Foundation Update (Fall 2006 issue)
Feature
Virtual Reality
Newspaper In Education programs are exploring online routes to deliver services. By Dinah Eng
With the growth of electronic newspaper editions, Newspaper In Education programs are preparing to head into cyberspace as well, moving to capture tech-savvy young readers in the medium they use.
Online programs are offering curriculum guides, teacher resources and links to other Web sites that may be helpful to students doing research projects. At some newspapers, access to electronic editions is being counted as other paid sales, just as print NIE subscriptions are.
One metro operation with an online NIE program is the Denver Newspaper Agency, which started offering replica electronic editions to subscribers in April 2003.
“Our former CEO, Kirk MacDonald, announced in 2005 that we would become paperless in 2007,” recalls Dana Plewka, Denver’s educational services manager.
She and Jill Armstrong, Denver’s youth content editor and NIE Webmaster, began working on a plan for an online NIE program. “Between the two of us, we’d debate what is it, how do we promote it, who’s going to use it, how will they order it, how will we deliver, count and pay for it?”
Once the Audit Bureau of Circulations finally signed off on it, Plewka says, Denver launched an electronic program for kindergarten through 12th grade in September 2005.
She notes that the first step was introducing the concept at a summer teachers’ conference, where 300 educators were given an online product demonstration, and offered free access for two months to familiarize themselves with it.
“The subscriber electronic editions were available, but we were working on the programming for the multiple licenses to schools,” Plewka says. “We didn’t want kids to have access at home, so we set things up to protect the integrity of the program, which is not designed to take the place of home delivery.”
Teachers now order an electronic class set by the number of students in their classes, paralleling what happens on the print side, where a teacher may order a class set and share the printed newspapers from one period to another.
“It’s being wildly received, much more so than we anticipated,” Plewka says. “I was hoping we’d move people off the print into the electronic edition, but what we found was it generated more excitement for NIE. While teachers might order some electronic editions, they also ordered print editions for students who might be slower. The print editions went up, and the electronic editions were up over 100 percent of what we projected.”
Plewka and Judd Alvord, senior vice president of circulation for the Denver Newspaper Agency, decided that while the program could go paperless, it’s not in the best interest of their customers – the schools – to do so.
“Once you get started on this, you find the electronic editions are great for the upper grades, but the younger kids in the primary grades still want those Mini Pages for the tactile experience,” she says. “My advice for coordinators who want to do this is to buy a couple of really good laptops, and go out and start training the teachers. You can’t sell this by direct mail. It’s a ‘show me’ product that you have to demonstrate.”
While there are no official numbers for how many virtual NIE programs exist, an Audit Bureau of Circulations report for the period ending March 31, 2006, showed 142 newspapers reporting electronic editions. That was an increase of 12 over the report for the period ending Sept. 30, 2005, the first time that electronic editions were included.
John Murray, NAA’s vice president of circulation marketing, says more newspapers are adding electronic editions to increase their circulation numbers, and are looking at innovative applications for the product, such as pairing it with NIE programs.
“With NIE, students are being licensed at the site, so that newspapers deliver an e-edition to the school on CD, which can be posted to their intranet, or the school gets a password and can access the e-edition on the newspaper’s Web site,” he says.
Currently, adds Murray, the nearly 150 newspapers reporting electronic editions account for 1.1 percent of total paid circulation, but most of that figure is attributed to subscribers of The Wall Street Journal’s electronic edition alone. Without the Journal in the mix, e-editions comprise less than half of 1 percent of total paid circulation.
“It seems to make a lot of sense for newspapers to tie NIE to their electronic editions,” Murray says. “It’s difficult to find a downside. I’d expect more experimentation in the coming year.”
Another newspaper offering schools access to the online edition is the Idaho Press-Tribune in Nampa, Idaho. The Press-Tribune launched “e-trib” in the winter of 2005, and began offering the product to schools in a pilot program in the spring of 2006.
“My goal is to get 50 percent of our NIE students online this fall,” says Laura Stewart, circulation director of the Press-Tribune, who notes that the newspaper is in 225 classrooms with about 2,000 papers per month during the school year. “We’re focusing on the junior high and high school kids. They really like being able to search by story, enlarge the story, print out photos, and do what they want with the paper, instead of it being in a static platform.”
Stewart says moving NIE into cyberspace helps the newspaper to reach younger readers, who learn on computers, and also cuts costs by not having to print and deliver the product.
She advises any newspaper interested in creating a virtual NIE program to get a feel for what local school districts want first, then give complimentary subscriptions to schools to make sure everything runs smoothly before charging for online access.
“I think electronic editions are the way to go, especially with NIE,” Stewart says. “We’re trying to get new readers, and we have to reach them in the medium they use.”
At The News-Journal in Daytona Beach, NIE Manager Nancy Govoni has been generating online program offerings for 10 years now, but the newspaper does not yet sell electronic editions to its schools.
“We’re promoting the use of the printed product, because that’s where our community and the newspaper are right now,” she says. “I like schools to use the print product, go online with us, and come back to the print product.
“It’s going to be harder and harder for print media to stand alone in the age of the Web. We need to intermesh with the technology so that people can see how to use both products to create smart readers.”
Cindy Piller, educational services manager of the Daily Times-Call in Longmont, Colo., says the use of electronic editions for NIE programs is new territory, and while the demand for it is clear, not every community can take advantage of the product yet.
“There are lots of teachers who would love to not have that newspaper ink on their fingers,” says Piller, whose newspaper does not have an electronic edition. “But having supplementary material that teachers can download, especially in a PDF, doesn’t work in our area because there’s no money for copy paper, not to mention textbooks. Not every child has access to a computer in every classroom.”
Still, the day is coming when technology will allow virtual NIE programs to exist everywhere.
“When I look at what’s happened over the last five years in technology, it’s amazing to see what we’ve been able to do,” Piller says. “I think there will be increased pressure for electronic editions because teachers like less mess. But ideally, we could use both the printed and electronic editions.”
Dinah Eng is a freelance writer and columnist for Gannett News Service based in Los Angeles. She can be reached at dinaheng@earthlink.net.
