I hardly read my newspaper anymore. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still subscribed. But then I remember the comfortable experience that comes with it. Grabbing the paper from the doormat, noticing it’s totally soaked from the rain outside (I live in The Netherlands, one soaky country). And then, the experience gets completed by dropping myself on the couch, browsing the enormous sheets, while wetting my fingers to optimally turn the pages. Some relaxation!

But how come I (and many others with me) don’t get to do this ritual anymore? Finding the time of course is part of the problem, but there’s a bigger part, which deals with the fact that it’s just static information you’re reading. It’s already outdated from the moment it is being printed. Furthermore, I can’t interact with the information, I can’t click on keywords I want to know more about, I can’t filter on subjects, it is still just ink on paper.

During the day I receive RSS feeds from the web on the kind of news I’m interested in. It’s instant and often free. Next to that, I follow some people I’m interested in on Twitter. They get me the news I want. But often, this results in an overload of information of relatively poor quality. Besides, reading big articles from the screen just doesn’t do the job. It’s nothing like the real thing, it is still just pixels on a screen.

I’d like to have the best of both worlds: dynamic, interactive and filtered news on real paper for that special moment in the evening. I will subscribe myself to The Daily Meta Paper.

In this context, we will kick off a student project, called Nieuwsbeleving, which is about innovation in the newspaper business. The project starts on november 23rd. We’re organizing this project with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Students from Innovation Management will look at the subject from a technological point of view and hopefully will come up with innovative solutions on both product and service level. If you like, you can also follow Niewsbeleving on Twitter.