An article on the Nieman Foundation's website looks at the success that Montreal's La Presse has had in moving a daily newspaper from paper to an ambitious tablet focused publishing model. As far as I know they represent one of very few successful newspaper transitions from dead tree publishing, and several other papers are planning to adopt their platform.
- La Presse has found that the product works best on tablets six inches and larger, though they're working on a "phablet" version.
- Content is free at La Presse - no paywall - and they're finding the readership is more than enough to make a buck.
- The tablet format is delivering a much higher CPM (cost per thousand readers) than print, desktop, and phone versions.
- La Presse made a big increase in staff for the launch of the new platform.
- Perhaps not surprisingly, the tablet edition does skew towards younger readers in their twenties and thirties, but it is also attracting people who weren't previously reading the paper.
- Although it's expected that daily print publication is nearing an end, the big, advertising stuffed weekend paper is still likely to survive.
And, for those keeping score, "heavy users of digital newspaper news skew heavily to Apple products, and, here, La Presse+ is no different. More than 80 percent of the product's "opens" and of the time spent using it, come from the iPad."
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Newspaper Success in a Digital Age
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday June 21 2015, @04:36AM
First, the metro-ization of the news. I want to see a list of headlines, with possibly a sentence or two summarizing the story. A year or two back they all started having big pictures with a skimpy headline. Information content went way down, page load times went way up, I quit visiting a couple news sites over that (cough msnbc cough).
Second, pay some attention to your links. Some sites keep a link at the top for days at a time, or will have several different headlines for the same story (Yahoo, I'm looking at you). If you can't pay some intern to weed through your auto-generated links, why should I waste time weeding through them?
Finally, if you're going to have a 'local' link, don't make it all about the local elementary school's upcoming bake sale. I live in a suburb of San Diego, yet whenever I hit the 'local' link I either get "no local news available", or I get a bunch of stuff, nothing at all relating to either San Diego or San Diego county.
Google news does an OK job, and they're the best of the bunch. BBC loses as it's Europe centric, although it's my second choice when looking for news. OTOH, the BBC is Europe centric, so when I do read a story I get a completely different viewpoint.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday June 21 2015, @04:39AM
To reply to my own post I should add I'm 56, still subscribe to the local rag (have since I was 18), and read online news on a Win 8.1 laptop.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 21 2015, @05:00AM
The paper must have known this was going to show up on SoylentNews, they rushed a Poutine [lapresse.ca] story to the front page.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @06:45AM
Born and raised in Montreal, I'd never heard of poutine until I moved to Toronto in the '80s. The funny thing is, most people seem to think this is an old and very popular food going back a long time in Quebec. It had a very small following for a long time and exploded in popularity in the '80s. I've never had the stuff; personally I think it sounds disgusting. When I was in high school, OTOH, the dish of choice was fries with gravy - no cheese. Never ate that either. When very young, I lived down the street from the original Chalet BBQ - those fries with nothing (ok, salt... maybe a hint of vinegar) was a childhood treat - plus the chance of seeing Jean Béliveau, Dickie Moore, Stan Makita or one of the other hockey players that visited the restaurant on occasion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday June 21 2015, @10:32AM
So how do they make the money?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @05:30PM
They're still in the ? stage, but they'll get there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Sunday June 21 2015, @03:35PM
My guess is that one of the major reasons this is successful is that it's not in English.
There's a lot of free English-language news sites for any particular niche you're looking for. Less so in other languages.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Username on Monday June 22 2015, @07:29AM
No one is going to run a business where the press only runs three hours on a saturday night.
Right now when a daily papers’ circulation drops too low that facility shuts down and their papers absorbed by a larger press. So on and so forth. Once transportation time/cost gets too high, it will then be digital only.
It’s only a matter of time.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday June 22 2015, @04:05PM
Newspapers will not be successful in the digital age, not once the old timers die off.
Any newspaper that succeeds will really be a digital entity that happens to use dead trees as seen here. Glad some old newspaper guy somewhere wasn't a total tool.