Dan’s Diner

BookBrewer, My Latest Creation

It’s been a busy 6 weeks since I officially went out on my own along with two co-founders with FeedBrewer, Inc. With the help of the Founder Institute tech startup training program, we identified a good first product for FeedBrewer: a blog-to-eBook creation engine we call BookBrewer.

On Monday, we began accepting alpha testers to BookBrewer. If you added your e-mail address to the alpha-testing list on FeedBrewer you should have already received an invitation to be a tester, but if not please let me know and I’ll hook you up.

I’m personally excited about BookBrewer for one simple reason: eBooks are a paid-content model that actually works. That appeals to the dormant journalist in me because I’ve been growing tired of sessions at journalism conferences that bemoan the lack of a sustainable business model for journalism. The question always comes around to “how do we pay for all this great jouralism,” and someone inevitably points to the idea of putting up paywalls on news sites (a nail in the coffin for most news organizations, in my opinion). Instead, content providers of all types should be looking at where people are actually paying for content, and put their content there. eBooks and the online stores are one such venue.

We did a lot of market research for this product, and the growth in eBook sales — at the expense of printed books, I might add — is already incredible. Amazon recently announced that its eBook sales have surpassed hardcover sales, and it expects them to pass paperback sales in 2011. You can read more about the eBook explosion on this post on the BookBrewer blog.

But in addition to that, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown may emerge through a grass-roots service like BookBrewer. I and my two co-founders are not only technologists — we’re creatives. All three of us have musical backgrounds, two of us are writers, and one of us is an accomplished visual artist. Ultimately, FeedBrewer and BookBrewer will be defined not by technology and tools — which will inevitably fade into the background — but by what people create with those tools. And beyond that, it will be defined by how many of those authors make money off their content.

With that in mind, we’re also launching what we call the Charter Author Program (CAP for short). In exchange for helping us test out BookBrewer and letting us publish their eBooks, CAP members will get lots of great benefits — including a free ISBN number (usually $125 a pop), no setup fees and the full per-sale royalty that we receive from publishers. In exchange, all we ask is that they test things out and tell people about us if they have a good experience. if you have a book in you and are itching to get it out, click the link above and enter your idea into the Charter Author Program.

So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last 6 weeks. What do the next 6 weeks hold in store? That’s what’s most fun about a startup. You never know what’s around the corner.

Moving on from The Bakersfield Californian

After an incredible six years and two months, today is my last day as an employee of The Bakersfield Californian. I and my team accomplished far more in little Bakersfield than any of us ever expected. It has been a great experience that I will never forget, or regret.

What’s next? I’ve started a technology and consulting company with two former colleagues called FeedBrewer, Inc. (http://feedbrewer.com/). We’re working on a variety of mobile publishing solutions, including a service called “BookBrewer” that will help turn free bloggers into revenue-producing eBook publishers. You can follow our development on Twitter at http://twitter.com/feedbrewer.

5 Cool Tools for the Entrepreneurial Journalist

Social media expert JD Lasica recently asked me to compile a list of the five most important tools for helping people drive social change. I had a difficult time understanding exactly what qualifies as “social change,” so he cut me a break and said I could list tools for journalists. Since I’m now working on a startup (FeedBrewer — check it out!), I decided to focus that even more and list tools for entrepreneurial journalists.

I drew inspiration from the Boulder-Denver tech startup community. This summer, my startup co-founders and I are participating in a “tech accelerator” and mentoring progam called The Founder Institute. Over four months, we’re meeting other entrepreneurs like ourselves, as well as CEOs of successful startups who listen to our ideas and give us honest feedback. We also meet with four others in pre-assigned teams to share ideas. Some of these tools came out of those sessions.

So here they are. If you have your own tools to share, either post them in a comment or tweet them under Twitter hashtag #jstartuptools.

Five Tools for the Entrepreurial Journalist

1. http://evernote.com
Recycle those spiral notebooks. This cloud-based notebook makes it easy to record written and audio notes, as well as documents. Just input notes or drag and drop files, and they’re there for you to access and edit on your iPhone, iPad, or from any Web brower. It’s a great desktop app, too.

