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.

Pimp My Newspaper!

I thought Medill student Brian Boyer was supposed to be a programmer-journalist. That's true, but apparently he's also into muscle cars and MTV's Pimp My Ride.

In response to my Media Shift IdeaLab post about Brian's insightful comparison of Printcasting to Moo Cards, he's expanded on the idea. Printcasting, he says, is like the custom El Camino, with each one looking a little different. The vanilla newspaper is more like a beige Toyota Camry.

I like this analogy because the truth is that everyone has an opinion about the car they drive. Some people really love Camrys, while others won't be caught dead outside of a gas-electric hybrid. Still others require a little extra fender here, a little more chrome there. It's like the "Dude, Where's My Car?" media model. I want my car, not yours.

The analogy I often use to describe the Californian's admittedly strange local media model is built around boats rather than cars. Think of every daily newspaper as a big, beautiful cruise ship cutting through the deep blue sea. The people on that ship have been floating out there for decades, content with whatever the chefs have on the menu and the 5 activity choices the captain has chosen for them for that evening. Some are fine with that, but others want more.

One day as the cruise ship is approaching an island, someone spots something different. A group of fun-loving natives comes out in hundreds of little boats to greet them. The native on one boat is selling fruit and tie-dye clothing. Another is a music boat, with the pilot strumming a totally new kind of instrument nobody has ever seen before. And still another offers rides in his little boat for a few U.S. dollars.

That night at dinner, the captain realizes that 10% of the cruise population is missing. No problem, it turns out they're out having fun with the natives on the little boats. The next day, that number increases to 20%. And the next, 40%. What's happening? Is it the end of the world!

To the captain and his cruise ship, maybe it is the end. He can choose to stay out there in the same old ship operating the same old type cruise in the same old way. Eventually he will have no more customers and he'll need to shut down his business. But there is another way.

He can start throwing out some life rafts so his customers can more easily float around in the little boat world they prefer. Instead of being in the cruise ship business, the captain may discover he's in the flotilla business. Some people may move between boats in the flotilla and the cruise ship, and some may choose to float in the same little boat forever. And yes, some will never leave the comfort and convenience of the cruise ship.

But one thing is clear. If newspapers are going to have a long, bright future, we need to operate more like the flotilla and less like The Love Boat.

printcasting, newspaper industry

Why Print, and Why Now?

It's been more than a week since the Knight News Challenge winners were announced, which included our Printcasting project and many other cool ideas. It's been really interesting to learn more about all the projects, many of which are about new delivery mechanisms for local news and community.

So now that the dust has settled, it's a good time to address the unspoken question that I know is on many peoples' minds.

I'm someone who has been involved in digital media innovation for 13 years, and one of the early people in the newspaper industry to bring user-contributed content and social networking into the fold. I know that online social media is redefining the entire media business model, and have even done my part to accelerate that.

So why in the world am I supposedly leaving online media to go back to print, which many techies (and not just a few traditional journalists) consider a dying medium? And why at a time when every month we see new reports of falling newspaper print circulation?

And the answer is that I'm not. On the contrary, I'm seeking to bring all of the energy and excitement of social media into the world of print, and make local print distribution of online content an integral part of the fabric of Web 2.0.

In all the justified euphoria surrounding the emergence of the social Web, I fear that the newspaper industry has developed some unhealthy biases about its native print medium that are based on the assumption that the print-to-digital transition is a zero-sum game. As a result, we see continued innovation around pure-play online content (good) and almost no true innovation in the print model (bad!)

Yes, there are plenty of redesigns and creations of new niche print publications, but those don't count as true innovation of the model in my opinion. Just as we've done with user-contributed content, we need to think about fundamental changes in how print products are produced, and by whom, so that print is part of the social media revolution.

Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post editor who spoke at this year's Editor and Publisher Interactive Media Conference, put it best in her keynote speech. Said Huffington, "I don’t believe for a moment that print is dead. I think newspapers, and media in general, have a tendency to think about everything in terms of the delivery mechanism."

And lately, in terms of innovation, we seem to be focusing mostly on the Web, a little on mobile and not at all on print.

