The evolution of digital newspapers

Readers are likely aware that this newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, will complete its statewide transition to a digital-replica newspaper (plus Sunday digital and print edition) by the end of summer.

By that time, our Monday-through-Saturday newspapers will no longer be printed or distributed in our 75-county circulation area. Instead, those papers are or will be accessible in a digital-replica format to subscribers using their personal electronic devices or Apple iPads provided by publisher Walter E. Hussman, who’s spending $12 million on the table computers. The digital subscription rate is $34 to $36 per month.

The Sunday paper is delivered in both print and digital-replica format; print editions are available for single-copy sales at locations around the state such as Little Rock’s Capital Hotel.

The idea of employing iPad technology for news delivery may seem novel to some. But a prescient opinion piece in the Sept. 15, 2008, edition of Newsweek describes the possibilities of what it calls “electronic ink’s” role in saving newspapers, which were then beginning a decline in readership and advertising revenue. The iPad wasn’t even introduced until April 3, 2010.

In that piece Daniel McGinn, now a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, explained that while the concept of a portable paperless newspaper had been around since the late 1990s, it had failed to gain purchase in the public imagination.

“In the past year,” he wrote, “since Amazon introduced its Kindle electronic reading device [in 2007], thousands of Americans have experienced the pleasures of e-books—but for most people, e-newspapers aren’t yet a reality.”

McGinn said benefits for readers of e-newspapers read on devices like the Kindle included portability, an uncluttered reading environment free of ringing email notifications, no more recycling, and the avoidance of nasty weather when going outside to fetch the paper.

Benefits for publishers include elimination of printing and delivery costs, the ability to update news coverage quickly, and the potential to charge more for advertisements.

The downside, as McGinn saw it in 2008, was that the Kindle’s blackand-white screen didn’t handle photographs or graphics well, and the e-papers available through the device—there were 24 on Amazon at the time—carried no advertising. Navigating between stories was cumbersome.

The biggest difficulty, though, was that e-readers worked best for “linear reading”—reading long pages of text, as in a book—and not as well for the buffet-like browsing behavior that makes reading a newspaper one of life’s great pleasures.

“Instead of offering well-designed pages that entice readers to skim a story they might otherwise skip, today’s e-newspapers merely list headlines or tops of articles, which makes it hard to decide what’s worth reading,” he wrote.

The Democrat-Gazette solves that lack of buffet-browsing by presenting readers with a digital replica of each printed page; subscribers can see entire pages, organized in the same sections that they are familiar with from printed editions, now with color photos. They can click on specific stories, follow the story jumps to another page, increase type size, access photos and videos that go far beyond what appears on the page, forward the stories to others, or save them for future reference.

I never liked reading news distributed via headlined lists followed by a few lines of text on e-blasts or websites; being able to see an entire page complete with headlines, photos, cutlines, subheads, sidebars, access to jumps, and one-click ability to return to the original page are what I find most attractive about digital replica newspapers.

Back to the Newsweek story of 2008, in which a tech exec agreed: “You’ll see, in the next 12 to 18 months, a wave of electronic-newspaper devices,” said Russell Wilcox, chief executive of E Ink, the MIT spinoff whose technology powers the Kindle, Sony’s Reader and other competitors.

Still, there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical, as outlined by McGinn nearly 12 years ago: “The biggest worry is whether consumers who’ve grown used to reading newspaper Web sites for free can be persuaded to pay $10 or more a month for an e-newspaper subscription.”

Countering that concern is Media Insight Project, an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which reports that “funding for the news industry is going through an epochal change. In the future, virtually all signals suggest less of the revenue will come from advertising and more from consumers paying for news.”

The conversion rate for subscribers from the Democrat-Gazette’s print editions to digital editions is hovering around 79 percent in the first quarter of 2020.

Still, James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, wasn’t convinced in 2008 that electronic ink, or anything else, would allow newspapers to survive. “I know there are people whose hearts and souls are invested in saving the newspaper concept, but it’s breathing its last breath already, in my opinion,” he’s quoted in McGinn’s story.

As this technology evolved, McGinn concluded, “newspaper junkies like me will be rooting hard that the e-reader evangelists can prove him wrong.”

As far as newspaper subscribers in Arkansas are concerned, he’s rooting for the winning team.