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Newsdit, a new publisher, news aggregator and social network is launching fifty locally-focussed digital newspapers across the UK.
The first six are launched online this week with the remainder added swiftly thereafter. IoS and Android apps will also be made available during a two-month period.
Newsdit software and app is also being marketed and made available to existing publishers to save costs and enhance the content provided to their existing readers.
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Glasgow newsdit, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Staffordshire and Leicester are the first publications to be rolled out, plus The48News, with its focus on Brexit and the E.U. referendum fallout.
Its co-founder is former Financial Times executive Karl Capp, who highlights that newsdit’s software and innovative process takes all the effort and expense out of digital publishing. This allows editors to be able to focus entirely on content at a time where publishers are under enormous financial pressure.
Capp and his co-founder, Paul Meier, have already designed and built the software for ThinCats, the successful Peer2Peer lending platform, which was acquired by ESF Capital twelve months ago.
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The company’s innovative accounting software offers a particularly interesting angle when it comes to taking micro-payments for individual articles and funding new publishing enterprises. A new financial services project is currently in design and about to get underway, which will further enhance the company’s ever growing software suite and publishing capabilities.
Capp, a former FT European regional director, says that newsdit participation provides a one-stop digital publishing, content management, social media and e-payments solution for publishers.
He said: “Newsdit’s classification algorithms aim to enhance the readers’ experience by linking you to ever more relevant content and to your geographic location of interest.
“It is a digital newspaper with a sophisticated recommendation algorithm and extremely clever classifier, which, in addition to assigning a user’s geographic location, it cleverly filters interests, based on how articles are clicked-on and read.
“It is also a collaborative news based social network, connecting readers, writers and publishers through content, providing a grown-up social and news network.”
He added that, “a reader can, at any time delete their user track.”
Newsdit’s aggregated content is scalable to feature millions of feeds as publishers join the publishing and content cooperative. It not only acts as a platform for publishing journalism, it also provides publishers with a cutting edge website and mobile app.
Newsdit participation offers a solution to the challenge of declining online advertising by providing publishers with a system where they can accept micro-payments for individual articles or manage annual subscriptions. All subscription fees go to the publisher and all payments can be accepted in a range of international currencies as newsdit has created its own virtual currency for digital purchase including micro-payments. Advertising is also covered in the offering.
Membership of the app is free for readers, and freelance journalists, who want to use it as their own publishing platform – with a limit of 300 words and one image per article. Those with purchased premium subscriptions can write longer articles, feature more images, and charge money for their content.
Importantly to publishers, newsdit can be ‘white-labeled’ so that all client publishers can brand it under their own name and logo.
Newsdit also provides seamless integration enabling journalists to push links to their content out on the full range of established social media networks and also pull content in.
When readers register as Newdit users they input their geographic location. The software then uses this, as well as their interests, to begin recommending more content they may like to read.
Capp said: “Uniquely, newsdit is collaborative, connecting readers, writers and publishers. We’re not just keeping our software for ourselves and if you’re a publisher, or want to be one, then you can have your own newsdit digital publishing app, just as number of publishers already have done.”
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