Browsepaper
This is really very cool.
The National Post and other CanWest papers have launched new "electronic editions" that I've been playing with for the last few days. (The free trial is only up until Jan 24th, so that last link will probably rot by tomorrow).
Most major newspapers produce half-decent online versions nowadays, but they always leave a little to be desired. A really enjoyable newspaper is a product of much more than just the stories and the people writing them.
The page design and layout, the photos, captions, even the advertising ? in a good newspaper all these little things come together to create an absorbing experience.
Laying out content for the web, of course, requires a completely different approach from layout for a print broadsheet. You can?t use a web site in the same way as you use a newspaper ? we don?t even read things on screen in the same way as we read a printed document.
So it makes sense to publish an online version of a newspaper that reshapes the printed content into a format that works within the constraints of the browser.
And yet there are many reasons why, particularly as a PR guy, you want to be able to see precisely how a story actually appeared on the printed page.
Was that photo above or below the fold? Where did the story breaks fall? Did our guy?s quote make it onto page one? What was the headline for the back half of a split story? What ran next to this piece? Did the story appear next to our advert? (That?s not a good thing, btw).
Subtle points, perhaps ? but parsing the layout like this is one of the key differences in the way a PR person digests a newspaper compared to the typical reader. It's one of the ways we like to measure our successes.
If all you have is the online version of a story you?re going to miss many of these subtleties.
The other big thing that can be an issue with newspapers? websites is that very few papers will put their entire daily content online ? there will always be chunks missing.
The new CanWest electronic editions fix these problems. As their own advertising puts it, you get: Every Headline, Every Column, Every Story, Every Picture.
In fact, you get a very nicely-rendered facsimile of the entire daily paper ? an ?exact digital copy?, they call it. Even the classifieds and cartoons.
Beautiful job. This technology has come a long, long way from the days I used to muck around in what used to be called the DIP (Document Image Processing) business.
CanWest is using a product called ActivePaper from Olive Software. I see they have a slew of other interesting papers signed up, in addition to the CanWest stable. Soon, I'll be able to read Ireland on Sunday and the London Evening Standard online - in all their gaudy tabloid loveliness.
I?ve also been checking out Olive's ActiveMagazine product. The UI in this demo is just drop-dead cool.
Now if only they could squeeze something this good looking into a format I could read on my Palm while strap-hanging on the subway...
The National Post and other CanWest papers have launched new "electronic editions" that I've been playing with for the last few days. (The free trial is only up until Jan 24th, so that last link will probably rot by tomorrow).
Most major newspapers produce half-decent online versions nowadays, but they always leave a little to be desired. A really enjoyable newspaper is a product of much more than just the stories and the people writing them.
The page design and layout, the photos, captions, even the advertising ? in a good newspaper all these little things come together to create an absorbing experience.
Laying out content for the web, of course, requires a completely different approach from layout for a print broadsheet. You can?t use a web site in the same way as you use a newspaper ? we don?t even read things on screen in the same way as we read a printed document.
So it makes sense to publish an online version of a newspaper that reshapes the printed content into a format that works within the constraints of the browser.
And yet there are many reasons why, particularly as a PR guy, you want to be able to see precisely how a story actually appeared on the printed page.
Was that photo above or below the fold? Where did the story breaks fall? Did our guy?s quote make it onto page one? What was the headline for the back half of a split story? What ran next to this piece? Did the story appear next to our advert? (That?s not a good thing, btw).
Subtle points, perhaps ? but parsing the layout like this is one of the key differences in the way a PR person digests a newspaper compared to the typical reader. It's one of the ways we like to measure our successes.
If all you have is the online version of a story you?re going to miss many of these subtleties.
The other big thing that can be an issue with newspapers? websites is that very few papers will put their entire daily content online ? there will always be chunks missing.
The new CanWest electronic editions fix these problems. As their own advertising puts it, you get: Every Headline, Every Column, Every Story, Every Picture.
In fact, you get a very nicely-rendered facsimile of the entire daily paper ? an ?exact digital copy?, they call it. Even the classifieds and cartoons.
Beautiful job. This technology has come a long, long way from the days I used to muck around in what used to be called the DIP (Document Image Processing) business.
CanWest is using a product called ActivePaper from Olive Software. I see they have a slew of other interesting papers signed up, in addition to the CanWest stable. Soon, I'll be able to read Ireland on Sunday and the London Evening Standard online - in all their gaudy tabloid loveliness.
I?ve also been checking out Olive's ActiveMagazine product. The UI in this demo is just drop-dead cool.
Now if only they could squeeze something this good looking into a format I could read on my Palm while strap-hanging on the subway...
