Mark Porter

Lots of buzz going around recently about this project.

Newspaper publishers are always looking for solutions to their woes. The big hope right now is that new digital devices will come to the rescue. But there is another idea which has been hanging around for years, waiting for a technological solution — the personalised newspaper.

Hence the excitement over Personal News — a trial in Switzerland of a service which allows users to choose pages from a range of Swiss, German, Austrian and US newspapers and assemble them into a personal paper which is printed and delivered by the extremely efficient Swiss Post Office by 7 a.m. the next morning (or sent as a PDF).

Of course there are lots of questions to be asked… How do the newsroom deadlines match up to the printing schedule? How personalised is it? (You get to choose sections like business and sport from exisiting papers which are not very personalised in the first place). And does this minimal degree of personalisation change the game in any way? (It’s still yesterdays news, and you still have to pay for it).

But I’m intrigued by the design implications. Behind a bland front cover the pages seem to be reproduced directly from PDFs of the printed edition supplied by the sources (you can download a trial here). The effect of throwing together pages from a range of papers which originally had very different designs (and even different page sizes) is bizarre and unsettling. Of course, newspapers also have individual styles of writing and editing, but our promiscuous web habits probably make us less sensitive to this than we may have been in the pre-internet age. And magazines like The Week (and Internazionale) are living proof that text and images from a wide variety of sources can coexist if they share a coherent design.

But the visual form of a newspaper or magazine defines its character in a very powerful way, and reading a chimerical mixture of pages which retain their original design is curiously disturbing. As a publication designer I’m clearly hyper-sensitive but I suspect that the majority of readers would experience at least some of the discomfort I felt.

Editorial design is not just about readability or seduction, it is about creating an environment which reflects the values of the title. And to lurch suddenly from one environment to another, as you do here, can be quite vertigo-inducing. So if there’s a future for this kind of operation, it might have to be one where the content is poured into a new, conisistent design. There’s a good reason why web aggregators and weekly magazines have succeeded in this territory, but so far newspapers haven’t.