Paid content firm Journalism Online sells to RR Donnelley

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 25 March, 2011 at 9:42 am, filed under Paywall and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz the guys behind the paid content venture Journalism Online have sold their company to printing services firm RR Donnelley & Sons.

The deal should give Journalism Online a shot in the arm and possibly refocus its business on the B2B sector. Journlism Online’s problem to date has always been that it was unable to attract very many large publishers to its Press + system.

Journalism Online system has been up and running since last summer, but can only boast the likes of The Scranton Times-Tribune and the Augusta Chronicle among its publishers. Not exactly big-market names. Although it boasts two dozen customers including MediaNews Group in all.

As we’ve seen in the UK as well as the US most larger media firms want control of their own paywalls rather than going to a third party. Let’s face it, there is little enough revenue to go around without having to share it with someone else.

Against its failure to persuade more publishers to work with it Journalism Online has face growing competition from publishers going it alone like the Dallas Morning News and The New York Times. As well  Google which announced its ‘Google One Pass’ paid content system earlier this year.

However, RR Donnelley’s whole business is built around providing services to publishers and it has deep pockets. It will also retain, for now, the services of Brill and Crovitz who started Journalism Online along with Leo Hindery.

The acquisition could also suggest a new route for Journalism Online with RR Donnelley’s relationships with a “broad array of consumer and b2b publishers”. Specialist B2B could be an interesting market for Press + as that market as a whole is almost certain to put up paywalls faster than any other publishing sector.

Interestingly this comes not long after Journalism Online put out a survey that claimed paywalls were having little effect on newspaper web traffic.

There’s no word on what this means for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which bought a stake in Journalism Online last year.