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?

Express.co.uk is about to undergo a redesign (and there’s a good review of the new look, still currently in beta, at econsultancy).

To me, the new site isn’t that impressive (screenshot below, or you can compare the old front page or new front page) – it looks like a poor mashup of the BBC and Yahoo in the existing colour scheme.

Even worse, it’s not very accessible as there is literally no content on the new home page with javascript turned off.

The agency behind it is Netro42 who say here about the old version that “Netro42 working in partnership with Northern and Shell quickly established that the key to success was in wholly utilising the digital space.”

Personally, I like to partially use the analogue space when working on websites, but I may be old fashioned.

New Express homepage

I wonder if the new design means they’ll update their site on a sunday? Or get some better suggested search terms?

So the Independent has relaunched its website. At first glance there’s nothing spectacularly new or innovative, but a deeper look reveals some intelligent changes – particularly on the business side of things. Here are the headlines:

• A much more prominent place for RSS feeds, ‘Most popular’ (read/emailed/commented), videos, podcasts, blogs, (‘Just posted’ and ‘Catch up with our experts’), photo galleries, poll, etc. Which is as you’d expect.
• Likewise, there’s the now customary ‘Digg it/Stumbleupon/Facebook/delicious’ box on every article (plus change font size/print/email).
• ‘In the News’ navigation choice drops down to big stories of the moment. Not as striking as Sky and The Guardian, who are able to include those stories as a navigation choice in their own right.
• Editorial nous remains important as ‘Editor’s Choice’ becomes even more prominent (in comparison, ‘Most popular’ lies below the fold). The ‘Day in a page’ drop-down menu (presumably for people who missed the news that day and want to catch up) remains but drops to the bottom.
• Open House is described as an “online debating chamber where our diverse stable of columnists and commentators come together to discuss the issues of the day – and invite you to join in.” Looks like an attempt at cloning commentisfree.
• IndyBest micro-site brings together “The Independent’s ever-popular weekly 50 Best features and the daily 10 Best series”. Are they annoyed ShortList came up with the idea first?
• Weather is more customisable.
• But most noteworthy is the fact that the Independent are targeting new niche markets with new online-only sections including Art & Architecture, Fashion, Gadgets & Tech and Health & Wellbeing.
• Also notable: Offers gets its own page and navigation button, as does Student. And just as The Guardian prepares to invest in its own coverage in the area, Environment now makes it to the Inde’s top level of navigation.
• Finally, we see a commercial application of mapping in the Inde’s property service, and automated quotes from Xelector both integrated into editorial pages.

The final verdict? Clearly the Inde has its business head screwed on, while managing to tick all the boxes a newspaper should have been ticking last year in terms of technology. Editorially, however, it’s still trailing its broadsheet competitors in terms of making the most of the possibilities of the medium, with The Telegraph doing exciting things with databases and Flash, and The Guardian excelling on blogging and podcasting. Still, at least The Independent prints links to other sites in its newspaper, which is something its competitors have never done well.

And for the record, here’s what it looked like on January 4, before the revamp:

Alex Gamela talks to António Granado, editor of the online edition of Público, a reference newspaper in Portugal, as they relaunch their website.

Público have always been ahead as far as online presence is concerned, and recently the newsroom created a video team, as well as launching a redesigned website. In this short interview, we tried to ask a very busy António about his views on online journalism, a subject he discusses in his blog PontoMedia. Granado is also a lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and is one of the best Portuguese minds dealing with the new media issues.

What is the situation of the online journalism in Portugal? Does it exist?

Online journalism in Portugal is taking its first steps. The investment in this area is still minimum, and the media are now taking a different look to the possibilities opened by the Internet.

What changes are currently happening as digital journalism is concerned?

PÚBLICO debuts this week (November 19th) with videos on its website – we have established a five-person team to make them. We are also changing our homepage to give more prominence to vídeo, and we will be getting more pictures and graphics. The Economy Channel is now assured permanence by the economy journalists, which is a first step on the right path.

What is the audience of Público’s online edition?

