Newspaper Club

It’s a couple of months since I posted about our planning a US launch of the service, and I thought it was time for an update.

The biggest and best news is we’ve appointed Nick Mrozowski as our US representative. Nick is a New York-based designer who’s worked for newspapers big and small in the US and Portugal. He loves print, co-creating Ink, a brilliant twice-yearly design journal. He also designed a newspaper that’s just been named the World’s Best Designed, by the Society for News Design (read what they think here – it’s impressive stuff). You can contact him at nick [at] newspaperclub [dot] co [dot] uk.

Nick and I have spent the last few weeks continuing Newspaper Club’s search for printers, particularly in the New York area (Nick is based in New York and it’s easy for us to get to from London). We’ve found some good ones.

However, one of our main criteria was that we wanted to be able to replicate in the US the offer we have in the UK. And we’ve found two issues. First, we haven’t managed to locate a digital printer of newspapers – without one of these we can’t offer the really low, sub-300 copy, production runs. Second, the traditional printers of newspapers are mostly unwilling to print fewer than 1000+ copies (in some cases well into the thousands). They’re also mostly more expensive than our UK printers, especially on their smaller runs. In fact, the cost to a US customer of a UK newspaper – including transatlantic shipping – is in nearly all cases lower than getting one printed down the road.

Why do UK newspaper printers seem to be more flexible and competitive? Nick and I reckon it may be to do with the UK’s contract printing market being well-developed, deep and liquid (i.e. there are plenty of people out there whose sole business it is to print newspapers, and not just for newspaper publishers.) In the US, it seems most newspaper printers are tied to a newspaper publisher and so aren’t as set up for third-party business – which often means lower production runs. I also got the impression that there were far fewer people working at UK newspaper printing plants. Only an impression and, if it’s more than that, I’m not sure why it should be.

Anyway, having spent a few days feeling a bit vexed about this, I suddenly realised that what we were faced with was more promising than a problem. In the immortal words of avian hippy Jonathan Livingstone Seagull: “Every problem has a gift for you in its hands”.

We’re thinking that we should print our US newspapers here in the UK and ship them to the US. What would this look like?

It would feel like an American business to American customers as the US version of the site would be wholly American, in language and currency. We’d also have a presence there, through Nick.

The prices and offer would be competitive (our digital offer, that is our ability to offer very low production runs, may even be unique).

Lead times would be a couple of days longer than in the UK – seven-to-ten days, say, rather than within seven. But that hardly seems significant.

Altogether, then, this sounds like we’d be bringing a big net benefit to anyone wanting to print a newspaper in the US – especially in small volumes. This way we’ll also be able to provide a US version of our offer sooner than we envisaged: we’re working on the US site right now and hope to launch it in the next couple of months.

This experience has made us wonder whether we can use the efficiency and variety of UK newspaper supply – as well as our cheap and comprehensive global distribution – to meet demand for newspapers in other markets.

Communication through newspapers can be an enormous good – for civil society, for health, for education – and there may well be parts of the world where access to newspaper printing, despite being potentially very useful, is actually very difficult. We’ll be seeking out NGOs, in particular, to see if we can help them communicate helpful, important and valuable information across the places they do their work.

These are exciting times for us with many horizons opening up. Please do get in touch if you have any suggestions.

Most of the reason for this post is to link to this fantastic thing at McSweeneys, all about the vast superiority of newspapers. But it’s so obviously self-serving just to do that that I’ve appended this minor news update.

This is what we’ve been up to:

1. Management have been in the US, talking to possible partners and planning for our proper North American launch.

2. Engineering have been doing Coding Fist Bumps as they relentlessly improve the site, constantly releasing new features.

3. Customer Service have been servicing customers and have been thinking how we can help people finish the papers they’ve started but haven’t got round to completing. It’s so heart-wrenching to think of those 11 and 15 page papers sitting there, just waiting for the final moment of inspiration. Is there anything we can do to help you clear that final hurdle? (And, to be honest, a bit of extra business wouldn’t hurt right now. It’s been a relatively quiet week.)

4. Design and Sales and Marketing have been locked in a titanic series of Words With Friends games. I guess that might explain the parenthetical statement at the end of point 3.

Hackers! is one of my favourite papers we’ve made so far. And you can buy one.

Leila (the editor) says this about it:

Hackers! is a full-colour, 12-page, quarterly newspaper packed with entertaining creations and ideas, features on artists, scientists, and everything inbetween. Read about laser-powered bongs, hacking time, new games for old 8-bits, side- channel attacks, Victorian hackers, combination locks and plenty more.