2. http://twittertim.es
Too busy to click on all those links to recommended stories from Twitter times? Get them in an automatically laid-out web newspaper format. It’s like Google News with a social filter.

3. http://printcasting.com
Online news is great and definitely the future if not the present, but you can’t beat printed handouts for real-world meetings. If your stories are available in RSS feeds, use Printcasting to turn them into quick magazines that you can print and hand out at meetings, leave in coffee shops, or give to friends and family.

4. http://www.nameboy.com/ and http://namestation.com
You’ve got that great idea for an online news startup, but what to name it? These tools quickly find available domain names that use different combinations of words. You can even register them on the spot as you find them.

5. http://buddypress.org
Ning.com will soon require every social network to pay, or be shut down. If that doesn’t sit well with you and you have a WordPress site, install the BuddyPress plug-in. It adds user profiles, public and private groups and all the basic tools you need to run a social network.

What’s After Printcasting? FeedBrewer.

About two years ago, I wrote up an idea for how to leverage standardized Web content to create locally-targeted publications with less time, money and software than ever before. The technology and content would be digital, but the output would be optimized for physical distribution as printable PDF magazines. That concept became Printcasting and it earned us a Knight News Challenge grant.

We’re still extremely busy with Printcasting and are working on multiple tracks over the next six weeks before our grant ends. We’re finishing up version 2.0 of the Printcasting system on Drupal 6 and preparing to open-source everything, including the Drupal 5 version that powers the existing site. And we’re also helping partners, such as Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods in Philadelphia, which just printed 500 copies of its Printcasts and distributed them to the urban neighborhoods it serves. (Read more about what they’re up to here).

But we’re also planning ahead for what comes after Printcasting. So today, I’m very excited to announce the formation of a new for-profit company and future product called FeedBrewer.

We’re starting FeedBrewer out with a small bootstrap team, with me as the CEO, Printcasting designer Don Hajicek as the COO, and Drupal developer Andy Lasda as CTO. Learn more about FeedBrewer and its mission.

In addition to maintaining the free Printcasting.com service, which has been acquired from The Bakersfield Californian by FeedBrewer Inc. in exchange for an equity stake, FeedBrewer will expand Printcasting’s democratized-publishing approach to apply to more than just print. We’ll be adding additional outputs for smartphones, starting with the iPhone and Blackberry, and tablet computers, including Apple’s new iPad.

The FeedBrewer Approach

FeedBrewer is a publishing approach that works with almost any standards-based online publishing system. It can best be described as Publish Once, Distribute Everywhere:

What exactly does that mean? Here’s what we say on the FeedBrewer.com home page.

“FeedBrewer is a one-stop shop for designing, publishing and distributing your content on multiple platforms — including e-readers, mobile devices, e-mail and printable PDF magazines. You can even use it to redesign parts of your existing Web site. You don’t need to change how you publish content now to use FeedBrewer. Simply provide the RSS feed from your blogging tool or content management system, choose a design scheme, and we’ll do the rest.”

In other words, by simply providing an RSS feed and checking off some boxes for the outputs you want, FeedBrewer will let anyone become a multi-platform publisher in just five minutes.

Rethinking Print as Mobile Content

Sounds a lot like Printcasting, doesn’t it? It should, because we’re simply expanding the concept of print publishing to portable publishing. In our new thinking, printable content is subsumed under the mobile meme. That may sound like a stretch to some, but it makes sense if you think of print as the original mobile / portable format.

In addition, Printcasts already work on mobile devices that display PDFS, such as the iPhone and iPad. They’re purely digital products that exist solely in The Cloud up until someone decides to send them to a printer or view them on a mobile device.

To prove this point, here’s a picture of a Printcast on an iPad, which I brought up by going to Printcasting.com, clicking into a microsite, and clicking a “Download PDF” button. You have the same experience whether you look at the publication on a tablet like this, or by reading it on paper.

