Dan’s Diner

Printcasting Expands to More Cities

I’m very excited to announce that Printcasting.com, my 2008 Knight News Challenge project that democratizes print magazine publishing, is expanding to more U.S. cities. And I’m equally excited about the first partner: Denver-based MediaNews Group. Here’s a link to the full press release about our arrangement with MediaNews.

I’ll post more soon about our agreement and what it means for the Printcasting.com user, but here’s the bottom line. Now people in Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area can create locally-focused Printcasts in a way that lets local readers and advertisers find them. Media partners like MediaNews simply seed those markets with content and use Printcasting the same way as regular users, but by doing that they also provide content that the community can remix into niche publications as well.

The experience on the Printcasting.com site doesn’t change much on its face, as all of the real changes are on the back-end. When you go to Printcasting.com, you’ll now see a search box to “Find Printcasting Near You.” Enter a zip code and it will tell you if there’s a site in your town. If there is, you’ll be taken straight to a site that aggregates Printcasts from your area. If not, you’re told to create a Printcast and tag it to your zip code. If we start to see a large number of Printcasts in that area, we’ll create a site like this one for Denver: http://printcasting.com/denver.

But we’re not opening city sites for the entire U.S. just yet. Because Printcasting is such a new concept, we need people to help seed their markets with content (from blogs and professional sources) and publications that use that content. And we also need people who are willing to do the local foot work, and meet with bloggers and community organizations to show them how Printcasting can help them communicate with their audience.

The most natural partners for local promotion are newspapers because they have local content, local people, and an interest in growing local audience and revenue. Printcasting offers a way for them to do that at lower cost while also leveraging content from bloggers in their communities. Local bloggers will also benefit through ad revenue share, assuming a newspaper chooses to use their content in one of their Printcasts, and that Printcast makes money. In this way, Printcasting provides a way for newspapers — long leaders in local community development — to work in partnership with local entreprenurial-minded content providers rather than in competition with them.

This is where MediaNews Group comes in. I met Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group’s Vice President for Targeted Products, a year ago at his Individuated Newspaper Conference (thanks to former Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple for the introduction!) Peter has been working on his separate I-News initiative, which will soon let readers of certain MediaNews Group papers create personalized editions that contain only the content they’re interested in. The approach is different from Printcasting, but the end-result is the same. It creates more opportunity for targeted advertising.

I think Peter is more committed to this idea than anyone working in media today, and he proves it by assembling an open-invitation conference every year about personalized news. Peter is the one who came to me with the idea of using Printcasting as an internal niche-magazine engine. While that wasn’t what we created Printcasting for, it made sense. Add to that his and MediaNews’ openness to letting citizens in their markets create publications — even with content that starts within MediaNews — and we knew that we’d found our first partner.

But there are others out there who are equally interested. From the very beginning of this project we’ve received interest from organizations around the world — often newspapers, but also organizations such as universities and membership groups. It started as soon as we posted a prototype in the Fall of 2008, and it caught us by surprise. We’re responding to demand rather than going around asking people to participate, and that’s a good sign.

Between now and December we will continue to talk to interested parties and roll out more sites in more cities. If you think your organization may be a good match, please let us know! And regardless of that, please feel free to start using Printcasting wherever you are. If you enter your zip code (or international postal code) when you create content, that will be a sign to us to open a Printcasting city site near you.

Citzen Media Goes Fisher-Price

I just posted this to PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, and am reposting it here with permission.

I’ve been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started “citizen media” brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe. But it wasn’t until a wave of tornadoes went through my hometown of Denver this week that I realized just how far the revolution has come.

A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.

Just look at the experience of Lauren, my 6-year-old daughter, with her $68 Fisher-Price digital camera. On Tuesday, it vaulted us both into the local media spotlight within minutes after she captured footage of a funnel cloud forming over our house.

I uploaded everything to Flickr and Vimeo and posted links in Twitter. Minutes later, @CBS4Denver, the local CBS News affiliate, was broadcasting the footage on the air and interviewing me live over the phone.

That night, CBS came to our house to do a segment about my daughter and how she shot the photo on her Fisher-Price camera. Here’s that segment, followed by my video footage.