I suspect this bias is partly to blame for why most newspapers still have "print people" and "online people" after more than a decade since the advent of the consumer Internet. With a few exceptions, anything new and cool tends to be focused 100% on the Web and completely ignore print. Newspapers seem to increasingly hire people who are focused on digital media, and lose people who focus only on print -- which is a shame since both of those camps can, should and must come together.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the social networking forum that is either getting lost in the new-media hubbub, or intentionally ignored. While we see more and more activity in local online social networks, all of the real revenue growth is still in print. And it's coming through the back door in new niche print products which contain content that's submitted online by local consumers.

The concept of Printcasting really started in 2004 after the launch of The Northwest Voice, the first so-called "citizen journalism" product created by a U.S. newspaper. This is the now-familiar approach of letting people write stories about their neighborhood, which are then reviewed by an editor and placed in printed publications that are delivered to everyone on the block.

We see this with the Voice, others like it such as the Denver Newspaper Agency’s YourHub.com and magazines like New West and 8020. All of these work because they have print editions.

There are two reasons for that. First – and I know that this will shock some of the digerati – average people love the idea of seeing their content printed and locally delivered. That's the primary reason they spend time writing their stories. I have no way to test this, but I would bet that the quality of content in citizen media products that include print editions is higher because people know that once it's printed, everyone will see it and it can't be changed.

And second, local advertisers also like print when they can afford it. When you see that newspaper advertising is faltering, it's not because local businesses are saying they don't want to advertise. They're saying that they can't afford the high rates required to print 70,000, 120,000 or 200,000 copies of the same ad in the hopes that it will reach the much smaller number of people it was intended for. Because we have not solved this problem, they increasingly avoid the newspaper and turn to more targeted local delivery mechanisms, such as direct mail (hello – a print medium!) which costs less to get a message out to locals who are more likely to want their products.

The bitter irony for newspapers is that of all industries, we have more experience around creating and delivering local news and information in print than anyone. And yet, even the U.S. Postal service, with it’s snazzy Click2Mail service, is doing a better job than we are at delivering customized information and advertising in print. Let me restate that for emphasis: an institution that is part of the bureaucracy-laden federal government is doing more around personalized print delivery than newspapers.

With all due respect to the post office, that's just pathetic.

At The Bakersfield Californian, we've had a lot of success with local niche-focused social networks that include print editions. We're very good at identifying an audience with unmet information needs, creating a publication and Web site, and leveraging peoples' online contributions for printed magazines. And we’re getting better at selling ads in those publications.

But the challenge is that for every audience we identify, there are 100 others that we miss and may never identify, and even if we did we could never hire enough people to manage those publications and Web sites. That's the nature of todays fragmented media world, where less time and more choices naturally eat away at traditional aggregation-centered media models. That's where automation and citizen publishing tools come in – the very heart of the Printcasting concept. We want to, and really need to, tap into peoples’ passions so that they can create new niche publications all on their own which local advertisers can afford.

If this idea sounds interesting to you, I hope you will join our growing community of interested individuals at our Web site: http://www.printcasting.com. It’s a place to review our ideas and participate in discussions that will help ensure this project is a success. And I hope it also has another effect of breaking down the self-inflicted, anti-print stigma that has developed over the years.

The attitudes about print aren't all bad, by the way. Over the last few months I've been happy to discover that there are many people and companies out there that are orbiting around the same basic ideas. Thanks to MediaNews Group’s Peter Vandevanter, there’s even a global personalized print conference (in which I'll be a participant). Thanks to the convergence of good ideas and promising new print technologies, we may be at the beginning of a new global movement around personalized print creation – the child of the Zine explosion of the 1990s. It couldn't come at a better time, or a moment too soon.

printcasting, newspaper industry, the bakersfield californian, knight news challenge

Where are Classifieds heading?

Where will newspaper Classifieds be in another few years, and where do they need to be?

Steve Outing has a new initiative around this called Reinventing Classifieds, which is collecting information using an online survey. If there are other research projects out there like this, such as the incredibly insightful Classified Intelligence, I would be interested to know about it and will gladly write about it on my blog if I find it of interest. The more information in this space, the merrier!

