Local Blogs in Print Test the Future of Newspapers

If your favorite blog was printed with advertisements and handed out for free, would you be more inclined to read it? Joshua Karps thinks so. Creator and inventor of the The Printed Blog, Karps published the first edition of the blog in Chicago and San Francisco last January. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times wrote an article discussing the potential success and failure of Karps's idea.

According to Miller's article, the The Printed Blog is currently printed weekly in two metropolitan cities, yet Karps plans on expanding the company to print twice a day in cities across America. Run solely by volunteers, the blog is printed on cheap 11'' by 17'' paper and paid solely through advertisement. Eventually, Karps plans on allowing subscribers to pick and choose which blogs they wanted published on delivered to their house.

Yet is this model sustainable in the long-term or is it a quick fix for the failing newspaper industry? Where is the market? Where is the need? David Cohen, founder of Silicon Valley Newspapers believes he has the answer.

"There's a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times because they have to capture people's attention," he told the New York Times.

Hyper-local news is also a new phenomena, like blogs, changing the face of journalism. Last Tuesday, Barry Bar, creator of the Coastsider, a new website covering Half Moon Bay and surrounding newspapers, spoke to my Digital Journalism class and discussed the success of his online publication. The online edition competed against, and sometimes beat, local metropolitan newspapers for stories. The era of citizen journalism is here and, in some communities, very strong.

So receiving your news from such avenues of citizen journalism in print is only a natural progression, no? Only time will tell.