"Revenue sharing" first for group

Regional newspaper publisher CN Group is trialling a new "revenue sharing" scheme on its' hyperlocal sites in a first for the UK journalism industry.
CN Group runs 19 hyperlocal sites in the Cumbria and Barrow area. The new scheme allows part-time contributors on these local sites to receive 25% of ad revenue generated.

It is hoped the scheme will encourage contributors to help generate ad revenue as well as populating the websites with announcements and content. CN Groups' head of digital content Nick Turner believes the scheme is an incentive for contributors and will free up time for full-time journalists to generate news.
"The reality of the situation is that our reporters and reps have a lot on their plate," he said.
"The company has contracted a bit in size with some voluntary redundancies so that's only going to accentuate that so it's going to mean that there's a greater sort of visibility in these towns on the periphery of where our headquarters and core circulation is."

Mr Turner hopes the scheme will make his company’s papers more visible in these communities. "It will be like a bridge between the journalist, the community and the paper," he added.
Mr Turner said he realised local journalists were under increasing time constraints and needed more time to concentrate on generating news.
"We're not looking to replace journalism with these people in the community. From our experiment so far we can see how far removed random members of the public, no matter how committed they are to their community, are from actual journalism."