The reason for the recent silence of this blog is nothing to do with the Murdoch takeover of the WSJ. I just give the guy a sofa to sleep on when he's in South West Florida, that's it..

In fact it's the fault of a much more interesting client of mine, whose offices are a two-hour drive from my home. This means that I have been spending four hours a day in my car, which really cuts into my alone time with my keyboard.

The good news is that it's given me a new optimism about the future of the newspaper. Now I can see how we get some of our revenue and readers back. We get them to read their newspapers in the car.

Now I don't for a imnute advocate popping the newspaper on your steering wheel and trying to take in a coruscating editorial about North Korea whilst negotiating a tough intersection on the way to work. Though here in Florida it would hardly make people drive more badly.

But while everyone dutifully parrots the mantra of platform neutrality it is perhaps odd that no one has yet thought how newspapers might disrupt the radio business.

I have always subscribed to the Economist magazine. I love it because it ignores many of the pompous norms of newspaper journalism. The main one is that important news stories have to be long to be intelligent. The second is that people want to know who is writing a story: all the Economist's stories are unbylined. Thirdly, that news must be unbiased to be credible. I trust the Economist's news judgment despite an obvious bias. Fourthly, visual design is the key to presenting information in a way people will read. The Economist has a layout and pictures so simple that you could typeset it on Lintotype hot-metal if you had to.

Anyway, the Economist have just launched an audio edition. Old news, I hear you say. Every media outlet in the known world is doing a podcast. True, but The Economist audio edition is different in a way that hints at a potentially seismic change, one that could work out to the benefit of newspapers if we're quick and smart.

The Economist audio edition is not a podcast. It is the complete version of the Economist read out aloud word for word by four or five posh sounding British newscasters. Subscribers to the print issue can download it as a folder of MP3 files from Talking Issues. You can then create an iTunes playlist, import the files there and sync it with your iPod.

So why is this so revolutionary? Because it means that I can press the forward button and skip any story I want and move to the next one. It's rather like reading a newspaper in your car - you start most of the stories but you skip quickly past the stuff that doesn't grab you in the first few seconds until you get to something that does.

This is revolutionary because of the way it undermines radio. Radio is a terribly flawed medium in the car. Because of the terror of listeners deserting to another channel, all radio stations have clustered around the same common denominators. They shout loud, talk fast and move on quick because they daren't let your attention wander for a second. TV news has  done the same thing for the same reasons. Now CNN are claiming with pride to have the most stories per hour as if that were a badge of pride.

What "iPod News Radio" in this form does is make radio into a something that feels like a newspaper. Stories can be as long as is required, because the listener can choose to move on from them while staying within the "program". Sample and choose. And if the writer can engage you with a great first paragraph, or a well written tease, then maybe you'll stay for a story that otherwise you didn't think you were interested in. These are newspaper skills, not radio, TV or online ones.

The other things that interested me were just how compelling the written word is when spoken. I listened to some podcasts following my Economist experience and mostly they are attempts to mimic the style of radio and transfer it online - much as we all once thought that newspaper writing online was obviously what the internet wanted. But with "iPod News Radio" you don't have radio's problems. Immediacy doesn't matter as much. Brevity doesn't matter as much. The middle ground doesn't matter as much. The listener has a simple way of deciding what to listen to. Your job as the broadcaster is to put it in front of them in a manageable, navigable format.

There's more. I read my printed Economist fitfully despite loving it. Sometimes my daughter is watching Dora the Explorer and I try and grab 15 minutes to skim through a few articles. Maybe at Starbucks on my way somewhere else. Maybe over a sandwich at lunchtime. But I would guess I give it a maximum of 30 minutes a week.

The audio version? I listened to it in the car for eight hours in total last week. I listened to stories that I would have skipped instantly in print.

It made me realize that my reading habits are deeply affected by how much time I think I have at work and at home and that as time in both locations is increasingly squeezed, so is my desire to read newspapers and magazines, however much I enjoy them. Newspaper pros, paid to read a lot, often don't get this. But those who have launched free dailies aimed at a younger audience are appealing to this reality very successfully with print products. They say: if people have less time, let's give that section of people a smaller newspaper that they do have time for. Let's make it shorter and let's make the topics more interesting to the time pressed group. (I'm puzzled that young people are supposedly more time pressed than parents, but that's for another day).

But there's a second approach. How can we turn time that is currently unavailable for newspaper reading into newspaper time. This is what the Economist audio edition has done to my driving time.


This is why the internet is the wrong avenue. It's a zero sum game competing for time at work and home. If we improve our websites we limit time available for our newspapers. We can't make money from the internet - have a look at Editor and Publisher's data page this month if you dont believe me..The internet, as a generally static visual medium is a competitor for time with newspapers, at work and at home.

But newspapers attacking radio? This I like. Firstly we do not currently compete in this space and therefore have nothing to lose. Secondly it is a medium that will never become visual, which keeps TV companies out. Thirdly the incumbent will struggle to respond to a disruption because while the new radio looks the same, it's completely different from what they currently do.  Fourthly competition here costs us almost nothing but puts a premium on something that is quite expensive - large supplies of high quality content. Fifthly there's ad revenue here. I am surprised that the Economist doesn't do ads on its audio edition. I am much more willing to tolerate short smart ads on a system where I can skip the ones that bore me.

What makes this a real new media rather than an interesting little diversion is what probably happens next. At the moment a newspaper on my iPod constructed as I've outlined above is too fiddly for the mass market. If you have to sit down and move files around and then sync something, a few of us will do it but not many.

But what if your iPod and phone increasingly became the same machine? What if I could download "iPod News Radio" to my phone, let's call it an iPhone, the nice one that I have installed in my car, at the press of a widget and could be charged for it accordingly. Well, then I wouldn't listen to news on my radio ever again.

In terms of immediacy it would be "good enough", - 360 days of the year there is no real breaking news story that needs to be updated every five minutes. But in terms of ease of use it would outclass existing offerings in a way that consumers would love.  This is value innovation and it's a well trodden strategic path to growth. When was the last time one of those was offered to a newspaper....?

It won't happen for a while, maybe 12 months. Download speeds are still a little slow - the Economist is 130mb and would take 25 minutes at real speeds to download to a phone. But that will improve. When it hits the five minute barrier and when legislators start pressuring motorists to install more hands-free phone kits, newspapers may be ready for a leap across a chasm for a change rather than a blind rush into one.