News online can be news in print
News Designer has a story about Guardian’s plans to offer a free downloadable PDF of content from their website. It also says that the pdf copy will be updated every 15 minutes and that users can choose — by way of options — as to which sections they’d like to “custom print” for reading.
This method is probably a decent add-on [as a choice to certain section of users] to what I wrote about News Online and how to improve the experience. [And before someone points out that I hate ePaper, yes, I do. It's nothing like a clean page of select news that you choose to print, if you ever wanted to. ePaper can't be printed on a decent A4 size legible enough to read, so that you'd carry it with you on a subway or something.
But a single production of news online, which would be converted into a printable form -- on the fly and without extra effort -- is quite okay. How? There are quite a few functions in PHP and other scripting languages to achieve this. So, you get a pretty good idea about how Guardian's pdf offer is updated every 15 minutes. It must be automatic, obviously. Like another format, like feed. The moment a new story is added, an updated pdf version is generated too based on user's selection of all news or only certain sections [via the convert functions on the fly].
My point of all this — technically — is that news in a web form [XHTML, CSS, et al] can literally take on center-stage and make the print form a subsidiary of the web form of news, as far as production is concerned. While, what we see actually in practice right now is the other way around.
Imagine that the web based news is full and free. Print is a convenient version that you’ll either pay for or print it yourself. Convenience to the news media [in maintaining a single set of news -- no extra effort in duplication for the web and print separately -- while cutting duplication and production costs]. Convenience to the consumer in her method of consuming news either on the web or as print. Best of both worlds?