The New Press is funded by publisher and CEO Jan-Jaap Heij and a partner, and arose from the ashes of a previous free newspaper called De Pers or The Press. After about five years of operation, the paper was forced to shut down last year as a result of losses incurred during the financial crisis in Europe, Heij told me in an interview from The Netherlands — but instead of closing its doors entirely, the editor decided to create a new entity with many of the same staff and focus solely on mobile news and content.

Readers can subscribe to one writer or a package

Launched on Monday, the New Press app is powered by a company called imgZine, and allows users to pay about $2.50 per month or $23 per year for a subscription to the entire output of a specific author or journalist, or about $6 a month and $50 per year for a package of all the writers who are currently being syndicated through the platform — a total of 11, according to Heij, with a goal of having more than 50 by the end of the year. In the future, he said, The New Press may also offer packages of writers focused around specific topics such as sports or crime.

Jan-Jaap Heij by Frank Groeliken

Although it is still early, Heij says there has been a substantial amount of interest in the app, and not just from users but from journalists and writers as well. As part of its deal with the authors that it distributes, The New Press shares 75 percent of the subscription revenue with them (after paying Apple its 30-percent cut), and if they get 500 or more subscribers to sign up, they get 85 percent. “We have had about 200 people approach us about being part of the service,” Heij says. “After the launch, my mailbox just exploded with requests from journalists.”

Why did The New Press decide to offer a subscription feature for its writers instead of going the traditional route of a blanket paywall or just a charge for the app? Heij says he believes that media is becoming much more about individual brands than institutional ones, and The New Press wanted to take advantage of that phenomenon:

“As we see it, people are now starting to follow journalists as brands and not the media they work for. A lot of journalists have way more followers on Twitter and Facebook than the brands the media company that publishes them, and I think it’s because people want to hear individual voices, not institutional voices. Media brands are losing power and personal brands are becoming more important.”

Heij said that while individual writers have always had strong personal brands, “it’s far more easy than it was even 5 years ago to publish yourself” and build your own following — to the point where some writers such as star blogger Andrew Sullivan have severed any ties to a traditional media outlet and set up their own publishing operation driven by subscriptions.

Maybe not the only answer, but one of many

The New Press publisher said that the current selection of writers is a mix of established or “star” names from different sectors of the journalism market, as well as newer writers who show promise and are willing to experiment. All sign freelance contracts with The New Press, and while they don’t require a certain number of articles per week or per month, Heij says that the expectation is that they will work hard for their channel or “one push of a button and they are gone.”

Some of the content related to its writers is free, the New Press publisher said — such as blog posts from other sites or their Twitter stream, for example — but the majority is behind the subscription wall. Some journalists have been using the service to publish their older material from other sites, he said, while others are writing daily or weekly pieces specifically for The New Press, and some are a mix of both approaches. The New Press also has staff writers who do a live-news blog that is free to users.

So is the personal subscription model the future of media? The New Press publisher says he isn’t prepared to go that far, but he thinks it will be a crucial part of the future of content:

“We see ourselves as a combination of a newspaper, a news app and a publishing platform. People have asked me whether this is the answer to the crisis in journalism and I have said I don’t think it’s *the* answer, but it is one possible answer.”

Heij, who made a substantial amount of money investing when he was younger, says that he and his partner have invested about 100,000 Euros in The New Press, and the venture also raised about 25,000 Euros through a crowdfunding effort to launch the app. “I’m quite certain we will lose money at the start, because everything you do in media tends to lose money at the start,” he said. “But I am optimistic that this could turn out to be a very significant business.”

This story was corrected at 5:06 pm to note that Heij made his money through investments, rather than by inheriting it as we originally stated.

Images courtesy of imgZine / Frank Groeliken and Shutterstock / artjazz and Flickr user George Kelly

Netherlands-based Cleeng, which we have previously reported on and which facilitates payments through blog CMSes and other suites for outlets including La Tribune, Dailymotion and VentureBeat, is raising a €400,000 ($511,000) investment to try targeting U.S. business.

Amongst the backers is Pascal Cagni — until his resignation this May, Apple’s VP for Europe, Middle East, India and Asia — who says (via release):

“Through my 12 years leading Apple in Europe, I was uniquely positioned to monitor how the digital revolution can be disruptive and make monetization challenging. In the meantime, the proliferation of mobiles devices is on par with the acceleration of content digitalization and has broadened market reach in an unforeseen fashion. The opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward, robust solution to monetize content, being TV programs, videos, or live events is simply huge.”

Meanwhile, central European buffet payment facilitator Piano Media is trying a limited addition of paid video to its system that already charges users to access sections of several newspaper and magazine websites.

The video is from Zuzana Piussi, a Slovak filmmaker who could face two years in prison if convicted for her controversial film about the Slovak judiciary. Her latest film, about Slovak politics, is being distributed only via the Piano-powered paid part of weekly news magazine Týždeň’s website.

