A free daily in Nashviille, The City Paper, has purchased a system from Olive Software of Santa Clara, Calif., that allows online readers to easily page through the paper, seeing pages as they would be displayed in print. The software allows readers to click on ads and reach advertisers websites, according to a press release from Olive Systems. Wehaa Design LLC is vendor of similar software. Both companies sell systems that will take the PDFs that a newspaper already makes and coverts them into pages that are easily turned, enlarged/reduced and searched.In the press release, Albie Del Favero, publisher of The City Paper, says: “We are a free daily in the mold of European commuter dailies, but since Nashvillians don’t typically commute via train or the bus, we distribute the paper in office buildings rather than commuter stations. Because of this, our readers are more likely to read The City Paper at their desks in the morning. And what we found was that increasingly more of them were actually reading the paper online. Because of this online readership growth and the expense of printing and delivering the paper each and every day, we are slowly evolving the paper from a print product to a primarily digital product.
“There are lots of places to go to get national news, but there are very few places to get in-depth local news,” said Del Favero. “That’s why we remain focused on providing local, and not national or international news.