What’s most interesting to me is how naturally all of this happened, and how quickly a couple of tweets were picked up and broadcast all over the state. And it wasn’t just by CBS — The Denver Post, Daily Camera and Colorado Daily also pointed to it from their websites.

h2. How It All Happened

Rewind to last Sunday, when five tornadoes went through the Denver area, with one overturning a car and injuring a man taking pictures. Since then, everyone here has been on edge whenever strange clouds form. That day, I bookmarked a local Twitter search for the term Tornado and began monitoring it whenever I heard reports of strange weather.

When my daughter came into my home office on Tuesday saying there was a scary looking cloud outside, I checked the NOAA radar for Denver and didn’t see anything. I checked Twitter search and saw nothing as well. So we marched upstairs to take a look ourselves.

And that’s when we saw a strange, sideways, shoelace-like cloud that appeared to be growing:

I immediately grabbed my camera and starting taking pictures. It was at this time that I remember hearing Lauren say, “I’m gonna get my camera too!” It was ultimately her photo above that ended up on TV news, also spreading through Twitter via a few retweets that resulted in 400 clicks in just a few hours (according to bit.ly).

Here are the most popular Tweets that started the ball rolling:

I should add that I also addressed some tweets to the attention of @cbs4denver, which made it easier for them to find, as well as @denverpost. I subscribe to both of their feeds and had noticed them asking people to tweet tornado news on Sunday. This was an incredibly smart move by both organizations, as it immediately extended their newsroom to include everyone on the ground. The Denver Post, followed by the Daily Camera and Colorado Daily, ended up embedding my video on their home pages. Vimeo reports that the video has been played 729 times since then, with 400 views on the first day.

h2. How Breaking News Has Changed

This personal experience has really changed my view of breaking news, and opened my eyes to the revolution in news reporting that microblogging and real-time search are making possible. A year ago, I was skeptical of Twitter, thinking it was just another Web 2.0 darling that would quickly lose its luster. Now I’m starting to sense that Twitter, microblogging and real-time search are a new medium in their own right, distinct from being simply part of “the Internet.” They’re a new chapter in the digital media revolution.

This anecdote also shows how quickly breaking news spreads through Twitter, which, as a medium, is scooping not only local news organizations but also the National Weather Service, which did not declare a tornado warning in Broomfield until 30 minutes after we saw a funnel cloud forming.

This was even more obvious when the CBS 4 news crew arrived, fresh from chasing the storm all the way to Greeley, Colo., and still getting no direct tornado footage. Instead, they spent the afternoon visiting people who had already taken and broadcast their own footage online. There was once a time when a news station provided the main lens on a locality and thus the eye of common experience. Now, the news station’s role is shifting to be more of a spotlight on “everycam.” As Clay Shirky said in his book by the same name, here comes everybody!

Newspapers Need a Galileo

Former Rocky Mountain News publisher John Temple has a great post about a recent depressing meeting of newspaper leaders, and their strategy for future success. The trouble is that most of their suggestions maybe made sense maybe 10 years ago, but now they just look out of touch. This quote nicely sums up his key points:

“The first mantra of the newspaper business, according to API, seems to be, ‘By god, the users will pay, because we say what we have to offer is valuable.’ The second seems to be, ‘If anybody messes with our stuff, we’ll force them to pay.’ And the third might be: ‘Businesses that are paying us should pay us more.’ ”

Here’s my take after five years of innovation from the ground floor at what is considered a very good, forward-looking newspaper. Their suggestions are depressing because they’re too little too late to save what once was. The last chance to start any of this was five years ago at best, which is not surprising since even the best newspapers have been operating under 10 to 30-year-old assumptions.

But I haven’t completely given up. Putting my optimist’s hat on for a second, I do think there is lots of opportunity for local journalism and media. It has nothing to do with technology, and all about branding, distribution and marketing.

In my opinion, the worst assumption of all has been that people prefer one big brand to meet all their information needs. This takes the root of current newspaper problems beyond a simple “print vs. online” issue, and straight to the core value of the product (or for those who have them, products) you offer.

It’s not that different from the geocentric view of the universe that Galileo correctly identified as false, but the Catholic Church fought until the bitter end. Likewise, newspapers, and many large media companies, still assume that they are at the center of the local universe, when in fact they’re really planets spinning around suns which orbit galaxies. They still have an important role, but until they realize that they’re one part of a larger system they’re operating out of an illusion.

Ask your friends and family where they go first for news, and you’ll learn that it’s usually via a portal like Yahoo, through search, or through a news search aggregator like Google News. And after that, blogs and “microblogs” like Twitter. In most cases, the news on those sites is really links, often deep into sites to read just one story. After they read a story on one site, they hit the Home button on their browser to go back to the portal, search engine or blog of their choice.

