As newspaper publishers struggle with the problem of making new media journalism pay, and daily news habits migrate online, it’s easy to think that the newspaper itself is about to disappear.

Just as radio disappeared when TV was invented. Or the horse completely died out after the invention of the car. Or why vinyl is something you only now see in museums.

Except, of course, the invention of TV forced radio not to disappear, but to reinvent itself. It found a different niche in people’s lives, and honed the skill of telling stories through the medium of sound, as pictures could be seen elsewhere.

Now that horses aren’t the only way of travelling that isn’t on foot, riding a horse is a more remarkable experience. The nature of the animal, the power, the rush of not being encased in a protective shell or fully in control of your movements are what make horseriding something unique, and even more thrilling than it would have seemed two hundred years ago.

Vinyl didn’t go away either – it became a more focused, niche medium for those who appreciate its unique qualities. Competition doesn’t automatically create obsolescence. It creates opportunity, and forces enhancement and focus. When you don’t have to do everything, you can concentrate only on what you do really well. It is only when a medium’s inherent qualities are superceded in pretty much every way by its successors, that it is in danger (wax cylinders, VHS).

That’s why I believe that print magazines will continue and thrive, alongside e-magazines and the like. And also why newsprint isn’t dead yet.

The newspaper format itself is a unique piece of haptic technology, with its own distinct aura among societies all over the world. As a format and an object, it has power, associations, relevance. It is uniquely both disposable and authoritative.

Content printed on newsprint suggests that it what you are about to look at is immediate, informed, and designed to be useful, perhaps reportage or analysis that will help inform your day.

The same content in a book form suggests longevity, permanence, importance, as something to spend a while with and then to remain on your bookshelf as a part of the footnotes of your life. Discarding it will be a more difficult decision than to recycle a newspaper.

In other words, form tells our brain how to approach content. The best publications are those that know how to manipulate the properties of both.

Enter The Newspaper Club. Fans of the form as well as its content, last year they published a simple, really lovely creation, called Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet.

Concept proven, they moved forward and gained funding from the marvellous British public-service innovation fund 4iP among others, to create a forthcoming service I’m really rather excited about.

It is, quite simply, print on demand for newspapers. And even more brilliantly, their system (currently in testing phase) is designed to allow anyone to make a newspaper, no matter how limited their design skills are. The cherry on the cake – or the cake under the cherry, depending on your perspective – is that you can order any number of papers, from 5 to 5,000.

If the service can fulfill its potential, then it promises nothing less than to liberate the medium, to democratise newsprint, and to give the tools to the people to create a sudden flurry of hyper-local newspapers, creative fanzines, affordable catalogues, unusual teaching tools/reading lists, remarkable experiments in democracy and community, stunning one-offs in unexpected places, new ways of sharing event photography and a general rethink about what the medium can be used for. And that’s just what has emerged from their testing phase.

All of this creativity can only benefit newspapers themselves. Unless, that is, they’re piss-poor local newspapers with no competition to keep them keen, and with a few disgruntled ex-staffers that they recently made redundant. In which case, I’d start to get worried.

The best bit is this: by getting in now, before most news publishers migrate elsewhere and the presses are closed, The Newspaper Club are giving newsprint a chance to reinvent itself early, before we start to lose the skills and machinery that would be needed to make it truly succeed.

Perhaps a collection of such smaller tasks, combined with a few big clients, could provide enough income keep newsprint going – and even provide much-needed revenue for the mainstream newspapers themselves. There has always been extra capacity available at newsprint plants; never has it been more needed to be filled. And what a way to fill it.

If similar foresight had occurred with camera film, perhaps The Impossible Project might have had a different name.

If you want to see a lovely sample of what can be done, you could do far worse than to pick up the latest, limited-edition, graphic design mag Gym Class, printed by the Newspaper Club. It features lots of lovely content, including a unique magazine collection geek-off between me and Boico.

The aforementioned new issue of McSweeney’s is beginning to cause a stir in the American newspaper world, as the advance spreads seem to be getting people interested anew in the possibilities of newsprint.

“Ah,” say the skeptics. “Easy for them – they’ve had months to work on it. You couldn’t do that kind of thing with a daily.” Except you can. I spent much of last week in the company of the team from i, a tabloid-sized Portuguese daily newspaper with a design team of five (including two infographers), and this is some of their work:

And here are some feature spreads (they lose something being reproduced so small, but you get the idea). The second one features the two leading national political leaders, by the way:
























This next one I particularly liked. According to the paper’s American design director Nick Mrozowski (who is, by the way, 25 years old), they were watching the president’s speech to his party before the election, trying to think how to visualise it. Then they thought about the shape of the sound. Before the speech had ended, they’d called up the radio station and got them to send over a recording. They then used the below graphic to show over two spreads where (and why) he spoke louder and when he spoke softer, and when the applause came in relation to the power of his delivery. All turned around within a couple of hours. A lovely way to visually dissect politics.












And then there’s the announcement of the national ‘measures’ by the prime minister. Measures has the same double meaning in Portuguese – so they literally created measures, reprinting a true, life size image of him over eight spreads, with a measuring tape along the top. Here’s the first spread:









And here’s how they’d have looked if you’d have bought two copies and laid them all out.







(More of these over at Quinta Tinta)

The newspaper uses lots of illustration, and more interesting photojournalism, all on a very tight budget. It’s not perfect – the insides still look a bit too much like Monocle, the first section on breaking news tends to be a little more traditional, and, curiously, the weekend magazine isn’t as well designed as the newspaper itself. At its best, however, i suggests that there is still a vibrant future for newsprint, beyond minor tweaks of the same old designs. Being a brand-new newspaper must certainly have helped. A legacy can also be a millstone.

They certainly seem very open to playing with different ways of telling each day’s stories, which must make it a fun place for a fast-working designer with imagination. Their 100th issue, for example, featured a tiny pocket-sized souvenir version of that day’s edition in its centre pages, to cut out and fold for yourself. I also suggested a crazy idea to Nick for what they should do on April Fool’s Day next year. The fantastic thing is that I believe they just might do it.

What’s also great is that Nick tells me that everyone in the team is thinking visually now, and that journalists and editors come to him with visual-based stories as well as text-based ones. This is the kind of shift the newspaper industry has been crying out for – and one that most magazines underwent years ago. The hardest part comes in choosing what to put in.

The big question, however: is it working? It’s still too early to tell – i has been going for less than a year, and although sales are up every month, it’s still only the fifth or sixth most popular newspaper in the country. It’s been winning awards – most recently, best designed newspaper in Europe – but with no culture of newspaper subscriptions in Portugal, it also has to fight out the newsstand battle day after day.

Most interesting, perhaps, is this statistic: it claims that at least 20% of its current readership never used to buy a newspaper. And that they’re mostly 18-45 years old. That scraping sound you can hear is newspaper proprietors around the world suddenly sitting up a little straighter.

In what is surely little more than a curious coincidence, the latest issue of McSweeney’s magazine is laid out as a multi-supplement, fictional broadsheet newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama (which looks awesome), while the actual San Francisco Chronicle is about to become some kind of hybrid glossy newspaper. Next up: the paper Kindle, and the internet in handy book form. Oh.

(via A Photo Editor)