With the newspaper industry desperately treading water, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the solution might just have to be a creative one. While we all try to figure out how to build the newsroom of the future, effectively monetize newspaper websites and bulk up their ad revenues to compensate for the death of (some) newspapers, some bright sparks are busy trying out their more cunning ideas.
One such bright spark is Joshua Karp, founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, an enterprising attempt to merge the worlds of the newspaper and the blog by printing blog posts into a newspaper format and distrubuting it for free.
According to NYTimes.com, The Printed Blog aims to eventually put out free neighbourhood editions twice a day in as many cities across the States as possible.
So what are the pros and cons of the Blogspaper?
Pros
The decline of newspapers has everyone worried about making money. The Printed Blog allows local content to be produced online and printed – this means that it marries blog production with the more advertising-friendly method of distribution provided by print. But it also answers questions about the physical artefact, enabling readers who enjoy the feeling of paper in their hands to consume content which might otherwise disappear.
The Printed Blog should also be cost-efficient. It saves on the cost of reporting, and there are also plans in the pipeline to reduce the cost of printing by avoiding large central printing presses. This, of course, means that the newspapers could be distributed for free. As we see in London, well-executed free newspapers remain popular, causing problems for the likes of the Evening Standard, forced to compete on an uneven playing field.
It would make the bloggers involved feel appreciated. Deep down, we all want to see our stuff in print.
Another nice touch is an element of ‘editing by committee’. Karp hopes that users will be able to log into the website and vote for which blogs they want in their local edition. As a result, a “city the size of Chicago could have 50 separate editions tailored to individual neighborhoods”. Now that is hyperlocal.
Cons
But this is by no means a perfect model. It does not adequately address the possibility to comment. Comments would feature on the following day, thus the immediacy of the blogosphere is lost and a more traditional form of “readers’ comments” is employed.
It also seems that Posted Blog papers would be laid out like a blog (i.e. a continual linear stream of posts). Why? One of the main reasons that this project is interesting is that it allows cost-cutting and modernisation while retaining the feel of the physical artefact. I think it would be more appropriate to lay the blog posts out in columns. After all, it’s not going to be an ongoing stream from one blogger. Presumably it will be more that the day’s news and views are lifted from a selection of bloggers. There is no chronological element.
All told, while I’m not convinced this will solve all our media woes, I will be watching with interest. I think The Posted Blog is an admirable project and a clever idea.
What do you think? Would you read a free mega-local newspaper made up of blog posts?
blogs, newspapers
Well, we had a great thing in Russia when largest business publisher – “Kommersant” published one of their magazines based on web 2.0 post only.
The project was implemented in cooperation with Russian subsidary of Edelman PR, and was called “Dengi 2.0″ (Dengi=Money). “Dengi” magazine is a weekly business review.
so that was a social media project called “Print your money” that started smth like October 2008, and the issue went out in January.
It made a lot of buzz and lots of bloggers wanted to get published. But, imho, that was popular among web 2.0 users only. Don’t think that people who never used social media even thought what the special “Dengi” issue could mean.
Local blog-paper sounds good to me. I even start thinking of creating smth like that in my town. Yet remembering how my small theatre newsleter was closed in one day after a harmless piece that someone of the mayors company didn’t like… I bet that’ll be hard to do.
Dengi 2.0 sounds like a great project. It lacks the immediacy of The Printed Blog but then again I think TPB is pretty ambitious!
Really love TPB idea! Is there any chance it’ll be implemented anywhere?
To the best of my knowledge it’s starting slowly in Chicago (as a weekly newspaper) and the intention is to roll it out to a wider selection of narrow audiences (if that makes sense) and increase the frequency.
Commercial issue isn’t it? Weekly papers in this country are typically flimsy and surviving fairly hand-to-mouth with local ads. But the news tends to be unrepresentative of what’s going on locally and sensationalised beyond belief (‘Mayor calls for new bypass to avoiding local rabbit colony’).
I live in a street where residents have their own email group list and regular online newsletter. Blogging is the natural next step. If every street or village did that – and it was commercialised so that businesses could reach those audiences – it’d threaten the conventional papers. But the best blogs tend to be uncommercial. Yet then we’ve got media overkill. So we’ll be reading about the rabbits and the bypass still. Ah feck at least I’m still being paid to write this.
Hi Steve, thanks very much for your comment.
I like the idea of a community email list and newsletter, and I think you could probably get away with a little advertising if it were done correctly.
Though that, of course, is one of the problems facing news sites and blogs already – how can they bring in ad revenue (necessarily distracting) while competing with a) traditional print and b) ad-free blogs?
I think the important point is that hyperlocal news must be produced in its target area, which means grass-roots bloggers writing passionately about their neighbourhoods. But then isn’t that what blogging does anyway?
So I guess the question is this: are we so entrenched in the physical artefact that a blog on paper is the way forward?