Yesterday The Edinburgh Reporter spent the afternoon on the top of the News UK building courtesy of Press Gazette who invited us to a conference on the future of digital publishing and the revenue that might be gained from it. The beautiful view of London was no distraction to the matters in hand, which trouble many in the digital world, ourselves included.
In the fabulous building next to The Shard which houses The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun all of which are behind paywalls, it would be easy to think that making money from online journalism is easy, but this was refuted by many of the speakers in the room. A full list of speakers can be read here.
One interesting fact revealed by Mike Darcey CEO of News UK who delivered the keynote speech is that according to a study carried out by The Times on the Scottish Independence Referendum over 60% of the electorate got their information from newspapers and websites, rather than party propaganda materials or TV or radio. We think this is cheering news and so did Guto Harri who is communications director for News UK, although he admitted it was not exactly what he expected when the research was commissioned.
Our site is based on WordPress and apparently so is the Metro website, although they have the VIP version at $5000 or so a month. Sadly we can’t afford that right now. One day…but until then….
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
