Introducing the e-newspaper - Audience Preferences and Demands

This paper adds to the overall understanding of new media adoption in general and the promotion of the enewspaper in particular by empirically studying the preferences and demands of the potential users. The enewspaper is a newspaper published on e-paper technology. The findings in this paper is based on the results from two studies, i.e. an online questionnaire with 3626 respondents and an evaluation in real life settings with 10 families over a two week period. Our initial hypothesis was that: users confronted with a vision of new technology and services are more positive to adopt than users with actual use experience of technology and services in an early stage of development with inherent technology problems. The research question of the paper is: How does use experience influence perceptions of preferences and demands for the e-newspaper? The findings showed that the hypothesis proved to be false, the test persons that have an actual use experience of the e-newspaper, despite the shortcomings in the device and service, were more positive to adopt than the respondents that have experienced concept movies and prototypes with more advanced functionality and interface.