Newspaper Club

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

One component of Newspaper Club is a service where we’ll create a bespoke newspaper. Offline. Especially for you.

We’ve just delivered such a project for the BBC.

It’s a collection of essays which came out of 8 studies commissioned as part of the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. The paper contains articles by Bill Thompson, Katherine Corrick and Pat Kane among others. Brendan from the BBC talks more about the project here.

I’m particularly fond of the cover. Looked great on the press.

We’re also working on an exciting one for Penguin, which we’ll be able to talk about soon.

This part of Newspaper Club is aimed at corporations, companies, firms, who require more control than the online version gives you. Like a traditional graphic design service. We’re still looking to explore different things you can do with newspapers and to make the best use of the format.

If you’d like to find out more about bespoke newspapers give Ben a call on 07966 282 286 or drop him a line at ben@riglondon.com

One of the interesting things about the recent splurge of Newspaper Club publicity and commentary is that we find out what everyone thinks we’re doing. There’s a ton of fantastic ideas out there about newspapers, curation, community, printing, all that. The only problem is, they’re all better than what we’re doing. We’re not trying to disrupt the newspaper business, we’re just trying for something interesting to the side of the newspaper business. So if you’re excited about what we’re up to, calm down, it probably won’t be that good.

Having said that here’s the news from today’s status meeting:

The Art Department Win At Status

Because they’ve found someone who can do extremely limited runs of a newspaper (around 20 or less) for an affordable price. Only black and white, but still, we can make a product out of that. We’re going to pushing a demo product through that in the next couple of days, it’ll look ugly but it’ll work.

Engineering Come Second

Because Tom has had his coding face on all week, just grinding forward, making things work.

Sales & Marketing Come Last

Because I haven’t really done anything useful.

In other news, Tom made jam.

It’s Friday afternoon. Ben and I are in our respective homes watching the tennis and Tom’s at London Fields Lido enjoying cakes (according to twitter anyway). We have family-friendly working policies here at Newspaper Club.

It feels like it’s been a long old week but I’m not sure if we can point at much specific achievement (he said in an hilariously frank manner).

Here’s what’s happened:

Ben and I have mostly been in meetings, which never feels like work, but is necessary and carves out opportunities for more achievement later on.

The paper we made for the BBC hit the streets. Full marks to the Art Department on that one. It looks lovely. And it’s a good read too. And it represents actual revenue. Hurrah! Consequently the Art Dept Won At Status.

Tom continues to nudge the Engineering forward and we started actual user testing yesterday. Admittedly the user was me, but since I never listen to anything Ben or Tom say I’m just like a regular person coming to the site with no pre-conceptions. So far it all works perfectly, until it breaks, at which point Tom fixes it and we start again. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?

And we had a little flurry of publicity which has been exciting. News was beginning to leak out, unsurprisingly since we’ve been blogging, twittering, mentioned at conferences, linked to by nice people and generally Not-In-Any-Way-Secret. So Dan at 4ip decided to tell people about their investment and we got a very nice write-up on TechCrunch Europe.

Now, pleasingly, we’re getting a few press enquiries and people wanting to know more. Which is great. Except we haven’t really got more to say. We’re working on everything – engineering, business models, community, design, vacation policy – and we have lots of ideas, but until we’ve actually made something we don’t want to be raising (or lowering) any expectations. We just want to get on with it. So we’ll be reporting progress on here, but we won’t be doing more than that.

Hope that’s OK. Now, if you’re still at work, get outside in the sunshine. (If there’s sunshine, and you want to go out in it.)

PS – And 4ip paid us some actual money. In the back account and everything. Splendid.

We had proper meetings today. With disagreements and raised voices and everything. In a mild way. And we’ve drawn a calendar with milestones on it. Blimey.

Things we’ve realised…

The human stuff is probably going to be harder than the computer stuff. Wrangling printers is going to be tricky. Though, excitingly Ben has meetings with printers next week. So; fingers crossed.

Things we’ve decided…

We think we’re going to limit the formats for the first product out the door. No variation in number of pages or anything like that. That’ll make life easier for us, and it’ll be easier for people to understand costs and logistics and all that.

