Introduction

Earlier this year, texas-based NewsStand launched an intriguing web-service: digital subscriptions to print-publications such as the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune or the Harvard Business Review. What the company is delivering via fast Internet connection is not simply the content of a publication repurposed for on-line consumption, but a digital version of the complete publication, advertisements, classified ads, stock market listings and TV programs.

In our increasingly connected world, NewsStand’s approach seems oddly anachronistic. Why on earth would you want to go through the hassle of downloading a huge digital file of a publication, since in most cases you can access more or less the same information in a web browser?

Nevertheless, once you take a closer look at the service, it becomes clear that content providers can actually learn quite a bit from this initiative. In fact, by pushing the user perception analysis a bit, NewsStand could provide a lot of information for web designers and content architects alike. It could even have some far reaching second-level impact on the content market.

In fact, NewsStand is interesting on a variety of levels. For one, it lets you examine reading efficiency of printed material displayed on a computer screen; we can learn a lot about why print-ads work, and online’ ads don’t; and we can also see the limitations of DRM schemes necessary to protect digitally distributed content.

What we can learn from NewsStand

So what do you get with a digital file that you don’t get with a web site? Much more than you might think. Lets start with information architecture: newspapers are extremely fine-tuned, optimized vehicles for delivery of information, and they integrate literally centuries of experience with information design.

A newspaper design uses a enormous variety of signs and codes to communicate the importance, rank of information which we loose when we transport information to the web. These signs include typography - an essential party of any written communication, and painfully absent in dynamic web-sites - but also many other codes which we take in practically subconsciously, such as the placement of an article on the page.

There is a lot of subliminal information in a newspaper: The size of the headline, the kind of illustration as well as its surface, the number of columns it spans, its position regarding advertisements, whether it is placed on a left-hand or right-hand page, and so forth. All these little bits of information help us get to the essential information faster.

This leads to another essential aspect: speed of information acquisition. We all know how fast we can flip through a newspaper to pick up the essential stories of the day, something which is virtually impossible on a web-site, however well conceived. The web, as paradoxical as it may seem, is a very bad medium for browsing. So, however clumsy it may seem to download and view a newspaper page on a computer screen, doing so delivers something we could not get beforehand: a reading experience which lets us take in the overall content of a newspaper in a few minutes.

Finally there are advertisements. It is interesting to note that print-ads work - even on a digital page. Part of that is of course that they are delivered in space in which we have accepted their presence, but there is more to it. When we read a newspaper, we are in control, we do not have to look at an ad if we don’t want to. Flipping a page is very fast, even on a digital file. However, if we are interested in the information and advertisement offers, we can zoom in very quickly. Of course, this needs to be analyzed in much more detail, but one thing is certain: on-line advertisers should give this matter some thought.

Archiving for future consumption

Another important aspect of the way the NewsStand service works is that you get to keep information which you have not had the time to read. Often neglected, this is one of the most important aspects of information acquisition and management with printed publications: there is an easy way of keeping them readily available. Anybody who has tried in vain to find an article he discovered on a website just a few days earlier will know what I mean.

As for trying to keep up with information you didn’t even have time to acquire the day it appeared, the web is totally hopeless. There is a good reason we all keep stacks of magazines and newspapers, and a service such as NewsStand lets you replicate this behavior- and makes us understand why it is so engrained in our way of handling traditional information.

The problem of perceived value

The most important lesson of NewsStand is probably perceived value. Since it is based on a well-established value proposition (i.e. the printed publication) we have no qualms about paying similar subscription fees, provided the printed publication is not available to us in timely fashion. Subscribing to the NewsStand service is in a similar price-range to a traditional subscription: if the latter is not available to us, all we have to see whether the digital subscription delivers what we expect. If you like a newspaper, receiving it as a digital file is a lot better than not receiving it.

This aspect is particularly interesting from a publication such as the New York Times, which tried to sell its content on-line, and had to abandon the paying subscription model for its website.

What does all this mean?

Both content and technology providers need to analyze the NewsStand example closely. It shows us that we still have a lot to learn from printed publications, and that “pure” information isn’t everything. On-line content is extremely handy in many cases - but NewsStand shows us one more time that a website does not deliver everything we get from a printed publication.

In other words, it is time for us to admit that we need to dive much more deeply into the analysis of information acquisition and management to deliver truly compelling on-line content. We still have a lot to learn…

January 4, 2002

©2001 Pfeiffer Consulting