Scardino will be replaced from January 1 by John Fallon, CEO of Pearson’s international education business, responsible for the company’s emerging-markets growth.

Liberum Capital analyst Ian Whittaker tells Bloomberg: “Marjorie Scardino was a big fan of the (FT) group, John Fallon has no emotional commitment.”

But that comment is a stretch to Bloomberg reporting the move “spurring speculation that the company may sell the Financial Times newspaper unit”.

It is Bloomberg which could be a bidder for any FT that might be for sale.

Genuinely sad to see our boss Marjorie Scardino go. I can honestly say she is the most inspiring person I’ve met in my business life.

— Steve Pinches (@sjpinches) October 3, 2012

@tartineaubeurre @tomjhall check your inbox- note from Marjorie is fabulously well written. bloomberg’s spin 100pc about chances of FT sale!

— Steve Pinches (@sjpinches) October 3, 2012

Michael Wolff in February reported pot-stirring dinner party chatter about a sale to Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters – then denied to paidContent by CEO John Ridding:

“My reaction was surprise. Pearson are very much committed to the FT. If you look back at the big moments in our history, that’s been clear.

“We’re plugged in to Pearson in an increasingly direct way. We see significant potential for the FT and Pearson through education.

“We are developing tools for professors and students to annotate FT articles. Case studies in business school books are pretty old but, every day, the FT front page is an interesting business case study.”

Bernstein Research analyst Claudio Aspesi today writes:

“Some of the items that will be part of the agenda of the new CEO should include … what to do with the remaining assets which are not directly supporting the growth of education (such as the FT Group and Penguin). This may lead to unlocking value hidden in those assets.

“We believe that continued focus on digital products in Education could be the key to unlocking a step change in valuation, such as reaching a £30 (share price) target by 2020.

“While most of the revenues should be relatively stable irrespective of changes in economic activity, the FT Group (and the FT newspaper in particular) is more sensitive to the cycle, and none of the businesses is fully insulated from a deep and lasting slow down of economic activity.”

The Financial Times has shown how it can successfully charge for digital business news content, but Pearson mostly delivers education content and services.

Speaking with journalists on Wednesday (via Guardian), Fallon described the FT as “valuable” but did not rule out a sell-off:

“I think the FT is a highly valued and very valuable part of Pearson. I think the Pearson strategy is very much the FT strategy.

“If you look at digital transformation of the FT over the last few years, that is leading the transformation of the digital publishing industry. My attitude to the FT is that it is a valued and valuable part of the company.”

Six publishers (Agora, Murator, Polskapresse, Media Regionalne, Edytor and Axel Springer-Ringier) are putting 10 to 15 percent of 26 national and regional news title and magazine content from 42 websites in to Piano. Consumers are asked to pay €4.90 per month for access to all participating outlets. But, although the bundle includes Agora’s Wyborcza.pl newspaper, it does not include its popular Gazeta.pl portal.

According to the firm’s proposition:

“Some publishers will provide ad-free versions of their sites, while others will offer premium access to their content before it is released to the public or even offer exclusive material available only with a Piano subscription. A lot of content that has never been online before will now be available.”

Web news payments of all models must overturn consumer reluctance that, in many surveys, puts inclination to pay at around five percent.

Interest is growing in this shared kiosk approach in some European countries, where individual titles may struggle to sell digitally but where a joint approach may prove relatively successful – local-language news can effectively be ringfenced from English-language competition, whose market is saturated and treacherous. Dutch publishers are seeking a kiosk solution, Belgians recently launched their own GoPress.

Polish publishers are the latest to try charging users for news websites. Point Group‘s weekly news magazine Wprost started charging pay-as-you-go micropayments and for a short-term metered subscription plan in June. Politics news magazine Polityka began charging in April; its counterpart Przekroj did so in 2011. Dutch and Belgian publishers are examining a joint kiosk method, too.

How is Piano – just one of the vendors vying to facilitate worried publishers inclination to charge – faring? Piano claimed first-month sales of €40,000 ($50,000) in Slovakia and €26,000 ($33,000) in Slovenia but has not disclosed total active subscribers. Several major publishers have placed on average up to a tenth of their web content in to the independent system, which costs €3.90 per month in Slovakia and €4.89 in Slovenia. CEO Tomas Bella told our paidContent 2012 conference in May (video):

“Media which put in 20 to 30 percent of their content are at three, four, five percent of conversion to paying users.

“The best ones are getting 30 to 40 percent of their online revenues from this source after one year.”

