Saturday, August 1, 2009

Print's bug becomes Print's feature in a world of personal TV. More and more about versioned newspapers.

The latest in the thread at the Next Newsroom is getting to the point I'm trying to make.
Chris O' Brien said
@Stephen Quinn: You're exactly right. And I'm not going to argue that print is the future. It's not.
Then I said:
@Stephen @ Chris,
Just to get this on people's radar, I would argue that print that can produced economically for arbitrarily small groups of communities or interest and connect the real world to the virtual world through QR codes is, in fact, the essential part of the future from a business point of view.

It's a much longer story, which I will save for my blog, but the fundamental fact is that only print and TV are mass market push media. The moving forward development is personal TV on smartphones. QR codes connect Print to TV via smartphones. CodeZ QR and TinyPurls can generate the clickstream data that can produce viewer informatics which are the necessary guidelines for advertising decision makers.

At any rate, this post at the Sparksheet is worth a read. http://sparksheet.com/fit-to-print/ The point I'm trying to make is captured in the following:
Generally, readership studies have been done very badly in the newspaper industry and the magazine industry as well, because they tend to put a great focus on those people who aren’t reading. One of the biggest problems is that people who actually buy the newspaper, the core customers, don’t read 75 percent of the content.That’s costing companies an awful lot of paper, a lot of production, a lot of salary. And they need to figure out how to get rid of that stuff and replace it with content that readers are not able to get elsewhere."
What Robert Picard doesn't mention is that another way "to get rid of the stuff" is to produce versioned newspapers that have 24 pages of exactly what a community of interest wants, and very little of what members of that community of interest don't want.

The value of a print newspaper is to separate the signal form the noise. All of the properties that have been seen as bugs, become features when TV goes personal.
If I'm right, versioned clickable newspapers are going to have the high class problem of speed to scale. If I'm wrong, I'm only a blogger so what would expect in the first place.

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