“The multiplex cinemas were against distributing the film after the controversy surrounding my last film,” Piussi says (via release). “Therefore, distributing the movie online, for me as the creator, is now the only way forward.”

Piano Media is better resourced than Cleeng for geographical expansion, having raised a €2 million second round in April. But Piano’s three launched countries so far — Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland — are all in Europe while Cleeng already appears to have ambitions of breaking in to the States.

Other Cleeng backers are unnamed private investors.

Now the Amsterdam pair want to help other would-be publishers feel the same glow — by giving away dedicated new web-based software they recently wrote themselves to redesign their own publication.

Called PRSS and launched on Thursday, the template-driven production suite lets people drag and drop web objects to design pages, is free for anyone to use and saves on distribution costs by storing magazines on Amazon’s cloud hosts.

TRVL claims to have clocked 700,000 installs, around 450,000 regular readers and has impressed by introducing a model in which individual destination articles, rather than an entire magazine, can be downloaded in its app.

But, still, Elings and Wijnands had an itch. And its name was Woodwing, the 12-year-old company that makes one of the most popular packages for producing iPad magazines.

“I had to learn Adobe InDesign to use Woodwing and it wasn’t really intuitive,” Elings said. “We were happy using it for a while but, in our app, it took seven steps just to tweet an article link — 30 percent of users go away when you build in an extra step.

“Distribution costs for Woodwing, InDesign and all the others are so expensive. People were downloading terabytes of data from our magazines, this wasn’t cheap to us. We also had to pay Apple a 30 percent cut and Adobe takes a 30 percent – you have only 40 percent left!” Elings says he didn’t mind paying Apple 30 percent but had to pay Adobe 30 percent on top of Apple’s commission.

The pair had enough when Woodwing last year agreed to a closer Adobe tie-up in which it became an InDesign reseller. “It was a blessing in disguise,” Elings says. “We thought, ‘Let’s do it ourselves.’ I wanted to make the magazine design software that Apple forgot, where everything just works.”

Re-making the maker

So, just like Wijnands, who has photographed for the likes of National Geographic for 15 years, and Elings, whose former consulting firm advised Apple among others, had done with their earlier tablet-only magazine incursion itself, they set about trying to reinvent the very software used to make such magazines.

The result is PRSS, the web-based suite the TRVL team now uses to make its own magazine. The benefits are smaller file sizes and cheaper distribution costs, Elings says.

“InDesign made a picture of every page, even when it was just text. Our photos became four times larger. A magazine was nearly 200Mb. In our software, the magazine is now 35Mb. We just cut 80 percent of the file size and the photos are even better.” The reduction means magazines can be downloaded and read quicker.

And, rather than rely on Woodwing and Adobe to host those hefty uploaded titles for distributing to iPad Newsstand customers, PRSS keeps them in low-cost Amazon storage. ”Today, I uninstalled InDesign. We can do everything in the cloud,” Elings says.

I’ve been waiting so long to uninstall InDesign. Tears of happiness ;) http://t.co/uYGy9CjV

—
Michel Elings (@michelelings) November 02, 2012

Give it away now

TRVL is not the only publisher to write its own tablet magazine production software. U.K. magazine house Future has also created its own suite, Folio, on which it is now building several selected titles — weening itself off the large industrial packages and offering Folio to other publishers as a service.

Although Elings and Wijnands conceived PRSS for themselves, making it widely available is also a strategy they want to follow. The service is now live to interested enquirers, and TRVL hopes to profit from a commission.

“PRSS will be totally free to use,” Elings tells me. “But, if you start distributing a magazine, you will have to pay a small fee to us.

“You don’t have to pay us a license fee, commission or share revenue with us — but you have to pay for distribution costs from Amazon. We want to take a little percentage of the download costs, we are going to make that fair and transparent. We will make a very small amount of money.”

Do it yourself

The proceeds may support TRVL’s independent travel photojournalism efforts, but Elings also appears to hope such actions can help kickstart an independent tablet magazine market.

The prospect is tantalizing. In the 1980s and 90s, desktop publishing (DTP) software and cheap printers helped amateur bedroom designers make their own newsletters, fanzines and posters. The web has unleashed that creativity still further. But, in tablet-specific publishing, production remains the preserve of a few established publishing houses with the resources to rent the kind of software packages Elings has come to detest.

“iPad magazines aren’t taking off yet because the apps are badly designed,” he told me. “They are all going for multiplatform instead of doing individual platforms right.

“We want to help the market. If this works, a lot of new publishers will start up — you can start your own magazine. We want to make an iPad editing app as well, where you can make an iPad magazine on your iPad — that would be cool.”

Such a thing could amplify the democratization of publishing from which TRVL’s Wijnands and Elings have themselves benefitted.

“We met each other by coincidence,” Elings said. “A day after, we started our own magazine. I was one of the few in the Netherlands with an iPad. I said, ‘Why don’t we start a magazine? We can charge less than National Geographic and become very rich. Well, that didn’t quite work out — it was early days.”

