ARTHR is dead, long live ARTHR!

Monday, February 18th 2013

Today we’re very pleased to announce the full release of the new and improved version of our online newspaper making tool, ARTHR. It’s been in testing for a while, but it’s now the default tool if you go into your dashboard and press “Make a Newspaper“. Hurrah!

As part of this, we’re shutting down the old version of ARTHR, now known as ARTHR Classic. This post details how the shutdown will work, and if you’re still using it, important dates to finish your work by.

As of today you can still make a paper in ARTHR Classic, but it’s not recommended unless you have a good reason. If you do, we’d like to hear about it, so we can see how the new version of ARTHR might meet your needs.

Barring any problems, on 18th March, we’ll stop people being able to make new newspapers in ARTHR Classic. If you’ve already started one before then, it’ll still be editable.

Then, on 1st April, we’ll stop people being able to edit newspapers in ARTHR Classic, and the tool will disappear from the site. On that date your newspaper will be converted to a PDF on our site, and you’ll be able to download the contents as a PDF, InDesign document or a ZIP file containing the stories and pictures.

If you’re working on a paper in ARTHR Classic you’ll need to finish and order it before then. Unfortunately it’s not possible to automatically move your paper from ARTHR Classic to the new version of ARTHR as the structure of the document is significantly different.

If any of that causes you a problem, please let us know and we’ll do our best to help out.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments, engineering, news

Newspaper Club NPD

Saturday, February 2nd 2013

Read more

If we were a different type of company and this was a different type of weblog, this blog post would be about how we’d successfully built a digital-analogue platform and now we’re moving on to the next stage – building (and helping you build) amazing products and services on top of that platform.

But rest assured, this is just a blog post about me, Russell and Tom messing about.

There’s a bunch of stuff we’d like to do this year and we figured the best way to do that was to just make them. Or fake them.

In 2011 Tom made The Telepaper, which was an idea we’d had since the beginning of Newspaper Club where somehow you could click a button and it would auto generate a newspaper from your delicious feed, or instapaper or pinboard or somesuch. Specifically the Telepaper was a tool that converts a Readability Reading List into a Newspaper Club newspaper. A demonstration of the Readability and Newspaper Club APIs. You can find it here on Newspaper Club and here on GitHub.

telepaper

We talk about this a lot, in the cafes of central London, but realised the other day that we all had different perceptions of what such a product looked like. So we went away and made one. Ordered it in the usual way and then sent it to each other.

Newspaper Club NPD

 

They were all quite different. Mine was called the Sunday Stellar was based on the idea that you could get a newspaper made from your Stellar. But seeing as we all follow more or less the same people on Stellar I wanted to make it friends of friends on Stellar. So I made a list of all the people we follow on Stellar, deleted the duplicates and then took faves from those friends’ friends.

Mine was a bit fancier with the layout, big pictures, blocks of colour and stuff, but I made it all with Arthr II. No other graphic design software was used.

Big pictures

Russell concentrated on long reads, stuff you might think would work well in print. Interesting stuff that’s hard to read on a screen. This meant he could only get three articles in a 12 page paper. This sort of feels odd, for no particular reason. Does it matter? Are you ordering a paper by the amount of articles? Is three articles enough?

Newspaper Club NPD

Tom’s was probably closest to what we mean. Good number of articles, stuff we hadn’t read before, some pictures.

All three of these were made using ARTHR II.

Newspaper Club NPD

This article about the New York newspaper strike was the one I enjoyed reading the most.

Newspaper Club NPD

 

We all used different styling, different fonts, different approaches. We can’t really learn anything from any of this, it’s just messing about. There’s nothing wrong or right with any of these approaches, any of these newspapers. It’s just us poking the prototype. Making stuff rather than talking about stuff. Having actual physical things to talk about. We had to make what we were thinking in order to express it.

We enjoyed this. I think we’ll make more of these. We have a few copies left, so if you’d like one send us an email.

And yeah, I know I need to clean my lens. There are more soft focus pictures on Flickr.