» Can operators like Piano profit from charging for news in Europe? Let us know in the comments…

Those who have paid for digital news ranges from 12 percent in Denmark to four percent in the UK, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s new Digital News Report 2012. And only six percent of survey respondents said they would be willing, in future, to pay for news from sources they liked.

But, while willingness was just five percent for computer access, it rose to 16 percent on tablet and 12 percent on mobile. Also encouraging – those aged 16-24 and 25-34 are most willing to pay (13 percent and 11 percent, respectively), compared with just five percent of 35-54s and just three percent of over-55s.

The research suggests that, as more younger people buy tablet devices, willingness to pay money for the news products many publishers are delivering to them may grow.

Actual propensity to pay amongst this segment also outstrips declared willingness – 21 percent of tablet owners say they have previously bought digital news on the devices.

“Denmark is slightly unusual in that one of the largest newspaper groups, Berlingske, has introduced payments for individual articles such as gadget reviews, travel, and slimming guides,” according to report authors.

“Most Danish newspapers also charge for mobile and tablet news apps, either as a single payment or as part of an ongoing subscription.”

The brand has been licensed to Asia-Pacific sales network Spiral Media’s Blah! Asia division, which is staffing ap.ign.com - available in Mandarin, Malay and English – with 20 writers, reporters and translators.

This will be IGN’s ninth national site, following localisations for Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, US, Germany, Sweden and the Middle East, the last three of which were also licensed out.

The operation will be led from Kuala Lumpur by editor-in-chief Maxime Villandré, a games industry executive who previously established the UK developer Codemasters in Malaysia.

IGN Entertainment international business development director Adam Doree tells paidContent:

“Our mission is to grow the IGN brand globally – reaching gamers in their own language – and there’s massive growth potential across Asia, particularly in Chinese speaking markets.

“The Chinese games industry is evolving rapidly. Western gaming markets will learn from Asia’s adoption of free-to-play and mobile games – and we can be at the forefront of this shift.”

Commercial sales will be handled by Spiral. IGN’s Doree and international VP Ian Chambers will be running things from the IGN side from London.

Multiplayer online gaming is huge in Asia.

Gaming and tech news publishers are amongst those branching out in to potentially lucrative new territories lately.

Wired  last year launched its website in Taiwan. UK magazine publisher Future launched its TechRadar portal in the U.S. in May.

Doree says IGN’s German localisation has doubled traffic in the last 12 months.

Latest figures show mandatory digital subscriptions, which the publisher introduced in mid-2010, now make up a whole quarter of the publisher’s combined print-and-digital circulation…

At current rates, those lines seem due to cross some time in late 2013 or early 2014

Of course, that’s not solely due to digital growth, which is actually sluggish. Much of the convergence is due to ever-decreasing print circulation.

Times digital-only subscriptions hit 130,751 after adding 908 new subscribers during April. These are small numbers. But, proportionately, they are at least on par with The New York Times’ 454,000 subscribers in the U.S..

The publisher’s tactic – combining winnowing print and growing digital numbers yields a cross-format circulation figure that, broadly, is holding steady…

And, save for discount promotions, each of those digital subscribers is paying between £2 a week (for web access) and £4 a week (for mobile and tablet).

That means The Times, just like Rupert Murdoch wanted, is progressively – if slowly – becoming a business with a higher degree of guaranteed revenue certainty.

A print-to-digital crossover would depend on The Times maintaining or quickening the pace of digital sign-ups. And it’s likely the paper has a natural audience ceiling, though it hasn’t quite yet been hit.

Following renewed reports this week (via The Telegraph) that News Corp, principally COO Chase Casey, may choose to sell Times publisher News International, Rupert Murdoch said (via Guardian.co.uk):

“News Corporation remains firmly committed to our publishing businesses, including News International, and any suggestion to the contrary is wholly inaccurate. Publishing is a core component of our future.”

The stocks were suspended in morning trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange today after excessive trading had pushed its price up by just over 100 percent from its initial listing at 20 RMB per share last Friday. It is currently at 40.5 RMB, and has now resumed action in the afternoon.

The procedural measure is, says an article on the People’s Daily site, “aimed at reining in speculative manipulation of share prices,” and is temporary. Indeed, the shares were also briefly halted on their debut last week.

But the motives for the bullishness on these stocks is interesting. Li Weidong, research director at consultancy China Venture, told the People’s Daily Online:

“The reason why investors are bullish about the news portal is because of its unique background. In some investors’ eyes, the state-backed media company’s profits are somehow guaranteed given the support it receives from the government’s preferential policies.”