We’re going to try and force a live paper through the system in two weeks, to see what we’ve missed.

Things to be done for next week…

Site design elements including warning signs, ticks, crosses and question marks.

Invite some contributions/tagging from people for the trial run.

More technical gubbins from Tom.

Get something more officially beta-y here.

Oh, and we’ve updated the graphics on the twitter page.

Ben made this to illustrate progress to date. (And he’s not quite being fair on himself. We’ve got a logo after all.) But I mention it because Meg supplemented it with my favourite flickr comment ever:

Day 12. We had a status meeting this morning. It was good but I realised that we’re over the initial excitement and into the slog. Very good progress from Engineering, we’re way ahead of milestones on that, and we’ve got a nice logo and the Art Department have clearly started thinking properly about design. But we’ve had little hiccups on budgeting, people we wanted to talk to aren’t calling us back and we’re facing up to the dread business of merchant accounts and all that.

Plus, this morning 4IP sent us an invoice, and they’ve not even paid us any money yet. It’s all legit, right there in the contract, we should have expected it, and it’s part of the money you get, but still, it’s a little shock when it arrives. Ah well. It shocked us into paying more attention to money, so now we have a special budget barometer to help us keep track.

It’s Friday morning. Day 10. Fifty days to go. Time for another update.

1. Engineering…

…have got XML flowing into InDesign and PDFs coming out. This is a triumph.

2. Art Department…

…made a logo. This too is a triumph. Though we need a new clip-art paperboy in the middle. Thinking about commissioning one. And we’ve produced a prototype that can be run through an ordinary printer.

3. Sales & Marketing…

…have had countless innovative and bold ideas, the genius of which the other departments aren’t equipped to appreciate. The best of which is to actually run a newspaper club – people join, pay us a subscription, vote on articles via Delicious – get a newspaper. So simple, yet so good.

This week’s realisation: We’re good at making things, but we’re even better at looking like we’re making things.

It’s Friday afternoon. Day Five. We’re supposed to deliver something working at the end of Day Sixty. (Working days. And we’re closed for August.) Fifty-five days to go.

Things to report so far:

1. Ben has been worrying about the logo, identity and ‘feel’. We’re not sure that Newspaper Club encapsulates exactly what we’re going to be making any more. We’ve told him to relax. We don’t even know what we’re making yet, so there’s no point deciding all that. So the logo he’s doing now, and Newspaper Club as a name are subject to change. And we’ve decided not to decide about ‘tone’. If we try and make the site feel different to ‘us’ then it’s going to be too much work. We’ll just make those decisions as we go along.

2. We had an excellent brainstormery session at the RSA on Tuesday. Many kind people came and helped us out. Things were decided:

a/ We shouldn’t start with the tagging a blog post thing. It seems like it’d be too hard to parse the real content from all the web cruft. (Look ‘parse’ and ‘cruft’ – I’m talking like a developer. There was also much talk of rabbit-holes.) So for the first version of the thing it’s going to have boxes in which you post your text, headlines, author details etc. Which means people can take their content from anywhere, it doesn’t have to be online already. This opens all sorts of possibilities. Which we won’t think about now. We’re just going to try and get something that works done as soon as possible.

b/ We need to talk to some printers pretty quickly. A lot of the things we might do depend on what our minimum batch size is, and what the unit cost will be. We won’t know that until we’ve kissed a few printer frogs.

c/ Legal. This needs a lot of thinking about. But we’re not going to worry about it until we’ve got something that works.

d/ Logistics. No-one knows what 1,000 papers looks like. How big, physically is it. We’ll need to help people visualise how much actual bulk is going to turn up at their house or wherever.

e/ And lots of other stuff. We have notes that are too long for here.

3. We’ve realised we’re going to need demo newspapers. For lots of reasons. Partly just to test the system, partly to have stuff to show people when we’re explaining the idea, partly to help express the range of things you can do with the product. We don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a parish newsletter provider. So we need to show how this could be used for art, music, travel, food etc. We call this the Paninaro strategy.