We have no data that allow us to perceive who the Público.pt readers exactly are. Anything I’d say would be my opinion and not a fact.

As a teacher, do you believe that the preparation given to journalism students at universities takes into account the new reality?

It is clear that most universities aren’t preparing the students for the new realities. For example, there’s still a separation between the teaching of written, radio and TV journalism, which is an outdated 20th century concept.

Are Portuguese journalists, in general, ready to embrace new media?

Portuguese journalists aren’t prepared for new media, because new media are making their way into the newsrooms quite slowly, and sometimes, in the worst way. Journalists must be trained for the tasks demanded by the new journalism, you have to do it with the journalists’ support and not against them. In many places this isn’t being done.

Is there a citizen journalism in Portugal?

I don’t think there’s any yet.

A few years back some said that there was no future in online editions. This year El País’ director said that if he started the newspaper now, he would do it only online. What sort of mentality prevails in the Portuguese editorial market – and what needs to be changed?

It’s a backward mentality. There’s still fear of the digital. People don’t post news online so they won’t “burn” paper scoops, there’s no investment in multimédia because, deep inside, people think that maybe the newspaper crisis isn’t here to stay. Managers’ attitudes towards multimedia must be changed (the small moves aren’t enough, bigger steps are required); newspapers’ mentality must be changed, they can’t go on thinking that a news story lasts 24 hours; journalists’ minds must be changed, they must understand that their main mission is to inform in any way possible, and not to sell newspapers on the day after the events.

Journalists have this strong sense of self, maybe something comparable to doctors, because there’s a notion of power. What will happen to this sense with the participation of readers? Is citizen journalism really journalism?

Journalists must get used to the participation of readers. Jay Rosen calls them “the people formerly known as the audience”, because now they can and want to participate more in the news process. Journalists must understand this radical change and adapt to it. Citizen journalism sometimes is, and sometimes isn’t, journalism. As we all know, there’s also journalism that isn’t journalism, and that ashames us all.

What does the future journalist look like?

The journalist of the future is someone who can look at a story and tell it in the most effective way. Who cares more about the readers and not as much about the sources

And the reader of the future?

The reader of the future is the reader of now. “He knows more than I do” as Dan Gillmor says. He wants and he can participate more. He’s not happy with text only. He wants news immediately, on the platform he’s using, and not on any other that is imposed to him.

The setting for Portuguese online journalism may look desolate, but change is inevitable. Old habits die hard, and the situation in Portugal is rather similar to many other countries. It’s a slow process that has to be made, just like Granado said: “with the journalists’ support and not against them”.

Pictures by Sandra Oliveira

German regional publisher WAZ just launched its new flagship website, Der Westen. New features include geotagging, blogs and keyword filtering, monitored from a futuristic-looking newsroom. Martin Stabe has the details.

The concept, writes Der Spiegel, is to let users choose the centre of their world, their perspective on news. Der Westen then provides content around it.

The FAZ today has an interview of blogger-turned-editor-in-chief Katharina Borchert. Numerous online ventures have been playing on regional papers’ turf, from local advertisers flocking to AdSense to local radios breaking news more rapidly, she says. To compete, paper brands must regain their offline roles as community leaders by enhancing the news hole with social features, Facebook-style.

Concerning marketing, the size of web audiences requires looking beyond the traditional paper reader. WAZ offline subscribers currently account for half its websites visitors. They aim at bringing this figure to 10%.

As Bas Timmers wrote, such a shift in scope will come at the expense of traditional brand names. Der Westen already serves as an online window for five dailies.

Economies of scale, in terms of brand familiarity for users and editors, offer an incentive to develop a single frame covering several segments, be they geographic or demographic. The extent of content personalisation within such sites then allow for finer targeting.

In Quebec, regional leader Quebecor aggregated its brand under the single Canoë portal in the late 1990s. According to Jeff Mignon, it’s a financial success story. In France, regional giant Ouest-France built a template for all its papers, maville.com. It just signed a deal with about every other regional publisher to blanket France with maville websites. Time Warner went cross-media in brand-mixing with its portal CNN Money in early 2006.

