Newspaper Club

Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand why we’re taking content in a format that’s perceived as new and printing it out in a format that’s perceived as old. And then I was reading this article in The Guardian and the editorial legend Sir Harold Evans uses this rather nice expression, “I’m in love with the craftsmanship of print. But I have to say I’m intoxicated by the speed of the web”.

That seems to sum it up rather nicely.

I think I can confidently predict we’ll be adding a Changing Our Mind A Lot Strategy to our Disappointing Strategy. As Simon as pointed out in the comments on the previous post; we shouldn’t say we’ll be UK only at launch, we should say that we’ll only be printing in the UK at launch, but we’ll be able to ship worldwide. That’s fair. Though it probably won’t be cheap. It’ll probably be just about affordable with the smaller print-runs, though for 5,000 papers it’s going to cost a lot. We’ll find out just how much and report back.

We should, for future reference, also point out that almost all our plans and procedures can be changed if you’re willing to throw enough money at us.

(The picture above does show us working in a coffee shop, yes, but we should point out to the investors that it was a special promotional coffee shop and the coffee was free. Newspaper Club – Looking after the pennies so the pounds look after themselves.)

One of the things we’ve always been careful to say about Newspaper Club is ‘it won’t be as good as you’re imagining’. It’s easy to think of all sorts of great things you can do with newspapers, it’s a lot harder to actually do them, so lots of them, we won’t be doing.

Here are a couple of the specific disappointments we’re going to offer for the beta launch in a few weeks.

When we start the only product you’ll be able to get will be a twelve-page newspaper. We’ve been assuming all the way through the process, up to Friday, that it would be 16 pages, but now we’ve decided to knock four off.

Firstly, it keeps costs down – adding extra pages is what makes printing expensive. But secondly, and most importantly, 16 pages requires a lot of content, a lot. And we think it’s going to be hard for people to do that much.

This is something we’re thinking about a lot. Making a newspaper is hard, it takes work, effort. It won’t be a quick burst of fun, creative decisions like making your Moo cards. It’ll mean assembling lots of content, deciding where to put it, lining it all up, working out where to get it delivered, lots of stuff. It won’t be something people’ll do just casually. You’re going to have to want to make a newspaper. We don’t think is a bad thing, we think lots of people will want to make one, and we’re going to make it as easy as we can. But one way to do that is to give people less blank pages to fill up. So – for launch – 12 pages.

The second big disappointment we’re announcing is that, for launch, we’ll only be able to print in the UK. This is simple logisitics. We only want to work with printers we’ve actually met, who we have good relationships with and we want to make sure that shipping etc works well and costs a reasonable amount. We don’t have time to be visiting and negotiating with printers elsewhere. Not yet anyway.

Hopefully, once we’re up and running, we’ll be able to add other printers and other countries pretty quickly. But, at the beginning, it’ll just be UK. Sorry.

So, keep lowering those expectations, and soon we’ll explain why all the design decisions we’ve made suck too.

We promised you more blogging, so here’s the second post in two days. Oh you lucky, lucky people. Above is a note Ben took at Monday’s meeting. This is proof that we’ve moved onto the hard stuff. The webterface is mostly done now. It looks lovely, it works well, we’ll show you pictures soon. We’re even able to take money off people; now Tom’s finished swearing at Paypal. All the digital stuff is under control.

But we always knew the hard bits would be analogue – people and stuff.

On the people side we’ve got lots of copyright and ownership things to think about and work our way through. Lots of people are asking us if they can do instapaper-to-print things, stuff no-one would object to if it was just one copy, just for you. But because we can scale it up to lots of newspapers really quickly, that’s a different matter. So we’re going to be thinking about that.

And, more immediately, we’re worrying about what happens when you click order. Do we contract with a fulfillment house? Do we do some of it ourselves? Can the printers help? How do we help people who’ve never printed a newspaper before understand the logistical implications of 5,000 newspapers turning up at their house?

The web doesn’t help much with this stuff. It’s good old analogue friction and we just have to work our way through it with phone-calls, meetings and spreadsheets.

We’ll let you know how we’re getting on.

Another good meeting today. Lots of interesting things happening. Smart decisions and tough choices were made. Chief outcome for me seems to be that I need to write more blog posts. So here it is. How’s this Ben? Happy now?

Summer’s over. Work to be done. News will follow. Onwards.

When we signed up for this merry ride we agreed that we’d have something built in 60 working days from commencement. However, we also stipulated that there are no working days in August. We’re off on our holidays.

I’ve always thought that the joy of being a small island floating between Europe and the US means you can select the best from two great business cultures, and while we’re happy to embrace the early-rising and grande-lattes of our North American friends we should also honour our European heritage and bugger off for the summer.

There used to be an idea that you could evaluate the commitment and energy of a company by checking out how full the car park was on a Sunday. We’d fail that test. We’re more about this, than this. But nevertheless we’re managing to get somewhere.

There therefore won’t be a lot of activity here, just a couple of catch-up posts from Ben about some prototypes we (and other people) have made.

When we’re back in September we’ll start getting beta invites to people and have more news of progress, speaking engagements and promotional mousepads.

Have a good summer. Bye.

(Quick intro from Russell – One of the things we’ve been trying to do with Newspaper Club is make sure we honour some of the traditions and textures of newspapers. Not the floundering around in unsuccessful business models, obviously, but the little bits around the edges; weather maps, jargon, graphics, the stuff that makes something feel like a newspaper. Alfred has been helping us out research this and he’s turned up such interesting material that we asked him to share that on here. It doesn’t mean we’ll be putting crosswords in our finished product, though I guess we might, but it’s still interesting. So, ladies and gentlemen – Here’s Alfred!)

Researching newspaper culture and history you quickly understand how many things that has changed and how many times the industry has faced drastic changed. Classic newspapers has gone through as many redesigns as editors-in-chief but a few things has been surprisingly persistent throughout history.

One of the things that basically hasn’t changed since its first appearance is the crossword, invented by journalist Arthur Wynne in 1913 and published in New York World. The idea was inspired by a children’s game called magic squares and the design of it came naturally given the limited graphical possibilities with that day’s printing. But the design has pretty much remained the same with the cryptic crosswords looking identical almost a 100 years later and seen as iconic examples of graphic design. New York Times was the only classical newspaper too conservative for the idea and it would take until 1942 until they published their first one, today they are seen as the best in the world. The first Times crossword appeared in 1930 and the UK with it soon develop their own distinct grid when making crosswords.

British Grid

Praxis holds that when crafting crosswords they should have a 180-degree rotational symmetry so that it looks the same upside down and white cells must be orthogonally contiguous, which means that they are all connected forming a white mass. The Japanese makes even more complex crosswords, black cells can’t share sides and that all corner cells must be white. The Swedish ones are quite unique in that the clues are all written in cells within the crossword.

Interesting crossword related bits and bobs on the internet:

Emily Jocureton does illustrations based on the New York Times crossword.

How to Master The Times Crossword

The Times Crossword Challenge for Nintendo DS

Crosswords About The Old Testament

Sources:

http://www.fun-with-words.com/first_crossword.html

http://www.crosswordtournament.com/more/wynne.html

The Crossword Obsession