Building your own online newspaper can be done with some sites like Newscred (which just launched v2), which pulls from various news sources via RSS and then makes a pseudo newspaper interface. I use these myself to give the look and feel of newspapers, with my favorite being Feedly, hands down.  The Feedly interface is where I am starting to live and breathe RSS, but more on that later.

In order not to lose readership, many newspapers themselves are now creating up to the minute web newspapers.  Most recently, the New York Times introduced Skimmer (not to be confused with Skimmer the social aggregator of course).  No account is needed and information is updated in what seems to be real-time.

However, is there a loss in revenue to the newspapers with the removal of advertisements?  How do they count distribution to promote advertising?  Does sharing articles from the site help drive readership?  The current Times Skimmer is sponsored entirely by Blackberry, which must have reached a nice agreement to be the only advertisement showing in the upper right as well as a graphic ad.  The sidebar has the sections, blogs and major topics (much like trends).  They are on the right path.

The Times Skimmer offered 5 different layouts from

• Serendipity – much like Swiss, not sure of the subtle difference
• Priority – small and to the point, no ad.  Chunked to make a fast read.
• Lines – straight lines of news showing no article excerpt, small icons (if any) and no ads
• Swiss – which was a page with tiny squares of news (I guess like Swiss Cheese.  In order to be politically correct they could have said blocked or something.)  This was the default.
• Fridge – looked liked a billion word magnets stuck to the fridge to make articles.  Cute but hard to read or function with
• Blackout – Swiss done in black.  It could have been more Tweetdeck-ish but it just made it white on dark for reading
• Flow – each article ttitle followed by the excerpt right into the next one.  Hard to follow and not like a newspaper

Newscred takes a different approach. They allow you to create numerous custom newspapers and share the entire paper across your networks. I am creating one now for an upcoming conference.  While I wish there was much more capability in what could be added, it is a clean and good start.  I can then share the page socially and have people follow and subscribe to the paper, just like you would do for anything else.

I was able to quickly add feeds form any source that had one and drag the page order around.  I could open each section (source) as it’s own page, much like the idea of a newspaper.  If they can build in the ability to see the full story natively, like Feedly, then they would have the next step in keeping users there.  Also the ability to actually print the paper in some format would be great for handouts to drive interest.  People still love paper. I would also like to insert my own ads into the page since I am basically building a newspaper and make it look like part of the format itself.  I could always build an RSS feed for ads I imagine, and then include it, but I would want graphics and more.

So where do papers go from here?  Driving premium, up to the moment content.  You can’t live in days old (or even a day) anymore and survive.  People trust newspapers overall.  They have made a brand for themselves over a hundred years in many instances.  But with mobility, instant passing of information and public reporting, newspapers need to align themselves quickly to make it through 2010.