Norwegian moves London flight from Fort Lauderdale to Miami
Norwegian Air Shuttle is making its Miami International Airport debut with a daily direct flight to London starting March 31. The Miami route will replace its current service from Fort Lauderdale.
One-way flights on the budget airline will start at $159.90; meals, seating, and checked baggage cost extra. Premium tickets — including reclining seats, meals, priority boarding, and more leg room — will start at $719.90 one way (Norwegian.com/us).
Norwegian currently operates direct London-Fort Lauderdale round-trip flights but decided to switch the route to Miami last year. London is a popular business destination, and demand for premium tickets is greater in Miami, said Anders Lindström, Norwegian’s director of communications. Its routes to Barcelona, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen will continue to operate from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International.
In addition to business passengers, Miami also offers more opportunity for Norwegian to carry cargo and has higher searchengine recognition, Lindström said. “By moving to Miami, we will reach a much larger audience,” he said.
Low-cost European carriers have closed in the wake of financial stress, and earlier this year, some experts questioned Norwegian’s long-term stability. Lindström said the airline underwent a cost-reduction project at the end of last year and is already seeing results toward its profitability goals for 2019.
Another budget airline, VivaAir, recently added the first direct flight from Miami to Santa Marta, Colombia, starting Dec. 18. American Airlines added a Miami to Guyana flight that began in November 2018.
Taylor Dolven: 305-376-2052, @taydolven
McClatchy and Google are partnering on an experiment to operate pop-up digital news outlets in three underserved communities to explore new “sustainable business models” in local journalism.
Craig Forman, the CEO and president of McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald and 28 other newspapers, authored a blog post on Tuesday announcing the partnership. The Compass Experiment is the first effort to emerge from the Google News Initiative Local Experiments Project, which also launched on Tuesday.
In his blog post, Forman said the project would bring three brand-new local news operations, each owned and run wholly by McClatchy, to a yet-to-beannounced trio of “small to mid-sized U.S. communities that don’t have access to significant local sources of news and information.”
Axios reports that the project team will select three cities with populations under about 500,000 people, and that Google intends to “fund dozens of new local news websites around the country and eventually around the world.”
Over the next three years, McClatchy will launch these newsrooms on multiple platforms and in collaboration with experts at Google.
The tech company will assist with financial support, but McClatchy will have full editorial control, Forman wrote.
“The Compass Experiment isn’t about making incremental improvement for local news,” Foreman writes. “It’s about coming up with new approaches, and harnessing the expertise of both McClatchy and Google to create new models. While we don’t know what this will look like at the end of three years, we share a vision for the value and potential impact this collaborative work will have on the local media industry.”
This isn’t the first time Google and McClatchy worked on a seminal project together. Last year, the media company served as a launch partner for the Subscribe with Google initiative. The findings from The Compass Experiment will guide Google as it proceeds with other similar projects.
Forman said the locations of the planned news outlets, along with additional information, will be announced in the coming months.
“We are delighted to expand our collaboration with Google to explore new models for independent local news and information and share what we learn with the industry,” Forman said in a statement to the Miami Herald. “The Compass Experiment reflects our continuing commitment to local news and the communities we serve.”