Slashdot Mirror
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."
I used to get CDs with my paper all the time. Of course, they were from AOL...
I remember playing pretty decent video on my 486 from a CD yet still forced to a tiny little window with garbled sound quality and badly pixelated video when trying to watch some streaming news.
The CD will come out monthly, not every Sunday as reported in the story.
I'm surprised this hasn't happened earlier actually. Magazine's have been slapping on CDs to their publications for a long while now (especially Gaming and computer mags) and these days you can even get CD's on Breakfast Cereal boxes.
Of course, whether or not any of the information contained on the cd's will be of any use/quality is another matter.
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.
Everything on the CD is an advert for something else. You can't even get to the main menu without watching a video of a car advert.
I've seen something like this done in a neighboring city, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (I live in El Paso, TX). The subscription rate is really low; the paper is almost completely distributed in stores and newstands. Every once in a while, the paper has a special edition contating a cd. I think it's only music for now, but it may change. The special edition costs around US$0.50 more, which is about the normal cost of the paper (Sunday doesn't cost any more). I have never heard anyone else actually mention it, so I don't think it is fairing well.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
Somebody should suggest they run an article on Linux, so they'd just have to stick knoppix on the CD and save on the multimediocre content creation.
...
Also, somebody should suggest the same idea to Playboy Magazine. They don't even need to make it fancy, just a directory with huge jpegs and another with videos
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
benefit from the rich multimedia content
"suffer from the bland multimedia advertising"
Feed me a stray cat.
Gonna be awkward trying to read the news while I'm on the throne.
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.
The Marketing Drone that thought of this baby will be canned and sent back to Publix or wherever he came from.
Yeah, right.
That's good news for the trees, I hope the CD's are recycleable. This reminds me, I get really annoyed when I see a big stack of phone books lying around, that no one really wants. How long do you guys think it'll be 'til phone books go CD for standard (/common)distribution method? I'd much prefer grepping for pizza than flipping through hundreds of pages.
more coasters
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a paper-boy on a bicycle.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I prefer to have things available online these days rather than having them on a CD. I have hundreds and hundreds of CD's stacked up everywhere, and its becoming slower to find something small from those cd's than find and download it from the net. Especially the CD's that came with a magazine get useless quite fast as the things there get old, and the process of finding the cd and listening to the loud cd drive reading it is far less comfortable than just finding and using the same content from the internet.
I find it more interesting to have access to magazine articles from the net after subscribing. That way the content is always available from almost anywhere in addition to the paper magazine.
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 it's Sunday edition.
are cds more enviromentally friendly ?, aren't plastics created from oil ?. At least trees can grow back.
A few months ago I read about how a San Fran newspaper was providing an audio CD so you can listen in the car. I like that idea.
Taking that idea a step further, I wish Avant-Go would do something like that. I'd like to synch my PocketPC in the morning, then plug it into my car's audio so I can listen to fresh news on the way in.
"Derp de derp."
with the sunday edition AND a multimedia cd, nobody will be done reading the news paper before next week!
;)
That's no excuse! Any slashdot readers won't bother reading the articles anyway - they'd just hold the paper and cd, read the headlines, and then bitch about stuff around the water cooler anyhow...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Forget the CD. The environment comes first.
An obvious attempt to find a new channel that more closely couples the advertisements and the content. I can see how the marketer-droids at the Times would want this, since with normal webpages it's so easy to run proxies that strip all the ads out. But here you have to endure entire commercials before you can even get to the menu. I bet half the people who look at it are going to shitcan the thing right there, never to try it again.
It kind of defeats the purpose of finding new eyeballs for ads if the implementation is so cumbersome and painful that it drives people away. Will these people ever learn?
The loader is quite slick, but unfortunately it has been made with flash and took an age to load the first time on my machine.
As an asside you also got a code with the cd cover to see if you had won 1000gbp. I was tempted to write a program to brute it because it was only 3 letters (all ucase) and 4 numbers, but you also need to send in the cover to claim the prize...
...you have to remember who their target audience is for this venture.
The target audience certainly isn't the more technical or internet-savvy PC or Mac user (the disc is dual format), it's the PC or Mac user who hasn't used their machine for much more than word processing, light browsing and email.
The kind of people who are wary of buying from websites like CD-Wow.com, Play.com, etc who offer great prices simply because they don't recognise the brands that they're dealing with are far more likely to buy something from a site backed by a brand (The Sunday Times) that they are familiar and comfortable with, respect and with which they possibly have a life-long affinity. In that respect, the CD serves its purpose.
Don't for a second be under any illusion that the CD is aimed at the typical Slashdot reader. A newspaper unlike a website can't differentiate between a nethead or a newbie, and as there are more people at the newbie end of the scale then the nethead one it is natural for The Sunday Times to pitch its offering at the less technical end of the PC and Mac market.
Remember, this isn't an addition to attract people who know one end of a PCI card from the other, it's an addition to attract floating readers to this particular broadsheet newspaper as opposed to the ones next to it on the shelves.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I have large picture windows in my living room
and birds keep flying into them, usually breaking
their necks - it's most distressing. However, I
find that if I hang the Sunday Times CD ROM on a
string outside the window they stay well clear.
Thank you, Sunday Times!
Jean, UK
Right now, CDs are as clsoe as we get to universal broadband.
About a year ago, I built a PC which was optimized for video capture, learned Lingo and bought a licensed copy of Macromedia Director (I believe on this site, buying a licensed copy gets more attention than nearly anything) and started a part time business as a multimedia author.
