Richard Wray’s article stated that while Carat - part of the Aegis marketing empire - had reduced its forecasts for the global advertising markets for 2008/9, it also said online advertising will continue to grow, overtaking radio as the third most popular advertising medium after TV and newspapers and magazines.

MediaGuardian’s report is interesting to look at in the light of statistics made available last week by the Online Publishers Association (OPA).

The US-based figures suggest that ‘consumers on all three types of local media sites – newspapers, television stations and magazines – are more likely to take action after viewing a local advert than visitors on all other local content sites’.

As part of the OPA study, JupiterResearch surveyed 2,069 US online consumers ‘who qualified as Local Online Content Users, by currently using online yellow pages, newspaper, TV, magazine, city guides, user review sites, portals or classifieds for local information.’

Here’s the breakdown:

Per cent of consumers taking action after viewing local adverts

• Local Newspaper Site: 46%
• Local Television Site: 44%
• Local Magazine Site: 42%
• User Review Site: 39%
• Portal: 37%

Click here to view the full report and follow this link for the press release.

Johnston Press, the publisher of the Scotsman and over 300 regional newspapers and websites, announced that digital revenues had grown by 52.1 per cent to an unstated figure, in its interim results for the 26 weeks ending June 30.

The publisher reports that it will ‘continue to experience significant growth in overall audience reach – combining our newspaper readership with the rapidly increasing number of people visiting our websites.’

Meanwhile, INM, which - among other titles - publishes the Independent, the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday, saw online revenue from advertising grow by 23.3 per cent to €15.9 million in the six months prior to June 30, it reported in its half-year results.

INM’s online revenue (including its stakes in other online ventures) rose buy 57.1 per cent to €30 million over the same period ‘reflecting good organic growth and a continuation of its multimedia investment strategy across all regions,’ the report said.

Online classified and display advertising now represents around 4 per cent of publishing advertising for the group. This increase was helped by ‘strategic’ investments in services such as price comparison, online gaming, image search, and mobile.

Nonetheless, online was included in INM’s overall group costs, which increased by 1.4 per cent. The publisher also recorded ‘certain online and education start-up development costs’ of €6 million and €19 million.

Hoping to attract interest in her own magazine, the article links to the magazine’s website and its subscriptions page.

“I’d written for them before I joined France Magazine, so it’s a great way of carrying on the relationship and promoting the magazine at the same time,” she said.

France article

The intention of the scheme is to ‘build a more interactive relationship with its readers’, a press release said.

According to the Mail, ‘tens of thousands’ of users have already signed up to the service.

Users are charged for the network connection, and a message from a registered user to another costs 1.4p, and 6.4p to a non-user. Users collect 0.5p in ‘MailTXT Credit’ for every message sent and received, and are encouraged to access the Daily Mail’s content and special offers from their phones.

Bloggers publish their posts on Blogcritics, which acts as a source of news and reviews ‘covering all aspects of contemporary culture and society’, to gain wider exposure, an introduction to the site explains.

According to a press release, Technorati will seek to help bloggers on Blogcritics monetise their content.

“As part of Technorati Media, we’ll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences. Technorati’s mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us,” said Eric Olsen, founder of Blogcritics, in the release.

DailyPostCymraeg.co.uk, which went live today, will focus on North Wales, but also feature main UK news headlines, a release from the publisher said.

The site includes forums, blogs and video content aimed at a Welsh-speaking audience, and will be published alongside the Daily Post’s English-language site.

Shares in the company tumbled on the London Stock Exchange last week after the newspaper group failed to impress the market with its interim half-year results.

Perhaps jittery from all the recent talk of recession, investors did not appreciate the highly geared company’s reports of ‘worsening economic conditions’.

Despite Montgomery’s assurances that his business model is very different from that of UK newspapers - with subscription rates as high as 96 per cent in some of the countries Mecom operates in - alert observers noted that advertising still makes up 52 per cent of revenue.

No more title-specific news desks?
As widely reported, this does of course mean employees at the company, already disgruntled about redundancies on the table, will have to prepare for an even tighter ship in times ahead.

But there is more to this story: in a phone conference with employee representatives last week, Montgomery is reported to have admitted the company cannot cost-cut its way out of a recession; and emphasised that new ways of working and new streams of revenue were necessary for newspapers to have a profitable future.

He specifically highlighted two areas as key to the company’s future strategy: digital expansion, where its Norwegian division, Edda Media, is leading the pack with 9 per cent of its revenues from digital operations; and the media house strategy pioneered by Lisbeth Knudsen, the CEO of its Danish operation.

