NY Times: Industry retrench painful. Why? Let's get excited about change. What if the newspaper became a new, exciting product. Peter Van

N.Y. Times to Reduce Page Size, Slash Jobs

07.18.2006, 07:05 AM

The New York Times plans to cut 250 jobs and shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them one-and-a-half inches narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday's edition.
The newspaper's plans include closing a printing plant in Edison, N.J. The plant's workload will shift to another in New York City, the article said, estimating the moves would save the company $42 million per year. The job cuts account for about one-third of the Times' total production work force of 800, the newspaper said.
The reduction in the size of its pages would mean a loss of 11 percent of the space devoted to news, but the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss.
"That's a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably," Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted as saying. "The smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form."
The article, noting that USA Today and The Washington Post have cut their size, pointed to rising newsprint costs and the loss of readers and ad dollars to the Internet.
"It's painful to watch an industry retrench," Keller said. "But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau."

The "database of intentions" means the personal newspaper will not only tell you what you want to know but what you will want to know in the future. By cross-referencing your interests with others of similar interests and recording their search subjects, stories you will be interested in (the future) are revealed. Check it out. Peter Van

"The Internet Knows What You'll Do Next"
By David Leonhardt
New York Times, p. C1 Wednesday, July 5, 2006

A few years back, a technology writer named John Battelle -- http://battellemedia.com -- began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions. . .
A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward . . . making the database of intentions visible to the world . . . by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple of years and to see the cities where the term is most popular.

Newspapers have traded for hundreds of years on the human need to identify with a group. The perfect marriage now -- in this era of personal choice -- is individuated news with group news. Personal pages combined with traditional pages. Peter Van

"How Soccer Explains The World" by Franklin Foer (Harper Perrenial, 2005), p. 198

. . . Throughout the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we would finally get past nasty ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans -- shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.
It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave identifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. . .

No matter whether Digg appeals to a huge audience, the concept is exactly right: let readers vote on the best stories. The top vote-getting stories go to the top of the page. The personal newspaper gains a new tool. Check it out. Peter Van

June 11, 2006
Digg This: Soon, Not Just for Geeks Anymore
Rob Hof
Digg, the collaborative tech news site, will soon branch out beyond geekdom. At a Web 2.0 panel at the eBay Developers Conference today, President Kevin Rose said that in the next month or so, the popular site--where people vote on stories submitted by others, with the highest vote-getters moving to the top of the front page--will add coverage of world news, entertainment, politics, and more. Major redesign is in the works.
It'll be interesting to see if Digg, and other nerdy sites like Techmeme.com that are trying to branch out beyond tech, will appeal to the general population. I think what they're doing--generally tapping into the zeitgeist using people's own opinions of the best articles and posts--has great potential value beyond tech news. But I wonder if the sites themselves can stretch their brand that far.

The e-ink reader is one of the great hopes of the future. But the e-ink tablet is not radical -- only technologically different. What will be revolutionary is when people chose what shows up on the e-ink tablet. That's the personal newspaper. Whatever makes the personal newspaper happen sooner rather than later is good news. Read all about it. Peter Van

Dawn of the Gig-Stained Wretch

Reuters 08:45 AM Jun, 12, 2006

The newspapers of the future -- cheap digital screens that can be rolled up and stuffed into a back pocket -- have been just around the corner for the last three decades.
But as early as this year, the future may finally arrive. Some of the world's top newspapers publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.
Flexible versions of these readers nay be available as early as 2007.
The handheld readers couldn't come a moment too soon for the newspaper industry, which has struggled to maintain its readership and advertising from online rivals.
Publishers Hearst Corp. in the U.S., Les Echos in Paris and Belgian financial paper De Tijd are planning a large-scale trials of the readers this year.
Earlier attempts by book publishers to sell digital readers failed due to high prices and a lack of downloadable books.
But a new generation of readers from Sony and iRex, a Philips Electronics spin-off, have impressed publishers with their sharp resolution and energy efficiency, galvanizing support for the idea again.
"This could be a real substitution for printed paper," said Jochen Dieckow, head of the news media and research division of Ifra, a global newspaper association based in Germany.
It's easy to see why publishers are keen. Digital newspapers, so called e-newspapers, take advantage of two prevailing media trends -- the growth of online advertising and widespread use of portable devices like the iPod music player.
Nearly all papers run websites, but few readers relish pulling out laptops in transit or risk dropping one in the bathroom.
E-newspapers would cut production and delivery costs that account for some 75 percent of newspaper expenses.
Circulation in the $55 billion U.S. newspaper industry has slid steadily for nearly two decades as papers compete with internet news for attention and advertising dollars.
Some publishers now see new devices as a way to help them snatch a bigger slice of online advertising and protect their franchise in reading away from home.
Ad spending on newspaper websites grew 32 percent in 2005 but only accounted for 4 percent of total ad spending in newspapers, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
Still, little is known about demand for an e-paper. "The number of consumers who are interested in reading on the go as opposed to listening to music on the go is probably smaller in the U.S. today," NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin said.
Sony and iRex's new devices employ screen technology by E Ink, which originated from MIT's Media Lab. Investors include Hearst, Philips, McClatchy, Motorola and Intel.
The company produces energy-efficient ink sheets that contain tiny capsules showing either black or white depending on the electric current running through it.
Some of the latest devices apply E Ink's sheets to glass transistor boards, or back planes, which are rigid. But by 2007, companies such as Britain's Plastic Logic will manufacture screens on flexible plastic sheets, analysts say.
Separately, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard are developing methods to produce flexible back planes cheaply. Xerox, in particular, has created a working prototype that lets manufacturers create flexible transistor boards much like one would print a regular paper document.
Production costs are expected to be low enough soon for publishers to consider giving away such devices for free with an annual subscription. Data on subscribers could also help publishers better tailor ads.
Sony's reader will cost between $300 and $400. "If you can get one of these products to cost less than the cost of a year's subscription it could probably work," said Kenneth Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media.
He declined to name which other groups plan testing, but said Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle will likely be among the first of its 12 daily papers to offer such devices to several hundred subscribers later this year.
In Europe, Ifra is discussing trials with 21 newspapers from 13 countries. The New York Times Co. is a member.
Sony is separately in discussions with some publishers to offer newspaper downloads in its e-bookstore due to launch this summer, although no decision has been made, said Lee Shirani, vice president of Sony's online content service, Sony Connect.

The personal newspaper idea lives in Germany. I talked to two men who have put together a business plan for a test of the personal newspaper concept this fall. Visit their site: http://www.individualnewspaper.com. Their model mixes and matches pages from your choice of newspapers around the world into one personalized version. A Kodak Versamarmk VX5000 prints the pastiche newspaper. They plan to deliver your paper to you (in Germany) this fall. I talked with Greg Dorsch, the software guru, and Christian Bayerlein, the printing expert, over the phone and we were all excited to have found kindred spirits in this world. Check it out. Peter Van.

The crisis continues: For the six-month period ending March 31, 2006, NAA’s Fas-Fax analysis of circulation data reveals the average daily circulation for all 770 newspapers reporting for comparable periods was 45,414,979, a decrease of 2.5 percent (from 46,589,261) over the same period a year ago. On Sunday, the average circulation for the 610 newspapers reporting for comparable periods was 48,504,484, a decrease of 3.1 percent (from 50,036,312) over the same period a year ago.
Does this news offset? According to new data released by NAA, the online audience for newspapers hit record levels in the first quarter of 2006, with more than one in three of all Internet users visiting a newspaper Web site over the course of a month. Peter Van