On 18 September 2009, beloved London evening freesheet thelondonpaper folded. In its wake, London Lite remains.

While the closure is part of a larger effort by owners News International to trim the fat from their portfolio and erect paywalls around profitable titles, it also speaks to the future of freesheets on the web.

Back in April, thelondonpaper re-launched their web site. What was interesting about that was that London Lite had effectively no web site. It still doesn’t — just a ‘e-edition’. Its content is “incorporated” with morning freesheet Metro.co.uk. Looking back, one has to wonder what would have happened if the money hadn’t been sank into the web presence. Would thelondonpaper still be around?

In a comment on a Guardian article about the closure, a now-former londonpaper web developer had the following to say about the redesign:

I’ve been a freelance web developer at thelondonpaper.com for the past two years. After fighting through a huge amount of red tape, we were finally able to relaunch the badly failing launch website in April this year and have doubled our traffic within four months.

When it closed, thelondonpaper had a circulation of about 1.1 million. What we don’t know is the web stats. It’s great they doubled traffic — but what did they double?

The lesson to be learned here may be that general interest freesheets have no business expanding into the web. Other London freesheets that have web sites include Metro and City AM.

Metro qualifies as a “general interest” title, but the competition they face in the mornings is minimal — either pay for a paper, or pick up a free Metro. Also, City AM is extremely niche. There isn’t another free daily business news title that competes with it. The City AM web site isn’t very good, which is possibly intentional so to discourage web visits and drive print readership.

With thelondonpaper, News International wanted it all: a robust free print product and a robust free web site. When your product is free, losing millions every year and is often read just because it’s there, you’ve got to make a choice.

News International chose to close it down, cut their losses and move on. By the end of it, News International was so disconnected from the title they wouldn’t even entertain an offer to buy it. The brand dies with the company’s decision to close the title.

But it still makes me wonder what could have been if thelondonpaper had stayed away from the web. Had they of taken that money and instead sunk it into something else — other than a robust web presence — to set themselves apart, would the paper have survived?

In the latest part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Liz Bridgen looks at the online media scene in Iceland. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

As the country with the world’s deepest penetration of internet use (86.3% of the population) and highest literacy rate (around 99%), it’s no surprise that Iceland should have a buoyant online media scene.

The print, broadcast and online environment

Iceland’s population of just over 300,000 have a choice of three national Icelandic-language newspapers – all with online editions – plus several domestic English-language titles aimed dually at tourists and the growing útlendingur (foreigner) population.

The broadsheet Morgunblaðið (The Morning Paper) is the country’s daily ‘paper of record.’  Its content-rich online edition http://www.mbl.is/ is a resource of the day’s international, national and local news with additional links to sections including Viðskipti (Business), Fólk (People) and Íþróttir (Sport),  along with a link to Enski boltinn (English football) news (Icelanders follow English football and current affairs with considerable attention).   The website also has a sizable and searchable Myndasafn (photo store).

The main paid-for competition comes in the form of tabloid DV (Dagblaðið Vísir).  Its online edition http://www.dv.is/  is considerably more limited than its rival’s and focuses on the day’s main Fréttir (news) with just over a dozen international, national and local stories featured each day.   The DV website also provides a window to its publisher’s magazines  - such as the celebrity and readers’-true-story magazine Séð og Heyrt (Seen and Heard).  These magazine sub-sites highlight the latest issue’s headline stories.

The young pretender in the Icelandic media scene is Fréttablaðið (The Free Paper) which has been distributed to most Icelandic homes since 2001 and is now the largest circulation newspaper in Iceland.  Its online edition – as such – is hosted via its parent company’s website in the form of a PDF of the day’s newspaper.   However media group 365, whose portfolio also includes national and local TV channels, radio stations and magazines, draws its outlets together online under the http://www.visir.is/ website to create a sizeable resource of international, national and local news and features.

RÚV, Iceland’s public service broadcaster, controls the Sjónvarpið TV channel and the Rás 1 and Rás 2 radio stations.  Its website http://www.ruv.is/ provides headline news – listed by the time the story broke – and allows the user to stream live radio too.

Icelandic is claimed to be one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn, and with an increasing number of útlendingar (foreigners) working in the country, foreign-language online media is a particularly valuable resource for the non-Icelandic population (who principally speak English, Polish, Serbo-Croat and Thai).  These websites serve a dual purpose – since the Icelandic economy relies heavily on tourism, such media also provides background information on the country and its culture for tourists.

The English-language Iceland Review is a chic travel and culture magazine for the affluent Icelandophile.  However, its website at http://www.icelandreview.com/ is markedly different from the high quality gloss of its sister publication and instead focuses on giving the user a snapshot of the day’s Icelandic news stories.  While the magazine is beautifully written, mostly by American and English journalists (whose work often appears in the side columns of the website), the style of the website’s daily news is closer to a direct translation of the Icelandic newspapers that it uses as its sources (featuring stories such as ‘Dead Dolphin Found in Reykjavík Suburb,’ ‘Police Investigate Book Larceny from Estate’ and ‘Faroese Securities Enter Iceland’s Stock Market’).

