THE International Herald Tribune (IHT) said on Tuesday that it had opened a new office in Frankfurt to expand its coverage of Germany. On Wednesday it announced an agreement in Thailand whereby a daily English edition of Phujadkam, Thaiday Dot Com’s business newspaper, will be published in the Asian edition of the IHT.

The two announcements are typical of the pace set by the IHT management since January 2003 when it became wholly owned by The New York Times (NYT), and severed its partnership with the Washington Post.

The pace has been more hectic since NYT sensibly spent ten months deciding what to do with the IHT before implementing any changes. The first, in November 2003, was to appoint Michael Golden, a director of NYT who had been vice-president for operations development, as the IHT’s publisher. It is Golden who has overseen the expansion of the past 14 months.

When I met him yesterday, I wondered why the NYT had not exploited one of the world’s most powerful newspaper brands and renamed the IHT The New York Times and — using the IHT’s 28 printing sites — put it on sale across the world. But research showed that IHT readers wanted an international and not a US paper.

The NYT has invested in new print sites across the US to make itself the national newspaper, and there has also been significant investment as the NYT seeks to make the IHT the world’s newspaper. The IHT sells in more than 180 countries, and already calls itself “the world’s daily newspaper”. It’s a good slogan even if it is not quite true.

Golden’s mission is to take the battle to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and the Financial Times (FT) and to make the IHT the dominant global newspaper. The current leader is the FT which sells about 282,000 copies outside Britain against the IHT’s 233,000 and the WSJ’s 90,000.

Golden believes that, in the era of globalisation, success will come from cultivating business readers, and maintaining the paper’s coverage of culture, sport and fashion.

During his 14 months at the helm, the IHT has been redesigned, introduced colour on the front page, added two pages a day, appointed 12 new reporters, opened offices in Hong Kong, Frankfurt and Berlin, and started new sections on Friday for “global luxury real estate” and on Saturday for weekend business.

That investment is already paying dividends. In Asia, where the paper has 11 printing sites, readership of the IHT is up by 20 per cent against the declines of the WSJ and the FT. In Europe, the paper’s circulation has risen 28 per cent, the biggest increase of any international daily or weekly.

The IHT is not profitable yet, but Golden believes that it is well placed to benefit when global advertising starts to pick up again.

One interesting aspect of this global battle is that the winner will be the newspaper that goes most upmarket rather than the other way.

• IT WAS sod’s law for Carlisle’s News & Star last Saturday when its biggest local news story for decades occurred as the town was devastated by floods and 500 people were evacuated. After 2,000 copies of the paper had been printed, the electricity went out and production was abandoned for the first time in 40 years.

  Under its disaster plan, the paper could have been printed in Barrow, but it would have been impossible to transport the newspapers back to Carlisle — the plan had not considered water as an obstacle, nor that most mobiles would not work because the masts were down.

  The homes of a dozen of the paper’s staff were flooded. Photographer Paula Paisley found herself taking pictures of firemen saving her husband and her 18-month-old son from the upstairs window of their home. But newspapers, especially local papers, thrive on adversity.

  By Sunday night journalists and printers had jettisoned all the advertisements from Monday’s paper and devoted 34 of 40 pages to the flood. Some of the most dramatic pictures were taken from the Great North Air Ambulance, bought with cash that was raised by News & Star readers.

  The paper sold out when it went on sale at 7am, as did a second edition and that paper has gone on selling as a souvenir throughout the week. The News & Star normally sells about 27,000 copies a night. The flood disaster special has now sold 60,000.

  As editor Keith Sutton says: “Local news sells local newspapers. Bad local news sells even more.”

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