And so its state-sponsored heritage makes the stock, perhaps, a sure-fire winner in the micro-censored media landscape in China where private news websites can be ordered to do anything, and authorities can even demand the removal of articles or key personnel. That makes life tough for web portals like Sina, (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), et al.

Other government-controlled news organisations might list in China soon, including state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), and the official news agency Xinhua.

» This article originally appeared on Tech In Asia, and is reproduced by paidContent with permission.

This article originally appeared in Tech In Asia.

Lunch-stealing?

“Facebook will make north of $3 billion in advertising this year,” FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told the Paley Center For Media’s international council in Madrid on Thursday ”This is not doing anything good for journalism – in fact, it’s destroying it.”

Many news publishers now pipe stories through Facebook, which has also become an important referrer. Guardian.co.uk has made itself available inside a Facebook app. Grimshaw was not criticising such journalism efforts. “We have to engage with social media,” he said.

But Grimshaw is concerned that Facebook is beginning to gobble advertising money from news publishers. “I don’t blame Facebook, but I do blame the publishing industry for being very naive about some of these facts,” he told the gathering of digital news bosses in Madrid.

“Not all distribution is good distribution,” Grimshaw said. “We have to bring people back to FT.com, where we can generate revenue from them. It works very well, we’ve built a profitable model. The idea FT journalism could be freely consumed across all media platforms is not a panacea.

The nauseum of crowds?

Some leading news organisations have also concluded efforts to engage readers in journalism may not be all they’re cracked up to be.

Even The Guardian appears disappointed by Open News List, its effort to involve readers in story planning.

“It’s great that people read it, but they don’t really contribute to it as much as we hoped,” Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner told the Paley’s assembly.

“How much time and effort do people really want to put in to deciding and running their own news agenda?,” BBC News director Helen Boaden asked, suggesting only unemployed people really have the time to engage in that way.

“A lot of people are very happy for an ‘evil’ news editor to run it and to have someone else tell them what’s important in the world that day.”

And, following the call Google and Facebook made at the same conference to invent a better means of communicating news than the traditional narrative story, Wall Street Journal Europe deputy editor Neil McIntosh said that format remains in demand.

“Our readers need us to sift,” McIntosh said. “Readers are often crying out for less, not more. They’re still looking for the nut graf and the sort of stories I was taught to bash out 20 years ago.”

WSJ has, however, recently introduced Streaming Stories, a way of presenting live-updating material alongside conventional narrative.

“Print circulation is at record highs,” Andrew Rashbass told the Paley Center’s international council in Madrid on Thursday.

“We’re holding on to it as long as possible – but my view of what’s possible is more pessimistic than a lot of other people’s…

“It’s not fashionable to say it, but I think, frankly, it will be all digital. I don’t know when that will be exactly, but the idea that mass printing of paper will be around in 25 years is odd.”

Rashbass’ excited realisation at The Economist is, after years of trying to find a viable model for the Economist.com website, it is the linear and packaged “lean-back” experience of tablet publishing – more akin to familiar print magazine publishing – which gives the title its greatest possible digital manifestation and its best shot of online business success.

As titles like The Economist go there, some pure-play digital services like Flipboard go in the same direction, aggregating their content in the same way many publishers complain the web has done. So will publishers be disaggregated on tablets in the same way many have been on the web, I asked Rashbass?

“They didn’t ask me (to include our content) and, if they did, I’d probably have said ‘no’,” he replied.

“It’s not a creative reimagining in some way – it’s a head-on competitor. I don’t think it’s that significant, the (Economist.com) team obviously felt they wanted to do it. Let’s see – I’m happy to see experimentation and change minds later.

“But you’re heading down a route we’ve seen before – giving the opportunity to extract value to somebody else in an area that should be our own – so Flipboard is problematic.”

The Economist has a branded presence on Flipboard, with content taken from Economist.com rather than the magazine. No ads were visible when last checked by paidContent.

Rashbass declared himself “relaxed” about Apple’s 30 percent commission on its iPad edition, however:

“I don’t find the 30 percent problem problematic,” he said. “The majority of people in this room have always worked through third parties – whether through newsstands or other things. Even we have always have a newsstand presence.”

But they nevertheless think they have the prescription for what news media must do next…

First, the disclosures: “We’re not a news company,” Google’s head of news products and Google+ programming Richard Gingras told media executives at the Paley Center’s international council of media executives in Madrid on Thursday. “We’re a platform,” Facebook’s journalism manager Vadim Lavrusik duly followed.