I took the survey and look forward to seeing the aggregate answers, which you can only get if you take it. Outing promises me that all answers will be kept confidential and only reported with names removed. But if you're one of the many people in this industry who can't provide financial information about your company, know that you're also free to keep those fields blank. That's what I did.

Here's what I posted in the survey comment fields, none of which should be new if you know where I stand.

Newspapers' classified businesses are obviously challenged, but only because the marketplace is now much bigger than general-interest news products that revolve around print. People have many, many more choices than newspapers these days. The marketplace is much bigger than it was a decade ago, a fact which Classified aggregator Oodle is happy to tout.

Will consumers continue to pay for Classified advertisements? Sure, but maybe not in the way they do today. I see the model moving from one based on paying to publish to paying for targeted promotion. Publishing information online has been free for several years now, but if you look at the billions Google is raking in with keyword sales you can see that there's a LOT of money to be made promoting free and cheap content. On the same note, paying for upsells that make your ad stand out in a sea of information is also valuable (and is also Google's core business).

Ultimately people don't really care about the medium in which their ad appears, but they do care about how effective the ad is at attracting exactly the right person at the right time. Targeting saves them time, and for commercial merchandise may also result in a higher personal profit margin. If you can do a better job matching local buyers and sellers than any of your competitors, you will create value that will translate into dollars.

I also think it's useful to put Classifieds in the larger context of user-generated content, which in my opinion is really what Classifieds are.

In our market we see user-generated content making up most of the growth of our Web sites, but it's still hard to monetize that traffic. By positioning Classifieds as a way of telling stories about your stuff (the "Antiques Roadshow" approach) and promoting them with user content -- and vice versa -- I hope that we'll see the same kind of growth with ads that we've seen with blogs and user profiles. We've spent a lot of time lately building a solution that gives people the tools and space to tell really compelling stories, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry.

I also suspect that we need to stop positioning ad placement in terms of "online-only" and "print + web." Unfortunately the current choices from Classified vendors makes that difficult. What's really needed is an integrated solution that lets users place an ad, choose upsells and then choose where they want the ad to appear.

Looking into my crystal ball (and this is pure conjecture on my part and my own personal opinion), I expect that consumers will soon see a print product as just one of many promotional upsells. Some people will pay to have their ads promoted in various print products that match their target interests and demographics, while others may pay for carriage in completely different products -- such as Craigslist (why not?)

That's a really different way to think about Classifieds, but the reality is that newspapers don't get to decide how consumers view Classifieds anymore. There's a whole other world of choices out there. We can be one of those choices, and we must be in order to remain relevant in the Classifieds space.

Technorati Tags: classifieds, newspaper classifieds

Could print have saved Backfence and The Enthusiast Group?

I've been an early proponent of both citizen media and social networking for newspapers. For that reason, I have very unintentionally ended up with the label of "expert" on these topics.

While that's flattering, the truth is that everyone in the social media space is playing a game of intelligent darts, and we all have a litany of success and failures that can more accurately be referred to as "knowledge" and "wisdom" -- often with associated scars. There are no silver bullets when you're working on the edge, and nobody -- not even Google -- knows the future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who has the guts to try to do things in new ways, so I was personally saddened this year when two separate individuals with newspaper backgrounds were forced to shut down their social media businesses: Mark Potts' Backfence.com, and Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group. The demise of the Enthusiasts hits home especially hard, as I know Outing, who lives about 15 miles west of me in Boulder, Colorado. You can read his insights about his experience via his personal blog, and most recently his column in Editor and Publisher.

A lot of people have been asking me for my thoughts about these events. Implicit in that is whether it changes how I feel about what we're doing in Bakersfield, and I'm sure some of them want to know if we're next (that whole "celebrity death watch" journalist's mentality).

The answer to that is an emphatic "no." Our social media initiatives in Bakersfield continue to do well, and next year we plan to add more interest-focused brands to our current repertoire of nine. And we also continue to bring what we learn with the new brands into our core newspaper brand. The most recent example of that is Snap! high school football photos, which quickly paid for itself for the season through lucrative local sponsorships.

