Axel Springer plans pan-European Upday news service

Axel Springer is to expand its mobile news service Upday from four to 16 countries in Europe this year, as the German media group accelerates its shift into digital publishing. Upday, a news aggregator that uses human editors as well as an algorithm to select news stories, was developed as part of an exclusive partnership with Samsung and launched in Germany, Poland, the UK and France last February.

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So you think you chose to read this article

You may think you choose to read one story over another, or to watch a particular video rather than all the others clamouring for your attention, but in truth, you are probably manipulated into doing so by publishers using clever machine learning algorithms

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Few news providers will now be liking Facebook

Winston Churchill famously defined “appeasement” as “being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”. By that definition, many of the world’s biggest news publishing organisations have been in the appeasement business for at least the past two years and the crocodile to which they have been sucking up is Facebook, the social networking giant

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Flashes&Flames 2016 predictions: partnerships can change media

It’s a fair bet that 2016 will be the year of ever more ambitious collaborations between traditional media and digital disrupters. We have seen the Alibaba and Jeff Bezos acquisitions of the South China Post and the Washington Post respectively, the Axel Springer buy-out of Business Insider, and legacy media investments in BuzzFeed, Vox, and Vice News. These will surely be followed by a new wave of deals and collaborations. But with a difference

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Running scared: Why are publishers so afraid?

published a piece by our contributor Kevin Anderson titled ‘The collapse of the attention economy’. Its central tenet is that an overabundance of content to which we all have access has led to an unsustainable environment in which scale is all and practically impossible to achieve.

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Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy

For a long time, we’ve been creating too much content, so much so that I think that we’ve already reached Peak Content, the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable. There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain it for years and, with 2015 ending with a rush of acquisitions, consolidations and funding rounds with eye-watering valuations, 2016 will mark the beginning of a shake out.

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Walt Disney doubles stake in Vice Media to $400m

Walt Disney is doubling its stake in Vice Media to $400m, lifting its stake in the youth-focused media group to about 10 per cent, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal, which values Vice at more than $4bn, comes weeks after Disney’s first $200m investment in the Brooklyn-based company.

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Atlantic Media in talks to sell Quartz

Atlantic Media has held talks with a number of potential buyers interested in digital media about a sale of or potential investment in Quartz, the publishing group’s business news site, according to people familiar with the matter

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Why newspapers must dare NOT to be daily

It is almost 200 years since the UK’s pioneering railway network created the opportunity for daily newspapers to reach breakfast tables in every corner of the country. That led to decades of soaring power, prestige and profits. The newspapers of “Fleet Street” (named after their historic location) became as important to Brits as Shakespeare, the […]

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Johnston Press shares slide 20% after profit warning

Shares in British regional newspaper group Johnston Press fell 20 per cent on Tuesday after disappointing advertising revenues triggered a profit warning.The group, which owns more than 200 newspapers including The Scotsman, said there had been a “slowdown in general trading” in the three months to June and “specific weakness” around May’s general election. For […]

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