Publishers have been fanning out their business with projects outside their traditional area of expertise. Is your organization also thinking outside the box? What field do you think publishers should explore further to reach more users?
Here are 3 examples of newspapers going beyond their current business whether through new product offerings, democratic audience involvement or hardware implementation.
New successful formats – L’édition du soir, France
WiFi for the region – Nordkurier, Germany
Citizen Participation – AZ Medien, Switzerland
Petitio.ch is a localized petition platform. Launched in Switzerland, municipal residents can initiate petitions that run with coverage from local newspapers. If a petition gains enough endorsements from other citizens, it is presented by a regional newspaper to the relevant city council member. Petitions are open for 30 days and need to gather a certain number of endorsements depending on the size of their municipality (eg petitions in small towns only need 50 endorsements). The project was partly funded by the Google Digital News Initiative. Swiss regional publisher AZ Medien launched this portal in an open-source architecture and is a partner for other publishers who want to make this platform available in other regions.