While it's an uphill climb (always the case when building something from scratch), audience and revenue continue to increase for most of our initiatives. And for those that aren't, dedicated people continue to try new things until they find what works. We have a multiple-brand, audience-based strategy, and what works for one audience doesn't automatically work for another. From a network level, all indications point to continued growth, engagement and advertising.

I don't know if this explains everything, but there is one major difference between our approach, and that of the Enthusiasts and Backfence. We don't have a pure-play Internet-only strategy, and print is still a big part of what we do. That's especially true on the revenue side.

The vast majority of revenue for our social networking brands comes from associated print publications that roll up the best user-contributed content, augmented by some top-notch staff content. The content isn't just "shoveled" into print, either. It's edited by a real person who often goes back and forth with the contributor, helping him or her get ideas across more succinctly. While there's a lot of activity on the Web sites, core contributors cherish that interaction with the editor and they get a kick out of seeing their story on the cover in print. That "psychic income" has a lot to do with why they contribute a second, third or fourth time or get all giddy when Matt Munoz posts something on their guestbook.

But that kind of back-and-forth could happen even without print (and maybe it did with Enthusiast and Backfence sites -- I don't know), so let's talk brass tacks about the business side.

Last Spring, Bakotopia -- which began as a free Classifieds provider and evolved into a local music social networking hub -- started producing a magazine (download a few in PDF form here). It comes out every two weeks, and they're now on to Issue #15. The magazine debuted more than two years after Bakotopia started, partly in response to the site's hip users, who have been craving a downtown-scene magazine for years. But more importantly, it was at the request of advertisers.

In an irony that I will never fully understand, even the clubs that used Bakotopia profiles on a daily basis to promote gigs and interact with customers said they really wanted a printed magazine. You could talk to them until they were blue in the face about buying an ad on the home page, and some of them did, but once a magazine was available the dynamics changed and they all had to be in it. They'd see their competitor down the street in there and they couldn't resist.

What is it about print that makes local advertisers salivate? And what does this mean for the supposedly missing business model for social media? What does it mean about how we meet the needs of niche audiences and communities?

I have thought about this a lot, and here are my conclusions so far. I reserve the right to change my mind over time, because that's the nature of innovation.

First, I think so much emphasis has been placed on the mechanics of social media -- for example, using social networking and web forms and comments to solicit stories -- that people have forgotten about what we're trying to accomplish. The whole reason we started developing and deploying social networking tools was to engage audiences that weren't gravitating toward the newspaper brand, and in a way that is scalable. At a high level, The Northwest Voice isn't about so-called "citizen journalism." It's about listening to readers of a specific geographical part of town and giving them a voice. Bakotopia was about turning control over to a distrusting community and finally giving them the spotlight they deserved.

All of our separate brands have their unique value propositions. Because their brand identities were established so early, the brands have legs and can move between mediums and form factors. Bakotopia is the most recent example of that. And I'm not saying that we should have just created a magazine instead of a Web site, either. It's the interactive nature of the Web site that created a brand that could extend into print in the first place. If you took the Web site away, Bakotopia as a brand would falter. If you stopped the magazine, its revenue would falter. The two are married at the hip.

Second, we have a tendency in the newspaper industry to read too much into the troubles of our core products. Print circulation is falling at most daily newspapers around the world, and I think a lot of industry people assume that this means print is disappearing. But if you look at things from a higher level, even in your own life, this isn't necessarily true.

More and more stuff is crammed into my U.S. Postal Service mailbox every day, and I see more little magazines and newsletters and flyers around town than I did in the past (and increasingly, also in my mailbox!) Most of that content is full of paid ads, but it differs from newspaper advertising in significant ways. It's more targeted, and thus less expensive for the advertiser (although more expensive per target reader, which shows they're willing to pay more for targeting). And it's more focused and relevant to specific interests or needs -- for example, buying a house, finding a car or getting deals at nearby establishments.

Sometimes I think those of us in the "new media" realm tend to get caught up in our own manifestos about what people want, and in the process of doing that we miss the bigger picture. Our experience in Bakersfield suggests that people don't necessarily want more web and less print. They want more relevance, convenience and control in every aspect of media, which includes both print, online, mobile and who knows what else in the future.

