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Joshua Karp who less than 6 months ago started printing blogs on paper has run out of money and folded his nascent operation.
From the New York Times
Starting a newspaper filled with material from blogs seemed audacious — as did the idea of starting any kind of newspaper in 2009. But Joshua Karp did just that in January. In the end, it didn’t work out.
Mr. Karp, the founder of The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up that we wrote about early this year, announced Wednesday that he would stop publishing the paper because he had run out of money and could not raise enough additional capital.
“It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying,” Mr. Karp said in an interview. “I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers, but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form.”
Mr. Karp started The Printed Blog to try out a new solution to the problem facing all publications: readers are going online, but advertisers still pay more to appear in print.
His idea was to take free articles and pictures from blogs, with their permission, and print them on 11-by-17-inch pieces of paper. Then he sold ads to local businesses and distributed the papers at train stations in Chicago and San Francisco. Though he still had to spend money on paper, ink and delivery people, he tried to cut costs by putting commercial printers in the homes of the delivery workers.
The Printed Blog distributed 80,000 print copies and 100,000 downloaded copies of 16 issues before shutting down, Mr. Karp said.
The paper blog had seven different editions and covered a wide variety of blog posts that they hoped would appeal to the generally younger blog reading audience. But the paper was very much a mish mash of posts and pictures with just a handful of ads and seemed to lack any direction. Besides the fact that people just don’t read much of anything in print these days the idea of printing a range of blogs without any specific focus also contributed to the paper’s demise. One reason blogs thrive is that they allow the reader a chance for instant feedback. Taking that to the printed page removes one of the key features of a blog. It was an interesting experiment but doomed from teh start to fail.
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About the author
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.
2 Comments for Paper Blog Fails
david p,
i rather suspect you’re right, good idea wrong model. i do think the print media will continue to survive in some form, though losing much of their present influence and power from being seen as the willing, complaisant handmaidens of the “liberal” left as they have been of late. once you’ve been a prostitute its hard to convince people you’ve stopped whoring, and the “mainstream” media are still tricking for obama.
I wonder if this was a good idea, poorly executed. I still enjoy reading the paper more than surfing the web – I do enough computer time at work, and it gives me eye strain. I also recently subscribed to the Wash Times electronic version, which downloads and shows the entire printed page, and it’s still cumbersome to me.