Happy New Year!
It's the start of everything new this leap year of 2016. That's why I was so surprised to open my door Sunday morning to fecth my print edition of The New York Times, but, instead, saw a newspaper called The Downtown Times, complete with a Gothic style nameplate and a look and feel that brings to mind newspapers of another era.
Surprise all right! This was a four-page advertising wrapper for the popular TV series, Downtown Abbey, which premiered its final season on PBS Sunday evening.
Take a peek!
I am happy to see that we are more adventurous with the way we present advertising and thus stimulate monetizing opportunities.
Prediction for 2016
In case you missed this piece, originally published by the Nieman Lab!
Some doors will open and some doors will close in 2016.
One door that will open even wider and become more welcoming will be that of social media — and how readers discover and then decide to read stories in our newspapers and magazines.
With the opening of that door will come the closing of that other door , which we thought was the one where we planted our welcome mat for readers. I predict that in 2016 home pages will be re-evaluated as they have ceased to be the main event or principal point of entry for many of our readers.
As 2016 starts, some of the most innovative work is in the way in which publishers, editors and designers are rethinking and redesigning better ways to attract and to retain readers who may come into their publications via a social-media link. Collaboration among designers, editors and technical teams are providing visual presentations to make those links more appealing and , they hope, more effective in bringing readers to a newspaper or magazine’s home page. This will be an area of tremendous interest, growth and experimentation in the year ahead.
In my work I find that editors are curious about new ways to make each article a point of entry not just into a particular story, but to the rest that a newspaper or magazine offers. At Aftenposten in Norway, editor in chief Espen Egil Hansen says his team “produces a thousand pages each day.” If the home page has been the traditional “front page”, ushering audiences into a brand and its offerings, now the article is the point of entry. We are experimenting at Aftenposten with a system that allows each article to be an effective brand extension, inviting readers to read more than one story.
At this year’s a Columbia University School of Journalism conference, Journalism + Silicon Valley, a participant asked Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, to name his greatest challenge His answer? “How do we get a person who reads one news story to read a second story in The New York Times?”
That may be the most challenging task for publishers and editors in 2016 , the year in which newspaper websites redefine home pages or abandon them altogether, substituting them with constantly updatable panels that most users will check on their mobile devices.