Today online newspapers are putting a lot of resources into their news sites without profiting from them. They have to find ways to gain from them in order to keep them going. Lately there has been a move from print to multimedia, i.e. news is only a part among other services at the news sites and is presented as audio and video as well. We have conducted interviews at nine local newspapers in Sweden about their current situation and future plans. We have also used a cooperative scenario building technique aiming at finding new online services that could be profitable with both newspaper management and end users. The objective of this paper is to describe the current situation for these newspapers and to discuss possible new future services. Examples of services from the workshops are e.g. advertisement on demand and intermediary services.

The newspaper industry faces hard questions about business models and economic success for their online newspaper ventures. Managers, editors-in-chief and designers at nine local newspapers in Sweden were interviewed. In addition, semi-structured interviews with 153 users/readers of the news services of these nine newspapers were also conducted. The analysis reveals differences in digital news product content and revenue generation. The paper suggests a new business model for digital news products that includes content-based revenue generation through personalization, archiving and versioning, approaches to advertising that involve more highly targeted market intermediation, and non-news activities covering advertisers and information brokerage. Results suggest that management and users agree on the importance of archives, personalized and deep news content, and a role for the newspaper as intermediary. However, users are not willing to pay for increased multimedia or an e-commerce site sponsored by the news site.

Newspapers have a long tradition and centuries of experience behind today’s newspaper design. Pages, headlines, columns and fonts have been tuned in form and function to optimize content and context. They are all part of a user friendly and universally accepted product. Newspapers have two internationally recognizable formats, i.e. broadsheet or tabloid, familiar to readers all over the world. The first online newspapers appeared ten years ago in 1994, and since then research has been done to gain knowledge about how to design user friendly news sites. Today, we are facing the introduction of yet another media channel, the e-newspaper, which once again will require new design solutions for the graphical user interface (GUI).

E-paper is a wide and not defined term. For this paper we limit our research to e-newspaper that will emerge on a new breed of e-Reader terminals based on E-Ink technology. These future terminals will most likely be in the size of 5-8” in size and have been used as a base for his paper.

The change in the dimensions of printed broadsheet or tabloid newspapers into a smaller, digital e-paper format will radically change the user experience. Presumably, this e-newspaper solution will not replace the web but rather aim to replace the printed newspaper in the future. When designing for e- newspaper, the best from both worlds, i.e. print and web, should be considered in combination with the unique advantages of this new media.

Traditional newspapers hold the advantages of portability and readability while the online newspapers enable continuous updates and user interaction. The e-newspaper offers faster and cheaper distribution than the traditional newspaper but not the same interactivity that the web offers. Further, the production and distribution of the e-newspaper is more environmentally friendly.

In this paper we a) give an overview of the design possibilities and constraints of the e-paper technology, b) discuss design solutions from print and web that could be transferred to the e-paper media and c) present early empirical results from different studies. One study reports from experiences of prototyping e-newspaper interfaces. Another study presents results from interviews with designers at ten different newspapers, representing the publisher perspective.

Based on the above we propose a set of future scenarios for e-newspaper design. These scenarios will be used as basis for future research and prototype development in the research community as well as within the newspaper industry.