Posted by Ben | Comments (0)

Filed under: art, developments, Uncategorized

Step Three: Profit

Tuesday, July 17th 2012

We had a board meeting last week. You can see half of it above via the magic of timelapse. (The half of the table you mostly see consists of Tom and Gary. The half you briefly glimpse is Anne & Ben. You never see me.)

Lots of things were decided. Much exciting news was newsed. But the best bit was this, as detailed in Gary’s CEO memo:

“In our second full year of trading we’re very proud to say that we’re profitable. We’re not talking about a lot of money – just single figures as a percentage of our sales. However, it is enough to help ensure we can keep providing the levels of service that our customers seem to really appreciate. It’s also just enough to allow us to invest in developing our service.

We now employ full-time in Glasgow and London a small team of very clever people who are working on new Newspaper Club products. They’re developing ways to convert disparate pieces of useful and interesting digital information into printed formats that make it all a real pleasure to read. 

It’s an exciting time. We really believe that this pretty hoary old medium has a lot of life yet in it. In fact, the potential of newsprint is enormous – but only when it’s usefully integrated with the web. Hold the front page!”

Exciting isn’t it?

There are some changes afoot – me, Gary and Anne are getting new titles, we’ve got plans for new products and we need to talk about investment – Anne’s going to add some more detail on all that later in the week. (Unless you’ve got a few hundred grand going spare, in which case gives us a shout). In the meantime; we’re in our second year of trading, we’re employing great people, we’ve got brilliant customers and we’re making an actual profit. Hurrah.

 

Posted by Russell | Comments (2)

Filed under: developments, running a business

New! Embed Your Newspaper on Your Site

Monday, March 12th 2012

We’ve just added a little feature to the Newsagent. You can now embed a newspaper on your site, just by copying and pasting the HTML code provided on each paper’s page.

For example, here’s the paper that started it all:

Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet by Ben Terrett on Newspaper Club

And seventhirtyeight, which Anne wrote about earlier today:

seventhirtyeight by Steve Wilkin on Newspaper Club

There’s a nice little scroller, and you can click through to the paper on the Newspaper Club site. The medium size is designed to fit neatly into a typical blog post, and there’s a slightly larger option too.

By default anyone can embed a paper, but if you want to turn it off, just untick the option in the sharing settings.

It turns out writing the code to do this is a bit tricker than we thought, so if you notice the design looking a bit wonky on your site, please let us know.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments, engineering

It’s Nice to Share

Monday, October 10th 2011

I had dinner with some friends a while ago and we were chatting about what Newspaper Club was up to. The conversation went something like this:

Him: “What kind of things do you print then?”
Me: “Oh well, all sorts of stuff really.”
Him: “Like local newspapers and things like that?”
Me: “Yes, some of those, but really just anything that people want to put on newsprint: comics, portfolios, wedding papers, wrapping paper.”
Him: “Wrapping paper?”

This seems totally normal to me now. Wrapping paper: of course! But that’s because I’ve spent a couple of years watching people print all manner of things, and now it’s a typical week when someone prints a newspaper full of wrapping paper, or a collection of beautiful lines, or photography about a bus stop.

But for our customers, apart from our blog posts, there’s no way of seeing the full range of stuff that other people are printing. We want to surface more of these fantastic papers; to give people a space to show off what they’ve made, and why and how they did it, beyond the reach of the printed paper.

So today we’re beginning that. There’s now an option on each newspaper in your dashboard to share it:

Sharing Settings

There’s space to write a few words about it, to choose how much of it you want to share, and to tag it with a few keywords. You’ll end up with a page like this one of prettymaps from my profile, that you can share with anyone:

prettymaps

And a profile page for you or your organisation that looks a bit like this one by We are Words + Pictures:

prettymaps

When we’ve got a few more newspapers shared, we’ll open the Newsagent: a portion of the site to allow anyone explore all the shared newspapers, searching by tag or description to find papers they might be interested in. And we’ll be featuring papers and publications that we love on the front page and throughout the site.

But that’s a post for another day. For now, give it a go, and let us know if you have any feedback.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments, engineering, news

Looking for Beta Testers

Wednesday, August 31st 2011

We’re looking for beta testers for a new bit of the Newspaper Club site. If you’ve made a newspaper with us, either in ARTHR or uploaded as a PDF, and are interested in promoting it, sharing it, or just having a page for it on our site, then we’d love to hear from you.