FeedBrewer will use many of the same Drupal modules we created for Printcasting for feed aggregation and designed output. We will simply build additional FeedBrewer modules that can plug into a basic Printcasting installation that will enable output for different mobile devices.

The fact that we can do this speaks to the highly-structured nature of the new Printcasting 2.0 system on Drupal 6 which, once open-sourced, will be able to be used by anyone in this way. We know that we will be one of many different parties using the opens-source Printcasting tools, and as the maintainer of those modules we look forward to seeing what other developers can do with them.

Our Business Model

Since FeedBrewer will be for-profit and no longer grant-funded, its business model will rely on paid services. Starting June 1, we will begin building customized installations of Printcasting and, eventually, FeedBrewer for premium customers. (Interested parties can send us a note via our contact page). But please note that we do plan to continue to maintain free services on Printcasting.com, and eventually FeedBrewer.com. At a future date, we will begin to offer paid upsells for a monthly fee.

This new “software as a service” approach is a departure from our experimental business model for Printcasting, which relied on taking a cut of self-serve advertising revenue. While we will continue to experiment with new advertising revenue models, we see more near-term potential in providing value-added services to publishers who are trying to publish in an increasing number of channels with limited or shrinking resources. They will be able to monetize their publications using their existing ad networks, which is what Printcasting partners have been asking us to do from the beginning.

On the financial front, we are also beginning to reach out to investors. Anyone interested in being a financial partner in FeedBrewer’s future can contact us at news@feedbrewer.net, through our contact page, or by phone at (303) 945-3827.

Looking Ahead, and a Big “Thank You”

What’s next? We will begin building out the FeedBrewer tools in June and hope to begin alpha testing this summer. You can enter your e-mail address into this form to be notified as soon as our alpha is ready. And you can stay up to date by subscribing to our blog and Twitter feed.

I would also like to send out a huge Thank You to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, whose initial funding of Printcasting made future things possible — including our new company, but also many other projects that will use the Printcasting code in the future. We recognize the role that philanthropy played in our development, and while we will operate as a for-profit company we feel our future mission is still very much in line with the goals of the Knight News Challenge. Our objective always has been, and will continue to be, to preserve the news and information function of local communities. Mobile is an increasingly important part of that.

We’re also thrilled that we’ll still be able to work with The Bakersfield Californian, where I started Printcasting in my previous role as Senior Manager of Digital Products. In addition to being a shareholder in FeedBrewer, the Californian is also signing on as our first paying customer. In my six year as a Californian employee, I’ve been privileged to be allowed to play a critical role in its evolution from a single-product, print-centric newspaper to a multi-platform cross-media information company. My hope is that through FeedBrewer, we can help them and others in the next big transition to portable “anywhere” content.

Printcasting in Philly With Temple University

A couple months ago, Printcasting struck a partnership with a visionary hyperlocal journalism site called PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com. Managed by the Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, it uses college seniors in Temple’s journalism program to report on 25 neighborhoods that are largely ignored by mainstream media, apart from the occasional crime story.

After several years of operation, the lab realized that members of these communities weren’t reading the online stories as much as they wanted them to.

The Philly Neighborhoods team discovered Printcasting and began feeding select stories into the system to create targeted magazines. They then took the additional step of printing and distributing a few hundred copies in community centers and libraries.

The initial feedback from the communities has been extremely positive, and also surprising to the Philadelphia Neighborhoods staff. They immediately received calls from people who had read the first editions and wanted to know how they could get more copies. And perhaps even more interesting, some people asked how much additional copies would cost. The Temple staff didn’t charge for copies and doesn’t intend to, but the mere presence of this question is an indication of the value people place on hyperlocal printed products.

Co-director Christopher Harper also told me that the student-run staff was surprised to get such immediate feedback. Residents knew that Philadelphia Neighborhoods reporters were in their communities shooting videos and making interviews, but he said they didn’t quite realize the content was intended for them, rather than simply being about them.

