Ampp3d is actually the second such project from Trinity Mirror: the first — which, like Ampp3d, was created by former Guardian journalist and designer Martin Belam — was UsVsThem, which was launched in May and is a similar kind of site, but focused more on pure entertainment rather than serious journalism. In an interview on Monday, I talked with Belam about the rationale behind Ampp3d and what he has learned from the success of UsVsThem.

One of the most impressive aspects of Ampp3d — as a project that was built inside a major mainstream media company — is how quickly it went from concept to reality: Belam said it was less than three months from the pitch to the CEO to Monday’s launch. “We did a pitch document to the CEO with four potential sites and services, and from him saying ‘do that one’ to finding the team, doing the design and launching was eight weeks,” Belam said.

Understanding social sharing for journalism

The idea behind Ampp3d is to use social-sharing methods — snappy headlines, emotional content etc. — in the service of data journalism, Belam said. So where the Mirror recently did a feature on new pay raises for British MPs, with a big splash on the front page and multiple posts inside, Ampp3d came up with a single chart that shows the increase in a typical MP’s pay compared to that of a nurse, a teacher and other average British citizens.

Belam said that one of the lessons he learned from launching UsVsThem is that people like to share things that are fun or interesting, but that also have a point of view related to issues that they care about such as politics. So some of the most popular content on UsVsThem has been games or interactive widgets with a kind of satirical political edge to them.

“They’ve done well because it allows people to share some of their political beliefs without being the sort of boring political guy… so the question is how do we find those stories that resonate with people that they will share a chart or a graph about, not just because it says something about an issue but because it says something about them? I like a lot of data journalism, but I think there’s some low-hanging fruit there in optimizing it better for social media.”

Like UsVsThem, Belam said the new site is an experiment with a fixed life-span: the idea is to try a service for three months and see whether it strikes a nerve with enough readers to make it worthwhile to continue. “If we can build an audience then great, we’ll keep on doing it, if we haven’t then that will tell us there isn’t the market for what we’re trying to do,” he said.

Belam said that some of what he is doing at Trinity Mirror is informed by lessons learned with projects like the “social reader” or “frictionless sharing” app that he helped develop while he was at the Guardian — an app that relied on Facebook for the distribution of content. While the app itself failed in the end for a variety of reasons, Belam said it taught him that the market for an article is sometimes much larger than editors assume it to be, if it is promoted properly.

Finding new ways of telling stories

Belam said that UsVsThem and Ampp3d have both been driven by a desire on the part of Trinity Mirror (which publishes the Daily Mirror, one of Britain’s largest dailies, as well as a series of regional dailies and weeklies) to broaden its potential audience online — particularly outside the aging readership of print newspapers. And it has also been an experiment in trying to determine what readers want to share and what they don’t:

“The idea is to launch some new sites and services that can reach audiences that the Mirror brand can’t or the regional newspapers can’t [and] UsVsThem was kind of an experiment in seeing whether we could do that kind of social traffic. Trinity have been very good at SEO traffic, but not so much the other kind — not so much can you make things viral, but can you build stuff that people specifically want to share.”

Belam said his original target was that the site should be able to get about 10 percent of the existing traffic to BuzzFeed’s UK site, which is about 10 million unique visitors a month — but after a little more than six months, it has about 70 percent of that number, or about 7 million. This is “a bigger audience than I could ever have imagined getting,” Belam said.

Growth can often come in waves

But that readership of UsVsThem didn’t come all at once, according to its founder: after a strong start initially, with several items that really took off on social networks, the site hit a bit of a lull and Trinity Mirror actually considered killing it:

“We went through a fallow period of about six weeks without anything catching fire, and we did actually sit down and say on the balance of things, if you had to make the decision right now would you switch it off — and there was a point at which we said yeah, maybe we should switch it off. But then we persevered a few more weeks and stuff caught fire again.”

Belam said that the way he thinks about sites like Ampp3d and UsVsThem is that they’re not really any different from the other forms of content that newspapers often include because they are interesting to or useful for readers, such as horse-racing scores and TV listings. And in turn, those things help to subsidize the “serious” content (whether they do so by perpetuating a harmful pageview-driven business model is a separate question).

The other thing that Ampp3d reminds me of is how some aggregators such as Business Insider and the Huffington Post take a single chart or a single paragraph from a much longer news story and use that as the basis for a popular post — in much the same way that Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill did with a long story in the New York Times last year. Why shouldn’t a media outlet do that with its own content instead of waiting for someone else to do it?

