Missing Features

Your correspondent — under pressure form the chairwomen of the board — subscribed to his first daily newspaper: The Washington Post. Following in the traditions of the LA Times, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, the editorial quality of the post has deteriorated over the last decade.

But this post isn’t about content, it’s about format.

Your correspondent — like everyone his age — gets his news online. The experience of reading a real newspaper and reading news online in the same day makes clear one salient fact: paper newspapers have serious usability problems.

First, the paper can’t be easily held. The paper is half the size of your correspondent’s breakfast table, doesn’t fold easily and the pages don’t stay together. It get worse: the ink rubs off on your hands. Ick. Not a pleasant experience at all.

And yet millions of papers are printed every day to a continually decreasing reader base. Why don’t they change?

Probably the same old story of institutional fatigue. But for the forthcoming generation of publishers who didn’t grow up with a daily paper and who might have a slim chance of saving a few dailies, here are some recommendations that will help:

1. Make the paper smaller;
2. Use an ink that doesn’t rub off;
3. Bind the pages together;
4. Make it fold more easily; and (hardest of all),
5. Make it more relevant.

Recommendations 1 to 4 are pretty straight forward. But recommendation number five seems the hardest to implement, but that’s just an error of perception.

First off, papers aren’t relevant to most readers. By trying to serve the interest of all of their subscribers a newspaper serves the interest of none of the readers. Around here the Sports section doesn’t get opened and yet the business section is considered to be too small each and every day (leading to daily disappointment).

Well, there is no reason a reader can’t answer a few questions online and have different expanded sections of the paper delivered with different content throughout. Get each writer to blog, have the system cull recent stories at will for each subscriber, and print it and deliver it.

It shouldn’t be hard to change the printing process to assemble a slightly different paper each day for each reader, full of the stories they care about. If Wal-Mart can rule the supply chain, the Post can pull off a little custom printing.

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