Newspaper Club

You’ll be pleased to know that after our Investor Crisis midweek our shiny new Skype headsets arrived yesterday. They’re very nice and they came in a clever little postbox friendly cardboard box.

This morning I thought I’d try Skyping the rest of the team.

I tried Engineering first. No answer. I don’t think they were awake yet.

I tried Sales & Marketing next. No answer. I think they’d gone out for breakfast. They often do that.

Anyway, the headsets are splendid and this has got us wondering if anyone else would like to donate to a teeny start up. We’re particularly after some Aeron chairs right now.

In other news, we’re printed some more newspapers which I’ll blog about later and we’re fine tuning the design of key pages. We’re also getting ready for a very quiet, very private, very Beta launch next week. We’re going to test the site on a handful of people and if that goes well we’ll release the Beta to rest of the 2,000 people currently on our signup list.

(I’m not sure if “release the Beta” is recognised terminology. I was going to ask Engineering but they weren’t awake.)

We like 4ip. We like that they mock us and we mock them. We don’t think this is the normal investor/start-up relationship. For instance, we had this conversation yesterday (start from the top and read down). Apologies to anyone who thought we were really having a relationship crisis. Though I notice no-one came forward with offers of alternative funding. (Maybe because we take the piss out of our investors.)

Oh, and big thanks to Skype for the headsets. Very kind.

In other news, we’re very close to beta.

Remaining issues – paypal have to send us a letter with a secret code in it. We need to determine our VAT status before we can tell you our prices. We need Ts & Cs and Terms of Trade, so we need to have more meetings with lawyers.

Nearing beta now. Engineering frustrated with PayPal. PayPal convinced we’re fraudsters. Sales & Marketing writing copy. Art redesigning pages. Many enquiries coming in. Phone calls. VAT returns. Emails. More forms. Raised voices. Icons. Meetings. Specs. Meetings. Plans.

Soon, very soon.

We’ve been waiting for more pictures before writing about this. But I don’t want to let another day slip by, so I’m going to mention it now and we can add more pictures when they arrive.

One of the things we hoped for when we started this foolish quest would be that people would think of things to do with Newspaper Club that we couldn’t have imagined ourselves. 2Halves is a perfect example. It’s a special one-off newspaper, written by Spurs and Arsenal bloggers, 3,500 copies were printed yesterday morning in anticipation of the latest North London Derby and handed out to fans before the game. It’s a lovely looking thing, produced by our friends at The Rebel Alliance, and, if you missed it, you can download a pdf at their website. (Or, if you’re quick request a printed copy.)

As I say, more pictures when we get them. But, in the meantime, congrats to The Rebel Alliance for a splendid idea – which will hopefully inspire others to do something similar.

We had a Status Meeting this morning.

Everything is going well. All on target. Engineering ensure us a beta launch is “geologically imminent”.

We also had to fill in an Investor Status Report which made us realise we’re only £500 away from reaching 50% of our revenue target. That’s got to be good, especially pre-launch. Pre-lunch in fact, as Engineering have just popped out for a sandwich.

Matt is also doing a splendid job on the Guide To Newspaper Club he’s putting together. Today he presented us a glorious flat plan. On a flip chart.

Made a nice change from all the PowerPoint Sales and Marketing put us through.

(A quick introduction: In the run up to launch Matthew will be in Newspaper Towers playing with the interaction and language of our guide. When he’s finished it should answer all of the questions you have before you put together your own publication – and if it doesn’t then that’s his fault. He’ll also be doing a few behind the scenes blog entries, kind of like our own embedded reporter. So, without further ado, over to Matthew…)

It’s worth restating that for all of the brilliant and compelling reasons there are for making a newspaper, they don’t amount to much without content. Well-designed layouts are quite forgiving of white space, but 12 blank pages is a threat for people familiar with printing, let alone newcomers: yesterday’s staus meeting made it clear that even large organisations are having trouble ‘getting those final two pages in place’.

(Of course, in time this may be another thing the Bespoke Service will be able to help with: “Throw enough money at us and we’ll print on gold.”)

Something I need to emphasise in the guide is the fact that preparation of content is essential. Really. Part of the fun of the system is being able to play with how your copy looks on the page. If you think you’ll want to print a newspaper around the launch then go away now and start gathering words and pictures. I mean it: Now. It’s better to have to leave things out than abandon a half full draft.

In other news, the success of the Postcode Paper prompted Sales and Marketing to secure motivational literature for the team:

You may have noticed we’ve slightly changed the Newspaper Club logo. The previous one used a temporary paperboy graphic whilst we worked behind the scenes to create a bespoke one.

I’d like to tell you about the thinking behind the logo and show you some of the versions that didn’t make the cut. Other start ups don’t give you that level of transparency, do they?

