Printcasting's Advertising Implications

Online media pioneer and chronicler Steve Outing has a post about Printcasting and Classifieds on his personal blog, as well as his new venture: Reinventing Classifieds.

I ran into Steve at the Individuated News conference in Denver, Colorado in June, after giving a presentation about Printcasting. He asked me how our tools could be used by businesses, and if there were any implications for classified advertising. I told him that while classifieds per se aren't a focus of Printcasting, self-serve advertising is, and I see a lot of parallels between the two. The posts above are the result of our conversation.

How does Printcasting dove-tail with Classifieds? They both help small businesses market their products and services. A large percentage of newspaper Classified ad revenue comes from commercial customers (basically auto dealers, real estate agents and employers). These businesses are accustomed to writing text ads that are formatted to look good in print. The better tools on the market eliminate most of the design work for the advertisers, and simply accept feeds which are then automatically formatted into nice-looking Classified ads.

At a high level, this is how Printcasting will work, with feeds of variable content flowing into pre-fab publication templates. We want advertising to work the same way. A small business will only have to type in a compelling message about a product or service, optionally upload an image, and choose which publications they want their ad to appear in. After that, we will automatically generate display ads with different dimensions and fonts. They'll be able to see what their ads will look like in different sizes, but they won't have to worry about finding a designer for every ad.

If our advertising approach is successful for small businesses, I can imagine it being applied to larger commercial customers, as well as consumers. Forget about how things work in newspapers now, and instead think about the fundamental need for everyone at one time or another to get the word out about something. That applies to everything from garage sales to white sales, and everything in between.

Newspapers have a lot of different tools and terminology for different types of ads, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing: "Will you buy my apples?"

printcasting, steve outing, classifieds, advertising, small business marketing

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

How Technology Agnosticism Fuels Innovation

Steve Yelvington has an amusing post today titled "Dan Drinks the Kool-Aid," a reference to my decision to build our Printcasting tools on the Drupal framework. In the inside-baseball game that is the blogosphere, there's a story behind this that I think other media innovators can learn from, and in my opinion it's all about how important keeping an open mind is to building a culture of innovation.

Ever since the Californian started experimenting with social media after the launch of The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia, we've stayed in close contact with Yelvington and his team at Morris Communications. Very early on, people at both companies noticed that we had similar ideas and approaches to engaging audiences. The differences between the consumer experiences on the Voice, Bakotopia.com and Morris' Blufftontoday.com are very slight.

But there are some very large differences in our back-end technical approaches. Very early on, Yelvington's team started building its social media sites on the open-source Drupal platform. The Californian started its sites first with a vendor, and then partly out of the frustration of that experience, moved in the other direction and began building our own stuff.

There are some good reasons behind this. Compared to Morris, which has 13 daily newspapers, 33 radio stations and magazines in multiple states, the Californian is tiny. When my boss Mary Lou Fulton started the Voice, the Californian didn't have a single software programmer or system administrator on staff. Our complete lack of dedicated technical support staff made modifying an open-source tool difficult. We couldn't do anything on our own and had to rely on vendors and outside contractors to guide many of our decisions.

When I started in 2004, before the Californian had any niche products or technology to speak of, I wasn't satisfied with using vendors and I started playing around with various open source tools. We launched Bakotopia on an open-source platform called Noah's Classifieds. It was a great one-trick-pony platform for simple Craigslist-list style listings, but we wanted to do a lot more than that. In the end we saw that it had to be modified so much that we faced two choices: build a bunch of new functionality around a core to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, or spend an extra month building a new core that was a better fit for our long-term needs.

Before investing in a fully custom solution, we looked at other open-source tools, including Drupal. I liked the way it was structured, but found that it had stability issues and just wasn't all there yet (I used it on my blog for a good 4 months before it crashed and took all of my postings with it). The Californian couldn't wait for the perfect open-source solution to emerge and I didn't want to risk staking the future of this 140-year-old media company on a promising, but at the time still adolescent, technology.

So we started "rolling our own" and, to our amazement, ended up with the award-winning Bakomatic platform. That was the right thing to do at the time, and we will continue to use and enhance the system. It still has some unique functionality and experiences that don't exist in Drupal -- for example, the Inside Guide business directory and a Facebook-like Personal Inbox. And in some respects we can innovate faster with it because we don't have any external dependencies on other projects.

However, we don't have any strong religion about proprietary technology, or any technology for that matter. Whenever a new need comes up we think first about the end-user and specific business goals, and then see how different technology solutions meet those needs. We're technology agnostics.

Printcasting is unique for us in that it needs to work really well in Bakersfield, then be quickly adopted by partners in five other cities, and finally made available to anyone under an open-source license (read more about the three phases of the project).

