Newspapers on the Web get closer to the real thing

For as long as I can remember -- dating back at least to my teenage years -- I’ve started my day by reading The Times. I used to have to settle for other papers when I traveled outside Southern California, but now that The Times is available online, that should no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t much like getting my news on The Times’ website -- or any other paper’s, for that matter. I miss the tactile sensation of leafing through the paper page by page. I miss the serendipity of coming unexpectedly upon an interesting story I would never have thought to look for. Most of all, I miss the context -- seeing the size of the headline, the placement of the story on the page and in the paper, the juxtaposition of the various elements that make up a daily newspaper: stories and headlines and photographs and charts and graphs and even, at times, the ads.

Now there’s a solution -- indeed at least two solutions I know of -- to most of these shortcomings. One is NewspaperDirect.com. The other is NewsStand.com. Both deliver to your computer a wide variety of U.S. and foreign newspapers (and magazines) in their full, original format, identical to the print edition -- as opposed to the re-formatted or “re-purposed” presentation available on most newspaper websites.

What you see on your computer screen with both NewspaperDirect and NewsStand looks just like the ink-on-paper newspaper you hold in your hands.

NewspaperDirect carries The Times and more than 180 other publications -- including USA Today, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle -- in the United States and 40 foreign countries.

NewsStand carries about 90 publications -- including the New York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe and the Sacramento Bee -- in the United States and 20 foreign countries.

NewspaperDirect actually offers two services, the newest of which began less than two weeks ago.

When NewspaperDirect began operation, in 2000, its client newspapers were available only to people staying in hotels that purchased the service. The hotel buys a computer and laser printer from NewspaperDirect, downloads the newspapers, prints them out on double-sided, 11-inch-by-17-inch sheets of paper, staples the sheets together and gives the papers to their VIP guests (or sells them to regular guests, usually for $2.50 to $5 a copy).

Although the 11x17 format is smaller than a full-size newspaper page -- The Times, for example, is about 12 1/2 inches x 23 inches -- the high-resolution, high-quality laser printing makes it very readable (and it’s the ideal size for tabloid newspapers.)

Last year, NewspaperDirect expanded to include non-hotel business partners in more than 30 cities. These partners buy similar equipment, print the papers and deliver them to hotels, newsstands and other locations for distribution to readers.

NewspaperDirect also has some corporate and wealthy individual clients who have the equipment installed in their offices or, in a few instances, on their private yachts.

“Our whole concept has been to provide foreign travelers and international business travelers with the same-day newspapers they want, wherever they are,” says Richard Miller, vice president of NewspaperDirect. “It’s been especially valuable to people outside the United States who want same-day access to the financial news in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Financial Times.”

No printouts

On Dec. 15, the company introduced its latest feature -- PressDisplay.com -- which makes 160 papers available to individual subscribers in 41 countries.

Individuals can subscribe to one or more newspapers on PressDisplay and have them delivered to their home, office or laptop computers. But you can’t print them out. You have to read on-screen. That means you lose the tactile quality of newspaper reading. But you can navigate through the paper, page by page or section by section, just as you would with a “real,” hard-copy newspaper, so you do get the original newspaper presentation, context and serendipity. Best of all, you don’t have to download any special software to do so.

Subscription prices range from $9.95 to $29.95 a month, depending on how many newspapers you want to read. The $9.95 charge provides full access to 30 papers, whether 30 days of The Times (or any other paper) or, if you prefer, 20 days of The Times and five days each of, say, USA Today and Le Monde, in Paris (or whatever newspapers you want). The $29.95 fee includes full access to 100 newspapers a month, also divided however the individual subscriber chooses.

These multiple-newspaper options are especially useful on those days -- the morning after Saddam Hussein was captured or the morning of a major election or disaster or some other big, breaking story -- when some subscribers (me, for one) might want to look at several different newspapers, in different cities and/or countries, to see how each handled the story.

Competing service

On the other online, full/original newspaper service, NewsStand.com, subscription fees are individualized, by paper, and each paper determines its own charge, subscription length and term. You can get four weeks of the New York Times, Monday through Friday, for $13, for example. Thirteen weeks of USA Today costs $32.50.

NewsStand launched its first papers in mid-2001. Its most prestigious client -- and minority investor -- the New York Times came aboard in October 2001. More than 4,000 people in 120 countries now subscribe to the NewsStand version of the New York Times, a Times spokeswoman says.

Just as individual publications set their own subscription rates on NewsStand, so they set the conditions under which they can be used. Ten percent of the publications only permit users to read the publication on-screen, no printing allowed. About two-thirds allow printing of full pages and individual stories.

The rest -- including the New York Times -- allow printing of individual pages (all of them) but not individual stories.

Subscribers who want to print NewsStand publications must first download NewsStand’s free software. With a standard printer, you have three print options -- printing each page on one sheet of 8 1/2x11 paper (on which the type is so small that it’s very difficult to read) or dividing each newspaper page into two or four 8 1/2x11 sheets (which are readable but must be assembled).

Based on my admittedly limited and idiosyncratic tests of both NewsStand and PressDisplay, I’d say the NewsStand navigation tools are better.

If you’re reading a Page 1 story on your screen on NewsStand, for example, and you come to the line at the bottom that says, “Continued on Page 18,” you just click on “18,” and you’re immediately taken to that page.

PressDisplay is working on a similar capability but hasn’t developed it yet. For now, users wanting to “jump” from one page to another either have to scroll through the page numbers on the right hand side of the screen or click on a “thumbnails” button on the left side of the screen that shows all the pages; then you click on the desired page.

Are PressDisplay, NewspaperDirect or NewsStand fully satisfactory replacements for the newspaper I pick up in my driveway at 5:30 every morning? Not really. Not for me anyway. But even though I have desktop computers at home and work, travel with a laptop and always carry both a cell phone and a Palm Pilot, I think of myself as a Luddite -- or at least a traditionalist -- where newspapers are concerned. I like a full-size newspaper in my hands, even when my hands get ink-stained by breakfast.

All three of these services are a big step in the right direction, though. And they sure beat the alternatives when I’m out of town and want to see the closest approximation possible to the “real” L.A. Times -- or when I’m here, in Los Angeles, and want to see the closest approximation possible to any number of out-of-town or foreign newspapers.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.