Remember the Printed Blog? It was a newspaper – on actual glossy paper – that would syndicate posts from the Interwebs. Josh Karp founded it six months ago and he ran through 16 issues and 80,000 copies – all on his own dime. And now it’s dead.
The paper was published and distributed in Chicago and raised quite a bit of slightly laudatory prose from folks like the NYT and BusinessWeek. As far as I know we appeared in the magazine/paper once or twice, which was nice to know.
Why did the Printed Blog die? Well, Karp wasn’t able to get funding and the idea was, in a word, ludicrous – it was akin to pressing MP3 podcasts onto vinyl for those who still used a Technics turntable. The goal was noble – to introduce a non-online audience (Who? The old? Terminal Luddites?) to great online content – but this may have been swell back in 2004 when blogs were still fresh on the mass cerebellum. With the rise of the mobile web it’s easier than ever to surf over to a few great sites on your cellphone, thereby supplanting the need for a piece of paper with those selfsame blog posts printed on it.
The former print journalist in me still craves what TPB was doing and as a blogger I looked wistfully at the Printed Blog, wondering if it would survive and thrive. Todays blog post is tomorrow’s, well, nothing but at least you could have used a printed blog post to line your birdcage. It gave permanence to an evanescent medium, which was great. Sadly, the money was also evanescent.
A pity, but cells & tweets go on… so amen.
“…for those who still used a Technics turntable…”
Haha. Wow. Do you have any idea how prevalent Technics turntables are in homes and clubs around the world?
I’ll add some – do you people have an idea how good vinyl sounds? It’ll blow any CD, mp3 out of the water.
Looks like I’ll never get the copy of my story that was printed
Did you get the check paying you to write it?
Don’t blogs just write short blurbs about actual stories from newspapers. So in essence he was printing 3rd hand stories
What a ridiculous idea.
It was a great idea. But only had to find the right market. I could see it doing well in a market like Japan or China. Some parts of the U.S. but the appreciation would have to be very high. Only smart people can see the diamond in the rough.
Think of it this way. The print newspaper is +not +just dead because they lack real time story. They are dead because they are not alive. Very little user comments etc. Thus a Printed blog would be a cool product to read as it would be a combination of a mag, a newspaper, and a blog, but with real people input, not some staff. You all are idiots.
True true true. Most of us don’t really care for “breaking news”. How the hell will it matter if I get to know right now, or tomorrow morning about some Iranian protest?
The only breaking news I care about are sports scores.
Dave Winer summed it up best Anti Matter:
“Somehow I never heard of The Printed Blog until today, when it shut down. You were all spared my derisive laughter.”
It was a RIDICULOUS Idea! Can’t you see?
Well that is your view. But I still think you are all idiots
It would have been a good business plan if they would have been into focus of their main printing work and tried for VC’s for few more months rather than giving up. May be they should have sold some advertisements on the printed versions and got money to run the whole setup.
This remind anyone else of some lyrics from a Chorus Line?
Six months later I heard that Karp had died.
And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
and cried
cause I felt Nothing.
I find all of these criticisms to be somewhat bizarre. There is clearly an appreciation within the article for the printed word, but also the more abstract and more enjoyable notion of giving a permanence to an evanescent medium. Indeed, this wasn’t the most brilliantly put together business, with the man himself taking a lot of responsibility for its downfall.
However, there seems to be more value in the product than its being given credit for. Obviously, there is no need for anybody commenting on this site to be educated about what exists on blogs. However, mobile internet does not necessarily mean that everyone is going to spend all their time reading blogs – or vastly increase the variety of blogs read. The internet is so ephemeral and vast that even as a full time job it would be impossible to keep up with all interesting blog posts in one hour. Isn’t it also possible that we don’t know all the best writing on the internet, or that there are people out there who aren’t so proficient with feeds etc. Whatever happened to curiosity, and the desire for new things?
Contrarian ideas aren’t always to be dismissed so easily. When everyone was all about figuring out how to stream content to you, Netflix delivered it to your mailbox. What they hit on was a combination of the fact that old ways die harder than people think and that the internet wasn’t ready for downloaded or streamed DVDs. Content delivered to you on paper isn’t dead yet either. The current business model and presentation is what is going through the crucible.
It actually sounds like a really cool idea. I would definitely love to see my blogs in printed form. Perhaps if there was a service that printed out blogs for bloggers in a nice format, and bound them into a book, they would have something.
I think sites like this will die if they dont have a proper business model I see many sites which just have Google Ads. I think if you are running a site you have alot of expenses which just cant be met up with just google ads becaus emany people will come to your site and wont even click these ads.
e.g. http://www.hous...ngnewslive.com/
If you see this site, they just have Google Ads. I dont think they make a lot of money out it.
I have seen these days people have moved to get Donation on their sites to survive. They display contant by doing some kind of a aggregation and make some money through goole ads but they also need public money either though donation feature or some other thing.
I noticed yesterday morning while on the L, the first time in a few months, that it’s odd that I’m the only person reading the web on a mobile device, everyone else consuming the news was doing it via ‘traditional’ newspapers, mostly Redeye and other small format papers. And the thought occurred to me that it would be a great business opportunity if these people could get content from the web in a printed, small format package, similar to the Redeye or other free, ad-supported morning commute newspaper.
Now I find out that someone had actually done this already and was based in Chicago and I never knew about it. Amazing. I still think it’s a good idea that would find a great niche if it’s marketed right and edited nicely.
Malcolm Lloyd