“As long as newspapers offer less each day- less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos- then they’re giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself. With our prototype, we aim to make the physical object so beautiful and luxurious that it will seem a bargain at $1. The web obviously presents all kinds of advantages for breaking news, but the printed newspaper does and will always have a slew of advantages, too. It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.

We’ll keep you posted throughout the summer about our progress with this newspaper prototype, and any other good news we come across.”  Read The Whole Email

Video below, Dave accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools.

NAA sent me a letter with this month’s Presstime magazine letting me know that this is the last print edition I will be receiving.  They are moving online only.  Truth be told, it was probably the last print edition I would be getting anyway you see I graduated from NYU in January and NAA wants proof that I still qualify for their student rate. I do, but you know what NAA, I’m not wasting my time to send you the appropriate paperwork. 

Why is NAA, the NEWSPAPER Association of America, eliminating their print publication and moving online only?  The reason they cite in the letter is “to adapt our organization to the realities of today’s newspaper business”.  I’m calling bullshit on their reasoning.  The real reason I suspect is because NAA is too big a coward to try something innovative and instead is hoping to just hang in there a little longer like everyone else and hope for the best.

According to NAA’s website, here is the association’s purpose:

Today, NAA serves the newspaper industry in strategic efforts to:

. Serve as a catalyst for industry growth
. Identify and disseminate examples of industry innovation
. Provide tools to exchange information and ideas
. Advocate and communicate industry views and interests to the Federal Government and to third-party standards and measurement bodies
. Communicate the vitality of newspaper media to external constituencies including the advertising community, Wall Street and the news media.

Did you read the first and last bullet points?  What an awful message eliminating print sends to NAA’s advertisers, NAA’s members, and to the advertisers who spent roughly 34 Billion dollars in PRINT advertising last year.  We are adapting “to realities of today’s newspaper business”… by getting out of paper and everything that entails.   http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx   This doesn’t sound like adapting to me, it sounds like abandonment and surrender to the whims of whatever may come to newspapers.

Here is what NAA should have done:

Leverage the Newspaper Industry’s greatest asset and that is – the invitation to deliver a print product to people’s homes.     

Figure out how to deliver Presstime to readers using existing distribution channels of member newspapers and 3^rd party distributors like PCF.  

Show newspapers and advertisers how much money NAA is saving by distributing PressTime this way versus the US Post Office.  Show Newspapers and Advertisers how their existing distribution infrastructure can be used to deliver products to homes across the nation.  What kinds of things?  Things like magazines, catalogs, coupons, flyers, samples, and probably many other things an ad or marketing executive would jump at the chance to drop on a subscriber’s doorstep. 

For example, I get the Wall Street Journal delivered to my doorstep 6 days a week. Why aren’t my magazines and fishing catalogs delivered this way or anything else for that matter?    I can imagine a time in the future when I end my print subscription of WSJ but if I were getting other things via this home delivery service, I would continue to welcome my magazines and catalogs on my front step.  It’s a win-win situation.

If NAA thinks that a newsPAPER’s greatest asset is delivering news via websites then they and their members should expect ad revenue to plummet while competition rises everywhere. There is NO WAY to differentiate a newspaper online. 

If NAA thinks newspapers are unique media entities, as the association’s mere presence implies, then NAA must push the newspaper industry’s greatest asset – the invitation to deliver a print product to people’s homes.  This will open new revenue streams to newspapers and offer advertisers new and less expensive ways of advertising.       

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Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? Should newspapers be Free? Tabloid? Local? Niche? Opinion? Breakfast fodder? “In the long run there is no practical reason for newspapers to survive” states Jacek. Regardless, he is working with newspapers to create entirely new workflows and embedding great marketing, via design, right into the products.

Why you should listen to him:

Newspaper designer Jacek Utko suggests that it’s time for a fresh, top-to-bottom rethink of the newspaper. (At this point, why not try it?) In his work, he’s proved that good design can help readers reconnect with newspapers. A former architect, Utko took on the job of redesigning several newspapers in former Soviet Bloc nations, starting from basic principles. He worked closely with newspaper executives to figure out the business goals of their papers, and then radically reformatted the product to fit those goals. (And he wasn’t afraid to break a few grids in the process.)

As the art director at Warsaw’s Puls Biznesu in 2004, he redesigned this small business-focused newspaper and immediately won the SND award for world’s best-designed newspaper. Readers responded, and circulation went up. He’s now art director for the Bonnier Business Press, overseeing papers in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and the work he oversees consistently wins major prizes (including another SND world’s-best in 2007 for Estonia’s Äripäev), despite their small teams and limited resources.

“Who knew that the world’s best designed newspapers are in Poland and Estonia?”

-June Cohen, TED

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Final Edition

CSM editor John Yemma, “The key words in that sentence are “daily print.” As of today, we are shedding print on a daily basis. But the Monitor itself – the century-old journalistic enterprise chronicling the world’s challenges and progress – is becoming more daily than ever. And with the launch of our new weekly print edition, the Monitor is becoming more vital than ever”… continue to CSM at above link.

Better yet, read my interview with John Yemma from December 2008, at the link below, about his plans for going online and how the paper plans to make money.  The paper will continue to exist as a weekly for the cost of US: 1 year for $89.00 USD  or Canada: 1 year for $99.75 CAN (includes 5% GST)

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Rocky Mountain News Final Front Page