What now for thelondonpaper’s online community?

Tough times for the staff of the trashy afternoon tabloid thelondonpaper. The Murdoch owned freebie is closing after posting a £12 million loss to June 2009. Sixty staff are now out of work, not to mention the hundreds of part-timers they have outside stations, foisting the paper on you.

In an unfortuante sense of timing, the story broke the same day thelondonpaper’s head of digital announced plans to open up the paper’s data for other publishers to reuse and repurpose. It’s a similar approach to the Guardian’s where secondary users of the data would be expected to share revenue from any advertising they sell around the content.

It’s an interesting model that could extend the reach, revenue and brand awareness for the newspapers. But it’s also the polar opposite approach to News International’s upcoming introduction of paywalls on their other newspaper websites. Open up or lock down? Murdoch is very much going for the latter on his stable of sites so it may be more than a coincidence that thelondonpaper’s aspirations have been scuppered.

Conspiracies aside, the decision is made. We can assume the site will die at the same time as the paper and the content, applications and community will die with it. Two things spring to mind with this:

1. A lot of money has been invested in this website, with the intention of building a strong digital brand. They have gone beyond just republishing newspaper content with added features aimed at young Londoners such as dating, games, flatshares and competitions.

2. Although not thriving (and suspiciously quiet since the announcement), the site does have an active community who have invested time in the site.

This combination of loyal participants and content must have some value (obviously not enough to sustain itself, otherwise it wouldn’t be closing - duh). OK, so the ‘news’ content is value-free. Three years of stalking Amy Winehouse and Lilly Allen doesn’t amount to much. But what about the restaurant and bar reviews, recipes and cartoons? This is content that doesn’t date terribly and can still provide value in the short to medium term.

Instead of closing down the site next month, thelondonpaper could become a thelondonpaperlight - a scaled back site with reduced but focused content and existing community features. It wouldn’t last forever, but it would give the owners time to think how to migrate their loyal users to a new site or platform.

Bitchin pic from I love Q8 on flickr

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