This to me indicates that people prefer choice to a “walled garden,” which is also why I think the thick client-based AOL and MSN services ultimately failed and were repositioned or shut down. Thus, whether your medium is in print or Web or mobile or magazine stands (and these days it needs to be in all of those and more), you need to have your brands out there where your audience is.

In this context, keeping everything walled inside your single daily newspaper, or even your newspaper Web site, is futile. The only winning content strategy with a future is niche publishing, and if you’re lucky a network of niche audiences that you can advertise to across all media. To continue the scientific analogy, you need to make your content readily available and desirable on every planet in your solar system.

This of course means that the big daily newspaper brand as we think of it today is gone in most peoples’ minds. In its place is a very large, but increasingly focused, niche product. That’s what newspapers, news organizations and companies that own them need to be thinking most about. Everything else is ancillary.

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead

It’s been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grass-roots outreach is well underway. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we’re starting to see a stream of new activity.

As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we’re seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from the community — which is not bad for the first month, and before we’ve done any serious marketing.

I’ll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog).

The new feature we’re most proud of is a new tool that lets you create your own masthead using a photo from your hard drive.

Our development team is going down a punch list of 34 near-term projects like this. And in parallel, we’re starting on the next big round of features that will launch in early summer. Those are:

1) Ad payment and controls
We’re now working with The Commerce Guys in Jackson, Michigan to build out a straightforward, secure way for businesses to pay for ads (currently free during a trial period). Publishers will also be able to reject individual ads — or all future ads from a particular business — before those ads can appear in their Printcasts. All of this should be available in a testable mode in May, and ready to launch in June.

By the way, for you Drupal fans out there, we’re really excited to have Ryan Szrama, the lead developer on the open-source Ubercart module in Drupal who recently joined the Commerce Guys team, working on the ad payment project.

2) Revenue Share
The Commerce Guys are also helping us build out a very sophisticated, but user-friendly, system that shares advertising revenue. We will be providing more information about how this will work in the future, but here’s the gist.

Whenever a business places a self-serve ad in a Printcast, 60% of that money will immediately be passed on to the publisher via a Paypal account deposit. 30% will be set aside in an escrow account which is shared with contributors on Printcasting.com, and that escrow will be split among them every quarter in proportion to how much their content has been used. The final 10% will be maintained by the Printcasting network to cover ongoing hosting, development, maintenance and transactions fees.

Sharing revenue at all is fairly radical for anyone, including a newspaper. But we’ll also be giving much more direct revenue to the citizen publishers on our network than most revenue-sharing services do, and for a simple reason. We feel that publishers bear the highest burden for the success of everyone on the network, and the network itself. They’ll be footing most of the bill for printing, distribution and marketing of their publications to their own communities of interest, and contributors will only benefit when they do. If they incur the highest costs, we feel they should get the highest reward.

Note that the percentages above reflect only our current thinking, and they could change. One reason we can keep our portion so low is because our expenses are covered by the Knight Foundation through the end of May 2010. After that date we hope to be able to keep rev-share proportions steady, but much will depend on how much ad revenue is coming in the door by then, and how it compares to network expenses. In that sense, our own future success is also dependent on the financial success of publishers on the Printcasting network. And we like that, because it automatically aligns our interests with the interests of Printcasting.com participants.

Do you think these percentages are too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know.

3) “City Hubs”
As I’ve written about before, from the beginning we have seen organic demand for Printcasting in other cities. Our original plan was to extend Printcasting to five other cities starting in December, but based on all of the interest out there — which includes interest from other newspapers — we will be starting this rollout sooner.

City Hubs will be geographically-targeted launching pads for partners in other cities to promote Printcasting. If you don’t live in Bakersfield and you want to use Printcasting, be sure to add your zip code to your Printcast at setup. This data will be used to surface your content on any future city hubs we may roll out.

I can’t share which cities will be first because the partners have not been announced yet. But do let me know if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring a city for our national rollout.

4) Print on Demand
If you’ve ever ordered photo prints from a site like Shutterfly or ordered an on-demand book on Lulu.com, you understand what we want to do here. Imagine an “Order a Printed Copy” button on every Printcasting.com microsite and you get the idea. You click that button, enter payment details, and a few days later get a copy of the magazine at your doorstep (or perhaps pick it up at a local print provider).

