Thursday, September 1st 2011
We get asked a lot if we have any Newspaper Club tshirts. And we don’t, but maybe we should.
So if we built these tshirts, would you be interested in owning one? There are more over here. Let us know via Twitter or Flickr or one of those cool planes with a banner hanging off the tail.
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.
Saturday, August 27th 2011
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.
Tuesday, August 16th 2011
There’s a brilliant exhibition in the foyer-ery bit of the Guardian at the moment. It’s called Not to be sold separately: The Observer Colour Magazine 1964-1995 and features covers and spreads from that period.
There are some great covers.
This one is particularly cute.
And this is an interesting article about women working in The City.
“Hard work is no good, I’ve learnt, without luck too. I gave them assurances of no future children, and of being able to arrange my domestic life so that it wouldn’t interfere with work.”
“Inside the office of the future”.
So good.
It’s free, open to the public and a five minute walk from Kings Cross. More details here.
Thursday, July 28th 2011
Helping local newspapers get off the ground is something that we’ve always hoped would happen at Newspaper Club, so it’s great to see The Bedford Clanger, a newspaper designed to blow the cobwebs from local news in the Bedford area, come to life. The editor, Erica Roffe, told us how and why she got it started.
It’s very easy to become negative about your town, especially when the local newspapers seem to report only bad news. That’s why we started The Bedford Clanger.
The Clanger is a community newspaper dedicated to promoting the music, art, culture, people, places, independent shops, bars, pubs and restaurants that make Bedford such a great place to live.
With Sunday supplements, the Guardian Guide and Time Out as our inspiration, we set about creating a format that would work for us. We chose a traditional newspaper layout as it suited our content, but we have attempted to contemporise it by using creative photography or illustration to accompany each article.
We chose Newspaper Club to print the Clanger as the price, convenience and speedy delivery ticked all our boxes. Our contact, Anne, has been a huge source of knowledge and reassurance throughout the process – we really couldn’t have done it without her!
The launch of The Clanger took place over the first weekend in June and the response has been phenomenal. Through various recent events and initiatives, a community spirit has been awakened in our town, and The Clanger hopes to capture this feeling and share the joy.
The Bedford Clanger has been totally funded by advertising, but we have restricted this to ‘enhanced listings’ featuring a logo, website and contact details and just 20 words of text. The advertising only features on the listings pages, so doesn’t detract from the editorial content. The result is much more modern and visually striking than other local paper display advertising and as a result we have received ad revenue from businesses that traditionally don’t use print as an advertising medium.
We hope that through the support of local businesses we can maintain The Clanger as a monthly guide to Bedford. The layout and design are by no means perfect and they will develop as we learn more about the medium.
With the third issue on the presses as we speak look out for FREE copies of The Bedford Clanger in independent shops, hair salons, businesses, bars, clubs, pubs, coffee shops, libraries, The Corn Exchange and Bedford Tourist Information Centre. Limited availability, so grab yours while stocks last!!
Wednesday, July 27th 2011
Great Gran by Toby Morris is a lovely example of what people are doing with the new digital colour newspapers.
Toby, an illustrator based in Amsterdam, used the newspaper format to pay tribute to the remarkable life of his great gran. It looks beautiful and manages to raise a smile and bring a tear to the eye at the same time.
Printed in digital colour, it was produced as a limited run of 100. Copies are available from Toby’s online shop.
Sunday, July 17th 2011
You may have heard of Ministry of Stories, a charitable organisation that helps young people write their own stories. Based on Dave Eggers 826 Valencia and with his blessing and the support of others such as Nick Hornby they opened up in Hackney last year.
A few weeks ago they made a newspaper with a bunch of aforementioned young people. And not only that, we are eternally in their debt because they made this super video about their newspaper. That’s the kind of blogtastic social link love we really appreciate here at Newspaper Club.
Watch the video below. It’s ace.
Friday, July 15th 2011
Much of our inspiration for starting Newspaper Club is down to Aaron Straup-Cope, and his Papernet projects. Aaron’s thoughts on how paper and printed media can be a natural part of the web and the “network” encouraged us to play around, led to experiments with newspapers, and lo: Newspaper Club was born.
A lot of what we do at Newspaper Club is about making it easy as possible to access newsprint: to lower the barrier of entry and let people make whatever they want. We’ve built ARTHR, our layout tool, we’ve written lots of help pages, and we try and be helpful on email and the phone, all to try and make it as easy as possible.
But we want to make it easier for machines too. Because why should humans have all the fun? Machines should be able to make good looking newspapers too.
So, today we’re launching the alpha release of the Newspaper Club API. The API provides programatic access to ARTHR, letting you write tools and apps that generate newspapers from any content you have.
We’ve written some API documentation which should help you along the way. We know it needs fleshing out in places, but if you’ve got any suggestions for what we’re not explaining very well, please let us know.
As a demonstration, we’ve built a tool nicknamed The Telepaper, that turns a Readability Reading List into a newspaper with just a couple of clicks.
As luck and timing would have it, The Engineering Dept. entered this in Readability’s API contest and are very pleased that it won third place! Hurrah! (Thank you Readability folks.)
The Telepaper is a very simple Ruby Sinatra application that glues the Newspaper Club and Readability APIs together. All the source code is available on the Newspaper Club Github account, and you can try the application for yourself if you’ve got a Readability account.
If you’d like to have a go with the API yourself, you’ll need an API key from us. First take a look at the documentation, then drop us an email containing your Newspaper Club account’s email address, an OAuth callback URL, and a brief description of whatever you’re playing around with, if you know. We’ll have a web interface for this as we tidy things up and enter the beta stage.
We’ll be honest: this is going to be a bit of a learning curve for us. Running an API is hard. And mapping the concepts of print layout to an API is hard. So it’s likely that we won’t have got it right first time. Do let us know your thoughts.
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.
Thursday, June 9th 2011
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.