Accra, Feb 04, GNA- Ghana’s drive towards digitisation has taken an innovative turn with the setting up of an online portal for the sale and distribution of newspapers.
Touted as the first of its kind on the African continent and certainly one of the very few globally, “www.ghananewsstand.com” has the capacity to host hundreds of newspapers and deliver them into the personal emails of customers of the portal.
Set up by Swift Media Ventures, a Ghanaian company, the website is expected to give comfort to patrons of newspapers, who could access actual copies of newspapers from the comfort of their homes or workplaces at a fraction the price.
Mr. Kenneth Kuranchie, the Chief Executive Officer of Swift Media Ventures, in a statement issued and copied to the Ghana News Agency, in Accra, after the launching, said in the past, newspaper influence was limited to the number of people who could be attracted to see actual copies on the newsstands.
Those newsstands, he noted, were quickly disappearing and becoming more and more unattractive to the potential customers of newspapers, saying, by distributing and selling online, the narrowing window had been infinitely opened to potentially billions of customers.
“The whole world is a potential customer, instead of a few hundred newsstands in Ghana. This means that publishers can set up international newspapers and magazines in Ghana, with a realistic chance of distributing worldwide,” he said.
“Our distribution as newspapers is no longer circumscribed by geographical boundaries. The whole world is a customer,” Mr Kuranchi added that,newspapers, by their nature, were highly perishable and that, their time on the shelf was highly limited to the few hours after they appeared every morning.
That means that they must be taken off the newsstands every twenty-four hours, in the case of dailies, and weekly, in the case of weeklies.
“With www.ghananewsstand.com, however, the product is on sale permanently, since customers looking for back copies can easily access them and pay for them as well. The advantages are only pluses and pluses. Now, you sell for only a few hours. With www.ghananewsstand.com, you sell forever,” he said.
Newspapers in Ghana currently sell anywhere between GHc2.00 to GHc3.00, but www.ghananewsstand.com proposes to sell each copy of every newspaper it vended for GHc1.00 in Ghana and $1.00 anywhere else in the world.
So far, about eight Ghanaian newspapers have signed to distribute on the website, with more showing interest.
Mr Kuranchi said newspapers that signed on would have a unique advantage of attracting advertisers even more than radio and television.
“This is because each advert assumes a permanent record in digital format for each customer of the newspaper, which the customer can easily refer to in comfort, anytime the customer is minded to do so. Indeed this is a great innovation that all newspapers in Ghana, Africa and the rest of the world should take advantage off,” he said.
The introduction of www.ghananewsstand.com means that consumers of various newspapers in Ghana do not have to walk to newsstands to buy hard copies of newspapers.
Rather, they can sit in the comfort of their offices, homes or cars and have the newspapers delivered into their emails in portable document format (pdf).
It allows patrons of newspapers to access actual full digital copies of Ghanaian newspapers on their android phones, laptops, tablets and personal computers anywhere in the world, and to view their content, without walking to a news stand.
GNA