{"id":280,"date":"2008-01-19T23:26:20","date_gmt":"2008-01-19T22:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newmediatrends.fdim.fujacks.pil.dk\/?p=280"},"modified":"2013-02-25T21:07:05","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T20:07:05","slug":"standing-danish-newspaper-war-at-internetbased-turning-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/standing-danish-newspaper-war-at-internetbased-turning-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Danish newspaper-war at (internetbased) turning point?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weeks news in Danish online media is without doubt the Morten Lund take-over as majority shareholder at Nyhedsavisen from Baugur (press release here<\/a>), with Morten Wagner of Freeway as a minor investor. Why? It at the same time marks the exit of the Icelandic money backing up Nyhedsavisen – and holds the promise of a yet more intersting development of the Danish online mediamarket.<\/p>\n

Here’s the story:<\/p>\n

Nyhedsavisen is the constituting part of what in late 2006 was known under the name “the Danish newspaper war”. Around two years ago, Baugur Group – a set of Icelandic investors – challenged the existing (subscription-based) Danish news-papers, by launching a free, and freely distributed (to the doorstep og “all” Danish households), quality-newspaper. The dominant players JP\/Politiken and Det Berlingske Officin both answered back with each their own free and freely distributed newspapers – and spinned off very interesting initiatives from other players as well. Hopes were that Nyhedsavisen would be financially weared out in the face of some 3-6 competing newspapers, all of these being given freely to readers at home or in the traffic.
\n(I’ve covered this in a number of post, most notably Danish media revolution: New high-quality print and web-media to give news away this autumn<\/a>, First blog-editor employed by Danish newspaper<\/a>, The three drivers of the current media explosion<\/a>, Sneak preview – now they\u2019re really here – Nordjyske\u2019s new newspapers and website<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Estimates of the net-costs of this “war”<\/a> has been around 200.000 euro a day for each of the free newspapers – a significant amount for the involved players. Det Berlingske Officin backed out of the “war” rather early, and other players also renounced. Today JP\/Politikens 24timer is battling Nyhedsavisen.<\/p>\n

The sell-out of Baugur Group must have caused a celebration at the executive floor at JP\/Politiken, as Mads Kristensen<\/a> argues in a comment here<\/a>. Since Morten Lund (who has earned his money from seed-investments in among others Skype) is belived not to have quite the financial weight as Baugur (however rich he might be). Rumers are<\/a>, that if Nyhedsavisen doesn’t reach break-even in October, their forced to close down.<\/p>\n

Others pays more attention to a potential channel-shift at Nyhedsavisen, bringing online to the forefront of the battle. Morten Lund is a New Media entrepreneurial investor, and Morten Wagner is a New Media entrepreneur, his group controlling the Danish equivalent of Myspace, arto.dk, the leading Dating portals and quite a lot of other higly focused websites. Is now the time where the website of Nyhedsavisen is re-entering the battle, full of new energy, new ideas – backed by traffic-generating efforts of the Freeway-properties?
\nMorten Lund seems to be\u00a0focusing on the known corebusiness of Nyhedsavisen: “a second-to-none product to advertisers”, “a QUALITY PAPER and DISTIBUTION SERVICE” in this blogpost<\/a> on his investment, not even mentioning the online-opportunities.<\/p>\n

Morten Wagner, however, does seem to be in the Nyhedsavisen business for the sake of the internetopportunities alone. From this interview at Journalisten.dk<\/a>\u00a0(in Danish) it’s clear that it’s in online he sees the opportunities, and that he wants to realize them FAST. And that it is Morten Lund, a long-time admirer of the Morten Wagner\u00a0ventures,\u00a0who in a late-night meeting at a Copenhagen bar, finally convinced Morten Wagner to invest….<\/p>\n

I think this is facinating… can’t wait to hear about what’s next!<\/p>\n

Update, January 23rd:\u00a0<\/strong>Should be mentioned that\u00a0Morten Lund is not new to the Nyhedsavisen-game. He allready joined Nyhedsavisen as a small investor in the summer of 2006, and at that time it also roused a great deal of expectations of what this could mean for the online-part of the Newspaper-war (see my \u201cNyhedsavisen\u201d in aggressive online-move – presumably<\/a>). The website of Nyhedsavisen, avisen.dk, was created by a Morten Lund-venture, Hello Group, with a strong focus on blogging and commenting – and the ability for blogpost to hit the frontpage of avisen.dk. Marketing material boosted: “Now citizens take control”.
\nSo what’s new is not the participation of Morten Lund in itself, but his “51 percent-shareholder” commitment to the project. And then off course the things Morten Wagner and his Freeway-consortium has to throw into the venture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weeks news in Danish online media is without doubt the Morten Lund take-over as majority shareholder at Nyhedsavisen from Baugur (press release here), with Morten Wagner of Freeway as a minor investor. Why? It at the same time marks the exit of the Icelandic money backing up Nyhedsavisen – and holds the promise of… L\u00e6s mere »Standing Danish newspaper-war at (internetbased) turning point?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3694,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/3694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jon-lund.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}