Hearst completes 651€ Lagardere deal today, brings on new CFO for Hearst Magazines International division

These are heady times at Hearst Magazines as the company completed the deal today with Lagardere, getting the French media group to sign the final contract with the publisher to sell it stable of magazines for 651€ (just over $917 million).

"Having conducted the requisite information procedure with the Lagardere group workers' councils in certain jurisdictions pursuant to the relevant regulatory requirements, Lagardere SCA has today signed the share purchase agreement for the sale of its international magazine business to Hearst Corporation," it said in a statement.

The international division, not surprisingly, needed to staff up and today Hearst Magazines International president and CEO Duncan Edwards announced that Simon Horne has been appointed chief financial officer, general manager and senior vice president.

"Simon is an outstanding CFO and an experienced general manager in the international media business," Edwards said in the statement announcing the hire. "I am delighted that we are able to draw from our own strong pool of talent for this important role as we anticipate the acquisition and integration of new businesses."

Horne previously has been with Harcourt Publishers International and The National Magazine Company where he served as CFO.

New York Times paywall up, TNM climbs right over

That was easy: TNM is up and over the new New York Times paywall, thanks to Lincoln and their marketing offer. (That mean, I suppose, TNM readers will be able to view all NYT stories linked from this site.)

For others today is the day that the company said it would launch its metered paywall, and at 2:00 ET today in the US (last week in Canada) the paywall was up.

The NYT system went live on the 17th -- that was not only the day when those in Canada were subject to the paywall, but that the back-end of the system could record subscriptions (I'm guessing). As you can see from the screenshot below, my own subscription was recorded that day thanks to clicking on an ad that was delivered to me -- a promotion with Lincoln where the ad is delivered to 200,000 frequent users of the NYT website (I believe my ad was seen on my iPad). I've blurred my subscriber number, though I doubt that was necessary.


To introduce the new approach to web readers the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, has posted a letter on the website:

As I have said previously, the introduction of digital subscriptions is an investment in our future. It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to strengthen our ability to continue our journalistic mission as well as undertake digital innovations that will enable us to provide you with high-quality journalism on whatever device you choose.

Sulzberger then goes on to explain the details of the plan, emphasizing that print subscribers will continue to enjoy free access to electronic versions of the newspaper.

Newsy announces new round of funding, as company adjusts to changing media platform capabilities

Mobile video news company Newsy announced today that it had closed a new round of funding, worth $1.5 million, that will be used to aid the company's growth and expansion plans, as well as help it keep up with the ever changing world of mobile app development.

"It's nice to be able to hire, to help manage the growth," Jim Spencer, Newsy's founder and president told TNM this morning.

The round of funding will originate from the same St. Louis-based private equity firm that has previously provided funding.

"It really helps the company in terms of being able to staff, and manage the growth. You know the Worldwide Developer Conference was announced this morning and that costs $1500, there are real expenses that go with building apps," Spencer said with a laugh.

"But it will really help us be able to add to our marketing, our editorial, our sales, and our development teams."

The Columbia, Missouri based start-up recently updated its iPhone and iPad apps making them AirPlay-enabled. Newsy also has an app in the Android Market, as well.

"We really emphasis the mobile aspect of what we are going. We think of ourselves as a mobile video news company," Spencer said.

"Our stuff looks great on the iPhone, Android, the iPad, and places like that, and we have a website. But our website is primarily a platform to be able to insure that our content is distributed as widely as possible. The real emphasis is on our apps and what we are doing in mobile."

Newsy's main point of differentiation as a news service is that it that takes video news from different worldwide sources, aggregates and analyzes the content to then create new video news spots. One reason the company is located in Columbia in order to be close to its partner, the Missouri School of Journalism.

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Newsy was one of the first to take advantage of Apple opening up AirPlay to third party developers. The capability is a natural for Newsy, being a video news service. Now uses of Newsy apps can use AirPlay to stream video content to their Apple TV devices for displaying on television sets..

"First we wanted to create a new form of news which we call multi-source news, but we also wanted to create a product that was really a multi-platform product. So we're in the process right now of redesigning our videos to display most meaningfully on phones, as well as tablets, and now big screen televisions," Spencer said.

Spencer said that the company recognizes the new AirPlay capabilities will mean that the company will have to makes sure their video programming continues to attractive to consumers whether on a smartphone, or now on an HDTV.

"We happen to think our stuff looks really good on a big screen right now because we encode and distribute at such a good quality video. But you're going to see some very interesting changes coming to our products so that we are really are relevant and beautiful across multiple platforms," Newsy's president said.

Times of India releases first tablet edition along lines of NYT for iPad, but app lacks sustainable business model

The Times of India this morning saw its first tablet edition enter the iTunes App Store. The free app, The Times of India for iPad, is modelled after the NYT/Financial Times design which has proved popular for both readers and publishers.

The app's description does an excellent job selling the app, though that is hardly necessary since at this point there is no price attached. "Speed News scroll with minute-by-minute updates posted by more than 500 Times of India reporters from more than 80 Indian cities," the description states. It also mentions "live cricket scores", gotta have that.

