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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
aren't plastics created from oil ?. At least trees can grow back.
Most experiments in producing wooden CDs have failed miserably, except for Madonna's latest album which was both wooden and sold heaps.
mogorific carpentry experiments
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...
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.