When you think of newspapers you probably think of that ‘funny marmalade’ font. And you’d be right. That font you’re thinking of visually equals newspaper, so I elected to use that. Simple. I’m a huge fan of not over complicating design, as my old boss used to say, “you might say cliché, I might say crystal clear communication”.

Most of the typography that would pass as crystal clear communication for a newspaper masthead is based on the font Blackletter. Blackletter has it’s uses, but on screen is not one of them. In fact, it’s more Duchy Originals than Daily Oregonian as over an incredible 1,000 years Blackletter has undergone many cuts and derivatives and most broadsheet newspapers today use stylised versions. Or typefaces based on a gothic Blackletteresque font, more accurately.

I needed a version that said ‘newspaper’ as instantly as Blackletter but worked well on screen.

Back in June (on day one in fact) I looked at several versions and settled on Brauhaus . It has been simplified and is therefore better for online use yet it still retains the newspaper feel I was after. To make the letters more distinctive I opted to change the N and the C for slightly tweaked versions of the Blackletter N and C.

That’s the word marque sorted but for a modern start up you need an icon for all those pesky 32×32 square icons you have to create. And that’s where the paperboy came in.

The original inspiration was the Paperboy Atari game from the 1984. That’s a sort of digital newspaper joke for people of a certain age.

A little character would be handy for all those icons and also for guiding you through the newspaper making process. It feels right for Newspaper Club as we’re a friendly tool for people and communities not a secretive, hard edged, spiky tech dot com.

We used this chap for a while, but it was just a place holder. We wanted our own, so we tasked the amazing Rexbox with creating one for us. Rex has worked on all sorts of cool stuff including co-creating LittleBigPlanet and stuff for Disney and MTV.

Here he is. The paperboy, not Rex.

The result is a modern, friendly logo whilst hinting at the visual history of the newspaper masthead.  We hope you like it.

Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand why we’re taking content in a format that’s perceived as new and printing it out in a format that’s perceived as old. And then I was reading this article in The Guardian and the editorial legend Sir Harold Evans uses this rather nice expression, “I’m in love with the craftsmanship of print. But I have to say I’m intoxicated by the speed of the web”.

That seems to sum it up rather nicely.

I think I can confidently predict we’ll be adding a Changing Our Mind A Lot Strategy to our Disappointing Strategy. As Simon as pointed out in the comments on the previous post; we shouldn’t say we’ll be UK only at launch, we should say that we’ll only be printing in the UK at launch, but we’ll be able to ship worldwide. That’s fair. Though it probably won’t be cheap. It’ll probably be just about affordable with the smaller print-runs, though for 5,000 papers it’s going to cost a lot. We’ll find out just how much and report back.

We should, for future reference, also point out that almost all our plans and procedures can be changed if you’re willing to throw enough money at us.

(The picture above does show us working in a coffee shop, yes, but we should point out to the investors that it was a special promotional coffee shop and the coffee was free. Newspaper Club – Looking after the pennies so the pounds look after themselves.)

One of the things we’ve always been careful to say about Newspaper Club is ‘it won’t be as good as you’re imagining’. It’s easy to think of all sorts of great things you can do with newspapers, it’s a lot harder to actually do them, so lots of them, we won’t be doing.

Here are a couple of the specific disappointments we’re going to offer for the beta launch in a few weeks.

When we start the only product you’ll be able to get will be a twelve-page newspaper. We’ve been assuming all the way through the process, up to Friday, that it would be 16 pages, but now we’ve decided to knock four off.

Firstly, it keeps costs down – adding extra pages is what makes printing expensive. But secondly, and most importantly, 16 pages requires a lot of content, a lot. And we think it’s going to be hard for people to do that much.

This is something we’re thinking about a lot. Making a newspaper is hard, it takes work, effort. It won’t be a quick burst of fun, creative decisions like making your Moo cards. It’ll mean assembling lots of content, deciding where to put it, lining it all up, working out where to get it delivered, lots of stuff. It won’t be something people’ll do just casually. You’re going to have to want to make a newspaper. We don’t think is a bad thing, we think lots of people will want to make one, and we’re going to make it as easy as we can. But one way to do that is to give people less blank pages to fill up. So – for launch – 12 pages.

The second big disappointment we’re announcing is that, for launch, we’ll only be able to print in the UK. This is simple logisitics. We only want to work with printers we’ve actually met, who we have good relationships with and we want to make sure that shipping etc works well and costs a reasonable amount. We don’t have time to be visiting and negotiating with printers elsewhere. Not yet anyway.

Hopefully, once we’re up and running, we’ll be able to add other printers and other countries pretty quickly. But, at the beginning, it’ll just be UK. Sorry.

So, keep lowering those expectations, and soon we’ll explain why all the design decisions we’ve made suck too.