Consuming news on your own terms
Jinfo Blog

By Michelle Manafy

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There is an argument to be made that search as the dominant access vehicle to information on the internet has actually transformed how we expect to access information everywhere. Readers once routinely subscribed to trusted information sources – newspapers, journals, magazines, even encyclopaedias. People turned to the one(s) they deemed most trustworthy for the answers sought.

Today, on the other hand, information seekers search. Most often, this is through the open web, but this predisposition to search has impacted every premium information provider as they increasingly focus on improving search functionality.

Interestingly, recent research suggests that "affluent internet users are still big fans of print media" according to an eMarketer article. However, as the article title "Young Affluents Ditch Traditional Media" suggests, younger people, regardless of demographics, are (not surprisingly) replacing print and television media with digital media. The article cites Milton Pedraza, CEO of The Luxury Institute as saying, “the rising generation of wealthy consumers [are] consuming media in vastly different ways than anyone did just a decade ago”.

Again, not a surprise. However, for information managers and information providers, keeping up with the development curve to offer end users information in the most desirable shape du jour, one of the current conundrums involves an interest in all things mobile (think content-appification), personalisation, and an expectation of accessing whatever one wants whenever one wants it via a single interface (the simple search effect).

For the past few months, a Dutch project called eLinea has quietly begun tackling these content-consumption issues. eLinea is aiming for an international launch in October when it plans to introduce Flemish, British, and European editions of its eReading platform. The Dutch pilot currently hosts content from 40 publishers including Elsevier, Reader's Digest, and Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

According to Natasja Oosterloo, Business Developer of eLinea creator eReaders Groep, "we believe that consumers are prepared to pay for digital content when their conditions are met."The eLinea platform, they assert, makes it easy for publishers to distribute content in flexible ways without having to develop on each emerging platform.

For consumers, flexibility means more than device choice, however eLinea allows users to subscribe to very specific aspects of publications such as a favourite columnist, regional news or video casts – and users only pay for the slices they want, rather than subscribing to multiple publications of which they might only be interested in a small part.

Certainly, content aggregation is not new to the information industry. However it has long frustrated corporate content buyers and consumers alike that they can't simply pay for what they want, or just for what they use.

This has, of late, been compounded with a demand for delivery optimised on a vast array of reading devices. And increasingly consumers expect their reading experiences to be socially rated (which the eLinea platform currently offers) and socially mediated (eLinea reportedly has many such features in development) so that they can easily "discover" what friends and colleagues are reading and finding useful.

There are some interesting players in the space, such as iPad darling Flipboard, and customisable alert-based systems targeted at professional users such as NewsEdge. Without doubt, eLinea has its work cut out for it as it enters the challenging news distribution market.

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