Dan’s Diner

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.

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.

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