The Akron Beacon Journal appeared on the newsstands in a new format last week. For 25 cents, buyers picked up not a folded newsprint product but a small cardboard sleeve containing a CD.
Much of the newspaper is available on the Web through the Ohio.com site. However, Monday’s launch of the CD version represented another way of producing, distributing and reading the newspaper.
The CD version, once loaded into a home computer, gives users the newspaper page by page the way it was printed, complete with advertisements. Instead of turning pages, users click to read the continuation of a story.
Compare that to the Web site, where photos and graphics are smaller and users have to click on categories to get the story they want to read.
In many ways, the CD version goes beyond the traditional paper version, too, although Mike Needs, director of Beacon Journal Interactive, acknowledges that only a small number of readers will want the CD.
“Ninety-eight out of a hundred readers won’t be interested,” he said Friday.
For those other two readers, the CD may be a godsend.
“For people with vision problems, this is a terrific way to read the newspaper,” Needs said. A click of a computer mouse increases the size of the type as much as the user wants.
Mail subscribers are another major beneficiary. The mail delivery of a CD will be much faster for readers in Florida, who often wait two to four days to receive newspapers by mail.
Some subscribers need more than one copy of each day’s newspaper.
“I NEED the BJ on CD,” one man said in an e-mail. “I don’t have time to read my paper before I leave in the morning. When I get home, it is gone, or in sections all over the house, or sections turned in so that the front page is unrecognizable.”
Needs said the CD version also may be more appealing to college students and younger people who have grown up in the electronic age and find the paper product cumbersome.
The CD version offers features beyond the regular newspaper. There are links to photos not published in the paper because of space considerations; people with Internet connection can access the URLs contained in advertisements and they also can access Web sites related to editorial content.
Other advantages aren’t so obvious.
No trees are cut down to produce the CD. The CD itself is not recyclable, Needs said.
The CD doesn’t have crinkled pages or out-of-registration photos, problems that sometimes plague the printed version.
One definite disadvantage: The CD version contains the earliest edition off the presses, and sports scores may be missing. Needs said there are links to the Web pages with updated stories and scores.
Needs said that sales, which began Monday at about 30 Acme, Holland Oil and Speedway locations, averaged about 150 each day last week.
Just around the corner is an online version of the CD format. Needs said that project is expected to debut in August. Unlike the Web site, which can be accessed for free, users will have to pay to get the CD version online.
The format for the CD is unique to the Beacon Journal.
It was developed by Beacon Journal employee Mark Kovack, a systems integration engineer. He had been asked by Bob Tigelman, vice president of new initiatives, to devise a way for the Beacon Journal’s library to archive pages of the newspaper.
A patent is pending for the software program that Kovack devised, and Needs said the program has been demonstrated to the Beacon Journal’s corporate owners, Knight Ridder, and other national outlets.
Needs is hopeful that what is happening in Akron may spread across the nation in yet another old-media adaptation of new technology.
If so, that will be yet another example of the survivability of newspapers.
