Edipresse pulls plug on Swisster news site

Swisster.ch, a subscription news service in English covering French-speaking Switzerland, has shut down after two-and-a-half years online.

The site, which was launched in March 2008 by the Lausanne-based media group Edipresse, officially went offline on December 23.

In a statement Edipresse said Swisster had been unable to “take advantage of synergies to develop optimally and thus reach its critical mass” during a difficult economic period.

“And despite having doubled the number of subscribers in one year, Swisster.ch never managed to generate a sufficient number of online readers to survive long term in a very competitive niche market for an English-speaking community that has access to many different sources of information,” Sylvia Wuersten, Edipresse’s communication manager, told swissinfo.ch.

But the closure has nothing to do with Edipresse’s ongoing merger with the Zurich-based media group Tamedia, announced in March 2009, said Wuersten.

An estimated 11,000 Swisster reports will remain available on the Tribune de Genève and 24 Heures websites. The closure affects two full-time journalists and several freelancers.

Swisster was based on a subscription business model, with Edipresse selling packages to local multinationals and the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, worth SFr300 ($302), which gave access to the site and its newsletters.

In November 2007 Edipresse launched a Russian-language news website, Nasha Gazeta, also aimed at the expatriate community.