1. THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS?
Printed electronics meets hyperlocal and community co-design
John Mills
@_johnmills

2. Essentials
 Interactive Newsprint is seeking to
develop and test a new platform for
community news and information
 Using innovating printed electronics
technology, Interactive Newsprint
can create printed matter that has
‘capacitive touch’ qualities
 Working with communities
throughout Preston, Interactive
Newsprint hopes to carve out a
relevant, useful and usable platform
 Developing a commercial
model, focussing on paper-based
analytic data, that would add value
to printed materials

3. Background: The Bespoke Project
 EPSRC funded project as part of Digital Britain programme
 Running between April 2009 and April 2011
 Interdisciplinary project partners from University of
Sussex, Dundee, Falmouth, Newcastle and Central Lancashire
 Bespoke: combining digital storytelling and innovate collaborative
design methodology
 Developed ‘Insight Journalism’ methodology: where journalistic
‘insights’ are used to inspire design ‘action responses’

4. Bespoke record
 Recruited voluntary, semi-professional and professional
journalists
 Newspaper distributed every month
 Co-designed by community
 Distributed through every letterbox
 Offers an open platform for community to submit to
 Developmental news-website
 Based around map interface and carries all digital content
 Used by designers during insight and analysis stage of design
interaction methodology
 Delivered a range of digital designs into the community
 Viewpoint and Wayfinder key outputs from the project

5. Beyond Bespoke and the current news
environment
 Newspaper was found to be unsustainable
(time, resource and economics)
 Local communities found newspaper a valuable
resource
 Bespoke’s legacy was a team of community
contributors and establishing partnerships
between university and a range of groups
throughout the city

6. Wider industry issues: Newspapers are dead…
Philip Meyer – The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer – The Vanishing Newspaper
 e

7. Wider ecosystems:
 Falling circulations among regional press
 Johnson Press’s (owner of 250 regional
titles
 Pre-tax loss of £144m for 2011
 Revenues fall by 6%
 Daily circulation declines by 7.9%
year-on-year
 Last year, cut 670 jobs
 Newsroom job cuts
 Digital transference: offline to online
 Some hyperlocal experiments struggling to
make sufficient revenue
 Some have posited that ongoing digital
development and technological
advancement, such as those predicted by
George E. Moore would save journalism. The
rise of the tablet fuelled app store

8. Interactive Newsprint
 18-month project combining
interdisciplinary academic and
commercial team spanning
technologists, human-computer
interaction specialists, journalists
and product designers
 Developing ‘interactive paper’ with
capaciinternet connectivity
 Investigating the affordances of
digital paper, community news
requirements and commercial
opportunities
But what is ‘interactive newsprint’, really………?
Conductive ink that creates capacitive touch
functions
Chip allows audio to be embedded and log
interactions
Developing internet connectivity to allow both
upload and download: enabling the paper to
become part of the 'internet of things'

9. Demonstration
time!0

10. Premise: can interactive and digitally-
enabled paper save the news industry ?
 Seeking to utilise advantages of the affordances of digitally-enabled
paper
 Working with communities to articulate a new and useful ‘news
platform’ that moves beyond the traditional form and purpose
 Applying some of the online advantages to paper materials
use new technological advantages to create a
sustainable, relevant and populated community news
platform
Work with communities within Callon and Fishwick, but
also from across the city Preston to establish useful and
relevant community content
Current partners span
Community radio station
Housing association
Youth groups
Preston's 20 year Guild festival
celebrations

11. Method: Developing a community co-design process
 Autumn 2011: Designers prototype concepts
 November 2011: Community members feedback and explore
technology in creatively facilitated workshop
 Winter and Spring 2012Designers, journalists and HCI specialists
develop themes and produce ‘responses’
 February 2012: Second workshop with ‘stakeholders’ and
content creators
 Prototypes are iterated over summer
 Community editors will each develop their own platform
 Examples of editors include
 Community radio station
 Housing association
 Youth groups
 Local business community
 Local press

12. Internal decision making: Kitemarks
 c

13. Multifaceted methodology: eco-system
 Community codesign
 series of workshops inviting members of the community to suggest ways they could utilise the
technology (but this doesn't mean they ask for something and we build it)
 Designers, technologists and journalists take this inspiration and run with it
 Community content generation
 working with trained volunteers, established community-focussed publishers and broadcaster and
professional media, we aim to produce a vibrant editorial ecosystem from which to draw
 Researching the affordances of digitally-enabled paper
 At its very core, digital paper is a emerging technology. As part of the research, the project will aim to
distil basic affordances of paper. For instance: How do you turn a piece of paper on?

14. Paper data
Commercial imperatives
 Developing a sustainable business
model for hyperlocal news via
interactive newsprint
 Internet connectivity is key
 Digital back-channel and creation of
paper data.
 Opens up a whole new world: provides
advantages of digital, but with paper
 Analytic information based on interactions
 Pay-per-click
 Pay-per-mill
 Location data
 Individual user accounts
 Targeted advertising and advertising
campaigns on a local, hyperlocal and national
level
 and many other things
 What is key here is that specific
information could be ascertained through
paper data
You can see what was popular and wasn't, you can see what people were reading and what they
are engaging with. You've also got comments and [user] ratings under articles, so you can
genuinely get a feel for right now for what's going on at a story- by-story level."

15. Data and editorial construction
 d
“You can see what was popular and
wasn't, you can see what people
were reading and what they are
engaging with. You've also got
comments and [user] ratings under
articles, so you can genuinely get a
feel for right now for what's going
on at a story- by-story level."

16. Interactive Newsprint: future work
Between now and Christmas, the
Interactive Newsprint team will:
 prototype 3 to 5 codesigned platforms and
roll them out throughout the community
 develop a commercial model through
internal development, but through organised
and creatively facilitated workshops
 continue to partner with local, national and
international publishers to develop
Interactive Newsprint as a commercial
offering.
 Monitor how editorial production, and more
specifically output, will alter in response to
the platform's affordances