When I started this project a year ago I assumed there would be numerous print services that we could tap into using free Web APIs. I was wrong in that assumption. Most of these types of companies don’t have full open APIs, although some are beginning to work on them. Now that we’ve launched, we’re finally making progress with getting some large printing companies with national footprints to talk to us, so I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to add printing functionality sometime in the summer.

That’s the news from Printcasting.com this week. In the future: more about revenue sharing, and how it can benefit individuals, organizations, and also newspapers and printing companies.

This entry was cross-posted on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. You can read that version here.

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

This entry was cross-posted on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. You can read that version here.

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few.

For those of you who haven’t followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded
project, the gist is that Printcasting lets anyone participate in niche magazine publishing, and if they do a good job they also stand to benefit from advertising revenue when we begin charging for self-serve ads. It’s an admittedly radical idea to come out of a newspaper at a time when many newspapers are cutting back or shutting their doors. As a result, we’re starting to attract media attention, with positive mentions in The Miami Herald and Business Week.

But that’s all talk. We’re launched, so now instead of telling you about it you can jump in and try it out. One fun way to do this is as a Printcasting subscriber. With the permission of Mark Glaser, we’ve set up a Printcast for this Idea Lab site. Check it out here:

And for members of the Printcasting Community site, here’s a widget that promotes a Printcast version of this blog:

The thumbnails above comes from a special blog widget that’s available for any Printcast. Click on it to flip through a facsimile of what the printed version will look like. To get a copy to print, click the Download link. And if you want to receive an e-mail whenever a new edition is available (which happens about once a day for the PBS Idea Lab blog), click “Subscribe” and provide your e-mail address.

It’s also really easy to get a blog widget to promote your own Printcast, or one that you like. Just find a Printcast in the directory (or your own), then click the “Share” link at the top of the page. Copy and paste the HTML code into your blog template, and your blog or Web site promotes a printable PDF version for those who may want to print it out or read offline. When a new edition is published the thumbnail and link will update automatically.

If you have more time you can create a Printcast using feeds people have already registered, including some very good ones from The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. To get your own site’s content into your Printcast or make it available for other Printcasts to carry, simply register your RSS feed. All of these tasks take only a few minutes.

You can also print a few copies yourself and leave them at local coffee shops, bars, your local library, or anywhere that people in your community may be looking for local information. That’s exactly how we plan to start local promotion of Printcasting in Bakersfield, starting out with the 3,600 blogs on the Californian’s eight social networking sites. In addition, those sites have more than 53,000 public user profiles, which is a good indication of active participants who may take 5 minutes out of their day to register a feed or set up a Printcast.

That’s how our outreach will begin, but as with all local products, traditional street marketing is what will make Printcasting a long-term success. Our marketing evangelist Tom Webster — armed with mouse pads and t-shirts — is already setting up meetings with places such as the Kern County Library, which after one demo offered to let us use their computers for community training. The library’s Web site also has RSS feed content, so we’re showing the librarians how they can automatically feed their online content into printable flyers that people can take with them. Tom is also planning a series of blogger brunches to get bloggers on board, and also collect feedback.

Just because our initial rollout is complete doesn’t mean that we’re finished with development, though. This week we’re testing out a feature we call “review and approve,” which is akin to the copy editor telling the publisher to give a publication one last edit before it goes to the presses, and we hope to launch that very soon. We’re also gearing up to work on something a journalism major like myself never expects to be involved in: integrating e-commerce payment into the ad tool. To be honest, this is something we’d hoped to have finished by now, but we intentionally put it off so that we could give the core product the focus it deserved before launch. (Since we planned to make ads free for the first few months anyway, this doesn’t hold us back at all and may even make local advertiser outreach easier — especially in this crazy economy.)

It’s been a big year, and a very big week. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and given us suggestions, feedback and moral support. Do us a favor and post a link to your Printcasts in a comment. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or need help.

Printcasting in Business Week

Printcasting is mentioned in a Business Week story about “online experiments that could help newspapers”. And the story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia’s later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept.

The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader.

This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces in place to publicly launch in Bakersfield later this month. Here are some excerpts worth mentioning:

“… the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it’s launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners’ associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. ‘If we see a magazine that really has potential, we’ll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],’ Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. ‘This is cheap and targeted,’ Pacheco explains. ‘Even though there’s an ad recession, it doesn’t mean there’re no more ads.’ ”

And later on …

“This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. ‘Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,’ Pacheco says. ‘[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.’”