“Why hackers? I kept seeing this very fresh, very motivated creativity everywhere, individuals quietly looking for possibilities to subvert and improve given systems and technologies with their ideas – and refusing to accept that it can’t be done. There was a shared attitude, but no single place to go to find it all. So I spotted a gap for a new publication, respectfully and professionally produced, but made in the spirit of hacking rather than simply reporting on it. Hacking has many meanings – it’s as much about ingenious problem-solving as it is about mischief. People are beginning to realise that, and that’s definitely something to celebrate.”

I like it because it sits in that lovely sweet spot between professional and amateur. A newly emerging sweet spot that’s better than both extremes. Or something. Anyway, it’s nicely DIY and quirky but it’s also got proper discipline – because it’s been well edited and it’s got a limited number of pages. So it’s all good. (Not in the American sense of it not being a problem, but in the literal sense of being entirely good.)  And you can buy one.

We started Newspaper Club a year ago. What have we learned?

Do something interesting and people will give you awards and write about you. That’s the marketing strategy.

The slog is longer and sloggier than we could ever have known. It’s truly true that the ideas are the easy bit. The hard bit is fixing all the details, tidying up the edges, building, then rebuilding, then rebuilding again. Hitting a deadline, then the next one, then the next one. (Fortunately it’s made worthwhile by the papers that people make. That’s been the most satisfying thing – the lovely papers people have made.)

It helps a lot to have some pictures. We got pictures of papers properly shot by a proper photographer. It makes a difference.

ARTHR isn’t just a means to an end, it’s a marvellous invention that’s genuinely made new things possible – and we could do more with it than just newspapers.

The internet makes lots of things easier, but as soon as you have customers you’re dealing with people. And people have strange questions, interesting ideas and unpredictable problems. So you need someone nice to talk to them. Similarly, you end up talking to people at other businesses and they need someone who speaks their language. So getting Gary and Anne on board was a very good idea.

We’ve been incredibly lucky. If we succeed in any way it won’t be because of hard work and talent it’ll be because we were lucky. We’re lucky to have generous friends who’ve helped us a lot, we’re lucky to have met just the right backers early on. We’re lucky to have enthusiastic and understanding customers. Many other people could have done this, there’s nothing special about us. We’ve met quite a few start-up people in this process, the best ones seem to recognise the importance of luck and have read The Black Swan, the worst ones seem to think it was all down to them. We’d beg to differ. Making something that people want to buy and selling it to them for a more than it costs to make. That seems to be a good basis for a business. More internet businesses should try that. It means that we’ve been making cash since Week One. Actual cash money. Multiples of thousands of pounds. That’s helpful.

We don’t explain ourselves well enough. Lots of the bits of the business are obvious to us, because we’re involved every day. So we get surprised when people ask how many pages there are in a 12-page newspaper, but it’s not necessarily obvious. We’re going to be rolling more explanations out on the site. Give people more help. Explain the process differences between black and white and colour more clearly. All that.

And, overall, we’re glad we started. We’re not at a point, yet, where we can retire and live off Newspaper Club, but we’ve put it in the world and it works. If we all fell under a bus it would still work, still keep going and people would get to make their own newspapers. That’s a nice feeling.

We use two different processes for printing newspapers. One is basically a big laser printer – it lets us print small quantities of papers, we use it for runs of 5 to 500 papers. It can only print in black and white. The other is a regular, big, standard newspaper printer – like regular newspapers use. This can print in colour or black and white but only in quantities of 500 or more.

The first process is fantastic for lots of reasons – small runs, quickness, cheapness – but we’ve been starting to hear from customers who aren’t happy with the quality of the reproduction, particularly for large areas of dense black ink. This is obviously hugely disappointing for everyone. And it’s a tricky area to deal with. We’ve refunded everyone who’s unhappy and reprinted papers in those instances where we think we can get a better result. But, to some extent, less than perfect reproduction is inherent in the process. We think, for the papers we’ve done ourselves, that if you design with this in mind and understand what you’re going to get that it’s still a really good product. But we know that’s not a really acceptable answer and we hate letting people down like this.

It’s also worth acknowledging that unhappiness with this process has gone up recently. It’s possible that the printer we’re using is delivering below expectations for even this process. We’re looking into that. If that is the case then that’s clearly completely unacceptable and we’ll have to stop printing those shorter runs until the backup plan’s in place. (We are working very hard on a backup plan.)

