Why all newspapers need a printed permalink
Have you ever been reading your daily morning commute newspaper and stumbled across a great article and thought “I must share that with my friend X”. After getting to work, after partaking in your morning coffee, you browse through that papers online edition as you know with today’s more-convergent news operations everything is re-published online. Then you can twitter, del.icio.us or email that link off. But it’s impossible to find and the newspaper’s online search can’t find it because lets face-it their search is terrible. You give in and return to Techcrunch.
So all I want is something dead simple. Why don’t newspapers publish a small tinyurl permalink underneath every article title pointing to it’s location in that newspaper ’s online website. Then when I see something interesting I want to read in full later, bookmark for reference or crucially share with friends and colleagues, it’s immediately available to me. I could even Twitter it on the spot.
In the future newspapers are going to need to continue the reading experience back and forth through online and offline media to help fight the rising tide coming their way.
So Telegraph, Guardian and Times Online how about a little link-love in the paper?
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About the author
Stuart is a technologist’s technologist and one of the founding partners at Made By Many. He also is a champion of fluid, Agile business structures and new disruptive business models for a disruptive age. Follow @stueccles on Twitter
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Comments (5)
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Responses (1)
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Is there enough demand for print permalinks? | News in brief
[...] don’t print articles have permalinks, asked Stuart Eccles in a blogpost yesterday. That is, why doesn’t every article in the newspaper come with a [...]
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Germanleft wing paper “der Freitag” started to do this as they renewed their concept.
I found a (real) issue of the german paper “der Freitag” in a bar/cafe and found interesting articles dealing with africa (which is always difficult).
all the articles had a printed permalink.yeah.
but, now i would not buy the der freitag anymore cause its online.
German taz printed an huge article about black american WWI heros. it has never been digitalized and its pinned on my wall. so its in a way lost…like in the good old offlinedays.
you cant even google the article, nowone will find it woldwide.You must come to berlin and searcht the the “taz-archiv” in berlin, in case you know abot this article.
some newspapers even dont have an rss-feed. imagine. they are online, but u have to fuckin visit them day by day, to serach their (well-written) online paper.
letat
March 5, 2009
at 8:19 am
Really good idea. Make the transition seamless. I like the idea. I think newspapers will get there sooner rather than later.
Anjali
March 6, 2009
at 3:33 pm
Rails Magazine already does that – all articles are followed by a short URL, pointing to an online page with the article, comments etc.
Olimpiu Metiu
March 8, 2009
at 4:32 am
enlightening article,thanx.
puma
March 12, 2009
at 3:01 am
You might be interested in site called The Local Paper [1] started by Chris Roos [2] which aims to have permalinks for articles in a number of local papers.
[1] http://the-local-paper.co.uk/
[2] http://chrisroos.co.uk/
James Mead
March 13, 2009
at 3:55 pm