The Society for News Design yesterday announced the winners of their latest annual competition and named five newspapers as "World's Best-Designed."

The winners for 2012, with links to the SND judges' comments, are:

Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm, Sweden)

Die Zeit (Hamburg, Germany)

The Grid (Toronto, Canada)

Politiken (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Welt am Sonntag (Berlin, Germany)

European newspapers dominated the award this year, and four of the five winners had won the honour at least once in the past. Germany's Die Zeit received the award for the sixth time (it won previously in 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2004)

The Grid and Politiken both also won the award last year (Politiken won in 2006 as well), and Welt am Sonntag previously won in 2008.

"What distinguishes a World’s Best-Designed™ Newspaper? A culture of careful editing of all content that puts the reader first — through stringent attention to detail," the judges said in a statement that accompanied the announcement of the winners.

The statement concluded: "In the five publications we selected, details elevated them from their peers. In these papers, every page counts. These staffs perform an extra layer of editing to refine and strengthen the final product. Ultimately, these winning newspapers have been brainstormed, edited and curated for readers. They add analysis and context and serve to connect readers to their larger community."

In 1994, SND added the "World's Best-Designed" category to its annual "Best of News Design" competition, which is now in its 34th year. From 1994 through 1998, a dozen or more newspapers earned the title each year, but since 1999, the number of winners has dropped by more than half. Most years since then have seen five titles selected each year, but some years have had even fewer winners: 1999 and 2009 each only had three. There were just two winners in 2005, and only one - Portugal's i - claimed the title in 2010.

On Monday, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report titled “Newspapers Turning Ideas into Dollars,” which spotlights four US daily newspapers that are finding success through actively rethinking and reworking their business models.

The publishers in the four case studies are taking different approaches and the report emphasises the importance of tailoring efforts to match the audience: “Customizing the business model for the community, these newspaper executives say, is a key component of success,” it states.

The report also notes that “the leaders at these papers are risk takers who concluded that the biggest risk was not rethinking their business models.”

Written by Pew’s Mark Jurkowitz, the four in-depth case studies featured in the report are:

- The Naples (Florida) Daily News, which revamped its sales force to have staff focus on business categories that allow them to better relate to their clients and potential clients: “any media organization needs to be customized for the market, the local community. … The retooling of our advertising is seventy percent of our success,” says Publisher Dave Neill, in the report.

- The Santa Rosa (California) Press Democrat, which developed a “Media Lab,” a digital agency offering a wide variety of online marketing services to local businesses. Rick Edmonds of Poynter notes in an article about the report: “In my observation, this has fast become one of the industry’s most promising new revenue opportunities. Companies know they need to build out social media capacity and drive traffic to their sites with search engine optimization. They need help, and the local news organization can provide it.”

- The (Salt Lake City, Utah) Deseret News, where former Harvard Business School Professor Clark Gilbert has redeveloped “the entire company, including the newspaper, for a new kind of existence in the digital era." He views digital and print as separate businesses that need to be managed separately. The report states that Gilbert sees print as a “crocodile, a prehistoric create that survives today, albeit as a smaller animal. … Deseret Digital Media is the mammal, the new life form designed to dominate the future. … He argues that the path ahead does not involve merging the crocodile and mammal cultures, but maintaining them separately.”

- The Columbia (Tennessee) Daily Herald, which has a newsroom staff of just 13, has created a culture of ongoing innovation always on the lookout for "winners" (new revenue streams). Last year, the report says the Daily Herald launched, among others, "a digital subscription program (a metered paywall); a digital agency that provides online marketing services to local merchants; a daily coupon program; an online ticket selling service; a program that puts advertisers on five different print and digital platforms; and a new male-oriented lifestyle magazine. At the same time, the company is working on plans to roll out a real estate publication, develop improved video technology, introduce an e-commerce retail mall on the website and unveil a database marketing project to identify new customers for its advertisers."

All of these papers have daily circulations below 100,000 and the Daily Herald’s is just under 13,000, and many publishers around the world should be able to relate to their circumstances.

While championing the efforts being made and the results thus far, Jurkowitz is also careful to note that it’s not yet time for anyone to declare victory and clear the field: “these innovations are works in progress and these papers remain vulnerable to the economic disruption that has wreaked havoc on the industry in the past half dozen years and that industry-wide, continues to worsen.”

Commenting on the report on the American Journalism Review website, Rem Rieder concludes: “none of the strategies outlined in the Pew report should be looked at as a blueprint for survival. Solutions, if they are to be found will vary from paper to paper, place to place. But what is valuable is the reminder that there is an alternative to managing in a defensive crouch. If newspapers are to survive in the digital age, they’ll need a bold, innovative, proactive approach.”

If you are a news publisher who is finding successful strategies in adapting to the changing media landscape, we would be interested in hearing more about what you are doing and possibly feature you in one of our upcoming reports, such as Trends in Newsrooms. Feel free to contact either my colleague Emma Goodman or me by email at emma.goodman@wan-ifra.org or brian.veseling@wan-ifra.org

In an interesting development, the largely automated NewsCred, which licenses and syndicates content from publishers to other publishers and to brands such as Pepsi and Johnson & Johnson, has added the human touch with an eight-person Editorial Curation team, according to a report yesterday from Jeff John Roberts on paidContent.

NewsCred, which just a few weeks ago was named among "publishers' favorite startups" by Digiday, boasts an impressive list of content partners that includes many of the world's top publishing companies, such as AP, AFP, Bloomberg, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CNN and the Financial Times to name only a few. More partners are being added regularly, for example, the GigaOM Pro Blog reported The Washington Post signed on just last month.

The company describes itself as "the only global company to offer publishers and brands a full end-to-end content solution." The addition of the human editorial team gives another dimension to NewsCred's already impressive offerings.

Roberts writes that "The idea here is that clients who buy access to NewsCred’s fire hose of news stories can now have a personal editor who has real-life newsroom judgment — such as what type of story should be at the top of a page and for how long."

Founded in 2008, NewsCred now has more than 45 employees and offices in New York, London and Dhaka.

At the signing, Bernd Müller, IT Manager for Neue Westfälische Zeitung (at left in photo above), said his publishing house has been a Digital Collections customer for 7 or 8 years and that about 300 staff will make use of DC-X. Ole Olsen (second from right in photo), CEO of Digital Collections, said Neue Westfälische began using DC3 and then upgraded to DC4 some years ago, and has now ordered DCX. Olsen said it will probably take about three months to complete the upgrade. Also pictured above are Helmut Schmermund, Business Manager of Lippische Landes-Zeitung (second from left) and Axel Walker of Neue Westfälische (right).

Digital Collections says DC-X makes available all the latest and archived data to every user everywhere in the desired form via a simple, fast and comfortable search engine. The DC-X Client runs in a web browser and offers links and interfaces to various editorial systems, web CMS, tablet apps and mobile services. Integrated features are a workflow engine and rights management. DC-X is an agency system, media observer, archive and collecting pool for external content for all media formats.