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.

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.

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.