So, things we’ve been thinking about and doing:

It’s obvious that we need to be clearer about the sort of result you can expect to get, so we’ve put a handy guide on the site.

We’re working on finding better solutions so this won’t even be an issue.

We’re making a sample paper that will illustrate best and worst case scenarios. That’ll be available for everyone who wants one.

If we think of anything else we’ll let you know.

Also, please note, lots of people are very happy with the papers they get from this process, so that’s good, and the second, more conventional process has never had any complaints, so hurrah.

Back in the early days, when we had no idea whether this was a good idea or not, we took a lot of comfort from the nice things that Jeremy at magCulture said about us. He seemed to like what we were doing and he knows a lot about publishing.

So we were really delighted when Jeremy used us to make a 4th Anniversay Best of magCulture Paper. And even more delighted that it’s for sale. We really like it when we can help create something that people can sell, it’d be brilliant if we could become a platform for other little businesses.

Anyway – you can get a copy of the magCulture here, and you should. It’s only £4 in the UK. (£5 for Europe, £7 for the rest of the world.)

(pictures from magCulture, hope that’s OK)

Our friends at BERG launched Schooloscope this week. It’s a lovely piece of work, sweeping up all sorts of impenetrable data about schools and making it glanceable, readable and accessible. You can tell they’ve really worked hard on the details and, having glanced over their shoulders a little while they’ve been making it, we can attest to how they’ve worked to turn inherently judgmental and binary data into something fair and nuanced. Schooloscope’s perspective is that of someone neutral and informed, it’s therefore a brilliant tool for comparing schools, for exploring a terrain that’s completely baffling to many parents. It’s a superbly intelligent platform for data.

If you’re already connected to a school though, the portrait they offer of your school probably won’t feel adequate. Deliberately neutral government data will never do justice to what someone involved with a school feels about that particular school. All of which struck me because we’ve just printed a newspaper for All Souls School in Westminster – an unashamedly un-neutral paper celebrating all that’s good about the school – aimed at recruiting more kids and parents.

It’s a lovely piece of work and made me realise that Newspaper Club is a platform too and perhaps an especially good platform for people with particular points of view. (More pictures)

And, it should be noted, both platforms are supported by 4iP.

It’s all hands to the pump for the team at South by South West Interactive at the moment. We’ve carved out some space in a hidden away enclave in the Austin Conference Centre to work on our free gift for attendees of the Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design panel on Tuesday at 3:30pm in Hilton H.

There will be maps! There will be infographics! There will be writing from people you’ve heard of! There will be games to play! But we’ve got 20 minutes until our deadline, so it’s time to get back to it. If you’re around, we’d love to see you there.

The Engineering Dept. went to the Design Museum in London last night, for the opening of the Designs of the Year exhibition. That’s because we’ve been nominated in the Graphics category, which is nice.

The blurb says:

The seemingly unstoppable rise of digital communication has seen many people predict the impending death of print. The Newspaper Club flies in the face of this, by enabling anyone to produce, not just their own newspaper, but anything that can be made with ink on newsprint. To keep costs as low as possible on print runs from five to 5000, The Newspaper Club utilises downtime at printing presses. Files can be uploaded to the website, enabling prompt printing and delivery, and there are even tools to help the enthusiastic amateur arrange text and images in attractive page layouts.

We’ve been given a little space in which to show off Newspaper Club, and we wanted to make something friendly and interesting that people could actually do something with. So we printed lots of single sheet newspapers that people could take away with them.

On one side, a big logo. That’s not very interesting. But on the other side, James Bridle produced a map and an essay for a walk starting at the Design Museum. It’s called A Wide Arm of Sea. The walk takes you east along an imaginary shore line, towards the history of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. As James writes:

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

James has written all about it on his blog booktwo.org, so to save me just copying and pasting, go and read it over there. It’s a fine thing indeed.

A Wide Arm of Sea is available at the Design Museum for the next couple of months. If you follow the walk, we’d love to hear your stories and see your photos – stick a link in the comments.

As usual, more photos on Flickr.

James Bridle was the first person to print something with the beta version of Newspaper Club. And now, a couple of days later, his newspaper is on sale. It’s a clever and beautiful thing and you should consider getting one of the limited edition of 100. It’s very special.

It’s all very exciting, feels like we’re properly under way now.