News-Record.com

What are the realities of a digitally customized paper? Is it anywhere close to practical to allow me to go to a web site and "configure" my paper: Always give me Cone, Robinson and Roberts; give me Thinking Out Loud, Off the Record and The Inside Scoop, give me all the local stories on the front page; give me my 18 stocks and gold prices; ACC mens' and SEC womens' basketball scores and local high school swim meet results. Allow me to reconfigure my paper on the web as my interests change or as seasonal news rolls in and out of relevance.

This demands digital-to-print presses, and those are expensive. I wonder though if circulation wouldn't increase because of customization and if ads wouldn't be worth more too as they could be better targeted. I'm not aware of this happening anywhere though and wonder why you think that is.

Boiled down, I think it is a combination of an industrywide lack of imagination and a resistance to the sort of investment needed.

Do you think it would re-invigorate newspaper reading?

"Lack of imagination" is the cholesterol choking newspapers' arteries. And it, more than anything else, is killing old-style media.

Imagine a customized paper such as Roch describes, but delivered on the Web or a smartphone. I can get it now with a little tinkering on Yahoo Pipes. Most readers won't go to that trouble, but an imaginative newspaper company could make the process fairly easy. The programmers would have to add a server-side customization tool on the News-Record's site, much like the "My Page" feature already available under various names from MSN, Yahoo, iGoogle. etc. "My N-R" might offer a dozen categories (Sports, Government, Politics, Finance, Travel, Food, Blogs, etc.). Under each would be a set of tags. As a reader, I'd click-select tags that interest me; under Blogs, for example, John Robinson, Mark Binker, Debatables, Triad Today. After that, when I log in to "My N-R" each day, I get a customized newspaper. Along with the stories, your content management system could serve up ads "tagged" to those interests.

This is not rocket surgery. It's a simple system for readers and it's fairly easy from the programmer's side. It encourages people to use the newspaper's domain(s), rather than Google or MSN, because I certainly would much rather do this on the N-R site where I'll news and ads from my geographic locale.

Unfortunately, most newspapers still seem stuck in the Web 1.0 mire, where this kind of personalization and customization is hard to do (remember how we used to hand-code metawords to get the search engines' attention?).

Web 2.0 sites' tags make this much easier. See Flickr, Technorai and Last.fm as examples. The N-R can do it, too. I've seen tags on Mark Binker's blog. However, I've never seen tags in N-R news stories or, come to think of it, in The Editor's Log.

JR, it wouldn't cost you more than a little time to teach the staff, both news and creative services, to "tag" content. If the programmers then mashed up a "tag" index page, listing the key words and linking them to your search engine, I'd hit it every day. Two clicks and I'd have the ACC tournament schedule, instead of having to scroll through the Sports list of stories.

Based on tags alone, the newspaper could quickly develop the "My N-R" page. This also would help lay your foundation for a Web 3.0 or Semantic Web site.

Compared to the cost for a dead-tree press, it's a trivial expense. But it won't happen without imagination.

Steve,

I'd like to get in touch with you. Can you drop me a line? curator@we101.com

Honestly, Roch, I don't know that a digitally customized paper would measurably "re-invigorate" newspaper reading. It might well make it more convenient, but I don't know that inconvenience is the issue so much. The delivery method and packaging is one issue but not the only one.

I hear you, Steve, on site tags. I actually did them for a while, but they slipped off my scope and I haven't picked them back up.

"It might well make it more convenient, but I don't know that inconvenience is the issue so much."

Not more convenient, more relevant.

"More relevant" to whom? We have three newspaper readers in my house: myself, my spouse, our 15-year-old son. I suppose someone could digitally customize papers for each of us, but also print and deliver them at a reasonable cost? I doubt that. It's easier by far to custom/craft the individualized news product online. Financially, this evolution in news service makes sense, too. It shifts the newspaper company from the old model of needing revenue to buy, supply, operate and maintain an expensive press. The cost of printing now becomes the responsibility of the subscriber who has a choice of whether to actually print out the paper.

More relevant to the subscriber, whether that is an individual or a family. You're getting the point about customization being attractive, Steve, but I'm talking to the guy with the presses about extending that customization to the print product. Your wife wants some things you don't? Same for your 15 year-old? Fine, have your paper delivered with custom pages for them too.

Yes, more relevant, too. But Roch, are you talking about getting a customized paper delivered to your driveway? Or are you thinking of a digital one delivered online?

As a carrier, it would be very difficult to "deliver" the personally customized papers due to the time involved to sort by address. Unless the come presorted like the USPS is doing with the mail. Then you have the problem of say a detour or something of that nature, destroying the route order the carrier would drive. At $3.24 ++++??? per gallon we can't afford to sit and pilfer through the papers to find "your made to order paper". It is VERY difficult to make a profit now (and we're not in this for the sheer pleasure). Digital would be the way to customize.

