Archant's plans to launch a personalised online news service on its regional newspaper sites through geotagging have been delayed by months, its business development director told the Beyond the Printed Word conference.

Ian Davies told delegates, in Dublin today, that plans to relaunch the group's sites - which would have allowed users to prioritise news according to postcodes - have been put on hold until middle of next year.

Technical problems have delayed the planned rollout of the sites, which were due to be launched in the latter part of the year.

Davies told the conference that to make the sites work reporters at Archant's 80 local newspapers in the East and South East of England would be required to gather geographical information as standard to form part of the metadata to be added to the story.

The metadata will facilitate the ordering of news stories geographically and, according to Davies, allow the group to quickly and cheaply build new sites.