As students Anna Hyclak and Sherri Hospedales wrote about on their blog,

“Because of the lack of news coverage in the area, everyone we talked to while distributing Printcasting newspapers of our work in this class seemed very excited to see finally see the word ‘Mantua’ in print. Libraries and community centers were eager to display the newspapers, and people we passed kept asking for copies. They would then stop to read the paper right then and there.

We were surprised, because we didn’t expect such a strong and immediate reaction – but I think the people in the neighborhood were even more surprised than we were. Though they’ve seen us around, taking notes and conducting interviews and shooting video, I don’t think they ever realized that we were trying to produce content for them, not for ourselves. Perhaps this will be the start of a new news-gathering tradition in Mantua.”

Temple student Rachel Horning (right) shows off the first edition of the Printcasting-powered Hunting Park Times.

My own take on this is that by seeing its own printed newsletter with the name of the community right at the top, residents feel a sense of pride and ownership of the paper, and they more closely relate to the content and brand. The Printcast makes content that was previously available online seem more relevant to where they live.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Philadelphia Neighborhoods and learn more about their program.

The next step, says Harper, is to get Temple students to start creating their own niche publications using content from the individual reporter blogs they’re required to keep as part of the program. This has the potential for even more high-touch hyperlocal coverage.

PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods co-directors Linn Washington and Christopher Harper proudly displaying their first Printcasting editions.

Another piece of promising feedback came from the printer Temple uses. After printing the first editions, the printer asked about how easy Printcasting was to use. “Do you think that this is something other clients might find useful? We often have questions from people who do not have access to designers or design software,” wrote the printer. I’ve heard this from other printers as well, so maybe there’s a larger opportunity there.

I can’t overstate how thrilled we are about how well things are going with PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com. It’s exactly the kind of test site we always hoped for. But we’re not done yet. We have one more local partnership slot to fill before our grant ends. If you have a good idea for a local community that could benefit from Printcasting, please contact me and let me know how you plan to use it. Your experience and feedback will ultimately feed back into the tools that we open source in June.

Printcasting’s Expansion into South America

Yesterday, we announced our second media partner: an innovative newspaper in Lima, Perú called La República. Our press release explains who they are, how they’ll be using Printcasting and why we chose them. But the bottom line is that it really came down to good philosophical alignment between our organizations, and the potential for true collaboration that benefits both parties.

For some time now, we’ve seen a steady trickle of users from other countries. A common thread in many of them has been Spanish, and we’ve been asked repeatedly when we would offer a Spanish-language version. This makes sense even in the United States, which has at least 30 million Spanish speakers, and even moreso for the global population of 300 million Spanish speakers. So La República’s offer to translate everything caught our eye.

But in addition to that, La República has a very good site built on Drupal, which is the same platform we use for Printcasting. As we got to talking more with La República and actually met their developers (who are excellent), we realized that there was the potential for joint development.

As we get closer to releasing Printcasting under an open source license (which will happen in June), we feel it’s more and more important to get the Printcasting code to a point where other developers can just jump in and customize it to their liking. La República will help make sure that’s the case long before our open source date. And in case you’re wondering, any change they make to the code will also be open sourced — so everyone will benefit from what they do.

We’ve also learned from other partnerships that existing organizations really aren’t that interested in pointing to the Printcasting network, or to any external Web site. La República is no exception. They and others see Printcasting.com as a demo site for tools they can deploy directly on their own domains.

While that’s different from what we originally intended for Printcasting.com, it actually makes a lot of sense to us. In the long term we plan to offer such customization services, but we haven’t been allowed to do that while working from non-profit grant funds. Based on how U.S. tax laws work, our grant money can’t be used to economically benefit only one organization. (That also goes for grantee The Bakersfield Californian, which to date has not made one penny off Printcasting for the same reason).

However, things changed when La República said it could contribute something back to the project. By providing real value through custom coding and translations which will be part of the open-source project, they started to look more like a grantee. They’ll initially be putting a lot more into the project than they get out of it, and they’re fine with that.

