Blogs to Print

Every paper has a business section, but never one for labor.
-- Ron Silliman

Well, here's an interesting development. A January 21 article in the New York Times notes the development of a new way to read blogs: in print.

Amid the din of naysayers who insist that newspapers are on the verge of death, a new company wants to start dozens of new ones — with a twist.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

The first issues of this Internet-era penny-saver will appear in Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes eventually to publish free neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many cities around the country.

This is a new one for me, although I can think of two other recent ventures starting out as freebies in print: Bit o'Lit, in Washington DC, which publishes excerpts of new fiction and nonfiction for subway commuters; and Boston's own Color magazine, available at some T stops and as a monthly supplement in local papers: "the premier all-inclusive monthly magazine that highlights topics of interest revolving around New England's professionals of color." (Color is a very interesting new publication, and its editor, Josefina Bonilla-Ruiz, should be a great contact for someone in the class to work with.)

It's great when new free papers work out. I recall being at a conference in Milwaukee* in 1996 and picking up a crazy-looking free paper out of a newsbox. It had a story about then Presidential candidate Bob Dole, who, if I recall, was reported to have had an accident that revealed his metallic robot face (as in The Terminator). The interior of the paper had ads for local restaurants and bookstores along with lots of ads for sexual services. I recall thinking this was a really strange paper but that it had some of the funniest writing I'd ever chanced across. I wondered if I'd ever see it again. That local free paper was The Onion (which started in Wisconsin).

Sometimes they don't succeed, at least as paper publications. Exhibit A, a Boston-area legal publication ("the law in plain English"), was available in boxes at T stops for a while but now operates as an internet-only venture. What the successful ones seem to tap is a specific demand and readership. The genius of Bit o'Lit, a venture that I wish I'd started, is that cities like Washington DC are full of educated, highly literate people who may read less than a novel but could be enticed to read. So the magazine publishes chapters from new publications, and publishers jump at the chance to publish a chapter as a teaser to a longer work. Bit o'Lit tends to focus on things DC readers are interested in: politics especially. Perhaps a different set of works would be appropriate for other mass-transit cities. Color seems also to tap a specific group: urban and suburban professionals of color. Like Bit o'Lit, it connects readership to mass transit (a free weekly on farming would be unlikely to get a readership on the T). The targeted readership of each publication helps with the business model as well: publishers and bookstores underwrite Bit o'Lit, and Color gets advertisements from businesses interested in employee diversity as well as the often overlooked market of non-white professionals. Exhibit A may have overestimated the convergence of Boston's deep legal community with the reading interests of the commuting public. And so it goes online.

*On Milwaukee, from Wayne's World:

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?
Alice Cooper: Well, I'm a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.
Pete: Hey, isn't "Milwaukee" an Indian name?
Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact , it's pronounced "mill-e-wah-que" which is Algonquin for "the good land."
Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.