First of all, when we decided to adopt the tablet model, no one in the world was publishing a daily newspaper on a tablet. There were some tools available for tablet layout, but they were used more by magazines or weekly papers.
Producing a daily paper is a big job. I will give you an example. In Canada, we really love hockey. When a hockey game ends at 10:30 p.m., you have to be able to see all the information on the same screen. I do not know if you are familiar with the La Presse+ format. There are screens with multiple functions. You have all the results on one screen. You press on different buttons. The paper has to have a journalist who writes, a columnist who writes, a videographer who puts together a montage of the videos of goals scored, a photographer who works on the montage of photos, a statistician who provides the statistics. There were no such tools before. However, now, this tool lets five or six different people work on a screen at the same time.
When we embarked on our project, we had to develop five important pieces of production software from scratch. Some we developed in-house and others were developed for us by Canadian, U.S. and even European companies. One of our important applications was developed by a German partner. It took three years to develop it. It was a very long process.
Today, an organization could do it much faster. For example, the Toronto Star started a product similar to ours with our application in nine months.
That is what the first three years were like.
There is another aspect. We had a relationship with the readers of our paper edition for 132 years. We did not want to upset people. Thus, every six months we looked at improvements and at how people were doing. At the very end, the only people who had not migrated to the tablet edition were those who were averse to technology. We established programs to help these people buy a tablet, configure it, and make the leap. We were very respectful of our readers. In fact, communication about our project was so good that, at the very end, when we stopped printing the paper version, there were almost no complaints or raucous protests. We really supported people. We did a good job.