Many of the industry’s best are contained in the just-released "EXTRA" on Product Innovation, a special edition of the WAN-IFRA Magazine, the industry journal of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

The issue is the second of three targeted special editions coming out this year and is available in print and ePaper.

The case studies in the special edition focus on companies which are already seeing a significant return on their investment from new products, or that are destined for success.

Take, for example, the case of the Schibsted Group in Scandinavia, which lives by the motto, “a good idea knows no boundaries.” In 2004, Schibsted had the foresight to buy Blocket.se, a classified advertising website that was well established in Scandinavia and, critically, offers customers an option to pay a fee to have their ads appear at the top of the listings.

That simple “good” idea has since developed into a significant source of revenue for Schibsted, and the group has shared the concept with several of its other properties and partnered with a group in France and Asia.

Similarly, Gannett Co. in the United States rekindled a well-established, basic idea with its Sunday Select package, an editorial supplement carrying targeted advertising and delivered to homes of non-subscribers who “opt-in” to receive it. The product was launched in 2007 and is now present in all of the company’s newspapers, in addition to those of MediaNews Group, Cox, Tribune Co. and McClatchy.

It took 11 months for this twist on preprints - a long-lived treasure for U.S. publishers - to become profitable. Initially, Gannett needed seven ads to break even; today they are receiving, on average, 24.

Other featured case studies include:

  The Archant Group in the U.K., with its “Family Notices 24” classified web project, which offers customers the opportunity to create an interactive social environment around birth, marriage, anniversary and death notices online.

  gogol medien in Germany, which integrates user generated content into regional newspapers with its myheimat portal. One publisher in Bavaria generated one million Euros of additional revenue after producing a user generated publication using myheimat’s resources.

  Also in Germany, Axel Springer is banking on its household brand Bild, Europe’s largest daily, to drive its online and mobile innovations, including new payment options, advertising, and applications.

The EXTRA edition kicks off a series of regular reports on product innovation in the bi-monthly WAN-IFRA Magazine. The next EXTRA edition on “Cross-Media Publishing Systems” will be published in December.

To subscribe to WAN-IFRA Magazine, please go to www.wan-ifra.org/subscribe.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.

Learn more about WAN-IFRA at www.wan-ifra.org.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, WAN-IFRA, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: larry.kilman@wan-ifra.org.