August 15 |
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Read all about it: Local papers delivered anywhere in world
Source: International Herald Tribune
Berlin. For the past six years, NewspaperDirect has been acting as a sort of global paperboy for homesick tourists, business executives and expatriates. The Vancouver company is one of a handful of businesses offering to bring them an almost exact replica of the day's paper the way it looks at home to readers — wherever they are in the world.
"As time goes on, people are learning to accept different forms of news," said David Owen, vice president of NewspaperDirect in Europe. "They've come to accept more easily that even printed news can come in different forms."
In the case of NewspaperDirect, that can, for example, be a version of The Daily Telegraph of London for that day printed out and delivered to your hotel room in Singapore for $3.
The newspaper is printed on A3 paper (28 centimeters by 43 centimeters, or 11 inches by 17 inches), but it is still a close replica of the original. Subscribers can also head to the Web site www.pressdisplay.com, where they can page through a PDF version of the paper, a duplicate that includes not only all the news, but also the crossword puzzles and even the advertisements.
The PDF version, Owen said, is a more attractive option for readers who do not want to mouse through a newspaper Web site, where they are far less likely to come across an interesting article by chance.
Other companies, like Satellite Newspapers, go further. The Swiss company has 350 automated kiosks placed in conference centers, airports and hotels around the world where customers can slip in a few coins or a credit card and immediately get their newspaper printed for them at the customary size.
"There are still so many people that want to have the actual physical newspaper, to take with them into the train or wherever they are going," said Ralph Vooys, a Satellite Newspapers spokesman. "The majority of people are not carrying around a laptop while traveling."
In an age in which news and other content have myriad ways of reaching readers, companies like NewspaperDirect and Satellite are offering publishers a modern take on the traditional approach. At virtually no cost to the publication, the companies allow publishers to reach more readers and expand their brand without having to deliver physical copies of the paper internationally.
"It's purely to get our brand overseas, and it makes it easier for people to get our product," said Nick Edgley, international advertising manager at The Daily Telegraph. "It's a hell of a cost saving, really."
Although The Daily Telegraph sells only around 400 copies a day through NewspaperDirect, it gets a royalty for each one, and the cost of producing the PDF files of each day's newspaper pages and transmitting them to NewspaperDirect is minimal; many publishers already produce PDFs as part of their process of printing the newspaper at home. About 225 newspapers are available on NewspaperDirect, including The Washington Post, Pravda and the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung. The publishers receive a royalty of up to 25 cents on each newspaper sold.
In June 2005, NewspaperDirect printed and sold more than 250,000 copies, a number that has increased by 50,000 every year since 2002.
At the moment, Satellite is going aggressively for the printed newspaper market, aiming to increase its subscriber numbers, which Vooys said hover around the "tens of thousands." But Owen said that an increasing part of NewspaperDirect's business in the future would come not from printed copies but from the electronic editions of the papers it offers at www.pressdisplay.com. "We'll supply it in any form they want," he said. "But you need a laptop format or PC format if you're really going to get into the millions of subscribers."
Technology analysts say such companies would be well-served by moving away from digital printing sooner rather than later.
Jaap Favier, vice president and research director for consumer markets at Forrester Research, said it was only a matter of time before paper is obsolete.
"The print business is slowly but certainly going down and there will be a shift in the business model," he said. "It's not that news isn't going to be read, it's that it's not going to be read in the traditional form."
There are already signs of a generational divide confronting publishers of print products. An Online Publishers Association survey in 2004 showed that 45 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds rely on the Internet as their primary source of information. Only 3 percent regularly read a newspaper.
Newspapers will have to search for different solutions to stay relevant in the digital age, and their Web sites may not be one of them, said Kit Webster, chief executive of Newsstand, a digital publishing company based in Texas.
A technology known as Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, is enabling increasing numbers of readers to pick and choose streams of news from different Web sites. So-called news aggregators, like the ones provided by Google and Yahoo, allow readers to dip in and out of newspapers' Web sites, accessing content at no cost.
"Newspapers are competing with themselves for free on their Web sites," Webster said. "That is not a recipe for long-term viability."
The short-term solutions might be the electronic editions provided by NewspaperDirect and Newsstand. The long-term answer, Webster said, will have to look completely different.
"One evolutionary path to take is to begin with the digital edition and make it more Internet-like," he said.
This year, his company released IBrowse, a Web tool that attempts to do just that.
IBrowse allows readers to peruse the articles in the paper as they appear in the print edition, rather than click on Web site links to go directly to the articles.
It also offers a few more bells and whistles than the average electronic edition.
Readers can enter search terms and scan the entire paper for articles featuring those terms, for example. By clicking at the bottom of an article, they can jump to the page where it continues.
"A lot of people don't like Web sites," Webster said. "So if you can go to a Web site and produce the print version of the paper, then you've got them."
Publishers pay for the service, and Webster has managed to get titles like The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the magazine I.D. on board to offer their electronic editions exclusively through Newsstand. In all, more than 250 publications are available.
The pricing system is left up to the individual publications, most of which offer short-term subscriptions for around 50 cents an issue.
Favier said he was doubtful readers would want to make their way through an electronic version of the newspaper, zooming in and out and flipping pages by clicking a mouse.
"Our research shows that the more clicks a reader has to make, the less inclined he is to read," he said.
Webster acknowledges that the model is not yet perfect.
Both he and Owen, of NewspaperDirect, say flexibility is the key in deciding which way to deliver the news to the reader in the future.
"In the end, our customers will tell us how they want the news," Owen said.
Andreas Tzortzis
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