Building the features on our own proprietary platform was one solution that would have required releasing some or all of our code to the open source community. We briefly considered doing that, but then realized that technology was only half of the picture. We also needed an open-source community. We decided that the project would have a bigger overall impact if it was connected to an existing open-source movement versus trying to start our own competing movement.

Four years after our initial evalutation, Drupal is well out of its adolescence and is an ideal launching pad for almost any social media tool. By making modules for the consumer-facing pieces and tying them into PDF generation on the back end (which by the way would not be done by Drupal, but the end-user will never know or care), we know that thousands of existing Drupal sites, and many more thousands to come, will experiment with what we build. Not only that, they will take what we do and make it better. That's perfectly aligned with the goals of the Knight News Challenge.

Will the Californian use Drupal for more projects? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on the project. We're also now using Ning sites as a low-cost way to serve smaller niche audiences. If they show promise, we invest more resources and move them into our larger network. If not, it's really easy to shut down a Ning site. Ning didn't even exist when we started down the path of social media. In another four years who knows what else will be out there?

Drupal is looking really good now based on our current needs, and it may continue to look good in another four years. But if there's one thing I've learned it's that innovation relies on flexibility and open-mindedness. The minute you put a stake in the ground, you're cutting off your options and your rate of innovation slows down.

One thing that has bothered me since I re-entered the newspaper industry after nearly 7 years away is how it's always looking for one silver bullet. Perhaps that's because the industry relied on one solution (the daily printed newspaper) for its entire existence up until now. But times have changed, and one solution to every problem is no longer feasible.

Innovation requires the opposite of silver-bullet thinking. It's an ever-evolving process that requires constant experimentation, evaluation and change.

Or put another way, feel free to drink someone else's Kool-Aid, but make sure you buy the variety pack. Today's Black Cherry may be tomorrow's Blue-Dini or Purplesaurus Rex.

printcasting, knight news challenge, news innovation

Printcasting in the Blogosphere

The word about Printcasting is starting to spread on the blogosphere. Here are a few recent posts mentioning the project -- for which we are very grateful.

• Fernando Pizarro of the Honolulu Advertiser puts Printcasting in the context of a larger trend of reverse publishing. Many newspapers, like the Advertiser but also The Bakersfield Californian, now publish content online first and then feed it into print publications.
  
  I think the big difference with Printcasting is a) that we give total publishing power over to regular people, b) we allow it to happen automatically, c) we don't require printing and distribution in order for people to read, as they can also subscribe to receive PDFs in e-mail, and d) there's a significant self-sere advertising component that is not dependent on a sales person for every ad.
  
  
• Kristen Taylor from The Knight Foundation is publicizing our screencast of early User Interface concepts.
  
  
• The AFP's MediaWatch site is including a link to my MediaShift Idea Lab post.
  
  
• Fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn posted this impromptu video of a demo I gave him at the MIT Future of Civic Media conference. (I reluctantly link to it, but not because of Dave, who rocks. I really hate videos of myself. So focus on the ideas and not on the bumbling, talking head :-)
  
  Speaking of Dave, check out his own News Challenge project Spot.us, which will take the idea of community-funded reporting to new levels. If there's a story you want to fund, you'll be able to drop some coins in a tip jar -- kind of like Barack Obama's approach to election fund raising. Very cool! Hopefully one day every Spot.us reporter can have an instant Printcast, too.
  
  
• And finally, 2007 News Challenge winner Lisa Williams says she can't wait for us to build Printcasting so she can have an instant magazine for her blog. Music to my ears!
  
  Speaking of Lisa, she and Susan Mernit are now in a partnership together for a new company called Peoples' Software. There aren't many details available yet about what they plan to build, but I've talked to both and I can see the light in their eyes. It will be fun to see what these two smart innovators cook up! Susan is also also running the Knight News Challenge for its 2007/2008 round.

printcasting, knight news challenge

Making Print Part of Web 2.0

For the next two years, I'll be posting thoughts and updates about Printcasting on the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog. My first post is titled, "Making Print Part of Web 2.0." It explains some of the thinking behind the idea -- especially with regards to the digital-print hybrid activity we've seen in Bakersfield -- and examines some of the roadblocks people have to new print models.

My Reality Check for Steve Ballmer

I'm cross-posting this from something I sent on the Online-News list today in reaction to a Washington Post interview with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, who basically said there would be nothing in print 10 years from now. The exact quote:

There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

All I can say to that is, really? Print is dead? Just last week I received a postcard in my mailbox from Microsoft urging me to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Ballmer's statement is overly simplistic and completely disregards other trends that are not directly connected to "the daily newspaper" or general-interest magazines. Here are just a few:

• Increased niche print products, especially hyperlocal ones. Larger newspaper circulation may be decreasing, but in some cities -- like in Bakersfield where I work -- there's a net increase in total number of eyeballs reached with niche print products.
  