That accurately sums up what we’re trying to do with Printcasting. Thanks to senior writer Olga Kharif for good reporting.

Of course the real story will begin once we launch later this month and are able to point to how regular old people are using Printcasting to make their own magazines and newsletters. Our local outreach is already starting in beta, and I can tell that what people do with these tools will ultimately be far more interesting than the tools themselves. The same has been true of Bakotopia and other social-media initiatives — connecting with people and allowing them to connect with each other is what the user-generated content space is really about.

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

Printcasting is in Open Beta!

I’m extremely proud to announce that Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, is finally in open beta. You can check it out at http://beta.printcasting.com. Or, click on the thumbnail on the right of my blog to see Danzine, the printable magazine version of Dan’s Diner.

We’re finishing up a few last features before we launch in Bakersfield (more on that here), but the rollout to early adopters has already begun with a post on Bakersfield.com by Tom Webster, the new “marketing evangelist” the site. Then later this month, we will “launch” — which simply means the URL changes to remove the “beta”, and heavier marketing begins.

As a Knight News Challenge project, Printcasting is focused on local news and information. For that reason, during the next few months most of our marketing efforts will focus on outreach to people who live in Bakersfield, with more to-be-determined cities rolling out in the future.

But as I’ve written about before, we have a lot of people following us from across the world (since I wrote that post a month ago, more than 100 more people have joined our Printcasting social network to bring its membership up to 325). So we invite anyone who has been following us to go to http://beta.printcasting.com and do any and all of the following: register your blog feeds, create Printcasts using your feeds (and those of others), and place self-serve ads. Then share your feedback by posting it online or sending an e-mail.

This is a really big milestone for a project that started over a year ago by me filling out a few forms on the Knight News Challenge site. Since then, we’ve gone through many iterations of PRDS, designs, prototypes, and now alpha and beta. Many people have made this possible and it’s hard to list them all, but I would like to specifically thank the following:

• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian for giving us the funds and other support to make Printcasting happen.
• Mary Lou Fulton, my boss and long-time colleague and friend for encouraging us to submit our concept to the Knight News Challenge — and all of the great marketing and outreach ideas.
• Justinian Hatfield, for helping us fine-tune the proposal, and lending his image and likeness — as well as his camera and tripod — to a video we submitted with the proposal.
• Lead developer Ron Robinson for, well, turning Printcasting from a concept into a working tool … and then some!
• Designer Don Hajicek for design, Drupal consulting, camaraderie and wicked funny jokes that continue to keep everyone sane.
• The good people at Photon Infotech for ongoing development and testing in conjunction with Ron.
• Tom Webster, our brand spanking new marketing evangelist, for jumping into Printcasting with such fervor.

We are now on the verge of entering the next phase of our project: going out on the street to show how various individuals and organizations in Bakersfield can be citizen publishers. I’ll continue to post updates here, on Printcasting.com (which will change to Community.printcasting.com after we launch), and on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. But it’s important to take a step back and be proud of what we’ve built. Ahh ….

OK now that that’s out of the way, back to the grindstone! The real hard work (and the most fun part) is just beginning.

Goodbye to the Rocky, a Local Digital Pioneer

Today is a watershed moment in the history of journalism, and not in a good way.

It’s the day that the Rocky Mountain News ceased publication after nearly 150 years of continuous daily production, and Denver became a one-newspaper town.

This hits me and people like me especially hard for several reasons, but among them: I grew up in Colorado and find it hard to imagine the state without an institution that has helped define what it means to live here. I once worked as a journalist in Denver (for The Denver Post, which is now the sole survivor in a long newspaper war). And finally, since moving back to Colorado 5 years ago, I have developed personal friendships with several people at the Rocky based on our shared vision for digital journalism.

Among those friends are editor and publisher John Temple, who I now consider to have been one of the most innovative, entrepreneurial-minded people working in traditional news organizations in the last 5 years. Also, online editor Mike Noe, who I went to college with at the University of Colorado, but only started to get to know when I moved back to the state.

For those who are tempted to think the Rocky, and many other newspapers, are all about a printed medium that is supposedly completely going away (an idea I think is preposterous by the way), you should look at what the Rocky has done in the digital space in recent years.

