Rival Swiss publishers considering joint regional news portal

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 November 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Newspapers

If rival broadcasters can meet the challenge of online aggregators by forming a joint online content portal, why not newspapers?

In Switzerland, one group of rival regional newspaper publishers is reportedly considering a joint online news regional news portal after another consortium announced plans for a cross-paper portal of their own.

Swiss newspaper publishers including NZZ and MZ, is considering whether to launch a joint, cross-title online regional news portal, according to the Swiss media publication Persoenlich.com. A decision on the project will be made by the middle of next month.

The move comes after other set of Swiss publishers, Tamedia and BZM, announced plans to launch a similar portal that will pool content from five of their newspapers.

According to the report, the regional portal project was originally conceived as a joint online news aggregator run by newspaper publishers as a rival to Google News, but that scheme has now been shelved.

Both the original aggregator idea and the latest proposals for joint online portals are intriguing.

In the Hugo Young lecture last night, New York Times editor Bill Keller pointed out that existing aggregators don’t always differentiate between high-quality news sources and more questionable ones.

He said: “Wikipedia and Google aggregate information from, well, from us. From the Times, from the Guardian, and from a lot of less dependable sources. They can pool reporting from hundreds of news outlets but what if there aren’t hundreds of news outlets? Or what if many of them are simply unreliable? And how would you know?”

To improve upon that situation, why not create a stripped-down aggregator or portal site containing only news and information produced by member publishers?

What might a news aggregator run by newspaper publishers look like in the UK? Martin Belam’s Chipwrapper is a nice approximation.

Tags: Newspapers