With small local advertisers there is a bit of a disconnect. Right now, they primarily want to see their messages out on the street where they do business, and print is still the best vehicle for that. Do they also want online? Some of them do, but they also seem to be hesitant for reasons that I'm not sure are fully grounded in reality. If an online ad fits their budget and it reaches the right people, they buy, but they expect immediate results that aren't as easy to track as when someone walks in the door with a clipped coupon. So maybe we have some work to do around online ad trackability. I also think there are some opportunities to make local self-serve easier and more effective at reaching local audiences than Google AdWords (let's face it -- a donut shop is never going to sell 100 more donuts to locals by placing an AdWord).

Would Backfence and The Enthusiast Group have succeeded with print publications? I don't know for sure, but I think it would have helped. It also would have cost a heck of a lot more, which is difficult for any startup.

So my final thought is that there are still some significant advantages that existing media companies have over startups. They have more resources and capacity and -- assuming their publishers are as forward-looking as ours is -- time than a typical venture-backed company. The question is whether they focus those resources more on innovation, especially as the economy appears to be on the verge of recession.

I have faith in the Californian to do that, but I'm not convinced about the rest of the industry. I'm really looking forward to having others prove me wrong there.
LATER: Steve Outing responded to this post. You can read his response here. And Mark Potts has some comments below this post.

I can appreciate the concerns around cost. Even for an exsiting media company like the Californian that has its own presses, the startup costs for printing and distributing a new printed product -- even one with 10,000 - 20,000 copies that comes out every two weeks -- is daunting. Those costs require a longer "runway" than most small startups probably have. Don't assume that you need your own printing presses to do this, though. Many of the niche publications I mention that are managed by Mercado Nuevo are now printed outside of the Californian because it's cheaper for them, based on the number of copies and type of print stock that they require.

I have thought for some time that there must be a way to let anyone publish a printed publication using online content, starting with PDFs and then moving to home printers, Kinko's and -- for the right type of content -- a larger press run. We submitted a concept to the Knight News Challenge for this, and have been invited to gointo the next round. If we win (a longshot given the number of entries), maybe the next citizen media startup will have more options when it comes to print. And if we don't, I think this idea is so compelling that we'll keep looking for a way to make it happen. I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet at a local level is that nobody has tried. All of the technology to create instant print publications exists, muchof it open source.

Technorati Tags: Enthusiast Group, Backfence, Newspapers, Social Networking


Technorati Profile

Amazon's Kindle: the iPhone of Books?

Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader sounds really interesting, and definitely applicable to newspapers or any print-based content business.

E-book readers have been around since the late 1990s, with the most recent buzz being around Sony's Reader, which uses E-Ink technology that's easier on the eyes and works in varying light conditions. Amazon's reader uses the same electronic ink technology, but adds in a couple more improvements that I think significantly change the game for electronic readers.

First, it lets you browse and purchase 88,000 books, and some of the top U.S. and international newspapers, directly from Amazon.com. And you don't need a computer to do it. You simply pick up the reader, browse the Amazon store, wait a few minutes for a title to download, then read it. Among the available titles are most of the New York Times bestsellers. They say it holds up to 200 books at a time, or more if you add a bigger Flash card.

Second, you can do all of this wirelessly from anywhere -- not through 802.11x wifi, but through a cellular connection that costs you nothing. And on top of all that, they throw in access to Wikipedia from anywhere for free (take that, you-must-have-ATT-service iPhone and wifi-required iPod Touch!)

Unlike the iPhone, the device won't browse Web sites other than Wikipedia. I have to wonder though -- given that it does bring up Wikipedia, perhaps they plan to make it available for more open Web browsing if people agree to pay a monthly fee, or buy a more expensive device in the future that will work with wifi.

Like the iPhone, it costs $400. I think that's a little more than most people want to pay to read books, but it's a good starting point.

Here's more on the Kindle from The New York Times.

Technorati Tags: kindle, E-Ink, Newspapers

Bakotopia's Print Magazine

It seems like every other week someone else in the news industry is predicting the death of print as online audiences grow -- sometimes even using the growth in online communities as evidence.

