Designing and evaluating the calm electronic newspaper

This paper reports from an ongoing action research study concerning the design of the future enewspaper, i.e. a newspaper on e-paper technology. The e-paper innovation is of great importance to the newspaper publishers since it has the potential of eventually replacing the printed newspaper due to its readability and high contrast. This study addresses the challenge of how to design calm user experience of the e-newspaper. The action research approach followed the canonical action research method, in collaboration with publisher, reader and advertiser clients. The activities include a range of data collection techniques such as project meetings, workshops, interviews and prototype testing. In the diagnosing phase we identified the core challenges for designing the e-newspaper which directed us to the literature of calm technology. Three design principles for calm user experience were formulated in the action planning phase, followed by designing three e-newspaper prototypes, which embeds the design principles, in the action taking phase. The prototypes were evaluated with 36 readers in the evaluating phase and the outcome of these evaluations was later assessed in collaboration with newspaper designers for specifying learning. The results indicate that the design principles support calm user experience

ENGAGED DESIGN SCIENCE: DEVELOPING DESIGN VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE E-NEWSPAPER

This paper reports the development of design visions for the future electronic (e-) newspaper. The ambition is to bring together the features of printed newspapers with the possibilities of online media. In an engaged design science research project we together with representatives of the newspaper industry and newspaper readers identified the three design challenges genre awareness, stress and lack of control, and obstruction. We also developed the guiding design metaphor of a calm e-reading experience and three design principles provision of media recognition support, support for user control, and support for focus on content. The design principles were evaluated through e-newspaper prototypes and on this basis we revised the design principles which led to a design theory for e-reading solutions on and for digital media

Through the Printing Press: An Account of Open Practices in the Swedish Newspaper Industry

Organizational practices that foster a dialogic relationship between organizations and their constituent customers have created an arena for inbound and outbound innovation. At the nexus of this development occurring in the media industries, these flows are carried by various forms of digital, social media and an increasing digital presence in the form of dynamic websites with varying degrees of interactive capabilities. In this paper, we posit that the newspaper industry is torn between indifference and cautious apprehension caused by the difficulty in marrying the journalism profession’s carefully guarded gatekeeping practices with the revolving doors of open innovation. Gatekeeping has emerged as a fiercely defended cornerstone for the industry and the profession of journalism itself is not enough to distinguish amateurs from professionals; for the segregation between professionals and amateurs to carry weight rather than being reduced to a hollow title, the segregation needs a practice that explicitly enforces gatekeeping—where actions speak louder than titles. Against this backdrop, we pursue the following research question: Why has IT-enabled open innovation become such a contentious issue in the context of the newspaper industry? Combining contextual in-situ ethnographic interviews and observation with an industry-wide content analysis of Swedish newspaper websites, we present an in-depth view of what IT-enabled open innovation means in the context of the newspaper industry. Results show that the process of legitimization inscribed by a particularly charged information technology—the printing press—continues to exert great influence in what constitutes open practice in the newspaper industry

A Genre-aware Approach to Online Journalism Education

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UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL NEWSPAPER GENRE: MEDIUM VS. MESSAGE

Over the last two decades, the cultural and cognitive artifacts that information and communication technologies circulate have become entangled with human and technical actors to the point of inseparability. These entanglements are primarily driven by the proliferation and wide adoption of online and mobile technologies. As a result, we discern the migration of previously physical artifacts to the digital realm and a transformation of the relations between users, information, and technology. A prominent example of the shift from physical to digital is the transformation of the print newspaper genre to the digital newspaper genre. Adopting a sociomaterial approach and building on genre theory, this paper presents an investigation of the nature and emergence of the digital newspaper based on an ethnographic study of a major news and publishing company. We find significant changes in the context, the news offering, and the roles of actors involved with the newspaper artifact ? emerging with the introduction and adoption of disparate media. Drawing on the empirical findings, we conclude that the digitization of the newspaper emphasizes the central importance of the medium and transforms the author-reader relations from interaction to intra-action. Hence, the print to digital shift is demonstrated to have profoundly altered the very notion of the newspaper genre