So, what is significant about this?

… you are looking at an issue – a publication – no longer looking at atomised content – or a collective of individual pages.

What is clear is that this is a particular issue from a particular time covering all the issues, the scores, the stories and the trivia that were alive and interesting and relevant at that time.

It is an issue. It has a date. In time, it gives a glimpse of what was important back then, when it was published.

Media then, is attempting to return to its roots with its latest devises – that is publishing newspapers, magazines and books – only this time with multi-media content.

Perhaps we should have labled this post Back to the Future?

News Stand - Should Look Like This Online?

The FT is not going to ’sell content’ online but they are going to start to sell daily newspapers online. Remember, the daily newspaper is the essence of any newspaper brand.

In an interesting report (also on the FT) the news was headlined as FT selling content for micropayments.

However, the really interesting news is that the FT is not going to sell individual articles (content) – but individual daily newspapers.

The mooted price is £2 – which is a similar price to what people pay at the newsagents.

It does rather seem that we have a hallelujah moment here. Suddenly, online media looks like offline media only distributed digitally as opposed to via newsagents.

Suddenly, you get the feeling here, what’s the big deal to buy a newspaper for £2? Do you have an issue with that? Of course not.

So, by dropping all this nonsense of online media is different, we can just see digital as a different distribution route for the same ideas.

Of course, there may be a few interesting developments here – such as the daily print newspaper containing a voucher which allows the reader to view it online… to deliver an enhanced brand experience  … an automatically download copy to your iPad …. or perhaps not?

It will be interesting to see what the FT does – and then even more interesting to see how the FT adapts its model to reflect consumer response.

But this is the first clear sign that media owners will return to selling packaged and branded goods (in this case a daily newspaper) and stop all the silly nonsense around selling single articles for pennies.

Print media owners figured out years ago that readers didn’t want to stand at the newstand shelling out 2p for each article they found interesting. No, they just wanted to hand over the money, get the package/ paper/ book/ magazine, and take it away.

Not so very different after all?

We Live in Interesting Times! (with apologies to the FT’s We Live in Financial Times strapline)