As the creator of many online communities, I've always found this odd. It's not print in particular that is going away, but rather the way in which we use print -- and other portable mediums -- to engage audiences and advertisers. We may think of our products in terms of their delivery buckets, but the consumers and advertisers who use them think of them as brands. They respond well when those brands cater themselves to the audience -- regardless of the medium.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the two-year-old Bakotopia.com community site, which recently debuted a CD and print magazine.

Bakotopia started in 2005 as an online community for the young, hip, and young-and-hip-at-heart of Bakersfield, California. Its initial purpose was to help "young" people of Bakersfield meet, hook up, sell stuff, buy stuff, vent and much more. I started and ran that community for the first year, then passed it on to Matt Munoz, who has succeeded in making Bakotopia a household name among its target audience.

As a result, Bakotopia as a brand has evolved into the defacto hub of the hopping Bakersfield music scene. On the web site there are more than 500 songs by local artists -- enough to justify creation of the Bakotopia Compilation CD in March, which features 16 local bands. (You can buy the CD for $5 through Paypal. See the ad on the Bakotopia.com home page for details).

Over time, the community kept asking when we'd create a print magazine, and other ways to take Bakotopia with them wherever they go. That's how the biweekly Bakotopia print edition was born.

This is no small operation. Every other Thursday, 10,000 copies are delivered to 150 locations throughout Bakersfield, including music stores, coffee shops, alternative clothing stores, skate shops, nights spots and college campuses. And its pages are full of affordable ads from many of those same establishments.

The best way to describe the magazine is what MySpace may do if it produced a magazine, but with a more local flavor. Within its pages, users find many of the same people they may have met on the Web site, along with expanded art, entertainment and downtown living features. Several pages are dedicated to showcasing excerpts from things people post on their user profiles, blogs and comments. But others offer exclusive interviews with people in the community -- whether or not they're members of Bakotopia. And in every case, the magazine refers to a keyword on the Web site to read the whole story.

The magazine also has advertising (as does the Web site -- contrary to what people remember from our first year of operation). That's not the only reason the print edition was created, but it's a big one. It's good to remember that while online audiences are growing, the people and businesses who use them all live in a very terrestrial world.

We have observed that the participatory Bakotopia.com drives virtual encounters that ultimately leads back to real-world interactions. And sometimes we fuel that by producing concerts and having a visible presence at local events. Layering a terrestrial print product onto a thriving virtual community will only increase overall audience interaction, and by focusing on the users, we believe we can create circular behaviors between the print and online products. That in turn will lead to even more audience growth, which will create opportunities for more advertising and maybe even new delivery mechanisms that fuel even more growth.

So is print dead? I don't think so. If anything, terrestrial content delivery is thriving in Bakersfield -- and the fastest growing segment is in niche communities. The Bakersfield Californian is very lucky to have realized this early on with The Northwest and Southwest Voices, Mas magazine, and now Bakotopia. Congratulations to Matt Munoz and the team at Mercado Nuevo for launching the Bakotopia Magazine!

Technorati Tags: bakotopia, bakomatic, newspapers

The Arizona Republic Licenses Bakomatic Platform

This week, The Bakersfield Californian made a major announcement about a new relationship with The Arizona Republic, one of the most innovative newspapers in the digital realm. They'll be using the Bakomatic Platform to provide social networking, blogging and more on AZCentral.com and other sites. We're very excited about it and look forward to seeing how they use the software to drive their goals.

Following is the press release that went out this morning:

The Arizona Republic Licenses “Bakomatic” Platform

(Bakersfield, Calif. Jan. 10, 2007) – The Bakersfield Californian and The Arizona Republic today announced that the Republic will license the Californian’s social media software, Bakomatic (bake-oh-matic), through an arrangement with Californian subsidiary Participata LLC (www.participata.com).

Bakomatic is the homegrown software that runs the award-wining Bakotopia.com and the blogs, user profiles and registration system on Bakersfield.com. It also powers all of the user-contributed content features of citizen media pioneer Northwestvoice.com, and seven other niche audience-focused Web sites.

The platform is an end-to-end solution that makes it easy for any newspaper to provide My Space-like social networking, blogging, user publishing and “citizen journalism.” Bakomatic is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Knight Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism in 2006 and the NAA’s Digital Edge Award (the Edgies) in 2006. Bakotopia and Bakersfield.com are Edgie finalists for 2007.

