This morning I got out of bed, made myself a bowl of cornflakes with milk and headed over to the kitchen table where my dad always puts down the newspaper I’m subscribed to: NRC Next. It’s a Dutch tabloid-format newspaper with daily news and in-depth articles around recent happenings in the world.
I recently resubscribed to it and I love it: I have redacted important news that fit’s to my size of wanting to read a newspaper. I just HATE folding around a large newspaper all the time. I want to have a portable newspaper that I can take with me, easily put in my bag and that falls on my doormat every day. Every night when I read the last less important articles in NRC Next, I’m already waiting for the new issue so I can enjoy another new newspaper-reading day.
So, that’s form and function. Now for the other great thing about NRC next: content.
I really HATE newspaper that just list all the news that happened the day before. They are just paper versions of the RSS feeds and news sites I refresh about 60 times a day. Those newspaper are old news in the morning and waste my time by reading the same content another time.
NRC Next provides in-depth articles and also covers topics that other newspapers do not cover like more Tech, Science and Philosophy. I like those topics in this paper because except from techcrunch.com I don’t really read about them, but they are actually the most important subjects in my life. NRC Next provides the most important “recent news” stories and than gets on to the good stuff.
Now, I think “old newspapers” are dying because of paper, because of the form and size they are printed on but also because they just provide “recent news”. All I see in most conventional newspapers is still the sum of stuff I’ve already read yesterday in my browser. They should cut that crap! Especially young internet-savvy people (25 and younger) already read those breaking news stories on the web. They get it trough sms, e-mail newsletters, blogs, RSS or refreshing newsportals 20 times a day. At least the more interested target group is interested in in-depth articles or articles about a not so well known topics: the niches. Most people tend to find content on niche blogs which are mostly amateur and the good ones are either popular and write about the same stuff from within a single standpoint or are hard to find.
I refresh techcrunch.com about 15 times a day because I won’t find that stuff in any newspaper.
So what would be the (or at least my) ideal newspaper?
My ideal newspaper is a newspaper where both journalists create but also just redact content. Professional journalists should have a moderation role over news and should add their own commentary about what they find. They should put together a newspaper with content from various sources and add their own content to it. Journalists are educated in filtering the crap articles and picking the right ones or the special ones. They can add some “recent news/breaking stories” articles, especially on bigger developing ones but they should but the crap with those small “a cat fell out of the tree and hit a car which caused a major accident”-kind of stuff. I already read that yesterday!
Also, I want to cut the paper out of newspaper. I have too many papers laying around all the time and I want to be able to view movies and stuff and listen to documentaries or audio clips while reading the articles. A device like the iPad would be ideal for this. I want to be able to drag, drop, click, view, interact, bookmark, sync and share the content the editors wrote and moderated for me. And I want to take my newspaper with me all the time and I want to be able to read it anywhere. And no, that doesn’t mean on a smartphone.
Have you seen the sizes of those screens? When reading a paper I scan, I look at the pictures beside it, I switch between articles etc. That’s just nog possible on the screen size of smart phone. A laptop? No. I don’t need a keyboard when reading the newspaper, I don’t want to open/close my lid every time I switch trains when commuting, talk to somebody at the office, go out lunch or just switch channels on my TV. I want it to “feel” like a traditional paper tabloid-size version so I can carry it around everywhere without fuzz.
So the last thing I would like to add that relates to content and realtime and carrying the device. Carrying the device with you DOES NOT mean that I want to update it all the time! When I get a lot of great articles in the morning I don’t want them to be lost in the stream all the news stories in the world. The professionals behind the paper can select and moderate them for me until I get my new newspaper release the next morning and leave out all the unimportant or boring stuff. The state should be maintained in every release. I want to be sure that when I wake up there is a great new digital and interactive release of that days paper and I want to be sure that it’s still there when I get home in the evening or go to lunch so I can read on where I left off.
I want a newspaper where content is moderated and written by professional journalists so I won’t have to do the moderation myself and check 2000 feeds every day. I want it to be interactive, be able to share and bookmark stuff. I want it to portable on a comfortable size. Not a phone size and not something sluggish like a laptop.
Finally I want the content to stay all day. I want to have that traditional newspaper feeling. In the evening, I want to have the traditional newspaper feeling that tomorrow there will be a great new newspaper release waiting for me to be consumed. I want to be sure that I’m never leaving any important piece behind and that the professional journalists will tell me the next day, if I do.
No, mainstream consumers are not ready for this yet, but I think they’re going to become very close in the next 2 – 4 years. I believe that in 6 years, everyone will be reading the news on an iPad-like device while commuting. And I believe this is currently the only way that non-internet-tech-journalist-savvy people can consume news in a better way.
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