Networking these products is the key to success, says Roberto de Celis,  Managing Director for Regional Internet for Vocento. "We have an advantage on the internet side – access, local content, support from local brands and from national brands for local consumption," he said in a session on successful cross-media projects.

The company has created a centralised newsroom producing content for all media, which it shares through the network. "It provides an efficiency of costs and shared resources and allows us to compete with national portals," says Mr de Celis. "This is easy to understand, but we've gone farther with the network."

What he described was a hyper-local project that provides news to communities as small as 4,000 people. This news attracts low-level advertising, but a lot of it, so the project is lucrative.

"It is a project born out of the internet, which generates the demand, and then a print edition comes out," Mr de Celis explains. "The print edition gathers the content from the portal. It comes out monthly, but it sold out within hours, and we're now considering weekly."