For starters this week we head off into the world of newspapers, where an interesting set of figures have been posted detailing which UK papers are “winning” the digital revenue race. The link to paidContent:UK summarises some pretty impressive numbers on the whole, with FT Publishing listed as leading the way with a revenue of £130 million from its digital activities, which is no small beer for sure. The numbers do start to tail off pretty rapidly after the first two players, but there are still some handy revenues being listed in the regional sector.Such activity has been drawn into focus this week largely due to the launch of another major world title going behind a paywall. You probably won’t have escaped the news that the New York Times has created a “pay for it” system, though some computer experts think that there is a work round.
The other newspaper news that should be highlighted from this week is that a US survey has discovered that more of us now seek our instant news from the internet rather than a printed product. Probably no great surprise here, but it’s always a shock moment when a survey tells you that it has actually happened.A similar shock moment may have been felt when reading that 80% of under 5’s now hit the net at least once a week. Maybe the two US surveys combined will give those newspaper moguls with vision something more to consider.
In the real world of printed newspapers, just another sign of change as in the US Erie Times-News lays-off 40 full and part time employees and outsources print production.
In the wider publishing world, some more major magazine shift into the iPad world, with such well-known names as Better Homes and Gardens, Condé Nast’s Self, and Hearst’s Cosmopolitan getting all digital.The biggest headline for the UK’s print industry this week has to be St Ives decision to sell off three magazine printing plants to Walstead for £20 million. The Peterborough, Roche and Plymouth factories had sales of £70.5 million last year, but failed to turn in a profit. Some 670 employees are involved.
In the same breath, considerable speculation is being aired regarding Northern & Shell’s magazine portfolio, which includes the popular OK! title.
I mention this purely on the basis that I was impressed by it: HP detailed to a waiting audience of journalists its latest strategy for 2011 and beyond. Yes, there were still a lot of American buzz words flying around, but what I liked was the way that a big business like HP was able to look beyond bean counting at take on board some concepts that you expect small business to get excited about – cloud-based software for example. Hats off to HP (one of those sentences that I never quite imagined saying!).Back to a story mentioned last week: the delivery of the “release candidate” version of Firefox 4. As promised we downloaded it and tried it out. It scores pretty big here at PIND, though we are Firefox fans. Top loading tabs and pinned tabs are all very Chrome, and there is an air of imitation about the new Firefox 4, but the extensions are still what makes FF tick, and they are still there, with the major one’s already updated for the new release.
Tablet talk should also make a reference to last week with the release of iPad2: the follow up can be guessed at, with initial deliveries of iPad2 now just about sold out!Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 45. Details of new stories will be added to this text page during the course of the week.
PIND044
Want to read issue 43? Click Here!
For an RSS feed for PIND add this address to your favourite RSS reader.
