It’s primarily catching the fancy of Gen X and Y. Hundreds of those with Twitter users are now becoming online publishers — creating their own newspapers with either ‘The Twitter Tim.es’ or ‘Paper.li’. It only takes a few seconds to publish your newspaper and the results are pleasing and aesthetic, especially for those who may have always wanted to become a sort of a ‘citizen journalist’.
Most of the news is culled out from an assortment of Twitter accounts, media sources and even personal writings (blogs, et al). There’s no outside moderation — the creator of the newspaper is the Editor & Publisher.
ll you need to do is to enter your twitter account (Paper.li even allows for a Facebook sign-in) and the Paper.li newspaper is ready in a few seconds. Twitter Tim.es asked for an hour to have the paper ready.
Paper.li is the idea of a Swiss start-up, Small Rivers. It converts a user’s Twitter links into a newspaper-like web page. It is backed by investors including Kima Ventures, whose co-founder, Xavier Niel, recently bought the France-based newspaper, Le Monde. Like TwitterTim.es, Paper.li harvests a user’s Twitter account for links, then presents hints of what they link to in an interactive broadsheet format. New ‘editions’ are generated every few days.
While Paper.li creates the paper from either user accounts (if it’s a celeb or renowned author for instance) or lists or just a tag (such as #environment or #technology), The Twitter Tim.es offers extra options like media sources too.
The trend appears to be catching on. It’s early days to comment on how much of a dent it will make on the offline newspaper industry which is already facing competition from online media portals, blogs, etc. Sales of offline newspapers have fallen dramatically in the West (not so much in India, though, where circulation is, in fact, looking up for language and even some general English papers).
However, Twitter users pick up a lot of stuff from the online and offline world (including offline newspapers), so the impact at first blush may be limited. As the trend picks up, though, the formats and content are bound to improve and pose a serious threat to conventional thinking.
