Over the past year, INMA’s researcher-in-residence and lead of the Readers First Initiative Greg Piechota has heard from publishers around the world who are rethinking the role of e-papers. During this week’s Webinar, The second life of e-paper, he gave INMA members a closer look at the new role the product is playing in the digital era. Phil Schroder, digital marketing consultant and former director of consumer transformation at Gannett, and Simon Regan-Edwards, publishing director at Daily Mail Digital Publishing, joined Piechota in an exploration into how e-papers have changed and what kind of potential they hold for news media organisations.

Piechota noted that e-papers are now being recognised as useful “bridge” products to help retain print subscribers who may be reluctant to go digital but like the familiarity and functionality of an e-paper. Many publishers are now looking at how they can improve the e-paper experience to appeal to such users.

“It’s no longer just like a PDF version of a newspaper,” he explained. “It has extra content, extra pages; it has afternoon, evening editions. It has a Web view in addition to a replica view, so if you want to read articles in a more convenient way by scrolling, you can.”

Features like videos, podcasts, TV listings searches, puzzles, and games give users more options for engagement. “An e-paper doesn’t need to be just a replica,” Piechota said. “It can be a much richer newspaper with all the features people liked in the past.”

Why are e-papers so appealing?

One of the big draws for e-paper readers is their familiarity, Regan-Edwards said. Although the Daily Mail experimented with different digital formats over the years, he has found that readers always come back to the e-paper format.

“We had been trying to reinvent the digital edition and they did not want that. They wanted something that was much more familiar to them,” Regan-Edwards said. But, in addition to the familiarity, they like the new features that the digital version affords: “They loved the ability to zoom to make the font bigger, to have extra picture galleries. So it’s not that they just want a flat PDF; they want an enhanced edition that is still rooted in the format that they know.”

Another appealing aspect of e-papers is that they don’t go on forever in an endless digital scroll, Schroder added.

“It’s a finite product. You go through a certain number of pages and you’re done with it.”

However, Schroder said that may change: “I see the product continuing to evolve …  shifting from being a static product to where it may even be evolving throughout the day as new updates are coming in on stories or there’s breaking news.”

Taking readers deeper

At the Daily Mail, the e-paper is a hybrid app that provides the kind of experience print readers long for but incorporates additional functionalities: “It also gives you modules where you can create your own Web view experiences,” Regan-Edwards said. “We have used that to add additional layers on top of the e-paper that allows us to create our puzzle bundles every day, as well as an ability to bookmark articles so that when you bookmark an article in the e-paper, you can then keep it into your saved articles area.”

Those kinds of digital enhancements, he said, are becoming an expectation among readers and are something that “any good e-paper product should now have.”

Unlike print newspapers, the e-paper’s analytics offer the Daily Mail insights into what stories are being read, how long they are being engaged with, and more. The dashboard shows the type of users (scanner, regular, long reader, etc.) reading the articles as well as the platforms they’re accessing the e-paper from. Most of the e-paper readers are older, using a tablet, and reading at home.

“Usually, at home, you get a very high engagement time, over half an hour,” he said. “This excludes the time people spend playing the puzzles in addition to this. So you’ve got a highly engaged audience.”

That high level of engagement offers news media organisations a unique opportunity to drive revenue. Schroder said that when he worked at McClatchy, for example, sports stories were effective for keeping readers engaged longer: “They love going to look at all the details about every game. We were able to add that very easily within a digital process, and it doesn’t take four pages of print,” he said.

Entertainment news is another area that can be scaled without the additional costs associated with print. And, while it costs money in the form of extra labour from the content and design team, Schroder said the extra revenue for advertising on those additional pages can more than cover those costs.

Switching customers from print to digital

Timing can affect how well subscribers embrace the e-paper edition, and both Regan-Edwards and Schroder agreed that news media companies should start pushing digital options from day one. The 70,000 print subscribers to the Daily Mail are also given digital access, and Regan-Edwards said those subscribers frequently receive e-mails reminding them of the other things they can do with their subscription when they go online, such as playing puzzles.

“One thing that we insist that people do when they become a subscriber, even a print-only, is they have to create an account,” Regan-Edwards said. “That account is a digital account that gives them access to their digital products. So that’s a key part of that migration; tell people they’ve got an account and they have to create that.”

Schroder said that at McClatchy and Gannett, the push for the digital e-paper was a crucial part of the onboarding process.

“Within the first week, they would get an e-mail about ‘make sure you’re checking out the e-paper, download the app to access it’ or whatever source we wanted them to go to,” he said. After that initial e-mail, the push continued, at times even targeting readers on Facebook and reminding them to check out the e-paper.

“It’s definitely something to target,” Schroder said, adding that it helps with retention. “That’s a key point and we need those readers to be viewing us in as many ways as possible and knowing about the different ways that they can check on our products.”

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