The app contains many of the important features readers are beginning to take for granted: video content and photo galleries, the ability to read news offline, and social networking sharing of news stories.

The feature missing here, strangely, is the ability to stream the video content. A user can tell if an app is AirPlay-enabled by whether the video content is still visible on the iPad's display while Apple TV streaming is enabled: if you can still see the video then only the audio is being streamed, but if the video player grows dark and displays an AirPlay message then you know the video is being successfully streamed to the user's Apple TV for displaying on a television set. This feature is missing on this app, as it is the New York Times app, as well.

Left: The video player shows that this app is not AirPlay-enabled;
Right: reader commenting is built right into the tablet edition.

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The video content also requires a live network connection to view, something that is fairly common with news apps (magazine apps often embed the video content, making them hefty downloads.)

While the app allows readers to view the comments on the articles inside, though there is no built-in mechanism for adding your own comments at this time. This is too bad, but probably to be expected since there is no registration built into the app other than the ability to sign into your Twitter or Facebook account to share stories.

This is a good start, as far as a first app is concerned, but the lack of a subscription or even single issue mechanism (combined with a lack of in-app advertising content) calls into question the long-term business model being employed here.

The Daily demonstrates that newspapers, too, can do single issue special interest editions - on the iPad

Take a close look at any display of magazines on a newsstand and you will quickly see that the display is not totally made up of monthly magazines, but that quite a number of the titles are special issues, single editions produced to attract a subset of the audience. Better Homes and Gardens, Sunset are just a couple of the publications that have specializes in this type of single issue.

Newspaper, however, are not exactly known for their special editions. Sure, the special section has been the lifeblood of many newspapers, especially local newspapers, but these special sections are rarely sold to readers outside the main newspaper.

But tablet publishing allows nimble publishers to create and sell single issues with remarkable ease. A good example of this comes from The Daily, which released a commemorative app (can I trademark that phrase?) following the death of Elizabeth Taylor. The $1.99 app was released on Thursday, March 24, only one day following the announcement of her death.

(One question that immediately popped into my mind was "how did they get the app approved so fast?" A lot of developers have to be scratching their heads over that one.)

One has to assume that the News Corp. digital news property was prepared for launching such a product well in advance (and probably has worked directly with Apple concerning streamlining these products). Each special edition could experiment with price and format, and the creators can learn from each release.

These single editions are but one of the new revenue streams that open up thanks to mobile and tablet publishing. But they are only open to those companies that have developed internal teams for this kind of publishing. But for those publishers that have contracted this work out to third party developers, there are still some platforms that offer this kind of speed -- Kindle Singles, for instance.

NYT paywall goes live; while readers look for ways around the wall, the company offers one way to avoid paying

Is a paywall really a paywall if most readers don't see it? And is a paywall really a paywall when the company offers its own way around paying for access? We will begin to get answers soon as the NYT closes the door, metaphorically, starting at 2pm ET today.

For some 200,000 heavy readers of the New York Times website, the first breach in the wall came with a banner ad from Lincoln which offered free access to the newspaper's website and smartphone access free for the rest of 2011. (TNM quickly signed up.) It was a clear sign that the publisher, or at least the ad people, see the paywall as a marketing opportunity.

"We've been spending a lot of time with our media partners looking for ideas," Connie Fontaine, Lincoln marketing communications manager told AdAge last week. "Our brand is one that has a lot of great news and a lot to say but isn't always heard. The Times did bring us this idea and we thought it was really relevant to the brand for a lot of reasons. The type of reader we'll be able to engage through this program is a thought leader."

Whether the NYT continues letting advertising partners offer free access will probably be determined by the success the company has getting frequent readers to pay up. Call it Plan B, if you will. It is one of the reasons I am not 100 percent against the NYT experiment -- there is enough wiggle room in the plan to allow the publisher claim some level of success. After all, a cut in the price might spur buyers, using similar offers for advertisers is another approach. Or, it is possible that the plan will work as currently designed.

Or . . . it is possible that the New York Times will find that technology is always going to be one step ahead of them. After all, it took mere minutes for a few creative Canadian readers to come up with ways around the 20 article -- their paywall having been raised last week. Whether it is javascript removal plug-ins (no links, you'll have to do your own searches), of Twitter feeds, for many readers the paywall will simply be something to work one's way around.

Unfortunately for the Times, these young, tech savvy readers are precisely who they would like to reach, the perfect target audience for their advertisers (ignoring their propensity to avoid paying). They are not, as Arthur Sulzberger Jr. recently told an audience last week "mostly high-school kids and people who are out of work” -- a remark he quickly regretted saying.

Another target audience, though, may be more willing to pay: the same group of readers attracted to the WSJ, highly paid professionals who may consider the new price simply the cost of doing business (and who will then end up writing off this expense, making tax payers foot the bill).

The adventure begins today.

Next, will we see a new NYT iPad app today? Or at least an update?