Case Study: University of Missouri students learn by producing digital editions of their college newspaper under the guidance of a longtime digital news advocate.Read all about it: The newspaper industry is facing a challenging future in the era of instant, online communication. Among the reasons:
• Declining newspaper readership, as younger readers seem less likely to become subscribers and more likely to seek their news online;
• High overhead costs of newsprint, ink and printing presses, etc.; and
• Greater display and classified advertising competition from Web-based resources.
While the increasing daily use of the Internet and related technologies by potential readers has contributed to the troubling trends for news-oriented publishers, some in the industry see prospective solutions in some online tools—including Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader and PDF.
Among those seeing hope is Roger Fidler, who has spent almost three decades contemplating, developing and evangelizing the concept of a digital newspaper.
The one-time "graphics guy" and technology savant for Knight Ridder Inc., the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, Fidler first described "what newspapers might be like at the beginning of the 21st century" in a 1981 industry special report.
PDFs don't have to be an Internet blight. Click here to read Don Fluckinger's column.
"While I firmly believed online media would be commonplace by the end of the century, I reasoned that to be successful, digital newspapers would need to be as portable and as easy to use as printed newspapers," Fidler says of the 1981 report and accompanying prototype he prepared for a journalism industry meeting. "And that they would need to add significant value for readers and advertisers. The digital newspaper I described in my essay and visualized with my mockups was the size of a standard magazine. The non-scrolling, portrait-oriented pages included hyperlinks and rich-media elements."
Click here to view a slideshow of the EmPRINT project.
That decades-old description bears a striking resemblance to Fidler's recently completed, 10-week online publishing project—dubbed EmPRINT—at the University of Missouri School of Journalism that advanced his research.
The weekly, PDF-based EmPRINT editions of the Columbia Missourian, the school's daily print newspaper produced by student journalists under faculty editorial guidance, showcased why Fidler has adopted PDF as the file format of choice for this and several previous experiments. "Adobe Acrobat can preserve the design integrity and visual branding of publications and advertisements," he says, "and allows pages to scale to the size of the display in full-screen view."
Now director of technology initiatives for Missouri's Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Fidler says the EmPRINT project was undertaken to provide a real-world evaluation of the digital newspaper publishing model. The field test, he says, represents "the first time anyone had attempted to produce and distribute a completely repackaged, rich-media PDF newspaper on a regular schedule."
Fidler's approach to displaying vertically designed newspaper pages on horizontal computer monitors sets him apart from the way most publishers currently integrate PDF into their online delivery environment. A common approach involves posting PDFs for download that were made directly from the actual page designs used for printing each edition.
The PDF "facsimile pages" files resulting from such a minimal cost-and-effort production workflow are anything but user-friendly: The broadsheet (narrow vertical) pages and columns are at best frustrating to manually navigate, Fidler says, requiring up-and-down, side-to-side and page-to-page scrolling. Little or no effort is made to add a linked index or table of contents to either the editorial or advertising content, which contributes to a mindset that PDF is suitable only for documents meant for printing, not for on-screen reading.
Another shortcoming from the quick-and-dirty method, according to Fidler: Printing press configurations and associated costs limit the use of color images in print, so converted-to-PDF pages default to including mostly black-and-white graphics. Last but hardly the least significant turn-off for end users: PDFs that include the high-resolution images required by printing technologies—but not necessary for online viewing—contribute to long downloads of large-file-size documents.
In his previous role as director of the Institute for CyberInformation (ICI) at Kent State University, Fidler's research led to the development of a pair of alternate, interactive PDF-based solutions that addressed the flaws he perceived in traditional publishing efforts by newspapers: the Kent electronic newspaper format, designed to take maximum advantage of pen-based Tablet PCs, and the concept of "Digital Newsbooks" for delivering newspaper special reports and other high-quality, visually rich content.
Next Page: Project aims to make digital edition pleasing to readers.
Missouri's EmPRINT project showcases lessons learned in Fidler's previous newspaper and journalism education research. The specially designed PDFs, using content repackaged specifically for online delivery, highlight the virtues of adopting an interactive format designed to meet the varying needs of readers, publishers and advertisers.