As Journalism.co.uk previously reported, Knudsen has reorganised her company’s titles into ‘verticals’ that deliver copy not only across platforms, but also titles - be they broadsheet, tabloid or regional newspapers. This, apparently, is to become the standard for all future media house strategy in Mecom.

Innovation exchange
“Mecom’s German division for instance - comprised of Berliner Zeitung, a national; Netzeitung, an online-only newspaper, and various magazine titles - should pay heed to these words. This model might be seen as a good fit for Germany,” an employee representative told me.

Mecom has also established an agreement that allows all Mecom countries to exchange software solutions developed in one country to another Mecom country without charge. The Reader’s Newspaper, a citizen journalism portal previously described by Journalism.co.uk, for instance, is to be exported from Norway to Denmark and Poland.

Another Norwegian export is a new range of hyper-local websites and freesheets Mecom is launching in Poland: Moje Miastro - a concept that has been operating for some time in Norway. The newspaper group, often portrayed as cash-starved and too much in debt, has also entered into an agreement to buy Edtytor Sp. z o.o., a regional newspaper business in Olsztyn. It has told employee representatives that the Polish expansion in new products was to blame for the dip in profits from its Polish arm.

Beware the ghost of recession
In other words, keeping an eye on innovations in the various parts of Mecom’s far-flung empire, can give useful pointers to what we can expect on group level.

Unfortunately for Mecom, a less fortunate trend spreading through the many European countries the company operates in is the ghost of recession.

In this age of globalisation, operating in more than one European country is no safe hedge against a market downturn, despite Montgomery indicating otherwise.

As Peter Kirwan recently wrote in his Press Gazette blog: “[W]hen it comes to the ad recession, we’re at the end of beginning, not the beginning of the end.”

In the summer months we have seen the footprints of recession appear in new territories such as Norway and Holland, causing the job and property classifieds markets to shrink - a sure sign that worse is yet to come.

For Mecom, the question is which is strongest, which will have the final say: the ability to come up with new innovative ways of doing business with less resources, or the clammy hand of a jittery market in the throes of recession?

The young journalists I talk to are full of energy and enthusiasm. We learn new skills in our own time. We try them out on our own web sites.

But the lack of institutional support is wearing, particularly since we (almost) all have full-time jobs. And once we learn the skills, getting them used in the professional media is hard. Newspaper executives, despite their words to the contrary, are so ingrained into the old way of doing things that it is hard to get the go-ahead to innovate.

But the blame extends further than that. Change would be more rapid if more people knew the skills. Unfortunately, journalism schools are not doing enough to teach the skills new journalists will need in their jobs.

I am enrolled in an online journalism class this semester, the only one of its kind at UNC. I’ve taught myself most of the skills already - blogging, capturing audio and video and HTML among them - but there are so many in the class and in the j-school as a whole who haven’t. And there are still empty seats in the class!

I used Twitter to ask whether that’s a failure on the fault of the J-school or on the students:

andrew_dunn: There should not still be openings in this online journalism class. J-school fail? Or student fail?

saragregory: @andrew_dunn J-school fail.

evanspatrick: @andrew_dunn usually student fail - but, I did sign up for music history and it ended up being about The Beatles

There are a lot of real challenges facing young journalists today - shrinking papers, curmudgeon editors, journalism schools that don’t teach students the skills for the changing market, inability to do much more than eat, sleep and report. All are serious obstacles. But as far as I’m concerned, the biggest hurdle to overcome is the fact that we may be expected to do it all. Write, blog, take photographs, make slideshows, shoot and edit video, record and edit audio, coding… the list can get kind of extensive.

A lot of us are more than willing to learn all of that. The fact that I spent most of my free time this summer expanding my knowledge of coding through www.w3schools.com show’s that I’m one of them. We’ve got a number of people in our generation who are extremely passionate about journalism and all of the really neat things that are in it’s future. Just look at the success of this blogging ring and the forums at Twentysomething Journalist.

I’ll even be the first to admit that having some sort of background in each of the areas would be great so that you could produce any of those forms of content in a pinch, even if it wasn’t your specialty. Knowing what it takes to package some of those projects also keeps you from under-appreciating those who normally do the work.

The problem arises when you’re expected to do it all, all the time. And not just for your stories and packages, but for the other less-web savvy people on staff. We may be passionate, but we are not all superhumans. Burn-outs could cost the industry a number of really talented individuals if that continues to happen.

Unfortunately, we’re in the midst of that exciting shift in how the news is reported and not everyone is going to know how to do their own packages or be willing to learn. The bulk of the shift will fall on those who are stepping up to plate, learning the skills that will become staples of reporting. The only thing we can do is keep moving forward, knowing that what we do is revolutionary and will shape the industry for years to come, and take deep, calming breaths whenever we get a moment.