I also know for a fact that La República isn’t that interested in making tons of money off ads in Printcasts between now and June, when our Knight News Challenge grant ends. They see it simply as a way of empowering citizens. The independently-owned La República has a history of supporting citizen engagement, and a whole lot of cool plans for how to use the Internet to empower Peruvians. It was a staunch opponent of the dictatorship of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori after his coup in 1992, and has been an important defender of freedom of speech and democracy at a time when most other local media was controlled by the Peruvian government.

They see Printcasting in that light. When we asked La República’s director Gustavo Mohme how he’d use Printcasting locally, his first inclination was to use it to encourage readers to create and distribute magazines that put pressure on corrupt Peruvian politicians.

I find this mindset refreshing at a time when most U.S. newspapers are more preoccupied with shoring up their bottom lines than in defending democracy and free speech. I mean, we all know that the economics that historically supported journalism are eroding. Everyone, including me, is thinking about new business models. But if you’re a journalist, be honest. Did you enter journalism because you thought it would make you a lot of money or because you wanted to sell ads? No? I thought so. Yes, we need to figure out how to support journalism and journalists, but the “supporting” part means nothing if we don’t stay focused on the reason it needs to be supported.

After spending an afternoon with various people at La República, which I got to visit on my way back from Argentina, I came away feeling empowered myself and remembered what it was that attracted me to the journalism field in the first place. In general, I get the sense that Latin American newspapers haven’t forgotten why they exist because they can’t afford to. At any given moment, a corrupt government can step in and threaten their existence.

So this gets to the really exciting part of this partnership, and Latin America in general. I’ve been fortunate in the last year to get to visit both Costa Rica (where I spoke at newspaper trade group Grupo de Diarios de América) and Argentina (for the Inter-American Press Association). What I’ve learned is that the digital and economic divides in Latin America make it the perfect testing ground for Printcasting, which is a true bridge between the digital and physical worlds.

Average Internet penetration in South America is around 33% versus 73% in North America, and those who do access the Internet for personal reasons often do so from Internet cafes or mobile phones. While 75% of the people in Latin America live in urban areas, the 25% in smaller towns are often out of

luck when it comes to information. They often don’t have newspapers available for a simple reason: the delivery trucks can’t reach them every day. And for the same reason, newspapers can’t invest much in hyperlocal coverage for these areas.

I don’t know exactly how La República will use Printcasting, and as a partner I can’t really tell them what to do, nor would I want to. But I have a feeling that Printcasting could be a way for Latin American newspapers to reach that lost quarter of the population in a new way. Instead of investing in hundreds of expensive trucks and fuel, they could enlist the help of thousands of citizen bloggers who have home printers. It can be a vehicle for both getting important journalism out to the people who need it most, in addition to helping them tell their own local stories.

This is why our announcement is about not just one partnership, but a general expansion south. Regardless of what we do in the U.S. (and don’t worry, we have some cool stuff ahead for El Norte), we feel that working with Latin America will help us in ways we never envisioned. And we’ll get something back: the ability to reach out to Spanish-speakers right here in our own borders.

Look Like a Design Pro with Printcasting 1.5

We’ve been busy working on a new version of Printcasting.com with completely new templates that give your publications more polish, while also giving you more control over design and layout. It all launched this morning, so jump in and give it a try.

This is just the first of two major upgrades, with much more to come in Printcasting 2.0 in the coming weeks. You can read more about our release schedule and future plans on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab.

Here’s what you have to do to take advantage of the new templates and functionality, depending on which publishing mode you use.

1. If you publish each edition manually …

• Sign in and go to the My Publications tab, then click the Publish New Edition button next to your publication. That’s it! You’ll see the new features immediately.

1. If you set up your publication to publish automatically …

• Sign in and go to the My Publications tab, then click the Edit Settings link under your publication. Check the box next to Create Each Edition Myself and and then click Save Changes. When the screen refreshes, click the Publish New Edition button next to your publication.