Finally the irreverent Reykjavik Grapevine, published 18 times each year, provides an English-language view of the city’s life and culture for the younger or more edgy reader.  The online edition at http://www.grapevine.is/   features news, reviews and comment, written by both Icelanders and native English speakers

Blog, bloggers and blogging

Icelanders love to blog, and blogging has been absorbed into mainstream culture to such an extent that personal blogs are now incorporated into all the main newspaper websites. While there has always been a view that if you write in Icelandic you can write what you like (on the grounds that very few non-Icelanders speak Icelandic), the growing number of foreign speakers of the language and the realisation that private comment has a global reach in the blogosphere, means that some Icelanders are learning to temper what they write.

http://www.mbl.is/ has a Bloggið (The Blog) page which publishes the day’s Icelandic blog posts – on a typical day it can feature over 100 blog posts and comments.  Meanwhile, in common with the newspaper’s theme of providing a sizeable online resource, the site publishes Icelandic blog entries listed by both creator and tag, along with RSS feed information.   Here it’s possible to discover that over 300 blog posts have been written (in Icelandic) on Formula One and that over 5,000 have been written on Stjornmal_og_Samfelag (Politics and Society).   

Likewise, http://www.visir.is/ also lists hundreds of Icelandic blog posts – again by tag – on its Blogg page.  There is a link to 365′s own blog on this page – a very corporate affair – and it its journalists’ own blogs.

Meanwhile, http://www.dv.is/ uses its writers to create blog entries on its Blogg pages.

Interestingly, although there’s little attempt at founding social networks via any of these websites, its not because Facebook and MySpace are unpopular – both are widely used, with the Icelandic network on Facebook having over 17,000 members.  There is an Icelandic social networking site, www.minnsirkus.is, but it doesn’t have the popularity of Facebook among Icelanders.

Iceland’s útlendingur (foreigner) population are also bloggers.   Many come to Iceland to work on short and medium-term contracts and the blogs are often closer to long letters home.  One of the first examples of these was Douglas Dankel’s http://www.the-saga.net/, which details the University of Florida professor’s Icelandic experiences while teaching at the University of Akureyri  between 2003 and 2005.

There’s a list of foreign-language útlendingur and traveller blogs at www.icelandreview.com/links/

Add to or edit this article here. Liz Bridgen is Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer, Public Relations, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She would like to thank Sigurbjörn J. Gunnarsson for his help with this article.

Here’s the second report I wrote for Press Gazette from the Future of Newspapers conference last week. The version which appeared in Press Gazette is here; the original is below:  

Former Guardian editor Peter Preston has said that owners who are “giving up the ghost” must take some responsibility for the decline of newspapers.

Preston, speaking at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff, said: “The internet may be the deliverer of the coup de grace but it is not to blame for the decline of newspapers.”

Instead, he blamed “inertia, fatalism, and cost-cutting,” combined with social changes.

“The risk is that we spend so much time discussing the dangers and not lifting our eyes to see round the corner. There’s a danger in introversion. Introversion means we don’t notice the world changing around us until it’s too late. Introversion means a fatal lack of communication in a communications business, and a refusal to make fresh connections or form new alliances. Introversion is a kind of stasis.”

Newspapers like the London Evening News and Star were killed off long before the rise of the internet, he said, by changes in society ranging from the changing nature of city centres and declining use of public transport, to people no longer working set hours and working from home.

“The reasons for buying hugely diminished. Life changed but the newspapers didn’t.”

Now, following a ‘golden era’ where “The only thing better than buying a newspaper was selling one,” profits are falling and newspaper chains are struggling to sell off their titles.

“In terms of profits, they’ve lost their allure; and in terms of influence many owners now shun the limelight. It’s neither a particularly glamorous nor lucrative game.”

The entry of freesheets into the market has also been a major factor in declining print circulations, he said.
“The London Paper is causing problems to the Sun; London Lite is causing problems to the Mail. Each is depressing profits on the house that publishes it.

“What kind of introversion commits editors to these prospects? Have evening newspapers fought back with investment? Did the Evening Standard set up satellites? London is the size of Austria, remember.”
Newspapers should be addressing the challenges head-on, he said. “The more tracks you’ve made in addressing the future, the more chance of success. But don’t believe you’ve ‘done it’ and stop.

“You are as good as your last idea or implementation, and others can have a good idea.

“The difficulty is seeing where the technology is going to be in ten years time. At the moment most current vision is about where the internet is, and where print is – but both are uncertain. I can rap about what the internet might be like in ten years’ time – but I have no idea what ownership ten years in the future might be. It may be smaller chains, and more local chains.”

A lack of effective strategies is compounded, Preston argues, by a lack of quality in management. “You need to get good people in journalism – and that’s difficult when you’re asking graduates to work for two years on £13,500. You have to think about how you attract not just good quality journalists but good quality managers for the next twenty to thirty years.”

But at the same time, Preston said, “If we wanted a good story to tell, we could have one. If circulations of free papers were counted, there would be no decline at all. There has been a 2.3 percent rise in the circulations of newspapers globally in the last year; revenues are up 3.7%. Circulations are up 12% if you include free papers.”

“It’s a fantastically interesting time to be involved in the news industry.”