A Look at MyHerald.com

Back in the early days of the Web (i.e., 1995) a popular site was CRAYON (CReAte Your Own Newspaper),  which allowed you to make a customized “newspaper” from different news sources. The site has changed a lot since then, but the premise is still the same: why rely on editors to pick stories for you, when the “daily me” is all you need? Of course, many newspaper sites now offer their own takes on this feature, with customization now widely available.

But I have always believed that while letting readers choose their own content has its place, they are missing out on one of the main strengths of a newspaper: the unexpected stories that editors select for you. That is why I still pay for two dailies – to read what editors have picked. Not just things I want to know about, but also things I SHOULD know about. After all, if I only had a customized newspaper, it would be all Yankees, all the time, with Calvin and Hobbes comic strips thrown in.
 

I like the approach of the new MyHerald.com service from the Miami Herald. It offers a mix of customizable stories, along with the ability to read the paper exactly as it was laid out in the paper thrown on my doorstep (if I lived in wonderful Miami, instead of a small Manhattan apartment). The site’s PDF version of the paper isn’t new or exciting; lots of papers offer a fee-based PDF version.

What is unusual is its “Quickbrowse” version, which lists every single story that runs in each day’s paper (174 in Monday’s paper alone). You can quickly select the stories you want and then get a new page with the full text of just those stories. This is not only good for fast browsing, but for fast printing, too. Just select, say, the four stories you want to read in print, and then you can print them all together, instead of hitting print four times. You can also schedule an e-mail version of the service to be sent to you each day, which I find very useful. You get access to both the PDF and the Quickbrowse versions for $5 a month, after a two-week free trial.

The service is the brainchild of Marc Fest, a former journalist whose other products are OnlineHomeBase (which I reviewed in a previous column) and the Quickbrowse Web browsing product.  He took the idea to Alberto Ibargüen, the publisher of the Miami Herald, and they came up with MyHerald, for which they jointly have a patent pending. This is in addition to the free, “traditional” Herald.com site.

As Fest points out, most sites “make it extremely difficult to read today’s paper because they put all of today’s content across 15-20 pages. And they mix today’s content with yesterday’s and even older content. Also, users constantly have to navigate back and forth when reading many stories.”  

Asked why the Herald agreed to be the first newspaper to try this,  Ibargüen, says, “As a business proposition we need experience with paid products, we need to understand what readers will pay for. This gives us some of that experience.” The service hasn’t had its marketing launch yet – a public launch is expected within a couple of weeks – but you can sign up for a trial today at MyHerald.com.

After testing out MyHerald for a couple of weeks, I am convinced that other newspapers should definitely look into offering their readers a similar service. Fest says he can take any newspaper site and turn it into a myHerald-like subscription service in “about a week.”  If you run a newspaper and want to talk to Fest about this, you can contact him at myherald@quickbrowse.com.

In part due to MyHerald, Bill Gates mentioned the Miami Herald (along with the Wall Street Journal, another innovative paper) last week as examples of newspapers “trying new things” in his speech at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America.

[Incidentally, Fest has recently written a free guide to the OnlineHomeBase product, the OnlineHomeBase Cookbook. Whether you are a newcomer or a power user of OHB, you will find it a useful read.]

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