This trend has publishers scrambling to design media that is friendly to readers where traditional web content has focused on videos, interactive graphs, and podcasts. Part of that design will be aesthetic but there is more to it than that.

Imagine tablet news as a source that is continually upgraded right in front of your eyes. All related products and events can appear on your screen.

Mario Garcia has spent over forty years designing newspaper layouts and scrutinizing ways to make things more appealing and now he is faced with the new challenge of tablet computers.

“The tablet is a very unique medium, and you simply do not dump content from the newspaper into it,” says Garcia.

He continues,”Print is designed for the brain and the eye – the tablet is designed for the brain, eye and finger.”

For Garcia it more than just aesthetic design, its about the psychology of the user and creating an experience on the tablet that other mediums don’t provide.

He explains, “People expect more of a relaxing experience there, but every time we go for a total lean-back experience, we discover that people also want to lean forward, for news updates before bed, or whenever they want to get that last update of the day”.

When asked about who he thinks is getting it right with tablet computer editions of news he says The Orange County (Calif.) Register has got his vote. In magazines he claims that Readers Digest has really caught his attention.

It will be interesting to see how tablets continue to change the way we read, dicepher information, and subscribe to periodicals. It’s something I haven’t given much thought to until now.

Hoy’s size and scope are well-suited to the kind of breakthrough it’s accomplishing here; according to a company statement, the daily newspaper is part of both the Chicago Tribune Media Group and the Los Angeles Times Media Group, and around 1.4 million copies of it are distributed each week.

Now, if all goes according to plan, advertisers who already trust Google will embrace this means of contacting Hispanic populations.  Google will split the ad revenue with Hoy, which could then grow even bigger.  Or, if you’re one of the “the-death-of-print-is-coming” crowd, it could survive even longer.

In any event, this is a good PR move for Google.  The company’s environmental efforts are all good and well, but with around 600 English-language newspapers involved in the Print Ads program, it might have looked odd had a Spanish-language entity not gotten involved.

Extra, Extra, Google Expands Print Ads

Over 225 newspapers have signed on to one of the few lifelines available that can provide life-giving ad revenue where little to none had been found.

Google announced the Print Ads program expansion in a statement today, a day ahead of its quarterly earnings conference call. The program opens inventory in newspapers to hundreds of thousands of US-based clients in Google’s AdWords program.

It looks like the tweaking Google made during the smaller scale test of Print Ads appealed to big name publishers. New York Times VP of business development for advertising Todd Haskell lauded the “flexibility and control to set our own pricing” for Print Ads.

The process of merging AdWords advertisers with newspapers appeared in Google’s statement:

Advertisers and agencies access Google Print Ads through the AdWords interface and interactively plan a targeted media buy-in up to hundreds of newspapers across the United States. Once they have identified target newspapers, they enter a bid for the available ad space and upload a creative. Newspaper publishers then view the bids, and either approve or reject them, with an option to provide direct feedback to the advertisers. Detailed reports and electronic tear-sheets provide accountability, and Google automates billing and payments for further transactional efficiency.

It’s all very sophisticated, but the fundamental economics behind Google and the newspaper industry probably tilts the program in Google’s favor. Newsprint has suffered declining readership, while Google’s fortunes rise with every ad it places online.

Though the Times and probably other publications feel they are in control, and they do decide on the ads they accept, they likely have to face a reality where they take what Google and Print Ads offers them more often than not.