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A dose of the digital could revolutionise the print industry

Inspired by a community news project and desire to turn the Harry Potter ‘Daily Prophet’ newspaper into a reality, a collaboration between local communities, academic partners and a conductive print company created and developed newsprint prototypes. The results might just give print a new lease on life writes Rebecca Jayne Pattison.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | June 24, 2015

Simple paper stock has the capability to include digital devices, audio storage, speakers, microphones, led displays, colour changing fibres and even thin, flexible interfaces. When these devices are connected through pathways of conductive ink and a wifi hook-up, paper possesses the ability to be updated, shared, rated and responsive.

It all began with two communities in Preston, UK, in 2009 and the ‘Bespoke project’ to explore how these communities could generate and distribute their own local news content. From this and a collaboration involving community representatives, the universities of Central Lancashire, Surrey and Dundee, and  conductive print company, Novalia, interactive newsprint emerged as an innovative new platform for storytelling and connecting people to the community around them.

If you put a new form of digital technology into the hands of the public, how will they react? We all know what to expect from a newspaper, but bridging that digital gap challenges the familiar.

How do we turn a newspaper on? How do we know when it’s sleeping? These are not the questions that we normally tend to ask when we look at newspapers. Flicking through the pages is an instinctive action, but pressing icons and expecting to have interviews read back to you is another thing. This raised the questions of what icons to include, and how do they encourage this interaction.

For the Bespoke project, community reporters were provided with training and other community members were encouraged to get involved as prototypers’ and readers. Despite the production of a monthly newsletter being a perfectly adequate channel for the means of distributing local news, the majority of households opted for a newspaper format over a hyperlocal website. It was time to develop a suitably rejuvenated print model that appealed to those who were digitally excluded.

Both the Bespoke project and it’s progression to creating interactive newsprint were funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) . They have been featured in a number of academic journals, across domestic news outlets and showcased at national and international events, such as London Design Festival and SxSW.

“It began with Sandpit focus groups. This essentially involves locking an eclectic bunch of people and skills in a room together, and seeing what ideas they come up with” said John Mills from UCLan’s Media Innovation studio. The result was quite simply “a really interesting piece of disruptive technology”.

“In the first instance, we were basically inviting ideas and were getting feedback on the core concept,” said David Frohlich, Director of the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. “We took in a blank newspaper which they could populate with content and think about what an interactive newsprint would look like if it was printed.”

A number of ideas were generated through this process, one of which being the concept of a printed radio. Users could pick and choose from different audio streams from podcasts or radio channels and combine them on a single card. The aesthetics would simply be an image of a radio, with the ability to not only store audio but refresh it.

The project teamed up with various local media outlets such as Speak Up Preston, Blog Preston and the Lancashire Evening Post, to see how interactive newsprint could not only change the way people interact with newspapers, but also radio and hyperlocal websites. Posters featured bold category icons able to play back updateable content in the form of music streams and featured articles, read aloud.

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By bridging this digital gap, it already became much easier to collect analytical data, as you would on a website. Now the print industry can analyse how much interaction there is with a printed item, through social media shares, likes and overall click-rates. A system which printers, journalists and advertisers can all benefit from.

“They could digitally monitor interactions with analytics,” said Mills. Meaning that all involved were “starting to get a value judgement on content from the audience”.

With the development of more robust technology, the argument that ‘print is dead’ will soon be a thing of the past. With increasing revenue, reduction in production costs when produced at a higher capacity and generally putting something out there in an exciting new format, circulation figures are set to increase.

Mills predicts that within the next three to four years, we will be able to experiment with more robust technology that will allow this type of ‘smart’ print media to tie up its digital loose ends, becoming faster, more reliable and user-friendly.

So where does the future of interactive newsprint lie? Perhaps simply through the Internet of Things. By encouraging people to interact with paper items such as web-connected coffee cups where you can access your bite size chunks of morning news. What about theatre tickets that allow you to hear exclusive interviews with the director? Or even train tickets which provide travel updates? There is so much potential to take something practical and paper-based and use it to create a more immersive experience that has the potential to be, not only accessible, but adaptable on a daily basis.

At UCLan, thoughts have now turned to continuing to develop prototypes in news, children’s books and music. By collaborating with the company Bare Conductive, who supply the all-important raw materials of the touch board, in the form of Raspberry-Pi chips, they continue to experiment with various products.

The University of Surrey, on the other hand, is in the process developing a series of ‘Light Tags’ products that embrace a new way of involving interactive printed technology into our everyday lives.

The possibilities are endless but are the practicalities? Is it not just more convenient to do all these things on tablets or smartphones? Perhaps so but why not attempt to challenge those digital platforms which are already in place?

Many may have had their doubts about the print industry in recent years, but with the evolution of disruptive technology like this, it is certainly not ‘dead’.

Communities and academic partners from UCLan, Dundee and Surrey teamed up to create and develop newsprint prototypes with leading conductive print company, Novalia.

Pattison is a researcher at UCLan’s Media Innovation Studio, which is part of WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI).

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