TRVL has scored points if not yet riches, gaining 100,000 downloads in its first year — and doubling that figure when Apple introduced in-app download and, later, Newsstand. All articles are free to download — only “coffee-table”-style photo “books” cost $2 — and the title is trying to sell interactive ads like those it runs currently for Canon.

Dutch publishers’ trade association  NDP Nieuwsmedia confirmed members are exploring possibilities for a “common platform to meet demand for their content”, involving a shared database.

Holland’s number-three paper de Volkskrant reports that its Flemish owner Persgroep, NRC Handelsblad and the business title Het Financieele Dagblad (FD), which already charges, want to create (wait for it) “a Spotify for newspapers”.

Deloitte consultant Marieke van der Donk tells de Volkskrant that research she recently carried out for NPD New Media showed: “There is absolutely a market for the pay wall. The idea is that people own a newspaper can compile from the range of all the newspapers.”

Holland’s local media groups have already agreed a common news payment system, de Volkskrant reports.

And Flemish publishers in neighbouring Belgium are also talking with each other about a common news payment platform, according to De Standaard.

Some publishers that have considered charging have concluded it risky whilst their peers remain free. And many have concerns that retail collaboration would draw anti-trust heat.

Now some publishers in the low countries appear to be gaining confidence in a related option rolled out in Slovakia and Slovenia, where many publishers have put a minority of their content in to country-wide payment systems operated by Piano Media at arm’s length.

Publishers in countries where English is not the primary language may have a greater chance at selling their unique content.

Thanks to University of Sheffield journalism student Jeroen Kraan for the tip.

The move will require Samsung to make a software change, and that will translate as a cost to the company — although not nearly as severe as the situation in Australia, which could see Samsung missing a chance to promote its new tablet during the critical holiday buying season.

The three Android-powered devices, the Galaxy S, the SII and Ace (pictured left, from left to right), have already been the subject of legal dispute in the country. In August, the court ordered a ban on their sales, only to halt that when Samsung promised a workaround for the issue. This newest development is that workaround.

According to Reuters (NYSE: TRI), the patent at issue concerns a method of scrolling through photos, which is used in those three Samsung smartphone models. In August the Dutch court dismissed the other claims that Apple had made to both software and hardware patents and design.

The new devices could go on sale as soon as next week.

Meanwhile, a development on the case in Australia, where Samsung has now had a temporary injunction on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet as the court continues to asses Apple’s claims.

Patent blogger Florian Mueller points out that the patent in question that was exercised in the case is one registered to the late Steve Jobs (among others) and concerns “heuristic touchscreen” technology.

The generality of the patent, he speculates, could be applied to a number of other tablets, not just Samsung’s, and the fact that the Australian court has chosen to support it means that Apple may now have the legal ammunition to go after other competitors looking to launch products in Australia.

That could have implications outside of Oz, too: “Apple owns those two patents in most major jurisdictions. If other courts also conclude that the patents are valid, they will almost certainly find them infringed by Android. Invalidation is Google’s only realistic chance to fend off this threat,” he told me in an email. “It’s just that Australia is the first jurisdiction to have taken a decision on this.”

That turns out to be very timely, because today is another big day in court for the two sides in the U.S., in which Apple is seeking nationwide injunctions on four different Samsung devices — the Infuse 4G, Galaxy S 4G, Droid Charge, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 — so we could see yet more developments on this case.

For Samsung’s part, the company has been making patent infringement claims of its own on Apple based on the UMTS technology inside the device. It is seeking injunctions in multiple markets on iPhone and iPad models, including the newest iPhone 4S device, on sale this week.

Speaking at the Mobile Netherlands conference, Victor Saeijs, VP for Nokia Europe also gave another confirmation that the first devices will hit the market this year.

The blog IntoMobile took this one step further and asked the well-placed blogger Eldar Murtazin whether he knew how many WP7 units Nokia planned to “make” this year, and the answer was an anemic 125,000. (Take that with a grain of salt, though: the number didn’t come direct from Nokia.)

Going back to debut markets, these six countries are important not only because they are strong markets for Nokia already — but they are also out in front when it comes to smartphone adoption and usage.

Just yesterday, Nielsen released a report detailing how currently 65 percent of all smartphone users in the country have Nokia devices, with overall smartphone adoption at a healthy 40 percent of all mobile subscribers.

Notably, the list of six does not include Nokia’s home country of Finland, or those emerging markets, like China, where Nokia has been putting so much emphasis of late in their strategy to become the smartphone brand for “the next billion” mobile users in the world.

But as we pointed out yesterday, it’s important for Nokia to stop the bleeding where it might be hurting it most right now, and this might be why European countries were named first by the Nokia exec. In the last quarter, Europe remained Nokia’s biggest market, with revenues of €2.08 billion ($2.9 billion) out of a total €7.08 billion ($10 billion). Greater China was second with €1.9 billion.

But as Nielsen pointed out yesterday, in Spain, its share has declined by some nine points just in the last quarter.