A key feature of Fidler's digital editions is the portrait (vertical) orientation of pages, the standard for printed newspapers and most other printed documents. Research on consumer viewing preferences conducted at Kent State several years ago found a "clear preference … for portrait-oriented, page-based designs that avoid the need for scrolling." The EmPRINT pages are not as narrowly vertical as typical print newspaper pages, but rather simulate the "look" of traditional page designs to capitalize on well-established reader familiarity.
"In my opinion, landscape does not work well for complex documents that contain large amounts of text and multiple story elements," Fidler explained. "Newspaper design is among the most complex forms of information design. Pages may include several headlines, decks, photos [of different sizes], captions, information graphics, as well as stories and advertisements. Portrait orientation provides a better reading experience than landscape and is still the preferred format worldwide for documents that contain large amounts of text."
Each 100-plus-page issue includes a single Summary Page with listings of and active links to all content. Other features of the EmPRINT digital editions, meant for downloading and on-screen reading (but also readable if printed), as explained in the Users Guide included in each issue:
• Interactive Forms: PDF forms allow readers to write and submit letters to the editor, comment on stories and communicate directly with advertisers.
• Layered Content: This distinctive online capability allows readers to toggle (by clicking) between multiple layers of related editorial and advertising content.
• Full-Text Search: Clicking the Search button, part of a set of navigational elements built into the EmPRINT template, launches an Acrobat or Reader search of the fully indexed content.
• Video/Audio Clips: Utilizing QuickTime, some content includes links to multimedia elements that enhance the print-based content, but are edited with file-size limitations in mind.
• Web Links: Hyperlinks in some articles and advertisements launch a Web browser, and each edition's Table of Contents and Ad Locator pages include direct links to specific content.
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Fidler cites the use of layers in select content—articles and ads—as one of the most interesting developments that can benefit both users and advertisers. In one issue, for example, an opinion article that included eight large informational graphics related to separate survey responses was designed in layers so that readers could click to view separate questions and the related graphics in context rather than having all together on one visually distracting page. Likewise, in another issue a local ad was presented in four interactive layers, each with a similar look but modified content featuring different employees.
The EmPRINT project also explored questions about production staffing, advertising potential, readership and technical challenges. Among the findings and lessons learned, according to Fidler:
• Fidler and two part-time graduate students established a workflow to produce the weekly issues that extracted the content from the print newspaper, using a number of scripts to automatically reflow copy into Adobe InDesign CS templates. Ads were redesigned for the digital newspaper format, adding interactivity. A technology upgrade in the school's newsroom—moving from a QuarkXPress-based PC publishing system to an all-Macintosh system using Adobe InDesign CS 2.0—is expected to help streamline the workflow.
• While the spring semester field test primarily published content developed for the print version of the newspaper, a future expansion slated for the fall 2005 semester will seek to broaden the effort to include more original, multimedia content. That will increase one of the project's challenges: getting print-oriented editors and reporters to think about audio and video elements during the planning process.
• One of the technical challenges for the EmPRINT project resulted from the default launching on the Mac OS X platform of Preview, Apple's built-in PDF-viewing technology in OS X. The layered content doesn't function properly under Preview, Fidler says. More recently, an apparent conflict between Acrobat 7 and Reader 7 with Apple's QuickTime 7 cripples the use of video clips, a problem he hopes Adobe and Apple can soon resolve.
• While the Kent format design is optimized for display on a Tablet PC, which among other relevant virtues offers portrait page viewing, it also is well-suited for display on most laptop and desktop computers that can take advantage of the free availability of the Adobe Reader. But Fidler doesn't see complex, visually rich news products like EmPRINT as being ideal for viewing on smaller handheld devices, such as PDAs and cell phones.
Fidler expects the printed version of a newspaper to remain the primary product for the near term, "but the way readership trends in the newspaper industry are going, there are some thoughts that we may be going all-digital, possibly sooner than a lot of people realize."
One of the most commonly cited barriers to acceptance of computer-based editions of traditional ink-on-paper newspapers is, oddly enough, the bathroom door. According to Fidler, over the years people frequently joked they'd never read an electronic newspaper until they could take it into their favorite private reading spot.
Proudly showcasing a mobile Tablet PC computer displaying an edition of EmPRINT, a specially adapted digital version of the Columbia Missourian, the school's daily print newspaper, Fidler gets the last laugh: "You can read this one in the bathroom."
