Another shot in the eye for those who believe that Web is the way forward in publishing?

News that the Westmonster Blog has closed ( via Journalism.co.uk)

Its parent Messymedia has announced his closure today saying that

we're no longer in the digital publishing business, and we're focusing instead on digital consulting to the UK media, NGO, and advocacy sectors.

A sign of the Times? A coupe of points stand out from their announcement

1.

When we launched last year, it was with the belief that there was an unserved niche for stylised reporting and content that fell between what the large media companies were doing, and what independent bloggers were providing. We're not saying that isn't true, but we are saying it's going to take significant amounts of investment in marketing and audience-building to build a business in there, for all sorts of reasons

2.

We've also found it really hard to recruit writing talent for the titles. We started with the working assumption that there was a significant tranche of young journalists in the UK willing to take a punt on a small publisher in return for increasing their own profile - we were offering pay, of course, but linked to audience and posting levels

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So is this a sign of the market,did they choose the wrong niche? Or simply a bad business idea.The final comment perhaps supports the wrong business model

While we were able to find some very dedicated and talented writers, the effective advertising CPM we'd have needed to pay them a reasonable wage only existed at an audience size orders of magnitude larger than we were able to achieve

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