Oh, really… ?

Kill the article

“Do we not deserve to rethink the architecture of what a ‘story’ is, the form of presentation and narrative to meet the needs of people who are consuming, not just by articles?,” Google’s Gingras, who previously led Salon Media Group and pioneering online community The Well, asked at the gathering.

“As Larry Page once said to me,” Gingras relayed, “‘Why don’t reporters do more footnoting?’”

For 15 years, one of the big promises of online journalism is harnessing hypermedia to better present contextual information. Linkages can easily be made between distinct events in ongoing stories, portions of those stories can be elucidated.

But Google tried to show news producers this promise two years ago, with its Living Stories system for exploring story timelines, and canned the project following experiments with leading news organisations. Content production systems are still mostly designed to celebrate the classical narrative story.

Context is king

“People want analysis from journalists,” Facebook’s Lavrusik advised. He showed data from the social network’s recent engagement with news brands suggesting ”posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks (than others).”

“Most newsgathering is still done in a very traditional way,” Lavrusik told me. “In too many places, it’s still ‘this is what’s happening’, not contextualising what’s happening. What needs to change is – there’s a lack of discovering why this is happening, the context.”

SQL at J-school

“We need to rethink how we teach journalism,” Google’s Gingras proposed.

“There will be a day – and it should not be far from now – where we can create persistent forms of stories not written in narrative form but in (Google) Fusion Tables and query strings, status updates and tweets.

“This is a renaissance of media and journalism,” he said, explaining “computational journalism” can amount to “the reinvention of the reporter’s notebook”

Less is more

“Because everyone can publish now, how do you show you’re the person to go to?” Facbeook’s Lavrusik asked.

“Media companies have approached it from ‘we need to chase more eyeballs, we need to create more content’. So journalists who created a few articles in one week are now doing that in one day.

“But content isn’t scarce – it’s the contextualisation and making sense of that content that’s becoming scarce.”

Nevermind the homepage

“Seventy-five percent of uniques are coming from external sources, only 25 percent are coming to the homepage,” Google Gringras warned. “This is significantly higher than it was three years ago.

“That suggests we’re not seeing a reconsideration of the design of the site in the first place.

“You go through your site redesign and 90 percent of your focus is on the homepage, because that’s how you present yourself to the world,” Gringras told the assembled news bosses.

Facebook’s Lavrusik backed him up. “I completely agree (with) this idea of re-thinking the article page design,” Lavrusik said. “The way news pages are designed is still the traditional way. It doesn’t line up with how people are discovering that content.”

Find the niche in the haystack

Amongst the biggest challenges for news media’s adapting to digital is highly specialised competition from disaggregated niche services and outlets to newsgatherers’ big, broad brands.

“Large media organisations need to rethink how they segment,” Gingras professed. “There are many niche products out there.

“Should we not reconsider the validity of that all-things-to all-people brand in favour of a stable of acquired or built brands?”

For publishers, the microsurveys are “basically a substitute for a paywall,” said product manager Paul McDonald. When a user clicks on an article that would normally be behind a paywall, he or she can answer a question instead of paying for a digital subscription.

Google already has a paid content product, Google One Pass, that lets publishers sell digital subscriptions, but Google Consumer Surveys is different because it doesn’t require customers to purchase subscriptions or log in.

Google pays publishers $0.05 for each survey response, with publishers seeing average revenues of $15 per thousand page views, McDonald said.

So far Google has around 20 publishing partners and is looking for more. When I first tested the product on the LimaOhio.com website, I couldn’t get the surveys to appear. McDonald asked me if I had my AdBlock app on. I did, and when I turned it off, the surveys popped up. “It’s a loose paywall,” McDonald admitted, and “a very small percentage of users use AdBlock.”

Google can pay publishers because advertisers and small businesses are paying to run the questions. These companies “have market research needs that are not met by existing solutions,” in part because traditional market research is so expensive, McDonald said. “This is market research that is self-serve but has the same qualities of a high-end platform.”

The customers create surveys and select the audience who will see the questions. Questions seen by a broad audience representing the general U.S. population are $0.10 per response (with a minimum total cost of $100). If companies want to drill down by demographic or select a custom audience with a screening question, the cost is $0.50 per response.

Once a survey launches, customers have access to a custom reporting dashboard that lets them see how different demographics answered their question.

The tool can be used by anyone (including a reporter in search of data). Companies like Lucky Brand Jeans, King Arthur Flour and Timbuk2 are using it now.