  
• The hybrid online-print synergies observed in such niche products.
  
  
• Home printing. I like to tell the story of a local pastor I know who receives e-mails all day, but prints them out and carries them in a folder. At the beginning and end of the day, when he has time, he answer them.
  
  
• Direct mail, circulars and flyers, and anything that can be stuck on your windshield or door (like that Microsoft postcard!)
  
  
• Anything that can be printed out as a Kinko's and left in a coffee shop or bar. I urge everyone to go to your local copy shop on a Thursday or Friday night to observe all the bands painstakingly creating and copying "hand bills" for their gigs to leave around town. Not only does it show that print isn't dead, but it's being used by the young generation we're all told is tuning out print. Something is getting lost in translation there.
  

Technology is fueling more personalization and direct-to-consumer delivery in all of the above print distribution channels, which is the subject of the Personalized News conference in Denver next month.

I've been trying to track down what the net difference in print is when you factor in these other sources, and also figure out how you would measure it. Just like the broken "pageviews" stat for Web sites, total copies doesn't seem to make as much sense as total audience reach. If you have some relevant data, please send it my way!

My suspicion is that we're all individually receiving more personalized messages in print from these personal sources, and less so from general-interest publications. It's part of the larger trend that we see with information in all mediums.

And of course I'm working on something in this area called Printcasting via the Knight News Challenge that seeks to bridge the gap between online UGC and local "citizen" print publishing.

There's a lot of life left in print. But just like everything else, what it looks like tomorrow will be very different from what we and Steve Ballmer see today. And technology is fueling that shift.

printcasting

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

Printcasting story in Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News has a story today about Printcasting, a tool we'll be building that will let local people aggregate RSS feeds and local advertising in personalized print publications (through PDFs). Printcasting is one of 16 winners of this year's Knight News Challenge. Thanks to Janet Forgrieve for doing a good job with the interview and final story.

And with that -- even though I can get this online, I'm off to a coffee shop to pick up a copy in print for my scrapbook. Print still matters! :-)

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knight news challenge, printcasting, bakersfield californian

About Dan Pacheco

Dan Pacheco is a pioneer in online media and community with a 13-year record of achievement in consumer-focused digital experiences. His background has proven invaluable in understanding the impact of social media on traditional media models.

As of June of 2008, Dan is managing The Bakersfield Californian's Printcasting product. Printcasting is a two-year, $837,000 project proposed by Dan and colleague Justinian Hatfield in the Knight News Challenge, and is one of only 16 winners chosen from 3,000 applications worldwide.

The Printcasting product will let anyone create a self-updating, printable PDF newspaper, magazine or newsletter using content from RSS feeds and local self-serve advertising.

The team will later market the tools in Bakersfield, then reprint and locally distribute the best publications. The theory is that this will be a more scalable way to grow local audience and revenue around niche interests in print, a medium that local advertisers prefer but can't always afford. In the last phase, they will sign up organizations in 5 other cities to do the same. For more information, see http://printcasting.com.

Dan has been involved in online community and community publishing since the days of dial-up BBS's in the mid 1980s. But he got his feet wet at Washingtonpost.com, where he was one of their first online producers. He helped launch The Post's first web message boards and launched its first business and technology sections.

He later joined America Online and spent 6+ years working on mostly web-based community products. Dan held key content & product leadership roles for AOL Groups, AOL Hometown (personal home pages) and AOL Pictures, among others.

From 2004-2008, Dan has served as Senior Manager of Digital Products at the independently-owned Bakersfield Californian newspaper, where he and longtime colleague Mary Lou Fulton applied the concepts of citizen publishing and social networking at a local level. The Northwest Voice, the first U.S. newspaper citizen journalism initiative in 2004, and Bakotopia.com, one of the first newspaper-run social networks, are the Californian's two most well-known initiatives. In December 2005, the Newspaper Association of America selected Dan for one of their prestigious “20 Under 40” awards for Bakotopia. The "Bakomatic" platform that emerged from Bakotopia earned a Knight Batten Award in 2006, and Bakotopia won an NAA Digital Edge Award in the same year.

Since then, Dan's team has extended these concepts to the core newspaper site Bakersfield.com and a total of 11 locally-focused community brands, all of which are awash in social media activity. Many of these features can also be found on the sites of companies that have licensed the Bakomatic platform, including The Sacramento Bee (see Sacmomsclub.com and Sacpaws.com), The Arizona Republic, The Victoria Advocate and others. Learn more about them on Participata.com, the Californian's licensing venture that sells the Bakomatic platform.

Dan holds a degree from the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and currently sits on its advisory board. He telecommutes from his house in Broomfield, Colorado (right outside Boulder).