The I-News experiment begins

Dean Singleton's "Individuated News" experiment gets underway next week in Denver, when 25 residents in the Highlands neighborhood will receive stand-alone printers that will let them publish a 12-page personalized edition of the Denver Post at home. Singleton also plans to try the system out on 60 extended-stay guests at the downtown Marriott starting in July.

Assuming all goes well in the Centennial State, Singleton's MediaNews Group will install another 300 printers in Southern California homes come August, allowing subscribers here to create i-editions of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Bill Mitchell at Poynter explains how the system works:

Consumers pay the printer's manufacturer a highly discounted price for the Internet-equipped device and they pay a modest subscription price to the local newspaper. The newspaper reimburses the consumer for ink and paper, and advertisers pay the newspaper to get their messages delivered to customers located nearby.

With the discount, the $150 printers will cost subscribers about $50, Mitchell reports.

MediaNews appears to be pinning its hopes for I-News on a "hyper-local" advertising model. Coffee shops, grocers, liquor stores and the like will be able target ads and coupons to I-edition subscribers who live only blocks away. The ads will be a bargain for local shop owners, and yet the rates will be higher than for an online ad.

Althought it seems inevitable that the i-edition, if successful, will influence how MediaNews apportions its limited newsroom resources, the more immediate effect will be on daily circulation. As the Denver Post reported back in March:

One proposal, based on how well testing in Los Angeles goes, would be to print the newspaper only three days a week. That will already be the case with the two papers in Detroit, including MediaNews Group's Detroit News, starting March 31.

"Our greatest expense is printing and delivering a newspaper," [Mark Winkler, executive vice president of sales and marketing for MediaNews Group], said. "Eliminating it four days a week would be significant."

Voila, convergence!

The individuated-newspaper initiative jogs a reader's memory of yet another mostly forgotten newspaper experiment. This time it's the CueCat, a bar-code reader that aimed to link the printed page to the World Wide Web.

From NAA's TechNews column:

Of course, all these technologies assume that you’re willing to read (or watch television) while hunched over your creaky computer table. As wireless advocates predict about the ’Net as a whole, print-to-Web technology will leap forward when it’s untethered from the PC and accessible anywhere.

The year 2000 never seemed so long ago.

All the news you find fit to print

Los Angeles Daily News subscribers will be the first to test drive an electronic news-delivery system called "I-News" that Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group claims will turn readers into their own editors and publishers.

The "I" stands for "individuated" and the system purports to let subscribes choose which news stories they want to receive - and which ones they don't - via a stand-alone printer hooked up to a phone line or through a web-enabled device. The Daily News plans to test the "I-News" service sometime this summer.

From the Denver Post:

"You'll be able to choose the news you want about anything, whether you're a Detroit Red Wings fan or if you're green-oriented," said Mark Winkler, executive vice president of sales and marketing for MediaNews Group. "You become your own editor and publisher."

I-News gathers content not just from The Denver Post and other MediaNews papers but also from The Associated Press and other "scrapers of media," Wink ler said.

"We want to give the consumer exactly what they want," he said.

Time will tell whether this will be more useful to readers than Google Alerts and RSS feeds, and the story does not mention anything about subscription prices or delivery options. Will existing newspaper subscribers get the service for free? Can they dump the print edition and go with the e-edition only? Can new subscribers sign up for the e-edition without getting the printed newspaper? Will MediaNews offer these stand-alone printers for sale?

Then there's the moral hazard of turning newsrooms into buffet lines. If more subscribers want sports than City Hall coverage, will the paper cut resources to the latter? Or will revenues be shared equally? Is there a chance traditional beats will disappear if their numbers don't perform? Will subscribers have to pay more the more news topics they choose to receive?

Maybe more important in the short run, however, is a proposal mentioned toward the bottom of the Post's piece to cut the number of days the newspaper's print edition is published, as MediaNews has already done in Detroit:

One proposal, based on how well testing in Los Angeles goes, would be to print the newspaper only three days a week. That will already be the case with the two papers in Detroit, including MediaNews Group's Detroit News, starting March 31.

"Our greatest expense is printing and delivering a newspaper," Winkler said. "Eliminating it four days a week would be significant."