As we have moved to the age of diminishing attention spans, the online media really struggles to get people to pause and enjoy great stories. We wanted to find a way to force the people to stop, think and discover the joy of quality journalism again. Maybe this way we could help them to understand the risks of the electronic hustle and bustle?

We all know that we have a new worldwide problem: Aimless internet browsing and multitasking affect concentration and memory and are a real health issue.

Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish newspaper, wrote an online investigative article about the effects of multitasking. We wanted to demonstrate the insights of the article to the readers through their own reading experience.

The solution was a specially designed web page for the article - the catch was that when you are on the webpage, you can't read the article without shutting down your internet connection first! This is an online article that can only be viewed by going offline.

The Results:

- 5900 % more readers than an average online article

- Weeks most read article at the HS.fi

When you land on the www.hs.fi/takeiteasy website you are instructed to shut down your internet connection. Once offline, the article opens up. When you go back online, the article disappears.

The technology behind this is really simple: the content of the article is loaded into a cache, and when a script notices that you are offline the content of the cache is shown. The context is the important part - this might be the first time that a major newspaper builds an innovative online reading experience that reflects the actual content of the story.