However, such efforts hardly put traditional publishers back in the Bundesliga of web2.0. Amid the flow of blogopraise, Robert Basic only offers Der Westen the ‘Prize of conservative innovation’. The site lacks a Craigslist-style marketplace, a Twitter feed and state-of-the-art photo features, he says.

Publishers surely are making steps in the right direction with such moves. But the giant leap they need to take to survive online has yet to arrive.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns

1. The Rake Today: Lambert to the Slaughter

   “Next Monday appears to be the date for former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer to reveal his plans for the launch of a professionally edited and reported online newspaper.”

   to onlinejournalism independentjournalism

2. Newspaper offer readers ‘Riddle’
   A British indie feature is rewriting distribution rules by becoming the first to preem as a “covermount” DVD given away free with a newspaper.
   to televisioninteractivity covermounts film dailymail

3. USA Today Distributes News by ‘Widget’: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

   “USA Today is plunging into a hot new Internet technology, offering its online users the ability to install “widgets” on their blogs and personal Web pages that contain news updates and other information from the newspaper.”

   to onlinejournalism usatoday widgets blogs

4. OK! Relaunches Website with Eyes on TMZ | Folio Magazine

   “Celebrity glossy wunderkind OK! magazine relaunched its Web site today with an Escalade’s worth of features—“web exclusive, continuously updated breaking news, celebrity updates, photo galleries, videos, reviews, blogs and numerous interactive features…”

   to onlinejournalism newmediamagazines onlinevideo blogs galleries

5. Why Glossies Went Mass – Forbes.com

   “On Web sites such as Style.com, consumers can see looks from September’s shows an hour after they are premiered on the runway. Followers don’t have to have some high-ranking editor in New York to tell them what was hot or not. They can see and decide for…”

   to newmediamagazines onlinejournalism onlinevideo …

6. Blogging Without the Time Sink

   Blog your initial brainstorming. Blog your research. Blog your interactions.

   to blogs onlinejournalism … saved by 2 other people …

7. Conversational Journalism: Credibility Gained or Status Lost?
   In a sense, clinging to objectivity as an achievable goal denies our humanity. That puts us in awkward situations almost daily. And don’t think our audiences and communities don’t recognize that. Often, they’re laughing at us for it.
   to onlinejournalism ethics transparency community conversation objectivity …

Here’s another lovely use of wikis: BivingsReport have one on ‘Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites’. Simple principle, just add your suggestion to the list (or refine others). Worth watching.

As solo sports journalist Rick Waghorn relaunches his Norwich City news website in the first step towards franchising the service, I spoke to him about going solo, the importance of advertising, and the likely first places for the franchise to expand.

Originally, Waghorn says, the plan was to offer a franchise “in much the same way as you would set up a bathroom shop and people would buy the kit off the shelf from you.” But the plan has changed.

“I’m not sure that’s realistic in that perhaps that works for someone with a redundancy package to self-start a franchise from us, but I think the way it may work is: I’ve got some funding that we use to actually pay salaried journalists to open a Sheffield bureau or a Manchester bureau rather than someone actually buying a franchise off me.”

The new-look site is an impressive effort from a team of three people – putting most local newspaper sites to shame with clear layout and even up-to-the-minute features such as the ‘most read’ section, podcasts, blogs and a text service. Most impressive is a set of RSS feeds from what, in old media, would have been called ‘the competition’ – Waghorn clearly recognises that making your site a destination is more important than pretending the competition doesn’t exist. “If people only have ten minutes at lunch to go online, they’ll want a site that has all the details.”

In the 14 months since launching RickWaghorn.co.uk with money from a redundancy package, the site has exceeded Rick’s “wildest expectations”.

“It is very much hard work. In year one we roughly took about £35-40,000 which was done on a commission split with my ad man. It has been a huge voyage of discovery.”

Now Waghorn is planning “another voyage of discovery.”

