It is too early to judge whether it will be a commercial success, but it's worth having a look at what is in store for the reader.
Firstly, subscribers can add some gimmicks to the front page, like giving the paper a self-selected title and motto or add a personal picture. More usefully, the front page also carries the weather forecast for a specific town and a chart showing performance of subscriber-chosen stocks.

For the different sections of the newspaper the subscriber can select editorial content from a set of newspapers and choose how many pages he wants from any paper. Content is contributed by a wide range of papers - from quality dailies to tabloids; from local press to the national and international papers. For example, a subscriber can choose the title page from a leading national paper, add local pages for Berlin and one page from the town his family lives in. Then add the economy section of a leading financial magazine, the New York Times culture pages (for the next trip to the Big Apple) and finish off with the sports section from a tabloid.

Selected blogs can also be added, bridging the gap between traditional journalism and citizen journalism.
The paper has a fixed page count of 24 pages. Content selected that will not fit within the page count will be cut off, according to user set priorities. If not enough content is selected, the remaining pages are filled with title pages from other newspapers.

Advertising issues
An interesting area is how advertising is handled. In the past, newspaper publishers have frequently cited issues with advertisers as an impediment to republishing and personalising papers: ads can be rescaled, there are no proofs, the marketer has no influence on the surrounding pages and there is no guarantee that an ad is really printed in a given edition. Niiu takes the easy way and simply reprints the advertising as it is found on the original newspaper page. With a wider distribution of personalised newspapers some of these issues will require a more thorough resolution though.
Anybody that wants to try Niiu can get three editions for free; however the paper is only delivered to postal addresses in Berlin so far.

I believe there are several areas for improvement, but print quality is not one of them - Niiu is printed locally in Berlin on an Océ JetStream 2200.

Most opportunities to fine-tune are on the content side and here it gets a bit trickier. For example any table of contents or reference to another page is usually lost in Niiu, as pages are reassembled. Niiu itself does not have a table of contents. Selecting one's interest level for certain content by the number of pages is a bit crude as there's no way to ensure that all the important news will be on the first page.

There probably needs to be a bit more intelligence built into the editorial content from the publisher's side. Publishers should rank articles in importance or depth, so users can select accordingly, instead simply setting a number of pages. Even better would be to have several versions of articles, for example at different levels of depth.

The smaller sections, such as ‘Science' or ‘Travel', do fall through the grid altogether and generally there could be more personalised content - subscriber-specific TV guides for example. Another idea would be setting keywords to choose content.

Niiu is a great example that a personalised newspaper can be done if somebody really wants to. The pure technology has already shown great progress. However, if newspaper publishers want to take this to a successful business model they need to become much more flexible and modular to take advantage of the opportunities a personalised newspaper can offer.

Ralf Schlözer is a director of the on-demand printing and publishing consulting service for Europe at analyst Infotrends. Email ralf_schlozer@infotrends.com