Newspaper Company Wants to Gain Back Readers By Printing Customized Papers
The newspaper business is clearly not doing so well these days. Now, the MediaNews Group, which, among many others, owns the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News, and Oakland Tribune, is trying to revive its business by going back to an old idea that didn't work in the past and surely won't work in the future: individualized, printed newspapers that users can print out at home with a proprietary printer.
Party Like It's 1939
Newspapers have always looked for alternative distribution mechanisms, and Popular Mechanics reports that as early as in 1939 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tested the idea of electronically sending newspapers to customers' homes. Martin Langeveld discusses the history - and failure - of personalized and faxed newspapers on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog in some more detail.
Giving Readers a Choice
MediaNews' Peter R. Vandevanter, however, seems completely unmoved by the earlier failures of this idea. In an interview with the New York Times, he argues that "individuated news" - MediaNews' trademarked term for this idea - will give readers the ability to "decide what they want to read and on what platform." Of course, readers already have this choice, and, in large numbers, they have made the choice that print is not the medium they are interested in. We also can't imagine that too many readers would want to have yet another printer at home that is dedicated to nothing else but printing the morning paper.
As Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News argues, all newspapers have to do is simply provide readers with customized feeds for their online readers. Then, if you really want to print your individualized newspaper, you could just use a free tool like FeedJournal - and you don't even have to put yet another proprietary device into your house. Of course, if you already use Google Reader and you want a magazine-style feed reader that you can use to read on your screen, Feedly is the way to go.
CC-licensed image of dead trees used courtesy of Flickr users piglicker.
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Perhaps if readers consumed news from digital paper devices patterns could be mined here as well that could dictate interest on a per user basis 'automagically' to create a custom news experience. It's possible a vendor like Amazon could be the next media Goliath. The Kindle could potentially provide a platform for doing this and Amazon is already one of the most sophisticated at measuring interest and analyzing user behavior.
As soon as devices like Amazons Kindle attain market penetration I can see personalized printing. But not in paper print.
Agree 100% with Dan (above). Can see the idea working in a digital format such as Kindle, but not in print.
Definitely not with paper.
Personalized printed newspaper? Wow! you don't have to be a novice to think like a stupid:-p
With the the Feedjournal.com application its easy to create and printout your own customized RSS Newspaper. The main problem is getting full text RSS feeds from quality content producers. I've created my own custom newspaper at http://www.Libertynewsprint.com as a model of what any newspaper could do TODAY with their feeds with the Feedjournal Publisher. The Newspaper Industry is wasting millions of dollars trying to find an online solution when all they have to do is utilize the technology that is already available to them for almost free
It's an interesting notion - and with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's shift to web-only publication, the NYT's ongoing public experiments plus Joshua Karp's 'The Printed Blog' - news as a printed/personalised service is now entirely possible, both economically and technically.
However, from a personalisation perspective, I believe the technologies and design patterns here still require some work - in moving from editorial to curation. What're the mechanisms and tehcniques people will use to discover and personalise news that's most relevant to them?
Perhaps we should bootstrap a NetFlix prize for news?
great post...thanks for sharing!
Paper prints are not popular nowadays and I think that hereafter they will be completely replaced by mobile web devices.
The personalized newspaper certainly has a potential market. Nothing truly replaces the ability to touch and feel something. Printed media is a long way from history, even if it's heyday is long gone. The custom printed newspaper is a niche that has numerous advantages that will allow it to compete very effectively if properly marketed. Pilot projects have already shown a large potential market. As to printing them at home, yourself, though? I seriously doubt the efficacy of this method. The pilots that have shown any success at all have all included the printing and delivery of the customized newspaper to your door, not to your desk. Obviously, this is nothing different that having feeds deliverd for free....