There are a lot of improvements in the new interface of the Edition Builder, some of which you can see in this video and in the screen shots below. Here are some of the juicier ones:

• Live Previews as you Edit: The Edition Builder now doubles as a live preview of your magazine. It updates the preview right on the same screen as you add stories and change layout options.
• Cool New Header Design Options: The header tool has some new options that make you look like a pro without having to be a design wiz.

  

  Add transparent overlays to make otherwise average photos look like professional design elements, change font colors and more.

• Granular Layout Control: You can change the layout for text and photos for every story.

  

  Want three columns instead of two? Want your photo to appear at the upper right instead of the left? Just choose a sub-template layout and see everything move into place.

• Add and Crop Photos to Appear in Stories: You can now upload a photo from your hard drive to appear in any story spot, and even fill in the entire space with a photo instead of text (great for charts!) A slider lets you to position and crop it in seconds.

  

• Instant PDF Preview Download: At any time, you can download a preview of your PDF (marked “Preview”) so you’ll know exactly how it will look when you publish.

We hope you’ll give the new features a try and let us know if you have any questions or feedback. You can e-mail us any time at help@printcasting.com and a real, live human being will get back to you within 24 hours.

Printcasting 1.5 and 2.0

A funny thing happens when you win a contest like the Knight News Challenge. Suddenly, what was once just a wacky idea that you threw into a Web form becomes a long list of things you have to do. And those of you who are lucky enough to be filling out a full Knight News Challenge proposal this week should take note: if you win, you have to do ALL of it.

If you haven’t seen the list of features we originally promised to build with Printcasting, let’s just say it was pretty darned long. So it’s with great satisfaction that I can say that 18 months after our Knight-funded Printcasting project started, we have finally completed all of the features we promised.

But that doesn’t mean we’re finished. If anything, we’ve made our list even longer thanks to constant feedback from people who call us up to say, “Printcasting would perfectly fit my needs if you could just add this one extra thing ….”

Introducing Printcasting 1.5

So to those of you who have been asking for more control over publishing and design, pay attention. Next week we’ll take a huge step forward by rolling out Printcasting 1.5, which is all about giving more control to publishers. You can see a quick preview of some of the 1.5 features here:

The elevator pitch for those who don’t want to watch the video is that Printcasting 1.5 has much more professional-looking templates, more options for how text and pictures can be arranged on a page, more control over fonts, and some really cool design features for header images.

We call this a “dot-five” release because it’s really an incremental step toward the even more ambitious Printcasting 2.0, which will be a complete rewrite in Drupal 6 that will be more usable by the open source community. (We will also open source the Drupal 5 version once we’re satisfied with where it’s at).

We say that this release is all about publishers because, until relatively recently, we were still working on an extremely complicated self-serve advertising system. It was important to get the advertising system to work (and it was an important part of our Knight News Challenge proposal), but to be frank we haven’t seen a lot of interest from the small businesses it was designed for.

One reason for that is the economy. Many of those businesses either cut their marketing budgets or flat out went out of business in 2009. You could say that it was the second worst time in American history to launch an advertising tool, with the first worst being the Great Depression. I continue to be a believer in the idea of “democratizing” print ad publishing, but it will take more time to get the features just right and attract interest from time and cash-starved businesses.

Surprise! Businesses Need Democratized Publishing, Too

While we haven’t seen interest from businesses in buying ads, we have seen a ton of interest from companies and organizations that want to use Printcasting or utilize the democratized workflow that’s behind it. The common thread in these large organizations is something we never anticipated but which now makes sense: they need help spreading the work of publishing within their own walls, democratizing from the inside out.

These organizations run the gamut from publishers (including but not limited to newspapers) to membership organizations, and their needs seem to increase as the economy forces companies to do more with less. We hope to be able to work with some of these organizations as partners in the future.

