Newspaper Innovation

The third national free daily in the Netherlands, De Pers, will launch this month – the 22nd or the 23rd of January are the most mentioned launch dates. Printing facilities have been secured (with the printer that used to print the communist daily De Waarheid). De Pers also closed a deal for €1.2m with Dutch railway NS to distribute at least a third of its copies in train stations. This deal ends the exclusive deal of Metro with NS – Metro will be compensated for losing the exclusive rights. Metro agreed because they knew De Pers would go for distribution outside train stations anyway. According to the rate card (download from website) the paper is aiming at a circulation of 500,000 although it will start at 250,000.

De Volkskrant, once a partner of De Pers-owner Boekhoorn, is still thinking about a free paper of their own (although the paper is also likely to get sued by Boekhoorn because they went back on a deal to operate a free paper together – see previous post). The new plan involves a multi-media platform and is being developed together with Planet Internet, a subsidiairy of Dutch Telecom operator KNP. Both existing free dailies Metro and Spits (launched in 1999, joint circulation almost 1 million) have increased their distribution by securing contracts with local bus operators in North-Holland (Metro) and the South of the country (Spits). Metro also added a new columnist: Dutch rap-artist Lange Frans to get even more in touch with the younger generation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Plans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.