A manifesto for 21C newspapers


Changing the way we read.

It's early on a Sunday morning and I am lying in bed reading stories from the paper as I write this entry.

But the curled-up paper newspaper is still outside safely secured in its almost impenetrable plastic wrapping. I defy even the talents of the Fantastic Four to break the news from its polymer prison.

I have brought "Lola", the iBook, into bed. She is connected to the paper's website over the house's wi-fi network that is connected to the Net via broadband DSL.

This is how we usually access the news these days.

This is a reality for a small but rapidly swelling number of households.

I saw the future about nine years ago when I was asked to design an online strategy for subscribers at my last paper. But it has taken this confluence of power and price to make that vision today's reality and tomorrow's necessity. To make what I am about to describe work you need a reader platform (PDA or notebook), wireless high-speed local networking (such as wi-fi) and a broadband internet link. But most importantly you need a newspaper with an editorial platform at the end of this chain for readers so they can create their own content on the back of our work.

Wireless internet connectivity is especially useful for television listings because we can find TV shows' schedules quickly online, and research items connected to the content while we watch or just afterwards.

TV guides and published reviews, for instance, need many more of these sorts of hyperlink references added to them. It would be especially useful if the paper had an online guide with links to relevant sites of interest -- available initially to only subscribers. Services such as Foxtel's iQ could foreseeably offer such a service, but crusty old Telstra is so bound with Packer and Murdoch it is doubtful they could agree on a format that would service all their needs.

Papers should also offer free email addresses, hosting and blog facilities as a benefit to subscribing. Every published yarn would have a "BLOG THIS" icon that when clicked dumps the item into the subscriber's blog edit window and the link into their clipboard so they can comment. The option would be there to send the comments back to the opinion editor so they could be considered for publication in the print edition, or added to a roundup on a particular issue so online readers can surf entire topics this way. Other ways can be found to interact with the content, such as offering free use of a huge library of photographs and graphics for bloggers using the service and hosted on our servers.

This is a far richer way to read the news of the day. Everyone has a hand in giving the content context. And it facilitates debate, reinterpreting the paper as the foremost marketplace of ideas it once was.

The service could also be unencumbered from dead-forest (print) subscription. The circulation auditors could be encouraged to record a new category of online subscriber that would be equal to traditional subscribers for auditing and marketing purposes.

We have to re-imagine the editorial lifecycle, putting the publication of the initial yarn somewhere near the centre of a new feedback loop instead of thinking of it as the end of the road.

Posted: Sun - May 1, 2005 at 07:56 AM          

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