By: Carl Sullivan The latest electronic edition of a print newspaper officially made its debut today in Mesa, Ariz. Freedom Communications Inc.'s
East Valley Tribune is placing its entire print edition online using Olive Software Inc.'s ActivePaper Daily product.
The 88,358-circulation daily soft-launched the edition in late February, and has about 4,000 users so far. The
Valley Tribune is the first paper to use Denver-based Olive's product.
"We started offering the newspaper ads online in November using Olive Software, and now we're making the whole newspaper available," said John Allen, vice president of the newspaper's AZ Interactive Media Group.
The newspaper plans to charge a subscription fee for the electronic edition, but there's a free trial period for now. The paper will also up-sell display advertisers into their Retail Ads Online section. Olive Executive Vice President Shaun Dail said the model "is well-suited to bridging the gap between free and paid content online."
To see the electronic edition, visit
http://www.aztrib.com/.
The
Valley Tribune, which serves suburban Phoenix, is promoting the new product with print, radio, TV, rack cards, e-mail, and direct mail.
Freedoms' North Florida Community Group will roll out the
Olive software in late April.
Olive's ActivePaper software is similar to the technology offered by
NewsStand Inc. of Austin, Texas. That company is providing an electronic version of the
The New York Times print edition, among others. The
Times is also an investor in NewsStand.
The
Times version launched in late October and can be seen from a link at the bottom of the home page of
www.nytimes.com.
And
The Christian Science Monitor is using Adobe software to provide free PDFs of the print edition from
www.csmonitor.com. The paper plans to eventually offer a paid electronic version of its print pages.
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