Flashes&Flames: Can Axel Springer do the ‘impossible’?

Stories about the reinvention of daily newspaper companies are often not what they seem. They tend to involve traditional media groups not so much investing in the future of news as placing their bets somewhere else entirely. Thus, the UK’s Daily Mail Group, and Hearst Corp, in the US, are investing more heavily in business media and entertainment. And even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is now generating 35% of its profit and all its growth from digital property listings

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Publishers are in peril from annoying ads

There is nothing so inspiring as a person triumphing over disaster — the narrative of many books and films. So the sight of Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst who was disgraced in the 1990s dotcom bubble, selling Business Insider, the news site he founded in 2007, at a valuation of $390m is heartwarming

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Business Insider launches UK edition

As Business Insider UK launches Henry Blodget, CEO of the company, claims that, despite their attempts to embrace modern technology, the FT and WSJ remain “native print” publications”, leaving a space for Business Insider to serve the “generational shift” that has seen the emergence of a cohort of young business leaders who are “100 per cent digital” and shun newspapers and television

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