We also continue to get attention from the tech community, such as MIT which included us in a list of Research to Watch, and O’Reilly, which will include us in a session at their Tools of Change in Publishing conference along with our friends from RIT’s Open Publishing Lab and Spot.us next month.

Looking Ahead

So where does this leave us for June 1, the first day that we are no longer working from Knight News Challenge grant funds? When we’re not designing and coding, we’re also thinking quite a bit about how to keep Printcasting.com going after the grant and make it do even more — including automatic publishing of things that have nothing to do with a printer. I naturally can’t get into details about those plans, but they’re exciting and I hope to be able to talk more publicly about them after they firm up.

In the meantime, we’ll maintain laser-like focus on the user experience. Among our top priorities are:

• Launch Printcasting 2.0 on Drupal 6. My challenge to the development team is to complete this by the end of February.

• Roll out more partnerships. We’ve inked one to-be-announced partnership with a Latin American newspaper, with a second in the wings, and are deep in discussions with a well-known membership organization. We also hope to work with some smaller non-profit news organizations that have reached out to us. Think your company and organization could make for a good Printcasting partner? Fill out this form and we’ll get in touch with you. (On a side note, we’ve had many discussions with U.S. newspapers, but sadly most have stalled as most of those same newspapers deal with collapsing business models).

• More promotion in Bakersfield, through our sponsor / partner The Bakersfield Californian. After Printcasting 1.5 launches, the Californian plans to seriously ramp up marketing of the service in both print and online. We’ve already seen some increases in usage from some test promos.

• Experiment with eBook formats, starting with ePub — which is what Apple is using for the recently announced iPad. I was really excited to see Apple adopt this open standard rather than promote a new proprietary format. Those of you who think Printcasting is all about paper may be surprised to hear that we’re thinking about eBooks, but the truth is that Printcasting has never been just about print. It’s a digital technology platform that creates content that is designed to be read in your hand. The more visual eReaders become, the more important layout and design will be. We hope to make our service an integral part of the eBook and ePublishing ecosystem.

So that’s what we’re up to. Please give Printcasting 1.5 a try next week (we’ll post an update on our Twitter feed when it’s ready), and get ready for more fun stuff in the future.

Death or Transformation? It’s a Matter of Perspective.

It’s always interesting to get a Google alert about how something you worked on is getting killed  — especially when it’s not.

That happened yesterday when I got an alert about a story on PaidContent.org claiming that The Bakersfield Californian is shutting down its community web sites, including Bakotopia.com and The Bakersfield Voice. This was news to me, and it didn’t jibe with what I’d heard during a trip to Bakersfield a week ago. And after about 15 minutes of internal reporting I learned that it was not only inaccurate, but the exact opposite of the truth.

Just to be crystal clear, those sites and brands are not being killed, but they may be transformed in response to accelerated change.

For background: I got many of those sites off the ground starting in 2004. While I gave up management of them when I started working on Printcasting, I always feel emotionally attached to them and want to see them succeed.

It turns out that the report was based on a misinterpretation of what another Californian VP told the AIM Group. I sent the link to Logan Molen, my current boss who is also a  senior VP and COO at the Californian. Here’s what he posted on his blog last night:

… Both Bakotopia.com and BakersfieldVoice.com remain at the core of a strategy we’re set to launch in the coming weeks and months that will truly – and finally — leverage the collective power of our local network of community sites and social connections.

But he also said that they are evaluating the return on investment of the associated print editions for those brands:

In deep recessions, any smart business would evaluate whether it makes sense to continue funding money-losing products, no matter the reputation. That’s why the print versions of fabled publications like Portfolio, Sporting News, TV Guide, Newsweek and others have either been shuttered or scaled back this past year.

The important thing to note there is that they’re evaluating the print editions, but no decisions have been made about them yet. And even if they were to stop printing weekly or bi-weekly magazines featuring the best content from those sites, the investment in the brands and online communities that define them remains intact.

Also, I’d like to point out that any decisions about those biweekly print editions have no bearing on what we’re doing with Printcasting, which is a “bottom-up” niche publishing engine. We’re focusing more than ever on promoting and integrating Printcasting in the Californian’s sites.

