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Sunday Newspapers, Now With CDs
VirtualUK writes "The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition. They cite that one of the main reasons is that Internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD."
Newspaper is easily bio-degradable, I'm not sure about that of CDs. Plus you can wrap things with newspaper, but not with hard plastic.
Other than a few media clips the CD doesnt contain anything different from a normal newspaper. I think distributing the same thing in two mediums is annoying. I either want to read the paper, or watch a video. The short clips on the CD are easily available online too. The only place it makes sense to me to put a CD is on computer or game magazines where the CD content (game demos and apps) cannot be duplicated by 'traditional' means. Adding a CD to the paper makes it clumsy.
Forget the CD. The environment comes first.
What I notice in the article and in the responses is that we have one more example of piss-poor hybridization. Though a few readers liked the idea most of them found the CD about as useful as the AOL CDs that used to seem to appear out of the ether.
What's sad but telling about this is that is looks like one more lame-brained, half-hearted, probably cheaply implemented, attempt to hybridize, or as I'm sure they PR people would say, synergize, two media. But it's like tacking Greek columns on a log cabin. It just doesn't work. The current CD adds nothing really useful to the newspaper. So eventually the newspaper will probably decide that it's not been as successful as they'd like and not worth the effort and cost to make it really successful. And the few readers who do find it useful will probably give up as it slowly degenerates due to cost-cutting.
This is not at all to say that I think that it couldn't work. It just seems to me that most people aren't willing to spend the time and money to really think through a winning hybridization that both makes money for the newspaper and gives readers something that they really want. I have to think of Google in relation to this. They came up with something that soon became indispensible to most people. It's possible that something similar could be done with newspapers and other media. It's just that no one's had the vision and resources to make it work.
Ah well. I guess you can't get a Google every day.
Not sure if the CD that comes with the Sunday Times has a static copy but they already have an "ePaper" version of their daily available for around $120 a year. It's "printed" at 5am GMT on the day of publication!
What is the big deal about killing trees? Trees are just plants. Nobody complains when they pull up potatoes to make chips, or lettuce to be put into sandwiches to be carefully picked out before eating.
When you cut down a tree to make paper -- at least in a country with private ownership of land -- you have to plant another one in order to keep the value in the land you own. Sure, it takes awhile to grow a tree in human terms, but it isn't long in tree terms. You can also do this in parallel, as long as you have enough land available.
Recycling options for paper include paper feedstock, composting and energy recovery. It is quite biodegradeable if suitably cut up.
Making CDs, on the other hand, uses up oil which will take much longer to replace than a few trees, and ties it up with aluminium. Recycling options for a CD are building materials or energy recovery. CDs are not biodegradeable.
By the way, why does every pet care "expert" make out that newsprint is poisonous to rodents? If this was the case, then wouldn't city rats all be dead from eating the discarded newspapers you see in every city? I suspect a plot by the pet shops to sell more bedding!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!