Ghana’s drive towards digitisation has taken an innovative turn with the setting up of an online portal, known as www.ghananewsstand.com, for the sale and distribution of newspapers.
Touted as the first of its kind on the African continent and one of the very few globally, the portal has the capacity to host hundreds of newspapers and deliver them into the personal emails of customers of the portal.
The website, set up by Swift Media Ventures, a Ghanaian company, is also 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.
While launching the website, the Chief Executive Officer of Swift Media Ventures, Kenneth Kuranchie, stated that in the past, newspaper influence was limited to the number of people who could be attracted to see actual copies on the newsstands.
Newsstands
Those newsstands, he said, were quickly disappearing and becoming more unattractive to the potential customers of newspapers, adding that “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.
Mr Kuranchie explained that the distribution of newspapers is no longer circumscribed by geographical boundaries.
“The whole world is a customer. Newspapers, by their nature, are highly perishable and that their time on the shelf is highly limited to the few hours after they appear 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,” he added.
According to him, with “www.ghananewsstand.com”, the product is on sale permanently since customers looking for back copies can easily access them and pay for them as well.
He revealed that the advantages are only pluses and pluses, saying you can sell for only a few hours and your sales area also forever.
Newspapers
So far, about eight Ghanaian newspapers have signed to distribute on the website, with more showing interest.
Mr Kuranchie said newspapers that sign 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 urged.
He also emphasised that the introduction of www.ghananewsstand.com will ease the movement of consumers of various newspapers in Ghana who will buy copies of newspapers at designated newsstands.
“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),” he stated.
He added that 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.
Credit: GNA
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