It's kind of like those Choose Your Own Adventure books – newspaper style.
CBC Radio’s technology and culture program, Spark, recently talked to Wanja Oberhof, a 23-year-old German entrepreneur who is one of the co-founders of Niiu, the first “customized” newspaper in Europe.
Readers can design their own newspaper by selecting online the articles or sections they want to read from a variety of German and international newspapers. Their own Niiu is then printed overnight and delivered to their door, like any other newspaper, the next morning.
It’s certainly an innovative idea, and definitely a daring move to step into an industry that’s enduring some hard times and looking for a face-lift.
Some are saying that the individualized newspaper is a solution to declining circulation because it eliminates the problem of newspapers having “useless content”.
With “useless content”, I suppose, meaning “stuff the reader isn’t interested in”. But that’s quite different from being useless.
When CBC rolled out it’s new format for The National last October, it included the new online option of a build-your-own newscast where viewers could pick and choose which news stories they wanted to watch and in what order.
I had the same unsettled feeling back then as I do now.
Sure, you can’t, and shouldn’t, be expected to pay attention to every bit of news that’s thrown your way, but at the same time, restricting your news consumption to only what interests you closes your mind to a lot of things.
Part of being a globally-minded citizen means going beyond your own self-interests and learning about the issues that affect other people.
Yes, I’m guilty of taking advantage of the National's business update or latest unrest-in-the-Middle-East story to go and brush my teeth, but I’m also one of those people who will sometimes sit through, say, a feature on the loyalty of Saskatchewan Roughriders fans – not because I’m particularly interested in the story itself, but because I’m interested in broadening my knowledge of the world around me.
And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be seated beside someone who’s a big Roughriders fan and that information will come in handy.
Proof in point: today’s current events quiz in journalism taught me that I should read the FreeP for more than just the comics and Arts & Life section. If I had at least scanned the Business section, I might have known Disney is moving out of St. Vital!
Regardless, useless content was never really an issue for me. Old stories, however, are, and this is a challenge Niiu doesn’t seem to have met.
In fact, they seem to be approaching that issue in a bit of a backwards way, as Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg sums up nicely in Time:
“The Web offers news every second and gives the option to link to blogs and other websites. Why would people read and even buy a story or information, which they select on the Internet the day before? It's old-school journalism.”
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