Now another approach is being tried by a new paper in the Netherlands called NRC Next. 

The approach in itself is hardly original: offering readers heavy doses of news analysis. But it’s doing so by cutting way back on actual news, on the assumption that readers have already been well-dosed on the who-what-when-wheres elsewhere.

Though NRC Next is just six months old, it’s showing real promise, attracting young, educated city dwellers, the majority of whom were not previously reading a paper. The paper, which carries a cover price of $1.25, already claims a circulation of 70,000. It comes out weekday mornings.

If NRC Next looks to have a chance to succeed, others like it will follow in other markets, predict newspaper analysts, as the new big thing. 

“Newspapers are seeing circulation go down, but they are still making a lot of money. So they still have some money to experiment with new products,” says Piet Bakker, an associate professor at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. Though himself a bit skeptical, he sees NRC Next imitators on the horizon.

“They will try this,” says Bakker. “They have already tried free newspapers, and there is not much room in free newspapers now.”

NRC Next was developed by editors at NRC Handelsblad, an upscale evening newspaper in the Netherlands, in response to their paper’s circulation declines. The aim: to reach the young.

“This is the main group that everybody wants,” Peter Leijten, a top editor at the paper, tells Media Life. The new paper is one of four Netherlands papers owned by PCM Media. Like its parent, NRC Next is a national paper but with its strongest sales in metro areas like Amsterdam.

Leijten says NRC Next editors decided to skip running traditional news stories for very practical reasons. They’ve already appeared elsewhere. “If you read the newspaper the next morning, you see everything that you already need to know, so it is not interesting.”

With its editorial emphasis on analysis and background, NRC Next is a bold departure from the slew of so-call Lite spin-offs that have been popping up across Europe and the U.S. with the aim of attracting younger readers. Their emphasis is typically on celeb news, and the results have been mixed at best.

Leijten describes NRC Next as a daily newsmagazine in its style. About 60 percent of its stories come out of the NRC Handelsblad newsroom, but it also has its own dedicated staff, which turns out lifestyle and entertainment pieces. In all, some 27 new folks have been hired to help across both papers.

Next takes a different, lighter, more visual approach to design and runs snappier headlines than its sister paper, a traditional broadsheet. A tabloid, running 32 pages, Next is stitch-bound, as a newsweekly would be, to make reading easier on buses and trains.

The paper's editors have a blog where they post several times a week, typically explaining why the editors decided to lead with one story over another and responding to criticism of stories from readers and even editors at NRC Handelsblad.

The average Next reader age is 32, typically highly educated and urban, and more than 50 percent say they were not regular newspaper readers previously, reports Leijten. 

Like other paid papers in the Netherlands, the bulk of NRC Next’s circulation is home delivered by subscription, and at 70,000 it’s well above its 40,000 target. At the end of three months, says Bakker, circulation was audited at 48,000.

Both Leijten and Bakker agree that the real test for NRC Next will come when the initial subscriptions come up for renewal.
 
But so far at least media buyers are impressed. Says Ruud van der Zeer, media strategist at Publicis in the Netherlands: “If you want to target a young, affluent audience that is willing to pay for a paper, it is a good alternative.”