Newspaper Innovation

Dutch free daily De Pers will celebrate its first anniversary tomorrow but 2008 will be the year of truth for the paper that has spend more money than expected in the first year. The contracts of at least half a dozen columnists were ended while there will be also other costs cuts according to an internal memo that was revealed by Business News Radio BNR (audio in Dutch).

Publisher Cornelis van den Berg, however, denied that sacking columnists had anything to do with cost cutting, their quality was simply not good enough according to him. He also told BNR that new columnists will be hired while there will be no cost cutting.

The costs, however, might not be the most pressing problem. Income is more problematic as De Pers is still performing weak in terms of ad sales.

Owner Marcel Boekhoorn has been talking with at least four publishers in the Netherlands, but according to publisher Van den Berg never about selling the paper, suggesting that those other parties wanted to buy De Pers: “there must be other parties interested because De Pers has a unique position in the Dutch media landscape. If somebody is prepared to spend a lot of money, Marcel is business man enough to let the paper go.” This, in fact, seems not very likely, particularly if ‘a lot of money’ is involved.

Owner Marcel Boekhoorn, one of the richest people in the Netherlands, is “reasonable satisfied” with De Pers according to Van den Berg.

The third paper has seen its circulation go up to 450,000 while it had 700,000 readers in the first half year. It also introduced a Saturday edition in September. The promise of printing 700,000 copies before the end of 2007 has not been lived up to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Titles. 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.