As for mixing the “viral” nature of social content with serious journalism, Belam says it remains to be seen whether that will work or not (the Washington Post‘s site Know More has similar goals and has had a considerable amount of success since its launch). Said Belam:

“I suspect the general internet market for cat GIFs is larger than the market for charts about British politics. But in the end, basically, if we produce good content that people want to share then it will work, and if we don’t then none of the other stuff will matter.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / mj007

Newspapers were later than the daily deals sites to devise an engaging online local ad proposition. Now Trinity Mirror says it will spend £10 million on its new “Happli” over the next two years, expecting to reap annual revenue of £20 million by 2014.

Happli is formed out of Frugaloo, the deals site Trinity Mirror previously tried out in Manchester and Newcastle. It will be leveraged through its regional ad sales teams and is the latest deals site for newspapers powered by NimbleCommerce, on whose platform Johnson Press recently launched its own DealMonster.co.uk.

Trinity Mirror, which publishes both regional and national newspapers and sites and is led by CEO Sly Bailey, on Thursday said annual pre-tax profit fell 40 percent through 2011 to £74.4 million thanks to rising newsprint costs. Revenue fell only two percent.

Digital revenue in the group’s nationals division rose 13.3 percent in 2011 to a small-scale £3.4 million – just 2.5 percent of the unit’s total. In the regionals, digital revenue fell two percent to £25.1 million in an ongoing classifieds downturn, especially in job ads – 17.6 percent of the unit’s total.

Trinity Mirror firm has spent £30 million in four years implementing a controversial multi-platform content production system, due to be finished by 2013 with a final £15 million investment.

Now it will give the same template used in its recent MirrorOnline redesign to the rest of its sites, will launch ad-funded smartphone apps for MirrorOnline in Q2 and says it will launch “e-editions” for The Daily Mirror, Daily Record and its largest regional newspaper titles.

– Guardian: Lovefilm CTO Mike Blakemore will become the news publisher’s engineering director in May, reporting to GNM digital development director Tanya Cordrey.

– Yahoo: Vizeum digital manager Mark Gilleran will head Yahoo’s Ireland sales operations, working to UK and Ireland James Wildman.

– Trinity Mirror: The news publisher is adding to its directors board Donal Smith, CEO of stock-buying analysis firm Data Explorers.

In this video for paidContent, digital publisher Matt Kelly, digital MD Chris Ellis and digital product director Malcolm Coles discuss the impetus behind the relaunch…

The new site will employ content recommendations from Rummble Labs, automatic content tagging from OpenText, Facebook accounts for reader login, and was redesigned by &&&.

The Mirror’s separate celebrity gossip site 3am.co.uk – previously so distinct from the rest of Mirror.co.uk – is gaining the Mirror masthead for the first time and, Kelly tells paidContent, last week hired new staff despite layoffs elsewhere in the company. The separate MirrorFootball site is not yet getting the refresh.

In December 2011, Mirror.co.uk’s daily average user count rose 44 percent from the previous year to 726,653, but fell 4.2 percent from November. All national news sites pulled fewer December readers than in November except Independent.co.uk, which surpassed Mirror Group thanks to growth following its own redesign.

The Mirror’s red-top rival The Sun has not had a web refresh in some years, with publisher News International seemingly stopping to take a breath amid its ongoing crisis and reports it will launch a Sunday edition.

This is the stark reality of modern newspapers, the result of a coincidence of commercial necessity and technological innovation.

There is sure to be more hand-wringing at the decision by Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) (TM) to cut a further 75 jobs, amounting to 18.75% of its editorial workforce.

But, without wishing to appear to bless another tranche of redundancies at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, it must be obvious to all that it is the way of the world.

Most people are expected to leave voluntarily and it is to be hoped they pick up enough severance cash to ensure they can pay their mortgages for some time to come.

What many of them will know is that getting a replacement job is going to be very tricky indeed.

I expect both the British Association of Journalists (BAJ) and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) will issue statements condemning the action.

They will be heartfelt and sincere, of course, but they will not change the course of a process that is now irreversible.

In June 2010, I reported that TM was making 200 editorial staff redundant. That 25% cut resulted in the overall staffing being reduced to the current 400.

So the three papers will end up in a couple of months’ time with 325 journalists between them. (I seem to recall, when I edited the Daily Mirror 20-odd years ago, that it alone had more than 400 staff).

TM has announced that its move is linked to what it calls “editorial restructuring”, which involves an expansion of its ContentWatch production system.

In its statement this afternoon, TM claimed that ContentWatch had “helped transform the newsroom”. It probably has. And it is probably right in claiming also that the restructuring will “create an even more efficient multimedia operation.”

None of can ignore the fact that it is possible to do so much so quickly with advancing digital tools.

