The National

[pjc50]

Further to that, we have a new paper up here. Yes, someone launched a daily printed physical newspaper in 2014. It has a frustratingly google-resistant name, the online section is subscriber-only and is some horrible PDFoid thing that's basically unreadable and certainly cannot be linked to. But it's pro-SNP and, unlike almost all the rest of the

Comments

[ptc24]

I'm reminded of someone who described the Guardian as "the sort of paper which is nominally on your side and you feel you ought to support it, but when you actually read it, oh god!" Possibly they might have been complaining about it not being radical enough or being the wrong sort of radical or having a different reason for "oh god!" than mine.

Anyway, this new paper sounds excellent. Here's hoping (probably vainly, alas) that it's a massive success, stays true to it's original ideas, and inspires similar efforts south of the border.

[rmc28]

It sounds really interesting and possibly excellent.

Also the pricing for the PDFoid thing for online subscribers is low enough to make "give 5 issues a try" seem like a good idea.

[pjc50]

It's cheap, but I don't think I've conveyed just how awful the experience of reading it online is. It's not actually a PDF, it's some service called "pagesuite" which displays it page by page in a Flash applet. You can have two zoom levels, "not enough" or "too much". Viewing it on a mobile or tablet device is completely out of the question. You get emailed a link every day, which is redundant as it's the same link each time. I bought a couple of months subscription to the online version, which I've long since abandoned in favor of the paper version. The whole thing is like a 2000s-era "online magazine" concept.

On the other hand, if they put it online unpaywalled I'm sure it wouldn't make any money at all and if they had comments it would attract trolls.

[rmc28]

It's very special, yes.

I found a "reading mode" which is almost readable with, but only allows movement with the arrow keys, no page-up or page-down.

[swaldman]

I think this is the same system that the local paper here ("The Orcadian") uses - although they do also have short summaries of news stories on a normal website. I imagine the benefit for a small outfit is that they can simply upload the same layout they've sent to the presses and have all the infrastructure handled by somebody else.

My favoured newspapers-actually-making-money-online system is, I think, the "n free articles per month then you must subscribe" model that the FT and a few others use. But I imagine that there's a LOT more expense in setting up and running something like that...

[pentamer]

It does sound rather good. I don't really have trouble hearing the news (quite the opposite), but it sounds like something I'd read if I found it lying around and I had time to kill.