There are lots of decisions that need to be made... formats, codecs, bitrates. What is the 'universal donor' codec for Windows (I chose mpeg1)? What resolution video is acceptable? How fast will the processor be on the slowest machine you care about? How fast its CD drive? Must the end user install anything at all?
If you're careful and diligent, what people see on the CD can be nothing short of amazing.
I would be asked, all the time, why not DVD? The simple answer is, DVD just doesn't have the installed base, yet. You have to strive for maximum compatibility.
Encoding video is an art form, and I quickly found out few people in the business really understood what you do and why you do it.
With excellent full time employment, I have only done a few CDs. But, I am just as excited about the opportunities as I was the first time I saw they were there.
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!
>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.
Who cares about the Times on CD?
We want the Sun--page three(*) in particular!
*--for explanation see http://home.freeuk.com/webbuk/page3/about.htm
Why not have ONLY CDs and stop killing 75,000 trees for every Sunday edition? Even better, put it all on-line and don't print a damn thing.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?
Oh well.
How many people do you know that actually read the daily paper that would be willing to stuff a CD in a computer? I don't know any.
CD's and paper don't mix... two completely different media... two completely different markets.
The only place that it makes sense to put a CD is a computing magazine or a gaming magazine... where the content of one is directly related to the other.
People read newspapers to get quick news and to scan the headlines. You can't scan a CD in a split second.
Reading through the comments, I saw the reaffirmation of my ongoing belief that you've got to have a serious masochistic streak to do multimedia development these days. People are never satisfied because the desireable media experience is such a personal preference.
I've little doubt the product sucks and the criticisms are justified, but I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the, most likely, small staff cranking out a multimedia CD every week and I thought --you know, it's probably not such a happening position.
And for the people complaining that it doesn't work on their Gnu-Linux systems I have to ask --did they even try running it under Wine? From the article it sounds like a Macromedia based product and I've yet to see a Director or Authorware packaged piece that doesn't work under Wine. In fact, these types of products often work better under Wine than on Mac or MS systems because when Wine encounters an error that would freeze the program on the proprietary
OS's, Wine simply pops up a dialogue and asks you if you'd like to ignore the error. This makes life difficult for multi-media people trying to create DIY DRM techniques that work by intentionally crashing the program under a given condition on Mac or Windows platforms.
I have no idea how much an average printing run costs for your average paper, but surely it'd be a packet.
So, how hard would it be for a newspaper co to go moderately into 'offline' e-news?
What if you could buy a decent reader for 10 bucks (subsidised) and just zap the content in every day for 50 cents a pop? A 100-page pdf / zipped html of the daily paper'd have to fit in 32MB, even with pics. Perhaps you could keep yesterday's news as well , until you run out of storage space.
For those with slow net connections, you could wander into your nearest newsagent, give them yesterday's card and get another card with todays news. The advantage there being that it could be updated throughout the day, rather than the "print it at 3am - good till tommorrow" approach. Your old card simply gets flashed again , ready for someone else tomorrow.
After the initial outlay (subsidised readers, cards etc) , would it balance out in the end?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ah, Sunday! The day to kick back, drink coffee, read the paper, play with the kids. Perfect! Ah, sunday! A day to NOT look at a computer screen. Why would anyone ever ruin their Sunday (or any other day) by loading up a cd/dvd that you KNOW willl be filled with ads? It's just junk mail in a different form. Junk mail that takes work to view.... sigh.
This idea inspired by the "Universe Today" personalised newspaper in Babylon 5. Alternatively, the linked article suggests printing on a re-usable (as opposed to re-cyclable) paper substitute, such as Tyvek.
--
Ever since the term was coined, I've felt that multi-media lacked something. I never could quite put my finger on it. To me, multi-media means a combination of different types of sources coming together to create a single more impressive product. Yet almost every multi-media project that I have ever seen fell far short of my expectations. Typically the products have seemed rushed and lacked depth or are missing elements that I had expected to be there.
The application that would define what multi-media is never really came along. Perhaps some games have come close but I don't really know since I no longer game.
Frankly, I don't blame a newspaper for trying a CD-ROM. I can't think of a business that needs to look at changing how it does business in response to the computer and the internet more than the dead-tree based newspaper. They need to change or they will be left in the dust. Like blacksmiths, saddle makers, and buggy whip companies. Newspapers have huge investments in printing presses, delivery methods, and other things that the internet could simply kill. It probably already has to some degree.
If I were a newspaper publisher, I can see how I would think a CD-ROM could be a useful adjunct to the tree based edition of my product. I'd see it as a bridge to moving away from paper and on to something different. If I were sitting in that seat, I think I would see the internet and computers as being a double-edged axe. If I moved towards internet publishing I could reduce costs but would also risk alienating a significant number of my subscribers. That is where the bridge would need to come into play. You could gradually get the readership used to it and as the profitability of the paper portion of the newspaper started to decline you reduce the size of it and put more of your efforts twords the CD and online versions. Eventually you reduce depencance on the CD and get everything online. This weaning process could take a decade or longer or may never have to happen. I'm sure newspapers suffered with the advent of radio and TV but they have weathered both rather nicely.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9511/df951102 .jpg
Spray on computer. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/2 4/054219&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137
Then spray on a monitor..umm oh yes, spray on speakers and BAM! Newspaper that needs a CD.