Johnston Press recently published its interim results for the first six months of the year, showing an increased profit and operating profit of 19.5 per cent.

Operating profit was £40.05 million, up from £38.2 million compared to the previous year, on a turnover of £207.3 million.

As I've pointed out before, newspaper revenues may be falling but profit margins continue to be much higher than in most other industries.

Print advertising revenues fell by £8.4 million while digital revenues rose by £1 million, but it's important to note that digital revenues, at £10 million, are still much lower than print advertising revenues at £124.1 million. Johnston also raised £49.1 million from newspaper sales.

Johnston publishes 18 daily papers, including the Yorkshire Post, and 253 weeklies.

                   

Some time ago, I wrote a post called promoting communities on newspaper websites, which suggested local newspapers could do more to help communities develop on their sites.

To try to illustrate what I meant, I have now created a dummy newspaper website which does four things:

• Allows readers to create an online profile on the website, or to use an existing Facebook profile
• Provides ways for readers to interact with each other on the site
• Provides ways for readers to interact with journalists and bloggers on the site, on an equal basis
• Allows readers to share things, such as links, articles, videos and photos, to create content on forums and to advertise events

It's still clear what's been written by the paper's journalists and news is presented in a traditional manner (perhaps something else that deserves consideration in the future) but it is integrated with the "community" features of the site rather than separated.

Each journalist has a profile containing all sorts of information designed to help readers and hacks interact, and the profiles are presented alongside those of readers.

The features of the dummy site are fully functional. It does not, however, contain any real news or advertising - the news stories, blog posts, forum posts etc either contain information about the features of the site, or are placeholders.

It's not meant to be the "best" or perfect way of designing a news website, and it certainly doesn't have the perfect design. It may have a few bugs.

But it is designed to illustrate the sort of thing I think local newspapers could and should be doing more of. Or maybe I'm wrong - take a look and tell me what you think.

                   

One of the great things about Joomla is the large number of free modules and plugins available for it (and some good commercial ones too). But sometimes the only way to get exactly what you want is to do it yourself.

So I'm a little proud of myself after creating my first simple module, although it draws on code from a number of different sources as I examined other people's modules to see how they worked.

It's called Social Bookmarks and you can see it to the top left of this article if you are viewing the full article (if you can see the "read more" button below then you need to click on that to see the module - or click the headline).

The rest of this article is aimed at Joomla users coming here to download the module or check what it does:

                   

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Trinity Mirror's regional division had an operating profit margin of 18.2 per cent excluding the recently-acquired Manchester titles in the first six months of this year, or 17.8 per cent including them.

That's £26.2 million and £28.9 million respectively.

Full details are available here: http://www.trinitymirror.com/2010/07/trinity-mirror-plc-interim-results-2010.html

For comparison, Tesco's operating profit margin in recent years has been around six per cent.

                   

Farewell Politics Home, another superb free service which is no longer available - except as an extremely limited service - unless you pay for it.

I've mentioned politicshome.com before, calling it "one of my favourite sites". It's a politics news aggregator which manually recommends the best reports on the top political stories of the day as well as comment pieces, blogs and Twitter postings. It also includes a calendar of upcoming events and a précis of the most interesting broadcast interviews.

When I say manually, that means people are employed to monitor news sources and use their judgment to put Politics Home together. It costs money.

                   

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