Sunday Newspapers, Now With CDs

VirtualUK writes "The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition. They cite that one of the main reasons is that Internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD."

True

[Stonent1]

I remember playing pretty decent video on my 486 from a CD yet still forced to a tiny little window with garbled sound quality and badly pixelated video when trying to watch some streaming news.

Environmental concerns?

[Negative Response]

Newspaper is easily bio-degradable, I'm not sure about that of CDs. Plus you can wrap things with newspaper, but not with hard plastic.

Two mediums = bad

[TheAntiCrust]

Other than a few media clips the CD doesnt contain anything different from a normal newspaper. I think distributing the same thing in two mediums is annoying. I either want to read the paper, or watch a video. The short clips on the CD are easily available online too. The only place it makes sense to me to put a CD is on computer or game magazines where the CD content (game demos and apps) cannot be duplicated by 'traditional' means. Adding a CD to the paper makes it clumsy.

Re:good news!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you imagine that including the CD will in any way cut down on the amount of newsprint in the paper? I'd expect just the opposite. Anytime a notion like this suggests itself, just think "paperless office".

As for CDs being recyclable, even if they were (which they're not particularly), how would you gather them up after distributing them to every Sunday Times reader? Really the best way to "recycle" useless crap is before it's diffused out into the world.

Basically, does this need to exist? If the Sunday Times has trouble continuing without the extra ad revenue, does their business model still make sense?

Re:good news!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most newspapers are already made from recycled paper, and in most places there's usually a pretty good system for recycling again.

Old or unwanted CDs on the other hand generally get tossed in the land fill. Not to mention the nasty chemicals required to make the plastic in the first place.

CD's are not Biodegradable.

[reporter]

Unlike newspapers, compact discs (CDs) are not biodegradable and will contribute to the mountains of trash that Western societies already generate. Surely, Westerners can tolerate a bit of lag in an Internet connection to "The Times" newspaper in order to save the environment.

Forget the CD. The environment comes first.

... from the desk of the reporter [geocities.com]

bad implementation

[doodleboy]

An obvious attempt to find a new channel that more closely couples the advertisements and the content. I can see how the marketer-droids at the Times would want this, since with normal webpages it's so easy to run proxies [privoxy.org] that strip all the ads out. But here you have to endure entire commercials before you can even get to the menu. I bet half the people who look at it are going to shitcan the thing right there, never to try it again.

It kind of defeats the purpose of finding new eyeballs for ads if the implementation is so cumbersome and painful that it drives people away. Will these people ever learn?

Very true, but...

[WIAKywbfatw]

...you have to remember who their target audience is for this venture.

The target audience certainly isn't the more technical or internet-savvy PC or Mac user (the disc is dual format), it's the PC or Mac user who hasn't used their machine for much more than word processing, light browsing and email.

The kind of people who are wary of buying from websites like CD-Wow.com [cd-wow.com], Play.com [play.com], etc who offer great prices simply because they don't recognise the brands that they're dealing with are far more likely to buy something from a site backed by a brand (The Sunday Times) that they are familiar and comfortable with, respect and with which they possibly have a life-long affinity. In that respect, the CD serves its purpose.

Don't for a second be under any illusion that the CD is aimed at the typical Slashdot reader. A newspaper unlike a website can't differentiate between a nethead or a newbie, and as there are more people at the newbie end of the scale then the nethead one it is natural for The Sunday Times to pitch its offering at the less technical end of the PC and Mac market.

Remember, this isn't an addition to attract people who know one end of a PCI card from the other, it's an addition to attract floating readers to this particular broadsheet newspaper as opposed to the ones next to it on the shelves.

Re:Pure advertising

[1u3hr]

Everything on the CD is an advert for something else. You can't even get to the main menu without watching a video of a car advert.

Turn off autoplay for CDRs in Windows. Then just browse the files with Explorer or whatever filemanager you prefer. I really hate apps that just start installing themselves or playing some crap when I just want to check out a disk.

Idiots still

[pileated]

What I notice in the article and in the responses is that we have one more example of piss-poor hybridization. Though a few readers liked the idea most of them found the CD about as useful as the AOL CDs that used to seem to appear out of the ether.

What's sad but telling about this is that is looks like one more lame-brained, half-hearted, probably cheaply implemented, attempt to hybridize, or as I'm sure they PR people would say, synergize, two media. But it's like tacking Greek columns on a log cabin. It just doesn't work. The current CD adds nothing really useful to the newspaper. So eventually the newspaper will probably decide that it's not been as successful as they'd like and not worth the effort and cost to make it really successful. And the few readers who do find it useful will probably give up as it slowly degenerates due to cost-cutting.

This is not at all to say that I think that it couldn't work. It just seems to me that most people aren't willing to spend the time and money to really think through a winning hybridization that both makes money for the newspaper and gives readers something that they really want. I have to think of Google in relation to this. They came up with something that soon became indispensible to most people. It's possible that something similar could be done with newspapers and other media. It's just that no one's had the vision and resources to make it work.

