kerimsatirli.com

A bit more than a year ago, a famous Dutch newspaper, primarily aimed at the group of people with higher education, went forward with an idea to attract a new group of readers, namely the myriad of young professionals who didn’t have the time to read the full story behind events and only wanted a bit more than a blurb.

The publisher came up with a way to, basically, spoon feed information to their prospective, future clients and they called it NRC.next. The journalists like to think of their publication as a way to get up-to-date on what has happened in the world in the fastest way possible.

Now, a newspaper on it’s own wouldn’t really be worth the time to talk about, but NRC.next is different. They are one of the first Dutch newspaper to embrace crossmedia publishing and embrace it the right way.

Apart from the actual, printed, publication, there’s the online edition, with additional information. Many of the journalists also contribute to a platform that could actually be considered a blog. NRC.next even toyed with the idea of publishing podcasts but it would appear that that step was just a bit too much.

The best thing? Half of the web-based content is freely available to everyone, either via the browser or through a RSS subscription.

The resulting numbers speak for themselves, after one year, they are still standing strong, In a market that is very highly saturated, they managed to gain a foothold and attract an audience that normally wouldn’t bother reading newspapers due to time constraints or the lack of interest.

The newspapers distribution time is also different to that of it’s parent’s. While NRC Handelsblad is published in the evening, targeted at decisionmakers who want to relax after a long day at work and spend some quality time with the latest news, NRC.next is published in the morning and is supposed to be on your doorstep at 07:00am.

The idea behind that is simple, I figure: “if you’re the first to bring news to your reader, you win (and get paid, eventually)”, And it makes sense, if your client has a chance to get his news somewhere else, say, on the web, for free, there’s no incentive left to actually buy your publication.

While I don’t read NRC.next regularly, I’ve still been able to enjoy the newspaper for quite some time now and in fact still have the first issue at home. As a reader of the first hour, I have to say that this publication manages to amaze in ways previously unseen, in the Netherlands anyway.

So here is to you, you editors, you journalists, you bloggers, all of you who make NRC.next the great thing that it has become. I compliment you on a job well done. You’ve managed to amaze the (Dutch) publishing world, for a year already, don’t stop now.

As one wuld expect from a market leader in (publishing) innovation, NRC.next also gifted it’s readers with something very special: a 14 track CD.

The songs are a compilation from tracks published my favorite, online, music publisher Magnatune as well as from jamendo.com.

I’ve been listening to these tracks while writing this post and, like the newspaper, the featured songs are of high quality. The listing is very diverse, however, it doesn’t try to cater to all wishes at the same time but rather present the listeners with new music they probably haven’t heard before.

The whole album, free of charge, is available via this link, cover art and all is, naturally, included.