“The theory is that what we’ve done with Norwich should be equally applicable to most other provincial football clubs,” says Waghorn, “so we’re starting to have discussions with different regional journalists. Now the question is how you service that in an advertising sense, but one of the interesting things is if you can start offering, if you like, regionality, then I can start offering, say, advertising in Suffolk to companies in Norfolk.

“Or, let’s say we looked at the three Championship sides in South Yorkshire. If we had those we could serve them all with one advertising rep, but offer someone advertising on all three, and do a bundle sale.”

Teaming up with senior advertising executive Kevin O’Gorman has been crucial, with O’Gorman working “the local beat, bringing little local firms onto the internet who have built their own websites and need to market them.

“We give them a friendly face – someone they’ve been dealing with on a local basis in the last few years, and he holds their hand and helps them online. I do the editorial and he services the advertisers in a very old-fashioned newspaper sense – and then you find a mate with a background in web design and get the lucky breaks, but I’ve found a ‘Team Rick’ which has worked well so far.”

Another key to the site’s success has been its flexibility, and speed.

“It’s very peculiar for football because few regional papers have a Sunday edition, and at Norwich Evening News I was the last match report anyone ever read – at 5 o’clock Monday night when the paperboy put the paper through the door it was 48 hours after the event. In the age of rolling news that doesn’t make sense. Now, arguably after the official club site, I’m the first match report they read because my match report goes up on the website five minutes after the match finishes. All of a sudden I become a Sunday newspaper because I put out my match report, my interviews on Sunday. Now that presents a challenge to local newspapers because what are they going to put in their Monday night newspapers?

“Also, when you’re not part of a local newspaper group you’re nimble. I can hold my hand up to dozens of mistakes we’ve made but because you’re only two or three people we can say ‘Oh, that didn’t work, let’s try that,’ and I think that nimbleness is another of the key factors in dealing with the internet.”

Rick’s advice to journalists wanting to go it alone is to recognise the importance of advertising. “Start talking to your advertising department, because just as much as the editorial department is suffering from redundancies, so is the advertising department. Most journalists will tell you that the only time you bump into anyone from the advertising department is at the Christmas party when you’re trying to get off with one. But these people have skills and contacts, and you bolt the two of us together and that’s where it’s worked, so I’d start taking your friend from the advertising department out for a drink.”

Trinity Mirror have finally relaunched the first of their local newspaper websites, with the Liverpool Post and Liverpool Echo breaking free of that ‘icLiverpool’ brand and into individually branded sites that reflect their different markets.

It’s been a move the ‘ic’ sites have needed for a long time, and the contrast is considerable. The endless list of vertical navigation options has gone, replaced by a much clearer horizontal bar and the generally ‘bigger canvas’ look that most recent news website relaunches have adopted (larger images, fewer stories).

It’s no surprise to see video getting a stronger placing, while image galleries have become par for the course, although these are given a separate section rather than integrated with stories. And reader involvement is given top billing with four ‘calls to action’ on the banner – “Send your stories/videos/pics” and “Join a forum” (the latter too vague. It would be more productive to see specific forums promoted instead, but maybe that will come in time).

Web 2.0 is a keyword here, and the articles incorporate the facililty to ‘share’ via del.icio.us, Digg or Newsvine (with a helpful ‘What’s This?’ link for the majority of readers who’ll be thinking just that), along with reader comments, prominent RSS feed links and a fantastically comprehensive RSS service generally (well illustrated on the sitemap page).

Blogs are part of the package, and there’s some nice writing there, although someone ought to tell the columnists bloggers about the importance of linking (a music blog that doesn’t link to any band websites/MySpace accounts is pretty criminal – UPDATE Mar 3 ’08: now no longer the case: see comments below), and it would be nice to see more engagement with the blogosphere generally – surely there are some excellent bloggers in Liverpool not on the Trinity Mirror payroll?

The ranking system is a nice idea that hasn’t been thought through enough: as an article’s ranking is only displayed on the article itself it’s not clear how this is useful for readers who have already made the effort to get there. There is a “Most popular” box on the homepage, for instance, but no sign of any place where you can find the “Highest ranked”; it might also be useful for readers to choose only to see stories above a particular rating, as Slashdot does.

