Report: Publisher Seeks to Unlink Blogs, Create Local Papers

Matt Haber — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:55:33 -0400

Yesterday Wired.com's Chris Snyder reported on a new venture that aims to create an off-line newspaper made up entirely of repurposed blog posts. Called The Printed Blog (slogan: "The Best of the Web on your Newsstand!"), the company aims to create, per Mr. Snyder, "a twice-daily free print newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts." The first issue, which will come out in Chicago and San Francisco, is scheduled for January 27th (The Printed Blog's Web site has an archive page ready and waiting for that day), with a New York version in the works.

Mr. Snyder quotes Joshua Karp, who founded the company and is working to put out the paper with a staff of nine ("mostly unpaid interns," according to Wired), as saying, "Why hasn’t anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?"

While not a newspaper, there have been some attempts to turn digits into dead trees, like Sarah Boxer's recent book, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, which Sewell Chan, writing for The New York Times' City Room Blog, described as "aspir[ing] to be a sort of Norton Anthology of Blogging, with excerpts from 27 blogs, 9 of them by people living in New York City."

Then there's Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, edited by Kevin Smokler and published in 2005.

That book contained an interesting piece by Gawker's founding editor Elizabeth Spiers called Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog, all about the titular Mr. Krucoff's attempt to turn his blog into "a print publication that he and his friend Chris Gage would produce from the bedroom of his Lower East Side apartment."

At the time, Ms. Spiers described the prospect of this "amazing paper weblog" as follows:

That Andrew Krucoff would want to turn his blog into a print publication indicates that blogging has officially come full circle... it's also a retreat from the incestuous aspects of blogging that were initially attractive and later repulsive to me.

Observer » Report: Publisher Seeks to Unlink Blogs, Create Local Papers

Report: Publisher Seeks to Unlink Blogs, Create Local Papers