The Printed Blog is just that: A collection of user-generated content — mostly stuff that’s bloggers voluntarily give to a guy named Joshua Karp — printed on good old-fashioned paper. Karp, the publisher and founder, sells an ad or two to go with it and then distributes the whole thing free at newspaper-style boxes around Chicago.
That’s the front-page of the first edition, which debuted on Jan. 27, 2009.
These editions were eight pages long. The ad stack is down in the corner.
They don’t pay for the content. I’m not sure if Karp is paying the editors. The bios of the staff (you can read about them in the first edition [PDF]) indicated there’s lots of college students in their senior year or people who write blogs full-time. The publisher — Karp — used to run a software company.
Here’s their blurb:
“The selection of content in The Printed Blog is based solely on the votes of readers and their geographic location. In such a way, The Printed Blog revolts against the top-down, 'one size fits all' model of newsprint, as we know it. Instead of one paper serving hundreds of thousands of people, as is often the case, The Printed Blog publishes hundreds or even thousands of highly-localized editions based on what a community declares is important to them. The papers are distributed to neighborhood pickup points in A.M. and P.M. editions, and will incorporate rapid turnaround reader comments.”
My thoughts:
- The challenge for every editor is finite space. Newsprint space costs money. And that means The Printed Blog is going to have to make choices. If you want to pay the bills doing this, you have to be really good at making those choices. Believe me, that’s not easy.
- You get what you pay for. The New York Times this is not — but it’s neither intending to be that nor is it intending to supplant the Times (or, in this case, The Chicago Tribune.) In fact, though it’s still in beta, it looks more like a weekly magazine. Now many daily newspapers often have a kind of ideas and issues section inside their paper either everyday or once a week which provides this kind of reader experience. The Printed Word is suggesting that letting users decide what goes in will produce better results than letting professional editors guide the content. We'll see.
Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs
Wow, those are awfully short pieces, and they barely hang together as a coherent whole, for some reason (probably another one of those editing things that no one notices until it's gone…)
It's an interesting idea, but it could be done an awful lot better, it seems. People do blog about news, too.
Graphically, and I have been known to do this sort of thing for money — it looks like the kind of bric-a-brac visual onslaught that only a blogger could love… and those ads disappeared after issue #1. It's garish. Is this really what they think people are looking for in daily print media these days?
I think the advantages print has over screen is that you can slow down with it. Paper is nicer to read, people will tolerate much longer articles – they'll have a coffee, they'll soak in the letters. This really -is- a printed blog, and most blogs aren't very good anyway… and I'm sure they're running in to the horrible price of twice-daily distribution of full-colour physical media — it ain't cheap, and it definitely isn't profitable, so I don't know what kind of crazy people they've convinced to burn money on this when money's doing a really great job of burning itself in Chicago and the rest of the US.
So uh… interesting idea, interesting that they got some funding, but I don't think anyone's going to remember them by September.