Just as one tiny example, their online video coverage has become top-notch, and just as good as — or even better than — what you see on the nightly news on TV. You can see one final example of that in a video posted on the Rockymountainnews.com Web site, embedded at the bottom of this post. It’s on Vimeo, so it should be there if the Web site goes down tomorrow.

Another is citizen journalism pioneer YourHub.com, which was championed by Temple and fostered by Mike Noe and others, including Travis Henry who is now at Examiner.com. It endured much early criticism, but is now making money and — from what I hear — will continue to be maintained by The Denver Post.

And not to be forgotten, the Rocky’s mobile site has been one of the best local mobile news sites focused solely on Colorado. The Denver Post has since developed and improved its mobile site, but as someone who uses those sites every day, it’s clear that it has mostly followed the direction of the Rocky’s. I think that goes for a lot of other digital initiatives.

Just to be clear in case you missed it, I’m saying this as someone who proudly worked for The Denver Post in the mid-1990s and helped them get their first Web site going. It’s in my DNA to feel competitive with the Rocky, but looking back I have to say that they were definitely leaders when it came to things like design, format (I will really miss the broadsheet paper), and their understanding of and embrace of online community and digital journalism.

Yesterday Scripps said it would now focus its efforts on selling the brand, masthead and archives of the Rocky, so maybe it will have another life. But if not, I like to fantasize about the now-former Rocky staffers who built IWantMyRocky.com continuing coverage in some fashion, even if it’s just online.

But don’t rule out print in some fashion, even if it’s only via a digital-print / print-on-demand approach like Printcasting. Some type of traditional daily print newspaper is also not out of the picture. Just look at what the former employees of the San Juan Star did after their paper folded. They’re now starting a new, leaner, meaner daily called the Puerto Rico Daily Sun.

Here’s the touching video the Rocky staff put up on their Web site today. If the link goes down tomorrow, I hope someone will put it back up somewhere so that we can all remember how the Rocky Mountain News went out in style. We’ll miss you!

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

I’m reposting this entry from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Click here to read that post and associated comments.

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here’s what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing.

“Watch Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don’t know if it will work — Pacheco doesn’t either, I’d guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success.”

And later …

“I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco’s experiments and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press.”

I’m reposting my comments on Jay’s blog entry here, as I think they speak to how Printcasting is primarily about preserving the news and information function of local communities in a sustainable way. Our use of print (or more accurately, printable content) supports that goal, but we’re not intentionally trying to “save print.”

The reality is that the future of print is digital, and there’s no reason to print every single publication people create. We do want to print and distribute the highest-quality publications that come out the other end of this grand experiment, and only where the potential for ad revenue is higher than what those editions could receive from online self-serve ad revenue alone. This approach turns traditional print business model upside down, and also inside out thanks to the way it invites collaboration with people in the local community.

Here are my reposted comments, with a few additions:

I indeed do not claim to know 100% that the Printcasting experiment as currently defined will work exactly the way we except, but thanks to the Knight Foundation (which funds the project via the Knight News Challenge), we will have 15 months after launching to tweak things based on local community response. We will learn a lot during that time, make changes where we need to and end up with something that is more than just a theory, and hopefully a big success. For the record, I do believe it will be a big success — I just can’t point to anything that proves it will be. That’s the nature of innovation. It all comes down to making intelligent bets and staying flexible.

Our objective is not so much to “save print” as it is to find new, sustainable ways to meet the news and information needs of local communities — beginning in Bakersfield, but ultimately serving many different local communities.

Our idea for Printcasting came out of our experience in Bakersfield of creating multiple niche-focused social networking sites. We noticed that the brands that had a lot of user-generated content and printed magazines that locally distributed that content attracted more ad revenue than the sites that had less user-generated content and no print component.

As the business model supporting the general-interest printed product (the daily newspaper) began to crumble, while the business for niche digital-print hybrid products remained steady or increased, we asked ourselves, “what would need to happen in order for this new niche model to replace what we’re losing in the general-interest space?” The answer was that we needed not just a handful of niche sites and magazines, but hundreds or thousands, all in a network that was supported by affordable self-serve advertising. We then submitted that idea to the Knight News Challenge, got funding and got to work.

