While everywhere you turn it's doom and gloom in the nation's newsrooms, Peter Vandevanter and his colleagues at MediaNews Group in Denver are pursuing a fascinating possibility -- the so-called individuated newspaper, that is, a paper that is personalized to each and every user. From the Good Morning, Fran (or whatever your name is) on the front page to the story selection -- and the ads -- throughout. And it's a paper delivered to your doorstep or your computer or your printer or your cellphone or your Blackberry or whatever each morning -- and, at least as far as electronic delivery is concerned, updated throughout the day.
Sound impossible? Don't tell that to the attendees at the recent Second Annual Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper. Vandevanter, who has long championed the idea, was the force behind the gathering, but cutting-edge attendees like Eduardo Hauser of DailyMe.com, Dan Pacheco of PrintCasting.com, Jeff Kline of Accrisoft, Gregor Dorsch and Michael Stangl of German software innovators Syntops, Richard Miller of NewspaperDirect and media consultant Bill Ostendorf will tell you that the future is now.
Other supporters include academic revolutionaries like Vin Crosbie of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications and Randy Covington, director of Newsplex, a global newsroom of the future, and a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina.
The only real question in an industry hemorrhaging money is who will have the courage to do it first.
Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, sounded mighty interested. In his opening remarks to the conference, Singleton admitted that no one knows if the individuated newspaper is the absolute new model for newspapers, but he sure wasn't ruling it out. Just think, he said, "The publication will give readers exactly what they want combined with advertising about things they are interested in." Not bad, eh?
Okay, media types, let's get going. The future looks good, but we can't wait forever.
5 comments:
Fran -- good post. It was great spending time with like-minded folks who are betting on the evolution of newspapers rather than their demise.
Eduardo Hauser
Thanks, Fran. I obviously agree! The future is now. The technology is available today to personalize and individualize printed newspapers, magazines and more. We can also empower people in our community to do the same, partnering with them for mutual benefit. It's just a matter of bringing the right pieces together and presenting them to the audiences that are ready for it.
- Dan Pacheco, Printcasting.com
It's the first really good idea/concept I've heard regarding the future of newspapers. No one really knows where the industry is headed, though, and what sounds great today may not work out. But it beats headlines about shrinking staff and overreliance on AP.
Hey, Fran:
Google's beaten them to the punch, at least for anyone who is willing to put a very small amount of work into it.
What you need: A Google account, and a personalized Google homepage.
So suppose I've got that, and, after looking at a pile of my old cutoff jeans and my stack of Robin Masters novels, I decide I need to know everything about Tom Selleck.
So I go to news.google.com and type Tom Selleck into the search bar. Up pops a page with nearly everything in the online news printed about Tom Selleck.
Then comes the part that turns it into a Newspaper: Up on the address bar is a little icon (in Firefox at least, I think IE7 has it as well) that lets me subscribe to that page. That means if I have an RSS aggregator I subscribe to this ad hoc feed and can be instantly informed whenever an article about Tom Selleck is published.
Now here's where the personal Google home page, aka iGoogle, comes in: It's an online RSS aggregator. Subscribe to the Tom Selleck feed, and it's available to you online, 24 hours a day. I'm not so addicted to the web that I use Google Mobile, but it looks as though you can use it to feed your Tom Selleck jones from just about any phone available.
Note to self: Must write this up in detail for blog.
Anyone with a fair amount of disk storage and a server could make this work so that people wouldn't need the aforementioned blog post to figure it out.
Of course, this only works if newspapers and syndicates keep publishing their content on line, and let Google link to it. That will happen only so long as the papers can stay in existence. Once the various Times, Posts, Dispatches, and News are gone, Google won't be able to pull this off, because the content won't be there, at least in the form you and I grew up with.
Well except for the BCC, VOA, etc.
--
mjm
Death is pretty final.
I'm collecting vinyl.
I'm gonna DJ at the end of the world. (M.S.)
Happy your day.
Post a Comment