by Dorothy Marie Kucera

Created on: May 05, 2008

Newspapers need digital publishing plus a brand-new improved visual layout style of "magazine-style newspaper" to stay competitive in today's market of busy people who need to find article categories quickly. People should be able to get their local newspaper online for a fee but it is also true that a hard copy is preferred and required for many other readers. There is a better way of providing hard-copy newspapers that might increase circulation. Put yourself in the reader's chair or public transportation vehicle and consider the hindrances to the old-style of large, rag newspaper.

One of the greatest detriments to purchasing the standard style of newspaper is that people are too busy today to spend extra time finding a place to wash off the messy, smudgy ink from rag newspapers. The visual clutter is too hard on eyes and it is cumbersome to flip huge pages to get to the section you want to read. We are getting hundreds of pieces of mail each day-we do not have time to struggle with awkward, large newspapers. We need to move through the news faster and with more efficiency. Eyes are strained with so much reading material in today's "Information Age," so that is another reason to improve the visual layout. Our eyes should not be jumping all over a page of cluttered columns in varying lengths and locations. Searching should not be necessary...we need to know where to go to find certain topics immediately. Thus, the online version of getting news has become popular...the screen is backlit, it is a manageable size, there is nothing to throw out or put in a recycle bin.

Since many of us begin our days by quickly checking our e-mail and online news, that is the best marketing tool medium for modern newspapers-we need to have that option. In order to make it more user-reader friendly, put links on the top toolbar of your newspaper company's Home Page, listing your main divisions of your newspaper: Local News, State News, National and International. You can then use a left sidebar for the subdivisions. List these categories: Alerts, Arts, Cartoons, Classified Ads, Courts & Crime, Entertainment, Events Calendar, Finance, Government, Health, Living and Sports. (Travel would be included under "Living.") This type of visually, highly organized layout could also be incorporated in the hard-copy newspapers.

For both formats, stop the helter-skelter crowding of articles jammed into visually-distracting "boxes" that continue who-knows-where farther back in the newspaper. People

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