And one final weakness is a registration system that doesn’t explain why you should register (elsewhere the call to receive email updates does the job better).

These picky issues aside, the redesign is a massive improvement and much more pleasurable to browse. Aesthetically it beats competitors such as the Lancashire Evening Post and Hull Daily Mail hands-down. Although those newspapers seem to have better grasped the possibilities of new media editorially, this relaunch suggests Trinity Mirror understand the technical possibilities. Most impressive is a tagging system which allows users to click through to articles on the same subject/person – potentially making the accompanying ‘Related articles’ box redundant.

Journalism.co.uk reports that the next websites to get the facelift will be the Journal and the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, and the Middlesbrough-based Evening Gazette “to be followed by titles in South and North Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland.” Will these follow the template, or will there be more editorial freedom? The Post and Echo seem to be based on the same template, so I’m betting on the former, but there is enough freedom here to at least give the papers more identity than ‘icLiverpool’ ever did.

“Jim” at CNN.com has invited me to look at the beta version of the new CNN.com (screengrab top; current design below) for the Online Journalism Blog. He knows how to make a man feel special.

So of course I oblige, and the site? Well, I’m somewhat underwhelmed. In a year of relaunches, CNN’s effort lacks the ‘big canvas’ approach that seems to becoming the norm (larger images, larger text), and looks ‘small’ as a result. The redesign reminds me of that old cliche: ‘more evolution than revolution’, i.e. ‘we bottled it’.

So, a missed opportunity visually. But where they’ve done much better is under the hood, and in philosophy. Firstly, the decision to release a ‘beta’ version of the site to some users represents a change in the way these things have been traditionally done. So credit for joining the world of the ‘perpetual beta‘. Secondly, video is a stronger element, including a ”move to an in-page flash video player and in-page video across our various storytelling pages“, while the primacy of text is challenged by “the idea that, online, all media types are created equal – text, video, photos, graphics and audio“. Er, and interactivity?

This is illustrated vividly by the comparison:

Notably, the site search engine has three options – the Web, CNN News, and CNN video. I’m in the process of finding out how they made video more searchable. Jim tells me:

“The design itself was done in mind to make videos more searchable and discoverable by external search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc). Because the videos are no longer in a popup, users can link directly to individually videos and find them either from search engines or other partner links.

“For our internal search engine, we’re constantly making efforts to make our videos more searchable. We’re continually trying to find more ways to integrate more relevant metadata, thereby yielding more relevant results in a search. We’ve come along way and we still have plenty of room for improvement. We’re also continually looking at technologies that will help us improve our searchability.”

Those points aside, there are lots of little touches which are interesting signs of how news is changing: more prominence given to the Citizen Journalism arm (‘iReport’), more visible RSS feeds, blogs and podcasts, and, er, weather personalisation. I particularly like the subtle ‘Hot Topics’ line just under the navigation, too.

Of course, the great thing about a beta is: it’s work in progress. And the Behind The Scenes blog is wonderfully open about the changes they’ve already made in response to feedback. If you pop to http://beta.cnn.com/ you can add your own ideas to those already suggested.

PS: If you want the full CNN presentation, here it is.

UPDATE: The Journalism Iconoclast has also reviewed the site, and noticed some things I missed, particularly the use of AJAX, which does indeed make this a more impressive site than most:

“One of my favorite new features of the site is the video page itself. It breaks the video content down into different tabs like “Top Stories,” “Most Popular,” “By Category,” “Staff Picks,” “Live TV,” etc. But they aren’t separate pages. Using the power of Ajax, CNN.com doesn’t have to reload new pages each time you click on one of those tabs.

“Click on the story about the Glasgow airport attack. You are taken to the written story about what happened, but at the top of the page you’ll notice tabs for video and photos. If you click either one it puts the video or photos above a summary of the story for you to view — all without reloading the page. It’s very fast and seamless. Clicking on the read button takes you back to the full text.”