I also want to point out that we’re not assuming that all delivery of Printcasting publications needs to be via physical printing. And since the focus of our product is democratized publishing, where anyone can be a magazine publisher, we also don’t want that. As with blogs and any type of user-generated content, there will be a wide range of quality and we will only invest in printing those that merit printing. Does this assume that a large quantity will be of low quality? Most likely, yes. Look at the blogosphere. Most of what’s out there isn’t up to the quality standards we expect from The New York Times, but it does have its fans who are willing to apply a different quality standard in exchange for getting the niche information they don’t get from their newspaper.

Another theory we will be testing out is what I think of as the “American Idol” approach to print publishing. After a few months of outreach, we anticipate having a hundred or more Printcasts out there. Most will be subscribed to online so that readers who want to be informed receive an update in e-mail about new editions. They can read the content online — in HTML form as well as in a “pageflip” view of the PDF – or download and print the magazine on their home printers.

We will track each Printcast’s online traffic and PDF downloads, as well as reader ratings, and use that information to identify high-quality citizen publications that we think could attract even more advertising revenue if they were printed in larger quantities and locally distributed.

Here’s just one example of how this may play out. Numerous people at the Californian over the years have suggested creating a local wine publication, but creating that ourselves would be risky. It would take a lot of up-front investment in design, planning, sales outreach and content creation, and it may take many years for such a publication to break even. It could also fail.

With Printcasting, we’d reduce our risk and increase audience engagement by partnering with the community to generate a great new local wine magazine. We know there are people in town who know far more about wine than we do, and some are already blogging about it. Others — such as local wine shops — could write wine columns in their sleep, but they may not be doing it yet because they don’t have an online audience to make it worth their while. We’d reach out to all of these people and get them to register their content (or post it on Printcasting.com), then in 5 minutes make a self-updating wine Printcast that features their content. Others may come along and create their own Printcasts about wine, or use the wine reviews in Printcasts with a slightly different focus. We may print a few thousand copies of our wine Printcast, or possibly even a citizen-produced version, and place additional pages of ads in it.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of other Printcasts may have a good online following of people who print copies from home, and those Printcasts will be supported by self-serve ad revenue alone. Each will each make a little money and reach only a handful of people, and that will work just great for their publishers and readers who are currently getting no compensation for their online content.

Some topics may be so niche that we
would never, ever want to invest in printing them ourselves. But no matter — the community is full of people with home printers, and they can use their $60 ink cartridges to print them out if it’s worth it to them. I should also point out that the Printcasting network will take a small portion (around 10%) of ad revenue from all Printcasts to support this activity, so it will be in our interest to foster wide adoption of mostly-digital subscriptions.

The revenue from the self-serve ads as well as the additional ads we sell would be shared with those bloggers. Why do that? We want them to continue contributing high-quality content, and letting them share in the rewards is one way to motivate them. But it will also cost far less to share a portion of ad revenue than it would to hire a writer or two or three to write about those topics — let alone a publication designer, dedicated salesperson, and so on.

As you can see, while we will be using the print medium in some cases, this model is completely different from how print-based media businesses operate today. It merges the best of the Web with the best of print, and throws out all the inefficiency and waste.

I also hope that Printcasting will remove once and for all the artificial, largely institutional barriers that exist between “the print side” and “the online side” at most newspapers. In the Printcasting model, all content originates online, and flows into print where the ad revenue can support it. If not, the content is still printable by millions of home printers where readers think it’s worth the cost. The dividing line between print and online departments, not to mention staff and community, will become very difficult to discern — as it should be. Then we can all get along with the business of serving new audiences, collaborating with them and supporting our efforts with shared revenue.

Printcasting Featured on "Spark" Radio Show

Last week I got a call from a guy named Dan Misener who works on the CBC radio show, “Spark”. He was very well informed about Printcasting and asked me a ton of questions about it. Then he asked me if I could head down to a nearby public radio station in Denver to give a longer interview.

That happened yesterday, and one day later the radio show is up. You can listen to the Podcast on the “Spark” site.

Many thanks to Dan, and also host Nora Young for a great interview. And extra special thanks to them for doing their homework, which as a former journalist I’m embarrassed to say is becoming a rarity among reporters.

In other news, we are getting our Printcasting beta site ready over the next couple of weeks, and we may invite some of our alpha testers in to help make sure everything is in good shape. Our soft date is February 9 and — knock on wood — we’re feeling good about hitting it. Based on how the beta is performing, we will take off the password soon after, and then start moving down the runway toward our March launch. (More on that here).

Wish us luck!

- Dan & the Printcasting Team