Note, however, that “a centralised reporting and production hub” will operate with “teams working across all three titles” over seven days.

I can understand the production part of that operation. I am less sanguine about reporters working across titles.

Then again, somewhat contradictorily, the company’s statement also says that there will be a “retention of bespoke editorial teams for each title to protect their unique identity.”

I’m not quite certain how that squares with editors having “access to a greater number of reporters than is currently available to them on an individual basis.”

Clearly, the editors – Richard Wallace, Tina Weaver and Lloyd Embley – have their work cut out to bed in the new system.

Wallace is evidently going to assume management responsibility for the new system while continuing to edit the Daily Mirror. Good luck with that, Richard.

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

Communicator handles email marketing, newsletters and SMS engagement for clients including Phones4U, Birmingham City Football Club and Trinity Mirror itself. The company clocked a £1 ($1.55) million annual profit on £3.5 ($5.45) million revenue in 2010/11.

Trinity Mirror in 2008 bought Liverpool web design agency Rippleeffect for £5.8 ($9.04) million.

CEO Sly Bailey, via release: “Increasingly we’re seeing that, in addition to print and website advertising, clients want help in areas such as website design, search engine optimisation, e-mail marketing, social media and web analytics. The addition of Communicator Corp to our stable of digital assets will enhance our offering and complement the digital marketing services currently offered by Rippleffect.

“Personalisation and targeted content are increasingly sought after by marketers in a multi-channel world and Communicator Corp is recognised in the industry for its ability to meet this demand.

“This investment is another demonstration of our strategic intent to drive more diversified revenue streams across multiple media channels and accelerate our growth into a multimedia business.”

Digital revenue growth is a mixed bag inside Trinity Mirror. In the 17 weeks to October 30, regional digital revenue grew just three percent from last year. In the nationals division, digital sales grew only one percent after disappearing MirrorBingo customers wiped out advertising growth of 33 percent.

Trinity Mirror is buying Communicator from shareholders Paul Callaghan, Gerard Callaghan, John Bernard Callaghan, Steven Nelson, Christopher Wilds and James Bunting. MD Wilds will stay aboard.

That very broad topic is being investigated by a cross-party group of just three members and a chair. They are concerned that ongoing cuts to the likes of Trinity Mirror’s Western Mail and to BBC Wales reduce coverage of Welsh politics, but they are also asking how new media might fill the gap.

The conclusion already reached by Plaid Cymru committee member Bethan Jenkins AM, before the committee is due to report in January, is the same one recommended to it by Western Mail chief reporter and regional NUJ chair Martin Shipton – that the Welsh Government should buy its publisher Media Wales from Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) for £10 million before handing it over to a workers’ cooperative.

But the suggestion has some spooked, even in a country so reliant on the state sector. Fellow committee member Peter Black says: “Such a concept conjures up images of Soviet Russia. We would see an end to objective reporting.”

What committee members really fear is that, through lack of visibility, their fledgling assembly will lose legitimacy. They fear the Western Mail, which is not Wales’ highest-circulating paper but calls itself “the national newspaper of Wales” by virtue of being read by Cardiff’s intelligentsia, might go weekly or cease to exist.

Still, the committee, which is hearing almost exclusively from industry folk west of the Severn, appears not to have asked Trinity Mirror in Canary Wharf to comment on its fears, and only on Thursday was it told by Media Wales’ local managing director that their notions were merely hypothetical.

Committee members have remarked how Trinity Mirror has cut staffing but retained profit and failed to reinvest. What is the truth? I dug through 16 years of accounts to summarise…

Circulation has fallen hard. And so it has for newspapers around the western world.

Staff levels are currently a third their size a decade ago. With better technology and with newsroom integration of several related titles, it is certainly conceivable to do more with fewer – but the NUJ’s Shipton believes levels are falling toward a threshold below which it would make producing news difficult.

Revenue decline started in 2006 – that is before the great advertising crash of 2008, and around the same time broadband adoption boomed in the UK. The WalesOnline website replaced icWales in 2008.

Outgoings have remained fairly consistent. Cost cuts have been marginal and have lagged behind a more pronounced revenue decline, only accelerating in the last year.

After falling horribly, profit has stabilised or returned slightly in the last year.

With the reduced staffing, profit per employee shot up last year.

“The industry cannot be focused predominantly on print. The platform is not important – the content is…

Regional media businesses have spent years agonising over ‘the internet’. What do we put on it? Who does it? How do we make money on it?

All are valid questions, but the constant questioning and lurches of direction are paralysing the industry. It is fiddling while Rome burns.

