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that look like the real thing
Offering actual news pages from printed editions
By Marty Beard
The internet was supposed to supplant the newspaper, with its rustling, overlarge pages, smudged ink, paper cuts and sea of classified ads.
That's not happening. Newspaper readers haven’t been willing to sacrifice their morning ritual in favor of logging on to a web site.
It may well not ever happen, moreover. According to the Newspaper Association of America, morning-paper circulation has actually been increasing.
Which raises some questions: Just maybe there's something to be said for the printed newspaper format after all. Maybe newspaper web sites aren't all that user-friendly. Maybe the Daily Item that lands on your doorstep is actually easier to read and easier to get around.
Maybe, just maybe, if online newspapers looked more like printed papers more people would read them.
This is the theory behind a company named Newsstand, which is attempting to bring the nation’s newspapers to the web in a way that replicates the look and feel of the newspaper in electronic form.
The layout, articles and ads are identical to what actually runs in the paper.
Subscribers will pay the full subscription price to gain access to the online edition.
Newsstand offers a software product that converts the daily paper into pixels.
The technology caught the attention of The New York Times, which is Newsstand’s first notable customer. The Gray Lady has signed a five-year contract with the Austin-based Newsstand.
The Times and Newsstand did some joint research that indicates that people don’t get the same sense of connectedness from newspaper web sites that they get from reading the print paper.
"Folks like to know they're reading the exact same thing that someone else is reading," says Tracey Jones, Newsstand’s president and co-founder. "And this is analogous to that when you get the same paper."
Jones also believes that a reading habit as ingrained as newspaper-reading can’t be blithely overpowered in a matter of a few years by a new medium.
"It’s purely the metaphor of being able to read the paper," he says. "People have been trained for the past 150-odd years on how to read the newspaper. It’s just in the last three to five years that we've tried to convert to the internet model."
So far, The New York Times is Newsstand’s only signed customer, but the company is in talks with other newspaper companies, including the Cox newspaper chain, which publishes the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Conventional wisdom holds that internet users don't want to pay for their content, that they expect their information to be free. This holds true in just about every case except for online pornography, Consumer Reports and The Wall Street Journal.
Thus, newspapers don’t charge for access to their web sites, and funnel lots of money into bottomless portals that may or may not pay off.
But according to Jones, his company’s research indicates that 77 to 78 percent of newspaper readers would potentially be okay with the idea of paying for electronic content.
With the Newsstand model users will pay the same subscription fee as they would to receive hard copies of the newspaper.
Additionally, the Audit Bureau of Circulations will factor in Newsstand users when it calculates a newspaper's overall circulation--meaning that a paper will be able to command greater ad rates.
And yet Newsstand says it is not out to overthrow the current paradigm of online publishing.
"People in general look to news web sites for up-to-date information," Jones says. "When they want to get information and get it quick, they look to that medium. Our goal is to make available to the traditional publisher just another mechanism to reach their clients."
The Newsstand reader software looks and acts like a read-only cross between Adobe Acrobat and newspaper design software such as PageMaker or Quark. Users can adjust the page's size, scroll around, click on articles and jump from page to page.
It is designed to protect both readers’ privacy and the paper’s proprietary content, Jones says.
How it works: In the newspaper’s "rip phase," the Newsstand software encapsulates the pages before they go to the printer. The pages are transferred to a series of servers at Newsstand’s data facility, where the data is converted into the Newsstand format.
"We get close to a gigabtye of information on average from The New York Times," Jones says. "When we're done with it, it weighs in the neighborhood of 20 megs."
The layout, articles and ads are identical to what actually runs in the paper. The Newsstand edition is then downloaded onto the users’ computers.
"A lot of publishers don't put 100 percent of their editorial content in their web-ups," Jones says. "With this mechanism, the consumer will get all that's printed."
Once the paper has been downloaded, that's it for the day. The paper remains on the user's hard drive and the user does not need to reconnect to the web.
Jones says his technology is ideal for business travelers who spend a lot of time in the air and overseas. The technology, he says, is a good way for readers to read the paper on long plane trips. Jones, whose professional background lies in technology rather than journalism, got the idea himself after extensive business travel.
But why would anyone but a small number of elite readers want to read the local paper?
"Think about the University of Texas," Jones says, referring to the fact that Cox’s Austin American-Statesman is considering the Newsstand product. "How many people go there now--50,000, right? The school also has a large number of alumni. It’s a built-in audience of users who no longer live in Austin who will want to read about how the Longhorns are doing.
"And think of all the attention focused upon Austin during the presidential campaign. That's a whole new audience that would want to see the same paper that people who are actually in Austin will see."
Newsstand is also being pitched as a boon for advertisers. The print ads will be transferred, verbatim, to the Newsstand layout.
At the same time the ads can link to advertisers’ web sites. If the user is off-line, as many Newsstand users will be, the computer will "remember" that the user clicked on a certain ad and when he or she is back online, the links will be saved.
The New York Times plans to roll out a Newsstand product in the fourth quarter, according to a New York Times company spokeswoman.
The existence of the Newsstand product raises many logistical questions, such as which edition--national or New York?--will go online, and whether all subscribers to a newspaper’s print edition will have access to the Newsstand edition.
It’s all up to the publishers, Jones says, noting that all that Newsstand provides is the technology.
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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