Drop us an email to newspaperclub@newspaperclub.com, with the subject line ‘Beta Testing’ and the email address of your account. If you’ve got some of the details of the paper you made, that’d be great too. We can’t guarantee we’ll get back to everyone, but we’ll try our best.

The rest of you: the Newspaper Club Newsagent is coming soon.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments, engineering, news

One size fits all: digital paper sizes are a-changing

Saturday, August 27th 2011

The city does not consist of this...

As we mentioned a little while ago, the page sizes for our digital colour newspapers will be changing. From next week (Tuesday 30 August), the digital page size will be 289mm x 380mm, the same as our traditional newspapers. This makes life a little simpler as one template works for both types of printing. Hooray!

We did hope to have more notice of this but only heard from the printers last week that the old paper was running out. Clearly, changing the paper size at short notice may be a headache for anyone halfway through making their newspaper. Sorry about that. The good news is we can scale down any 317mm x 457mm designs and keep everything in proportion. Apart from that everything about the digital papers will stay the same.

If you have any questions about the change please contact us at support@newspaperclub.com. We’ll be happy to help as always.

Photo: Systems/Layers: Urban Experience in the Network Age, a digital newspaper made for the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design by Mayo Nissen and Adam Greenfield.

Posted by anne | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments

Now Pricing in Euros

Thursday, June 23rd 2011

Good news for our European customers: we now offer pricing in Euros for countries in the Eurozone! And we have done for a couple of weeks. We just forgot to blog about it. Sorry.

To find out the pricing for where you live, just head on over to the pricing page, and select your country from the dropdown. Couldn’t be easier.

Through the miracle of modern logistics, our newspapers usually arrive just a day after (and sometimes even before!) our UK deliveries. I’m subscribed to our delivery notifications, and the regular ping of gentle notifications as our newspapers arrive and are signed for, in the Eurozone and beyond, still amazes me.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments

Now Printing Twice a Week

Thursday, June 9th 2011

Begg paper

When we started Newspaper Club, we did a few things to make our lives as easy as possible, whilst we were still finding our feet. One of those things was doing all our printing in a single weekly print run every Tuesday at 2pm.

It’s worked quite well for us. It helped us gather all our orders into a single bundle for sending to the press, and gave us some time in the rest of the week to spend on improving the site and the service.

But as we’ve grown, it’s become clear that it’s becoming harder to get through all our orders in a single day, and we need to spread the load.

So from next week we’re going to be printing twice a week: Tuesday and Thursday, at 2pm UK time (9am Eastern time).

You can expect the same turnaround times. If you order on a Tuesday, we often get it you by Friday, for the UK, and early the following week for the US and Europe. And if you order on a Thursday, we’ll have them with you early the next week in the UK, and in the middle of the week for the US and Europe.

And, as always, if you need your papers for a specific date or event, please let us know. Often we can arrange something for you, but we need to know in advance to be able to guarantee anything.

Posted by Tom | Comments (1)

Filed under: developments, news

Engineering Update: ARTHR changes and the upcoming Newspaper Club API

Thursday, May 19th 2011

We’ve been making lots of tweaks to ARTHR recently, based on your feedback. We’re not quite there yet, but very soon there will be more fonts and colours to choose from, a selection of beautiful cover pages, finer control of where stories are positioned, and more.

And we’ll have news for developers interested in building services that generate newspapers using ARTHR’s layout technology. Our Newspaper Club API is in the process of being documented and tidied up. We’ll post here when we’re looking for people to be beta testers.

But today we’re just making a few changes to help us get ready for all that. When your ARTHR newspaper next refreshes (later today), you may notice that some of the typography has changed in places – the fonts style and sizes might look slightly different. You might find that stories start and finish in slightly different places, or that there is more or less room after them. Or you might not notice anything at all.

We’re making these changes today so that you have time to adjust your paper before our next print run on Tuesday.

As always, if you have any feedback on ARTHR, or anything else, please let us know at newspaperclub@newspaperclub.com.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

Filed under: developments, engineering

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