Automobiles are not the only ones going hybrid.

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

As newspapers face declining print circulation figures, one bright spot in this spring’s Audit Bureau of Circulations Fas-Fax figures was the increase in electronic edition readership, fueled by so-called hybrid subscriptions (see sidebar, page 20).

Case in point: The Denver Newspaper Agency, which saw whopping increases in the number of readers subscribing to the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post (see chart, page 20).

Bernie Gitt, the DNA’s director of circulation consumer relations, said hybrid subscriptions, where a consumer receives a print delivery in combination with electronic access, has yielded big benefits.

“This concept was started as a sales strategy and was tested in late 2006 and has also been one of the primary acquisition offerings this year,” said Gitt. “ABC qualifies this as a 7-day subscription, with the method of delivery being different.”

The DNA offers combination packages of printed Sunday or weekend service plus access to electronic edition the other days of the week.

Another high-flyer, The Orange County (Calif.) Register, counts more than 14,000 hybrid subscribers in addition to its 1,000 pure 7-day electronic-only subs.

Online convenience

The online convenience of electronic editions is a primary motivator, said Larry Riley, vice president of circulation and distribution.

“People that are tech-savvy, but like the traditional feel of a newspaper, are hooked because they’re not only comfortable with the news layout, but they like the traditional way of advertising and the ability to interact with advertising,” he said.

Electronic editions also help drive down the bottom line for newspapers looking to trim costs.

“A newspaper does not incur the typical cost of print, freight and delivery, which can run anywhere from 35 cents a copy to 70 cents (depending on page count or day of week,” Riley said.

Readers also like the layout of The Register’s e-edition, which holds the familiar look readers are used to in the print format.

“It’s a foray into becoming a geek while holding onto what’s customary and comfortable,” Riley said. “Reading a newspaper has been described as a leisure activity and the presentation of a newspaper in a somewhat traditional format plus access online gives a reader the best of both worlds.”

Both The Register and DNA launched electronic editions in 2004 and use Olive Software Inc.’s ActivePaper software for their digital versions.

ABC’s list of the top 25 electronic edition newspapers includes a diverse crowd of dailies, spanning the gamut of size and notoriety.

The top five newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Register, (Minneapolis) Star Tribune and The Denver Post.

The first two papers require paid subscription membership for online access; the three others reported double- to triple-digit jumps in e-edition figures from March 2006.

New features to woo interest

At the same time, electronic edition vendors are supplying more sophisticated products engineered to cater to a reader’s personal tastes.

NewspaperDirect, for example, has among its features the ability to link specific objects, such as an advertiser’s phone number, to elements that might be requested by the user.

The XML extractor technology “allows us to work with the PDF files and extract the description of pages,” said Igor Smirnoff, NewspaperDirect’s director of strategic development. “We understand very intimately the relationship between different objects within each paper.”

NewspaperDirect also offers a feature in its SmartEdition product line that translates articles into 12 different languages, from English to Chinese.

“Many of our publishing partners take advantage of this feature as they see this to be one of the ways they can reach out to new demographics,” Smirnoff said. “How great is it to for a large Hispanic population to read the Los Angeles Times in Spanish?”

NewspaperDirect also offers a blogging feature, which Smirnoff says is an attempt to help its newspaper clients reach out to that segment of Internet users.

“Blogging is a very interesting market segment for us,” said Smirnoff, adding that he believes the feature is a “very important vehicle for proper legal content propagation.”

“It’s the matter of how we present and give the tools we give to bloggers to work with the newspaper content while preserving the trackability and control of publishers so they can see where the content is being used.”

Regardless of technologies available for electronic editions, Riley said that digital delivery is the direction the newspaper market is headed.

“Readers love to thumb through the pages of a print newspaper, but they’re also becoming accustomed to accessing news and information online,” he said.