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So one of the disturbing trends we are seeing in digital publishing of course is
the demise of certain newspaper markets. I live in Seattle and we just lost the Seattle
PI, Post-Intelligencer recently but there is some interesting developments
going on, the digital space for newspapers and we are starting to see some
experimentation, and one of the examples here is The New York Times.
This is The New York Times website, very vibrant website with all the news that
you would expect from the New York Times paper edition, just online.
But they have recently launched a New Times Reader, a separate application for
consuming their content. So this is just the browser version of this.
If I scroll down to the very bottom towards their page, they have a Services
section here, and there is a link here to the Times Reader.
I am going to go ahead and click on that and that will take you to a page that
kind of explains what the Times Reader 2.0 project is all about.
This is a separate application rather than consuming in Internet browser, this
is a standalone application built on the Adobe Air platform.
You can download this for free and get some access to the content.
Of course they are trying to promote a subscription to the digital version of their paper.
I am going to switch back to their front page, which we can see what the current
headlines are, scroll up to the top here. So U.S. Relies More on Allies in Questioning
Terror Suspects. And the second link here, I just want you
to pay attention to those two links, because I'm going to actually switch
to the standalone application, the Times Reader. And you'll see that the latest news, they
are really are just feeding the same content from the website into the standalone
application as well here. So there is those two stories.
So you might ask, well what's the benefit of viewing The New York Times content
in a separate application? Let's go and expand this app so it takes up
the whole screen, and we'll start playing around with the reading experience
of this application. First of all, it is a separate application
which means it's a dedicated reader just for this particular publisher's content
but it's also got some interesting usability and reading experience features.
So for instance, if I resize the application, you will see the content relays itself out.
So now I've only got room here for two columns. If I make it wide enough, I actually have
room for additional columns of information. So there is some layout logic built into the
app here. You can also change the type size.
So if you want your body copy to be larger, you can go ahead and change that as well.
So I'll go back to Medium, and whatnot. It's got some nice navigation features as
well. Now this is the version that's free.
So you will see that some of the content is not available to me because I'm a
print subscriber to The New York Times. If I was a print subscriber, the entire set
of content is available to you for free as a part of your print subscription.
You have the option to subscribing to just the digital version and not have to
deal with the print version if you don't want to.
I believe their price right now is about $15 a month for the digital version,
and if you want to subscribe to that you have access to all that content.
But you do get enough free content here to kind of get an understanding of the
user experience of the application here. So for the free version, the Front Page content
is available, the Business content is available, and what everyone likes
of course is the Crossword. You have the digital version of the crossword
available. The thing I find interesting is that you can
store up to the last seven days issues in this offline reader.
So when you are connected, it always is looking to download the latest
content that The New York Times is pushing out but it stores the content here
up to seven days offline. So if you want to get on an airplane, or you
don't have an Internet connection for a while, you still have access to your
paper if you will, even when you are not connected to the Internet.
So that's kind of cool. In terms of navigating, so if I actually click
on a particular article here. I'll just click on this one.
You can see it's got a nice reading experience, very nice beautiful typography.
And I have got some navigational buttons that I can use at the bottom of the
application, or I can just use my keyboard. So if I use my down arrow, I can actually
go to the next page in the article. You will see there is a pretty tasteful insertion
of text ads being fed in by Google. And if I want to go to the next article in
this section, I use my right and left arrow keys to go to the previous article or
the next article. And I get a nice animated transition between.
If I want to again go through the current article, I just hit my up and
down arrows to navigate within an article and then right and left to go
within a particular section. They actually have their nice feature up here,
to the Browse feature. This actually zooms out and you get a little
nice size thumbnail of the current articles. So you can just use your right arrows here,
or left arrow to scroll back and forth within that particular section.
If I use my down arrow to go another section, you will see that these are now
previews because this is a locked area. So it actually says here, real tiny typing.
You may never be able to read that but it says Subscription Preview.
If I were to click to zoom in on that section, you get a little preview of the
headlines and short little summaries there. But I wouldn't be able to click into that
content unless I was a paid subscriber. So will this take off? Will we see other papers
using this kind of model? I don't know. It's probably too early to tell, but obviously
the newspaper industry is looking for different ways to monetize their content.
And The New York Times is going to have a bold approach here to encourage you to
pay for a better reading experience and a better access to the content.
So we'll see where this all goes in the future but if I had take an opportunity
to kind of just show you what one paper is doing, to try to reinvent themselves
and create a relationship between their readership and their content and
encourage them to pay for the content.