News.nl

» see news.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Free newspapers arrived in the Netherlands on 21 june 1999, when Metro and Sp!ts started on the same day and put half a million copies into commuter hands between them. De Telegraaf owned Sp!ts. In august 2000 it tried the trick a second time from the other end of the day, with an evening paper aimed at an older reader than Sp!ts had, and it called that paper News.nl.

The name is the artifact. In 2000 a company could look at a domain, decide it read as modern, then print it across the front of a physical newspaper as the actual title. Not a website address tucked in the corner. The masthead. Somebody in that building was certain that a dot and two letters made a broadsheet product feel like the future, and for about eight months they got to test it.

i was sixteen that summer, on a modem in Turkey that had recently got as far as 56k and still tied up the phone line. The premise of News.nl is that you take a free paper at six in the evening and carry it home, then go online to finish reading it. From where i was sitting that was not a small ask. Getting online in 2000 was a decision you made, with a noise attached, not something already running in your pocket.

~ the case file ~

~ the codes ~

Next to the articles were short codes. You typed one into news.nl and the site gave you the links and the background material that would not fit on paper. It is a QR code without a camera, seven years before anyone had a phone that could have read one, implemented with the only scanner available at the time, which was a person willing to retype four characters.

As an idea it is completely reasonable and it fails on a detail nobody could design around. The paper was in your hand at the moment you were least likely to act on it, on the way out of the office. By the time you were near a computer that could dial, the article had to still matter enough to justify the connection. Almost nothing in a free evening paper clears that bar.

~ the long tail ~

The distribution is what actually killed it. Metro and Sp!ts worked because they caught people at stations in the morning, standing still with nothing to do and a journey in front of them. News.nl was handed out at office buildings at going home time, and the accounts from the period say people leaving work simply had other plans than accepting a newspaper. It never passed a hundred thousand copies and De Telegraaf stopped it on 4 april 2001.

The Dutch tried the same hybrid again six years later. DAG launched in may 2007 from KPN and PCM, built explicitly to hand you a page and move you to a website, and it lasted seventeen months. By then broadband was normal and the excuse of a slow connection was gone, and it still did not work. news.nl does not resolve today. The paper was named after a domain, and the domain sat there for twenty five years after the paper stopped before going quiet itself.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »