Will newspapers reinvent themselves?

On 8 March 2009, Ad Age in the US reported that a major newspaper company wants to give you news the way Burger King makes hamburgers: your way.

MediaNews Group, the fourth-largest newspaper chain in the US, said it would test a customised newspaper service over the next few months at The Los Angeles Daily News, one of the 54 dailies owned by the company.

The service, which allows readers to pick and choose only the stories that interest them, is among the many maneuvers that newspapers globally are making to respond to the changes the Internet has wrought on their businesses.

Of course, through automated feeds and customised Google and Yahoo pages, consumers can already tailor their news consumption to their own tastes.

But the MediaNews experiment, which it has named “individuated news” — it has trademarked the phrase — or “I-news,” for short, has an old media twist: dead trees and a new piece of hardware for your home.

The theory is that I-News will be all about choice. If it works out in reality, newspaper readers will be able to decide what they want to read and on what platform.

Apparently, MediaNews has been working with a technology company to develop an in-home printer for readers. The printer will receive and print a subscriber’s customised newspaper — with targeted advertising.

It is unclear if subscribers will pay extra for the printer, or if it will be part of the subscription fee.

But already there is skepticism. Various journalism blogs and news sites on the Web have even greeted the idea with ridicule.

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, a blogger related it to the many failed experiments years ago to market a fax newspaper, the first of which was in 1939 in St. Louis.
However, with the amazing innovations we have seen in recent years, it makes little sense to say the new newspapers won’t happen. My feeling is that it’s better just to watch this space.