Every day a big fat newspaper lands in my letter box. I don’t even know why; I think a friend had their trial subscription moved to our address while they were on holiday and are having trouble canceling it. Anyway, every day I lift it out and dump it in the lobby for or someone else to read. Most days I don’t even read the 72pt headline.

It’s not that I dislike reading. I love reading.

It’s not that I dislike paper. I’d love to read more on paper instead of a screen.

It’s not even that I dislike their adverts.

It’s this: they’re sending me the wrong words. My interest in the words they print is exactly zero.

There’s at least one man who knows exactly which words I like to read: Marco Arment, the Instapaper founder.

For those who don’t already know, Instapaper works like this: every time I see an article linked on HN, Reddit, or somewhere else (I guess that might happen) and I want to read it when I’ve got time, I hit the Instapaper ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet. The text is then cached on their servers, pushed to all my devices and later on when I’m sitting squashed between giant sweaty footballer and unhealthy cough woman in the underground I can read it on my iPhone.

It’s a wonderful service, and the newspapers should steal the idea immediately. I have never subscribed to a daily paper in my life, but if my daily paper contained the articles I’d bookmarked the previous day, complete with images and nicely fomatted, well, that would make my life more awesome. I’d pay for it at once.

They can continue to mix in their top journalism stories (even if I ignore them, the paper costs them essentially nothing) but now they can replace all the filler that comes after page 2 with my personalized content.

They can get rid of the tiny font and huge form factor and make reading a pleasurable experience - they no longer need to pack as many articles into one paper as possible in the hope of providing me with one that isn’t utterly worthless; now, every article is a hit.

They can use my history of bookmarked articles (and everybody else’s) to trivially predict recent articles I’d love to read but haven’t discovered yet. They could give me a browser plugin to make sure they exclude pages I’ve already visited and either read or decided not to bookmark for a totally painless service.

They should do all this, because:

1. HN Monthly’s popularity suggests even technophiles still pay for printouts
2. Instapaper’s popularity shows people love to read articles offline and not while they’re busy trying to get real work done
3. They already have awesome global print and distribution networks, advertising contracts, market penetration, paying subscribers and brands
4. Their brand strength will make it much easier to push standardized self-register revenue-sharing deals to the blogs who’ll be providing this content. Bloggers crave attention; who wouldn’t register their content with a prestigious newspaper in exchange for a share of advertising revenues and nice stats about where their blog is being read? Don’t forget the chance to appear on their top blogs lists for even more exposure!
5. Two words: targeted advertising.
6. The first to do this will win - it’s classic chicken and egg. Bloggers will only bother to register their content with the paper that has the most readers for them, and people will only subscribe to papers that can provide them with their preferred content.

In reality though, the top newspapers will never do this. They mistakenly believe their strength is in breaking news and in-depth reporting of current events, not in providing low-cost, advertising-supported, globally-distributed printouts.

Sadly, it’d be a lot harder for a startup like Instapaper to do this - you really need a way to get print delivered to my door by 8am every morning for the price of a coffee and you need a brand that will convince bloggers to share their content with you in exchange for some revenue and recognition. You can’t get there from a standing start.

So expect to see Instapaper focus on iPad and iPhone and Kindle, and for the insanely massive print market to continue to be ignored by everybody who could make it work.

It’s a pity. For a moment there, I thought I was looking at the future.