My dad is old school. He gets a daily paper at his home in North Carolina and goes to the library to read The Wall Street Journal. He can’t really imagine a day without print. And the garbled emails I occasionally receive from him indicate he hasn’t really mastered his home computer.
So I was surprised recently when I showed him my iPad and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution iPad app. He spent some time fiddling around and pronounced himself a fan. He could envision a day, he said, when he would read his newspaper on a tablet computer.
If my dad can enjoy the experience, I’m pretty sure lots of folks will.
So I’m excited that in the next week or so The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will begin offering subscription “bundles” that include two digital ways to access the newspaper: the iPad app and the E-edition.
Both the iPad app and E-edition have existed for a while, with a limited number of users. But the launch will include improved versions that will be free to 7-day subscribers, and so we expect many more traditional print readers to give them a try.
Like many readers, I’ve continued my daily news habit of a printed newspaper, even after websites such as ajc.com started offering news. That’s in part because the paper is organized in a hierarchy, with the most important news at the top of the page and the front of each section. (Most websites, including ours, include importance as a factor when organizing the home page, but give more weight to breaking news updates and include other news that would never make the front page of the newspaper.)
The main reason I gravitate to print is because it includes the full page-turning experience. I value the ability to scan a full page of news, organized by headlines, and decide what to read. It’s a pleasure to page through the paper and serendipitously learn about things I didn’t even know were happening. I like the comfort of knowing that I have the whole newspaper in my hand — comics, ads and all — and am not missing anything.
The iPad provides a similar experience, and I believe that’s what my dad liked about it. The pages turn, you quickly comprehend the news hierarchy, and in both our iPad app and the E-edition, you can page through the entire newspaper. These digital products include some of the great features of the website too — searchability, the ability to share content, news updates that don’t require a printing press and trucks to deliver — but they retain the best things about reading a printed newspaper.
Now if all of this makes you nervous that someone is going to try to take away your print edition, let me assure you that is not the case. We have no plans to cut back on our commitment to print. In fact, figures came out this week showing that our Sunday print circulation is up nearly 7 percent, putting us among the fastest-growing newspapers in the country. We continue to hear from readers who say the paper is getting better, with more focus on in-depth and investigative reporting and valuable news that readers can’t get anywhere else. Our subscription sales are up and new subscribers are staying with us at a higher rate.
So we remain committed to our loyal print readers. But we’re also committed to following new technology so we can provide our content to our customers — both old school and early adopters — wherever and however they want to read it.
This month, that means a new offering of a print and digital bundle and digital-only subscriptions for those who want them. In coming months, we’ll include more tablet offerings that work on other formats such as Android. And as fast as the world is changing, who knows where it could lead in the years ahead?
So, I hope you’ll try the newspaper in these new incarnations. Fiddle around with them; let us know what you think. And maybe, like Dad, you’ll envision a world in which you experience an old friend in a new way.
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