I suggest we should simply accept that digital media is now all-pervasive and must be embraced totally, in newsrooms and in advertising sales departments…

I am astonished by the scarcity of regional media activity on tablets. Lately, I have become convinced that newspapers will migrate in significant proportion to mobile devices.

The iPad is a game-changer for media and the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) device and the multitude of copy-cats will continue to improve in experience and functionality, while reducing in price.

I believe the printed newspaper will survive, but I suspect 10-15 years from now, more people will read tablet equivalents.

Crucially, it is accepted that people will pay for content on tablets and e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

Sustaining journalism will require the public to pay for it and for the industry to stop pandering to the digital freeloaders. Shouldn’t we begin to occupy this territory?”

Meehan spent 14 years as an editor with Northcliffe Media before departing in July. He is now running his own communications consultancy.

“I remain hugely passionate about local and regional journalism,” he writes. But he is talking, note, about journalism – not printed newspapers as such. He continues:

“Let’s integrate print and digital, but it must be done intelligently. Throwing all of our print content on to the web – or even the best of it – is total madness.

It’s simply cannibalising unnecessarily our already under-pressure print sales and readership.

But the other extreme – focusing almost exclusively on the paper because it’s what pays the rent now – is a road to nowhere.

At best, that will achieve greater longevity for the printed product, but it will not maintain or grow audience, or sustain journalism.”

I’m not so certain he’s right about cannibalisation. Withholding content from the web is, in my view, counter-productive. But his main message, about the centrality of online journalism, is bang on the money. As is his belief in the coming dominance of tablets.

Towards the end of his wide-ranging article, he turns to the problem caused by the regulatory barrier that is preventing some sensible business deals among regional newspaper publishers. He writes:

“The recent decision to effectively scupper the sale by Northcliffe Media of newspapers in Kent to the Kent Messenger Group was a disgrace.

Did the industry kick up enough of a fuss about it? Did the NUJ protest? I believe we have to be much more proactive and purposeful in fighting for a fair deal for an industry that employs thousands of skilled workers.”

Well, I’m with Meehan in spirit on that one, as I wrote earlier this month. But how much fuss do we have to create?

The decision has been criticised in the Lords by Lord (Guy) Black (here), to the Leveson inquiry by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (here), in a major lecture by the former regional editor Neil Fowler (here), and in a public statement by another publisher, Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) (here).

Is no-one listening? Does no-one care? How many times do we have to say that this was a wrong-headed ruling by the Office of Fair Trading?

The predictable result has been an announcement by the ailing KM group that it is going to axe “up to 10″ journalists’ jobs. I readily concede that redundancies would have occurred even if the company had been allowed to acquire the seven titles from Northcliffe.

I also believe that some of those papers would have vanished anyway, due to merging of titles. And it is probably true that the deal would not have done much more than delayed inevitable closure.

That, however, goes back to Meehan’s essential point. We cannot hope to see investment – and, most importantly, innovation and invention – in digital journalism while a cash-strapped industry scrabbles around trying to save itself from collapse.

Sources: InPublishing/HoldTheFrontPage

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

“We will be looking to (startups) with a location based element that we can potentially add rich relevant content to make it better,” Hood tells NMA.

Archant’s London titles include Hackney Gazette, Muswell Hill Journal and Camden Gazette.

Hood had been consulting since leaving Trinity Mirror this summer.

• Nationals division (Mirror, People, Daily Record, Sunday Mail): Digital advertising sales grew by 33 percent – but almost wiped out by disappearing MirrorBingo custom, causing overall digital to grow only one percent.
• Regionals division: Digital revenue up three percent, with digital advertising up only two percent, other digital sales by a tenth.

Mirror Group Digital unique browsers over the period were 33 percent higher than last year (source: ABCe).

In recent years, publishers have tried augmenting their core free news sites with paid facilities like bingo. News International’s Sun Bingo is believed to contribute a significant amount to the publisher.

But, thanks to a deregulation of marketing rules surrounding online gambling, there is now a glut of online bingo games out there, many of them advertised on daytime TV, meaning more competition for the publishers.

MirrorBingo’s success for Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) has been slimming for some time since its initial burst – back in the 2009 annual report, the publisher saw “bingo revenues declining due to increased competition and the impact of the recession”.

In August 2011, CEO Sly Bailey promised City analysts: “Expect significant developments to the Mirror.co.uk and MirrorFootball.co.uk sites in the fourth quarter.”

Overall, Trinity Mirror advertising income is eight percent down from a year ago, but has been offset by an increase in circulation income.

The Sunday Mirror gained 61 percent circulation and The People is up 58 percent in the vacuum left by News Of The World. Even so, Trinity Mirror’s nationals division lost a tenth of its advertising revenue

Release.