Technical Innovations of the Twentieth Century: Newspapers on CDs
Via TechDirt this morning, two large newspaper groups will begin bundling CDs with their Sunday papers. The CDs will be "chock-full of movie previews, music samples, video games, comics, celebrity interviews and [oh yeah] advertisements." They will be helped in this initiative by a Santa Monica company called IMedia International. The newspaper groups are the Dallas Morning News and the New York Daily News.

IMedia Chief Executive David MacEachern said:

This is a medium that no one has really capitalized on....

Wow. Wait until they discover the Internet! Oh, they have. The CD will allow you to navigate to the Internet.

They did research and stuff. They think they can sustain around 285,000 views of each CD.

"It was a gamble for us to do this," said Bernie Heller, vice president of advertising for the Morning News. "I'm not ready to say it will definitely pay off in the long run or that my advertisers will embrace it. But so far it looks really good."

No mention of AOL and it's CD distribution projects of the past.

Read the LA Times story which reports on this like it really is news, even describing the opening segment:

An introductory segment on the CDs is meant to give viewers the impression they are flying into Los Angeles, before walking down the red carpet for a Hollywood premiere. A menu then opens — offering the variety of choices from games to a link for the newspaper's website.

Oh come on. I think I saw that on the Internet.

In a related story, my friend K. says that if you hang a CD from a stick near the tulips in your garden, it will keep rabbits away.


- posted by Peter Fleck @ Permalink 6:44 AM [to Del.icio.us]