YouTube, is an entertaining take on how to keep it all in perspective.

To watch the video on the Dagens Industri site, click here.
To watch it on YouTube, click here.

In 2008, U.S. newspapers saw their online segment grow to approximately US$3.3 billion, 5 percent more than in 2007. This is the first time since 2001 that single-digit average growth has been recorded, and at the local level results were very uneven, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

The growth in newspaper online revenues has, on any reckoning, been impressive.

At the end of 2008, interactive spending held an 11.5 percent share of all local ad spending. The last Borrell Associates research suggests that it is headed for a 15 percent to 18 percent share before levelling off within five years. If it reaches 18 percent, it will become the second-largest shareholder of local advertising, behind newspapers, according to the report, World Digital Media Trends 2009, released by SFN and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

The London Evening Standard today announced the availability of its mobile phone news application in association with mobile apps developer and distributor Handmark, a press release posted on BusinessWire.com announced today.

As newspapers continue to go behind paywalls, the move by the London free daily is aimed at bringing back its lost readership and increasing its subscriptions, by making the news app available on Java and Windows Mobile-compatible versions, ITProPortal.com reported.

The mobile news application is sponsored by British Airways London City service, and can be downloaded for free across a wide range of mobile platforms that include iPhone, Nokia S60, BlackBerry and Google Android smartphones, MediaWeek.co.uk reported.

"We are excited to introduce our new mobile application so our readers can now enjoy the convenience of having instant access to our trusted news and information on the go," Tim Smith, General Manager Digital of the London Evening Standard stated in the press release. "The mobile application provides an extremely intuitive, personalized experience and supports a great sharing experience."