Life is grand

A fascinating brief to the news print industry by Oliver Reichenstein:

News organisations cannot continue to ignore the global shift from institutionally controlled media to user controlled media. They have to redefine their processes and face the obvious question: Do we still need old media for news?

There are concepts in there but also pragmatic instructions on what to do.

Letters to the editor is often the most successful section of a newspaper. Why is that? Because web 2.0 is a new fashion that will disappear soon? Or because the curiosity in what real people think is human, all too human?

So true. Web 2.0 is the humanising of the web and the pulling down of the old guard’s walls. Not to destroy them but to include them in our global conversation.

1. Reduce number of banners per page to one.
2. Increase banner size.
3. Distinguish clearly between ads and content.
4. Kill all pop up windows.
5. Forbid animated and amateurish banners.

Funnily enough as much as I think the New York Times Reader is a failure (being a desktop-bound, closed app.) I do think their advertising is excellent. One per page, quality, non-intrusive.

Truth is: We need paper for books, yet we don’t absolutely need paper for news – it is just a nice to have option.

I don’t disagree with this but I think “digital paper” or ePaper can be added to the arguement. Static paper will disappear. Dynamic, reloadable ePaper will replace it (it has already been said ePaper will become cheaper than tree-paper.)

It isn’t that newspapers must go online and dump the physicality of paper. Rather that newspapers become true media two-way channels and allow any device to read their content. ePaper, laptops, mobile phones, TVs, desktop computers, billboards, train station walls and the side of blimps. These are display surfaces on which the news of the world can be read.