Ah well. I guess you can't get a Google every day.

Re:CD Contents?

[Basehart]

Not sure if the CD that comes with the Sunday Times has a static copy but they already have an "ePaper" version of their daily available for around $120 a year. It's "printed" at 5am GMT on the day of publication!

This is a stupid idea

[KRL]

How many people do you know that actually read the daily paper that would be willing to stuff a CD in a computer? I don't know any.

CD's and paper don't mix... two completely different media... two completely different markets.

The only place that it makes sense to put a CD is a computing magazine or a gaming magazine... where the content of one is directly related to the other.

People read newspapers to get quick news and to scan the headlines. You can't scan a CD in a split second.

Re:Ah the joys of multimedia development.

[pod]

Huh? Am I missing something? Never in all my years using computers have I seen an application trying to enforce some runtime rules by crashing itself. That's just too fucking weird, especially since you seem to think it's a common practice. In anycase, what do you think ignoring a crash error will accomplish? Make the application function correctly again? I would think most crashes are due to referencing invalid pointers or serious bugs in the API... ignoring them doesn't seem like a very wise idea to me.

They should've used DVD...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and by that I mean movie DVD not DVD-ROM. Seriously, it's Sunday afternoon, what would most Sunday Times readers prefer to do? Boot their PC and mouse away at an interactive CD-ROM (so very 1996) or throw a DVD into their DVD player and widescreen TV and navigate through the movie clips and articles from the comfort of their couch?

Re:How about just selling CDs

[ajs318]

What is the big deal about killing trees? Trees are just plants. Nobody complains when they pull up potatoes to make chips, or lettuce to be put into sandwiches to be carefully picked out before eating.

When you cut down a tree to make paper -- at least in a country with private ownership of land -- you have to plant another one in order to keep the value in the land you own. Sure, it takes awhile to grow a tree in human terms, but it isn't long in tree terms. You can also do this in parallel, as long as you have enough land available.

Recycling options for paper include paper feedstock, composting and energy recovery. It is quite biodegradeable if suitably cut up.

Making CDs, on the other hand, uses up oil which will take much longer to replace than a few trees, and ties it up with aluminium. Recycling options for a CD are building materials or energy recovery. CDs are not biodegradeable.


By the way, why does every pet care "expert" make out that newsprint is poisonous to rodents? If this was the case, then wouldn't city rats all be dead from eating the discarded newspapers you see in every city? I suspect a plot by the pet shops to sell more bedding!

Re:Monthly, not every Sunday

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is the same as the problem with magazine disks - they often autorun (virus vector), they often carry the 'latest IE6' which you are encouraged to install (and which is branded to buggery)

If they put out a vanilla CD with plain HTML and an Images folder I'd be interested. If it's got flash, exe files, installing crap and so on I'll drop it right in the bin with the rest.

Well, it is multi-media

[gone.fishing]

Ever since the term was coined, I've felt that multi-media lacked something. I never could quite put my finger on it. To me, multi-media means a combination of different types of sources coming together to create a single more impressive product. Yet almost every multi-media project that I have ever seen fell far short of my expectations. Typically the products have seemed rushed and lacked depth or are missing elements that I had expected to be there.

The application that would define what multi-media is never really came along. Perhaps some games have come close but I don't really know since I no longer game.

Frankly, I don't blame a newspaper for trying a CD-ROM. I can't think of a business that needs to look at changing how it does business in response to the computer and the internet more than the dead-tree based newspaper. They need to change or they will be left in the dust. Like blacksmiths, saddle makers, and buggy whip companies. Newspapers have huge investments in printing presses, delivery methods, and other things that the internet could simply kill. It probably already has to some degree.

If I were a newspaper publisher, I can see how I would think a CD-ROM could be a useful adjunct to the tree based edition of my product. I'd see it as a bridge to moving away from paper and on to something different. If I were sitting in that seat, I think I would see the internet and computers as being a double-edged axe. If I moved towards internet publishing I could reduce costs but would also risk alienating a significant number of my subscribers. That is where the bridge would need to come into play. You could gradually get the readership used to it and as the profitability of the paper portion of the newspaper started to decline you reduce the size of it and put more of your efforts twords the CD and online versions. Eventually you reduce depencance on the CD and get everything online. This weaning process could take a decade or longer or may never have to happen. I'm sure newspapers suffered with the advent of radio and TV but they have weathered both rather nicely.

Waste of resources

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone may have already said this, so I apologise ahead, but like AOL CD's this a huge ecological f*up. Tons of uselss plastic platters that 90% of people wont use for 2 min and will then go to the landfil. At least send out cd-rw's so people can re-use the silly things!

G.

combine with the

[hanno_barikai]

Spray on computer. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/2 4/054219&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137
Then spray on a monitor..umm oh yes, spray on speakers and BAM! Newspaper that needs a CD.