The Republic, a daily newspaper owned by Gannett, plans to use Bakomatic to enhance the community offerings of its local portal, AZCentral.com. Already one of the most popular local news Web sites on the Internet, AZCentral.com will leverage Bakomatic to be even more participatory in nature. The Republic also hopes to use Bakomatic to drive other audience-focused initiatives.

“AZCentral.com has a long reputation of producing unique, cutting edge technology thanks to our talented team of software developers,” said Adam Hooker, Digital Innovations Manager for AZCentral.com. “We are all looking forward to the opportunity to bootstrap our social networking projects using the Participata software,” he said.

The Californian was equally positive about the development. “Our organizations share a lot of the same intellectual DNA,” said Dan Pacheco, Senior Manager of Digital Products for the Californian and project lead for Participata LLC. “We both have a passion for audience participation, and we both see the need to reach well beyond traditional newspaper boundaries when it comes to the digital realm. And of course, we’re thrilled to see our software and philosophies applied at a large, prestigious newspaper like the Republic.”

The Bakersfield Californian decided to license Bakomatic in July of 2006 after receiving numerous inquiries about the technology over the past two years. The Republic is the second licensee, after Shaw Newspapers. “We will always remain focused on our local market, and that’s why we created this platform and will continue to invest in it,” said Mary Lou Fulton, Vice President of Audience Development. “But as more newspapers look to The Californian as a leader, we see that our work also has value to the entire industry. We’re very happy to let other newspapers share our success and also help us make it better.”

That dedication to ongoing innovation can be seen with the recent launch of Bakomatic 2.0 – which among other things lets users embed their favorite videos from YouTube along with their own content. “We spend a lot of time watching how people use our tools and responding to their feedback. Supporting YouTube was a natural progression of that,” Pacheco said. The next version of Bakomatic will seek to add businesses into the mix, giving users the ability to rate and review local establishments, and for businesses to be able to create lists of favorite customers to whom they can provide special deals in the future.

Currently, only newspaper companies may license Bakomatic, with pricing on a sliding scale based on daily circulation and the number of sites they plan to create. This allows newspapers of all sizes to duplicate The Bakersfield Californian’s success in growing audience reach through user participation. In the future, licensing may extend to other industries based on market demand.

Bakomatic is available as an enterprise solution, meaning that customers need a knowledgeable technical staff able to install and maintain the software. More requirements and software specifications can be found at http://participata.com.

The Bakersfield Californian is an independently owned newspaper providing local, national and worldwide news to more than 230,000 readers in Kern County. Headquartered in Bakersfield, Calif., The Bakersfield Californian has been family owned for more than one hundred years, with the founder’s great-granddaughter, Ginger Moorhouse presiding as publisher and chairman of the board. In July of 2006, Editor and Publisher magazine listed The Californian as one of “Ten That Do It Right,” an annual listing of the most progressive and innovative newspaper companies in America.

Technorati Tags: Bakomatic, Participata, AZCentral

Apple's iPhone and mobile content

Apple debuted its much-anticipated iPhone today -- which has everything available in the very latest iPods (music, video, iTunes connection), as well as some new pizazz.

While I like the features in their phone, it's the integrated Web browser that most sparks my imagination. Based on Apple's short demo of the browser, I'm already starting to think about how our sites will look on it as millions of people line up to get iPones starting in June. (There are also other impressive demos of the phone and video functionality that you can get to from the link above, particularly widescreen video -- finally!)

One of the soundbites from this year's Consumer Electronics Show was from Motorola's CEO Ed Zander. According to him, every second there are four babies born around the world, but in that same second 25 mobile phones are sold.

At that rate it's not hard to imagine how quickly mobile content will become the dominant method for accessing information over time, and how that will compete with both print and PC usage. I would not be surprised to see PC web usage become a predominantly at-work activity, with the rest of the day taken up with mobile and, of course, the insupplantable living room TV.

Or maybe we will all be glued to our own personal iPhone TVs? The mere idea is both enticing and sad. In a billion audiences of one, will there be enough of one single market to create the next Seinfeld or Battlestar Galactica?

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone,newspapers