AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS MIGHT BE able to learn a few things from our ancestral cousins across the ocean when it comes to keeping the industry afloat.
An article in The New York Times by Eric Pfanner notes that while many American newspapers are struggling or failing, some European newspapers are generating record profits.
German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest annual profit in its 62-year history and is looking for opportunities to expand into other countries — including the U.S., the Times reported.
The successful European papers are looking to loyal readers, rather than advertisers who tend to scale back in bad economic times, to keep their revenue streams flowing. Their creativity doesn't stop at the print product.
VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with the tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang, has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.
About 150,000 people pay up to $90 a year to take part in a weight-loss club run by the site. VG Nett recently started another paying service, live streams of Norwegian soccer matches, at up to $98 a year. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users for profile upgrades, according to the Times article.
News, however, is still free.
Some European publications have begun generating revenue by providing online music downloads, bundling them into the cost of a broadband subscription and making the service appear to customers to be free.
And some Belgium newspapers have banded together to reclaim revenue that had been lost to big Internet news providers such as Google News. Arguing that Google News violates their copyrights by posting their stories without paying for them, publications have tried to negotiate agreements with Google to provide links to newspaper sites instead of posting the actual stories.
VG Nett editor Espen Egil Hansen said one reason for the success of VG Nett was that it operated independently of Verdens Gang, with its own editorial and business staff. Most American newspapers use the same staff to produce both the online and print products.
“The whole idea of merging newsrooms is a catastrophe,” Hansen said. “When you merge that old, strong culture of newspapers with this new culture that doesn't know where it is headed, the old media will always win."*