The publisher may be right in the middle of introducing fees for its own online newspapers, but it is putting on ice Rupert Murdoch’s grander ambition of creating a pay-for digital news service comprising content from the entire UK news industry. At the same time, sources familiar with the company’s plans say similar efforts in the U.S. have been put on a slower track, but not being canceled. (more…)

[T]he Times will be creating a “sunrise edition” of its home page—a “fully refreshed” new product rather than an updated version of the previous night’s print edition. Instead of holding big stories for the print paper, Keller said, the Times will publish for “maximum impact,” putting pieces out online in the daytime to compete for immediate attention.

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via Dan Frommer, Flipboard CEO: Only A Tiny Handful Of Publishers Have Complained About Our App Taking Too Much Content.

I couldn’t understand why that notion appealed to Forbes’ owners, since the site always had lots of page views to sell, but the penny has finally dropped for me: Forbes wants to find a way to lessen its dependence on portals, particularly Yahoo (YHOO), for traffic.

In many ways the Web site has effectively functioned as a sub-contractor for Yahoo, generating stories and slide shows it hoped would land on the site’s front page, in return for a firehose of traffic via referrals. A cadre of contributors can’t replace that traffic flow, but much better to have page views and unique visitors that Forbes owns instead of rents.

via Peter Kafka Forbes Gets a Facelift. Next Up: A New Body | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

Gourmet Live has content-sharing agreements with the blogs Eater and Serious Eats. [....]

Ed Levine, the founder of Serious Eats, said that his staff would provide edited articles and accompanying photography in exchange for a weekly fee to Serious Eats. The styles of both the copy and the images will be those of Mr. Levine’s blog, not Gourmet, he said: “I think they’re very serious about wanting the Serious Eats voice and not wanting to make it into the Gourmet Live voice, and that was imperative.”

The partnership with Eater is slightly different. “Gourmet pays the editors for their work, not us, so we’re not directly profiting, but it’s good exposure for us and for our writers, and that makes me happy,” Lockhart Steele, a founder of Eater, wrote in an e-mail. “And we coordinate the stories and story assignments with Gourmet, so they’re getting the benefit of a bunch of members of our team, not just the writer writing the story.”

via Pete Wells, Gourmet Is Reincarnated, This Time as an iPad App – NYTimes.com.

David Brauer seems to be of the opinion that any new paywall should be “robust” and shouldn’t be able to be defeated by means of a plugin (or by using multiple browsers, or by deleting cookies, or various other methods, I suppose). But that’s exactly wrong. The purpose of a paywall isn’t to keep people out, it’s to generate revenue from loyal readers. (more…)