TGIF – PDF Newspaper

Ian Wishart, “journalist on the fringe” who abandoned work in the mainstream media after too many fights to try to speak the truth is an entrepreneur who has a record for shooting straight. Most of the time he’s got my vote – certainly on the subject matter. He may be a little marginal in some of his approaches from my read of things, but generally his writing is definitely worthy of a read.

He has established a new weekly publication TGIF (short for Thank God It’s Friday, no doubt) to join his monthly print production Investigate Magazine. He has kindly forwarded me a complementary copy – thank you Ian.

I’m totally confused about the format and the whole TGIF concept. While I have a lot of time for his journalistic integrity, commitment to investigation and outright bravery, plus his propensity to shoot straight, I think he’s really got it horribly wrong on this one. Having established dozens of new ventures since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I of all people know how hard it can be to trail-blaze, and I really would love to encourage him in his new venture. But I can’t see it working for him

I think his book Eve’s Bite has some very strong points and is definitely worthy of the read. His latest offering Absolute Power, while pertty obvious effort to pull Helen Clark down, was quite revealing in the details of a string of her skullduggery and political deceptions. Investigate of course has been a great read since its inception.

The problems I see is the format – an 8.5Mb full-colour PDF in A3/tabloid format. It just doesn’t work for me.

My take on the offering:

1. At three dollars, the price is fine – no worries there. I toyed with the idea of subscribing at the time he mentioned what he was going to do with TGIF but it just didn’t have the pizazz for me to do it then.
2. It’s too big. I have an ADSL2 connection from Orcon and GMail. clearing my email on a Saturday morning I had to download it before reading it. Anything more than 3-4 seconds and I’m sorry, but I’ve got to come back to it to read it. I’m just not going to sit there waiting for 8.5Mb just to skim through something like news – even if I think it might tickle my fancy.
3. The content was fine – believable and interesting with a tinge of scandal on the front page.
4. It’s too late. I already have Whaleoil and David Farrar’s Kiwiblog and on my Google Reader so there is little value sending me selected articles again. I’d already seen five out of the first fourteen stories elsewhere which meant that even though another nine stories were new to me, there was a big drop for me in perceived value in reading it. Investigate, however – now that’s a different story – it really has my interest and the wow-factor. I think he’d be better doing a mini-Investigate every week or fortnight and keeping the wow-factor there. THEN I would push through any pain-barrier to read it.
5. The real killer though is that it’s just too hard to read. On a computer screen I’m set up for and used to reading web pages, ezines and RSS feeds – not large format PDFs. I just don’t like horizontal scrolling and zooming in and out I have to do to to read something in a PDF. Even though I use 20 inch monitors, I usually print out anything more than a simple page or so of data to read. To get something readable from TGIF however I needed to print twenty pages at A3. Adobe PDF reader on a fairly decent commercial Xerox printer crashed several times, partly printed, and took way too long.

So what’s this all about? A new way of doing things?

In his editorial Ian says:

Why a digital newspeper?
Quite simply because we believe this is where all our competitors will be, ten years from now. The existing online model is flawed because it is not entirely reader friendly. Website technology is not as clean and easy to navigate as a newspaper, and even on current broadband speeds it can be time-consuming.

Now I’m totally confused. I agree with everything he’s trying to do, but by my reckoning he’s ended failing to meet his own objectives. In the time it took to download the PDF I had actually read half a dozen or more blog posts in Google Reader. In the time it took me to open the PDF resize it and scroll left right, up and down, zoom in and out I could have easily read a couple of ezines with news summaries, clicked through to the associated blog post or news website page, on the articles I was interested in and been done with the news section of my day.

Sorry Ian, while I salute you for your entrepreneurial endeavours, and the desire to be ahead of the rest, it’s really got to get a lot more user friendly than this. For your new business’ sake I really wish that I’m wrong on this, but downloadable PDFs in a large format on the screen do not work well – at least for me.

I am reminded of a saying I’ve heard and use frequently when people come up with a crazy idea – “Just because we CAN do it doesn’t mean that we SHOULD do it”.

The first edition of TGIF is available free. Subscriptions are available from www.tgifedition.com

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