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."
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.
Read the full story on PDFzone: Journalism Project Tests Viability of PDF-Delivered News
