If the readership is balanced towards information workers, there is also a good commercial opportunity for job ads and the site should be very attractive to sponsors (particularly travel, communications and gadgets).

With this mix, trying to charge for content would be counter-productive as the real value of the site for the reader will be in network-generated content. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the site can feed the magazine’s content rather than this being thought of as one-way traffic.

Also, to help gaining users, the magazine should start early and with both – print and online.

We’re currently working on a service all newspapers that think about moving online might want to use. I won’t discuss it here, but it’s a huge opportunity every entrepreneur should have a try at.

As usual, very nice article and comments, thank you for this interesting read.

P.S.: A “couple of days” a bit tight to define a business model, but you seem to be on top of it already.

Advertising is one of the objectives of the online version of Internazionale I assume, and today a lot of people on the Web suffers the fact that trends are changing, ads are not anymore so easy to obtain and they don’t convert as much as before. But from that article seems that advertisers didn’t disappear, they simply shifted to the new wave of social networks who are able to better tailor the ads to their users because they collect great ammount of infos about them.

Internazionale could use this strategy. Obviously to show ads related to the article that is on that page is an old and working solution, but you could also follow the logic I expressed in my previous comments, about registered users, substructures of personal blogs for users and so on to customize the rotation of ads per user based on the subjects where he comments the most, the post he writes about and so on. It’s not even obtrusive cuz is not about tracking and cookies and stuff like that. it’s not on visitors. it would be simply about usage statistics of registered users.

http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-geo-mashup/

we added it on our website, and it could fits good also for Internazionale.

About social media, i think you have to avoid the risk to add more and more stuff to make it “younger”. Internazionle is like an elegant old man with an iPod, not with (also) bermuda and basebal cap.

I think you should adopt a minimal solution, but not losing the power of the people around Internazionale. For example a Twitter (with access for all Internazionale journalists and collaborators as authors), and comments in the main blog.

About the blog, i think it’s more powerful and useful a unique main blog (or 2 maximum 3 blogs) than a lot of different blogs. I think you should deeply rethink the section “Interblog”.

That gives Internazionale a wonderful chance in my opinion. Other then reading quality news, what always attracted most readers was to participate and be involved. This magazine has probably one of the most active readership ever here in Italy. they are all people that would love to help gather informations and write somes because for many of them it’s their job or at least one of their hobbies. Other magazines and newspaper can’t count on such an active follow, they mostly have passive readers.

You should focus on that and build a website that allows users to gather news and contribute writing. and obviously implement features to support debates on the site. What would be great could also be to help create a substructure of blogs for readers. you know, like buddypress for wordpress. every registered reader can get his blog and maybe you can have a page of the main site where you have sort of feeds of users posts. You would keep a site with articles from Internazionale’s journalists but it would also be a starting point for their active readers.

My opinion is that magazines and newspapers are struggling to find a place in a medium that is parallel but opposite. it’s kind of a paradox to match the two of them. they have different rules. This doesn’t mean that magazines like Internazionale don’t have a place on the internet, but simply that I think is useless to try to create an online clone. I think what you should create should be something more interactive and different from the print magazine. they can be 2 separate things. This would also preserve Internazionale to disappear in its print version.

And it’s a thought that expands to the entire category, it’s not restricted to Internazionale.

Please let me know what you think about that. being into communication and a webdesigner this discussion would help me a lot to make up my mind on such a key topic for me :)