Launches and Strategies

Mumbai: Independent News & Media Plc, publishers of The Independent newspaper and who now have a 26 per cent equity stake in Jagran Prakashan Ltd (JPL), would like to introduce an Indian language daily in South Africa. According to Gavin K O'Reilly, Chief Operating Officer, the Irish media major drew its strength from servicing diverse geographies, a truism therein being that growth would require...

The International Herald Tribune will start publishing in Moscow on Feb. 1 under an agreement with The Moscow Times, becoming the first international newspaper to be published daily in Russia. The newspaper will initially be sold by subscription and at about 40 newsstands in hotels, supermarkets, trade centers and BP filling stations. An annual subscription will cost $599, while single copies will...

Jim Chisholm, Strategy Advisor for WAN and Director of the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project ( www.futureofthenewspaper.com) says newspapers have much to look forward to in 2006. Here are his forecasts for the year. By any measure the media industry is undergoing extraordinary change. Consider for a minute that MSN, Playstations, Amazon, and eBay didn’t exist in 1994. Google was launched...

NEW YORK–Time Warner Inc. is closing in on a deal with Microsoft Corp. to team up on an online advertising service to compete with Google Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the talks. The paper said the two companies were now focusing on a deal that would combine their advertising-related assets, with little or no money changing hands. It said they...

Le Monde, the highbrow French daily, has finally decided to get its act together and go in for a facelift to start with. It has launched its first major editorial redesign in a decade with emphasis on bigger photographs, more colour, larger typefaces, and fewer articles to hold on to its steadily eroding base of readers and advertisers. The day after The traditional Le Monde was last redesigned in...

LONDON - The Wall Street Journal is publishing an eight-page guide to the compact version of its European and Asian editions, which launch later this month. The guide, which will be published on Monday October 10, will explain the new format to readers of the paper's international editions and is being produced in the same format as the new compact version. It will contain many of the design...

From the rise of transparency to the decline of newsprint, every PR pro needs to remain on top of the ever-changing media landscape. Portability of video content "It's an understatement to say that the news media have changed almost cosmically over the past several years," says Laurence Moskowitz, CEO of Medialink. And that change, he adds, is not a result of content or society's appetite, but is...

What exactly is Alan Rusbridger trying to do with the Guardian, or "theguardian", as its masthead has it? On Monday, readers had their first sight of the new Berliner format, which is a shrunken broadsheet or a puffed-up tabloid, depending on how you look at it. But the biggest interest, for many, will be in how, if at all, Rusbridger changes the editorial content. The Times (of which more later)...

LONDON - The Guardian's Berliner relaunch provided a dramatic 40% sales increase on its first day of distribution. Unofficial figures suggest that The Guardian put on the 40 per cent growth following the move to the smaller format, which was supported by a major advertising campaign through DDB London. The paper is in need of significant sales increases to offset the £80m it has invested in the...

A couple of parts of the traditional English landscape changed significantly this week. Not only did the country's much-maligned cricket team--eventually and after much anxiety--regain The Ashes (a sporting trophy the origin of which, like the game itself, perpetually confounds brief description), but there is now an unfamiliar presence on news stands each morning. The Guardian, the venerable...