Bookraft

Our previous story on how the NYTimes is leading the way for news media with its Web 2.0 innovations has an important follow up. New digital editions of newspapers that you download to your PC or mobile phone are emerging. And interestingly some of the inspiration is coming from France.

As previously noted, published news media like newspapers and magazines are suffering as subscribers desert them for free resources like Yahoo, MSN, CNN and even their own free web editions. Worse their revenues are further reduced by the popularity of Google ads and Craigslist and other digital media. News media have been pressed for the past decade to find a paying presence in the digital world for all their news craft and content.
WAN- World Association of Newspapers has consolidated and is organizing conferences on how classic news media can respond to the digital challenge. If one looks at the agenda for the upcoming March Conference, the topic is Where is the Money ? - underlining how serious the challenge is to stay economically viable for many news media.

Meanwhile the IFRA arm of WAN has been working on some savvy French digital paper designs:

The technology insights developed over the past 3-4 years are being passed onto WAN/IFRA members.

And so it should not be a surprise that LeMonde.fr, the prestigious Paris daily, is now offering a digital paper using some IFRA tech:

For 6 euros, about $9 dollar per month, one can get a digital copy of LeMonde downloaded and delivered daily to your computer. And this edition is packed with multimedia, commentary, cartoons and past archives not available either in the print or web editions. Newspapers are starting to differentiate and add value to their digital offerings.

In the US, the NYTimes is taking the lead in delivering a digital newspaper. Unlike LeMonde, NYTimes is using Adobe Air technology to deliver its Boston Globe and NYTimes digital papers:

Subscribers to their respective newspapers can download the digital version in about 2 minutes and get 7 days of news, plus many but not all of the features of the Website digital version. This is because Adobe Air can accommodate some but not all of the DHTML and JavaScript used in the Web version. The two softwares, Adobe Air and DHTML/JavaScript deliver remarkably similar styling and features; but the underlying code is quite different.

So the Boston Globe and NYTimes are relying on the multimedia and presentation strengths of Adobe Air to carry the day. Air runs on all platforms of Windows, Mac and Linux but not all mobile phone OS[Palm webOS now with Google Android and Blackberry OS in 2010. The NYTimes have been able to import some but hardly all of their Web 2.0 innovations as the Ajax and JavaSCript+WebKit HTML interface gets a full set of features.

Two key features of Air help to add to the NYTimes/Boston Globe digital papers. First, Air allows for local storage of data so online connections are not required. Second, AIR uses the latest version of the Flash Player which is very fast and stores multimedia very efficiently. So with the use of Adobe Air, the Nytimes is taking some risks - but the ability to play on all PC desktops and 3 of 4 top smartphones with either HTML[eventually] and Flash multimedia will give the NYTimes and Boston Globe developers and editors a lot of creative headroom. Finally, in the US NYTimes/Boston Globe will have first mover advantages - so if they are successful, they may win dominate position in the emerging digital newspaper market.