I grew up reading the newspaper and still enjoy reading printed news that's fit to print. I realize I fall nanoseconds behind doing this; even so, it's preferable to reading online print.

Somehow I have a hard time seeing myself, along with a friend or family member, holding notebook computers and sharing comics or local news stories on Sunday mornings.

This discussion may become moot if recent news reports on the demise of reading ability come to pass. Let's hope that trend somehow is reversed.

"Roch, are you talking about getting a customized paper delivered to your driveway? Or are you thinking of a digital one delivered online?"

Both. The online configuration of one's interests would not only make a customized web page available, but it would also dictate the customization of the print edition. Both would be driven by the same set of reader preferences and the same database on the back end. Content would no longer be web or print, it would simply be content, stripped of any formatting but ready to be software-assembled on the fly for one's custom web page or for the presses as dictated by the reader's preferences.

This might be a weird thing for an editor to think about because, the whole job of what do we run and where becomes almost moot. You no longer need to consider dropping Snuffy Smith to make room for Soduku--give the user the option of either, or both. And if some mom's kid's soccer team wins the city playoffs, wouldn't it be cool for a parent to be able to configure her paper so that the following day's edition puts that story on the front page above the fold? Heck, she'd probably order a few extras for the grandparents.

The idea that the selection of what is important, what goes on the front page and what goes on B19, gets put in the reader's hands probably runs hard against the traditional role of editors. Nonetheless, if we are talking about reinvigorating the printed news, I think these traditions might be questioned. Even so, editors could mark stories that they deem to be of importance and, if the reader's preferences are not delivering those stories to them, there could be a daily "What you're missing" or "Editors' picks" where the reader gets the news their preferences wouldn't have otherwise accommodated.

Yes, the delivery would have to change a bit too, but delivering to a specific address is not rocket science.

Customized Print Papers: Possible Today

I found an article that explains better than me and adds some important empirical information. Excuse the long excerpt, but it's very relevant to this thread. The entire article is worth a read to anybody interested in this subject.
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http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/p1398_c985.cfm

Why will newspapers switch from analog presses to digital presses? Two reasons.

First, capital savings. A digital press that can produce 10,000 copies per hour can cost about US $250,000. A 200,000-circulation daily newspaper would need to purchase at least 20 of them (plus a few more for redundancy). However, that $5 million capital expenditure is a huge savings over the $50 million to $75 million that an offset analog printing press of similar capacity costs. Moreover, some of the many digital presses can be deployed along major circulation routes to reduce edition delivery costs and time. Bottcher said that these savings should soon begin motivating publishers to switch to digital presses when their analog presses wear out.

Second, individualization. Because digital presses use no printing plates and their ink jets operate according to electronic impulses, they can be controlled by electronic databases, including databases containing information about each reader preference. This is already done today in commercial printing.. A simple example is when each recipient's name ('Dear Joe' is literal personalization) and postal address is printed on his intended copy.

If the database contains (1) sets of individualized edition layout templates; (2) each reader's choices of specific categories of story interests; and (3) the newspapers available inventory of stories from all sources, the technology exists to print an individualized newsprint edition for each reader.

The initial financial motivation to print individualized newsprint editions will be individualized advertising revenues. Advertisers will pay a higher CPM rate to reach readers who individually fit the demographic target of a product or services.

Moreover, in an era when newspapers are in general trying to become more relevant to readers, individualized story editions find relevance with each reader. These editions will still contain all the bulletin and urgent generic stories that the editor wants all readers to see, but each individual edition will contain stories of specific interest to each individual reader.

For such reasons, individualization will become the mainstream of newspaper publishing, both on the Web and in print. At the pace that digital press technology is advancing, we should see the first individualized newsprint editions being produced early in the second decade of this century, but maybe sooner.

Yep. I think it is the coming thing. There are challenges to the current way we are structured, not the least of which is what the carrier pointed out. Part of that falls under the category of lack of imagination -- we would need to revamp the process so that we could get the right customized paper into the right hands by 5:30 or 6 a.m. Not impossible at all, but will be a challenge.

The other piece falls under the investment category. Not just the investment in the digital equipment but the investment in the front end equipment/software/data gathering to create each reader's customized data base.

Again, not impossible -- and probably eventual -- but the sorts of things I was thinking about when I referred to lack of imagination and resistance to investment.

Maybe being free of Landmark's reigns might be a good thing.

Possibly, but I sorta doubt it, Roch. Those are industry issues.