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Dec. 1st Meet the Printnets: your new audience

No print publication should be rethought today without paying attention to its digital companions.  I agree with William Powers, the media columnist for the National Journal magazine, who writes that “print is eternal”. However, it will only be eternal if it adapts to changes that are too rapid to assimilate properly. For editors, it is a constant dilemma about content and how to treat it; for publishers, the questions are many, and range from running the finances of their firms across multi platforms to how to give each of the platforms its appropriate role, while attracting new audiences without alienating the loyal ones.  In fact, when Rupert Murdoch recently addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he said:

“I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband Internet access. “

Some get more specific than that.  For example, Philip Meyer, author of the book The Vanishing Newspaper, examines today’s declining readership and states that the last reader recycles the last printed paper in 2040 – April, 2040, to be exact.  My last grandchild, David Mario Lazaro, born November 10, 2008, will be 32 then, indeed, a digital native.

However, in between, we are going through a period of transition, where readers who grew up with print, but who have taken quickly to the charms and efficiency of the Internet, go easily from columns of printed text to Google screens.  It is a back and forth journey, repeated several times daily, which, in fact, brings about some definite reading behavioral patterns: these readers can read deeply, but they are voracious scanners, who value effective navigation, and who not very forgiving when it comes to design that is intricate and not functional.

Maybe these are not yet among Murdoch’s digital natives, but they are what I would call “printnets”-—at home in both the worlds of print and the Internet.  They vary in age from 35 to 80—-as we were able to verify during the 2007 remake of The Wall Street Journal.  We have an obligation to design publications who cater to them, the pre-digital native audience.

I am a printnet, too

Of course, I am a printnet, and, if I had any doubts, they vanished last night during the Miami to Frankfurt flight, as I devoured the entire Nov. 17 edition of Newsweek, devoted to a post-election analysis of how Barack Obama fought for and won first the Democratic nomination, and, eventually, the 2008 election.  This was not a particularly graphic issue of Newsweek, but the writing was so enticing, full of details, and well organized (into seven segments), that I found myself turning the pages as if it was a favorite novel.

More about printnets in upcoming postings of this blog.

To read TheRodrigoFino blog, in Spanish, go:
http://garciamedia.com/latinamerica/blog/

Today, Rodrigo Fino writes about how magazines promote themselves, often previewing covers and stories prior to actual publication of their editions.