Ironically, just before I saw that PaidContent post, I’d set up a Printcast that features the latest music and movie reviews posted on Bakotopia. It’s called Bakotopia Spotlight and it may soon be promoted on the Bakotopia.com home page. You can see it here:

And earlier yesterday, we added this standing Printcasting widget to the Bakersfield.com home page:

Printcasting widget on Bakersfield.com home page.

We’re working on other local promotions for Printcasting for advertisers that will go out in the next couple weeks.

The larger lesson here is about semantics, and how different people interpret rapid change. To some, big changes are always seen as a move away from one thing and toward another, and to them that means death. In the last year, the chorus of people who talk about newspapers dying has reached shrill proportions. Their argument is overly simplistic: that people are dropping print products and moving to the Web. You can see that mentality expressed here by Paid Content, which confused a statement about two print editions possibly ending with the idea that the Web sites are being “shuttered.”

But there’s another, more accurate and much more positive way to look at this. The way the Californian delivers content from these niche brands is transforming in the heat of rapid external change.

I personally think that the concept of Printcasting makes more sense than ever in this economy. For example, if it turns out that it’s too expensive to print copies of a Bakotopia niche magazine for everyone to read (and that is a big IF), a series of Bakotopia Printcasts can be made available online with little to no ongoing effort. People could subscribe to them and print them at home, and the Bakotopia editors could still print a few hundred copies — versus a few thousand — to make available at local establishments and hand out at local events.

That’s not death, it’s metamorphosis. Let’s stop confusing the two.

Paid Ads and Revenue Sharing Launch on Printcasting

We just reached another big milestone on Printcasting with a feature that we think will redefine how publishers perceive and use the service.

Starting now, all ads placed with the Printcasting self-serve advertising tool cost $10, an amount that publishers can mark up per publication. In addition, 60% of every ad dollar is shared with publishers through their Paypal accounts, and 30% of every dollar is set aside to share with participating content providers in the future in proportion to how often their content has been used in Printcasts.

We’ve also made it easier for advertisers to place ads in each magazine by adding a “Place an Ad” button on the microsite pages. Click that, and you’ll see that your publication is automatically selected as a target (see an example here). This allows a business to advertise in publications they like by simply typing in the URL from the PDF printout (possibly in a sample copy that a publisher gives to them), click that button, pay and be done.

All of this is important for several reasons:

• First, we can finally tell publishers and content providers that they can use Printcasting not only to meet the information needs of their communities, but also to help pay the freight for reporting, content creation, printing and distribution. Like our fellow Knight News Challenge project Spot.us, we’re helping answer the question of how to pay for quality journalism.
• It creates a very compelling new way for local businesses to place affordable ads that they know will be seen locally. This is especially helpful for so-called “long tail” advertisers, that majority of businesses in every town that have very little time or money (and these days less money than ever before), but still need to market their services to stay open. These are businesses like nail salons, home contractors, local book stores, ice cream shops and the like.
• For newspapers, like The Bakersfield Californian and partners such as MediaNews Group, it creates a new way to reach those long-tail advertisers. One of the biggest problems newspapers are coping with right now is that most of their revenue comes from very large businesses. When two of them merge, or one ceases operation, it starts a snowball effect that these days leads to things like cost-cutting, layoffs and a corresponding loss of quality. For this reason, everyone who likes getting local news from newspapers has a vested interest in newspapers’ ability to diversify their revenue sources. Expanding their revenue to small businesses is one critical part of that.
• And finally, it completes the feature set we laid out 18 months ago when we entered the Knight News Challenge. From this point onward, everything we do will build upon and improve the core features in response to the feedback and usage patterns of users and partners.

Many thanks to The Commerce Guys and our lead developer Ron Robinson for getting this launched. You guys rock!

Find more info about on the Printcasting blog about how revenue sharing works and, if you’re a publisher or contributor, some important things you need to do to get paid.