The role of print
I was never culturally habituated to the idea of a newspaper. Sure, I grew up with one around the house, but having come of age in the Internet era, the newspaper struck me as inert and disconnected. Unlike the Web, the paper was always shallow where I sought depth but nuanced where I sought conciseness.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not a print guy.
I faithfully and lovingly thumb through my magazine subscriptions — The New Yorker, Wired, Communication Arts — as they arrive. I am never not in the middle of a book, and I’m typically in the middle of three.1 To date, my only contribution to Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools newsletter has been my review of a device that assists me with hands-free book-reading during lunch. I’m a founding member of a book club that celebrates its third anniversary this month. As far as I’m concerned, the world of print can stay around for a good long time.
Michael Josefowicz has been commenting here prolifically over the past few days, describing the roles print could play in the model we’re exploring. I’m with you, Michael. The Politico model — build your reputation among a sizeable audience online, but build your revenue off a comparatively small subscriber base in print — is interesting to me. MinnPost tried something like this, and it didn’t exactly work. I suspect part of the problem there was that the print product was a general-interest news edition.
The sort of cumulative, long-lived, topic-based, deeply contextual sort of journalism I’m advocating seems less given to a daily newspaper format and more to a monthly or quarterly magazine format. Could a quarterly publication including synthesis of months of online coverage of, say, schools in a given locality find a small, but lucrative subscriber base of school administrators, teachers, parents and students? My roommate Mike Fancher told me his paper’s annual schools guide was a hit. Might other topics merit the same treatment? I’m not sure, but I’m very interested in the answer to that question.
- Full disclosure: In the immediate future, it looks like most of my book purchases will be e-books. My Kindle feels like a device suspended between the digital and the analog world. It points towards a future where the boundaries between “print” and “online” are much murkier. [↩]
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Tim,
Wonderful choice of words! You inspired todays bloviation at my blog. It's called People Are Talking at Newsless.org. Thanks for getting the brain working. Here's the link:http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2009/01/people-a...
Michael Josefowicz
14 Jan 09 at 1:27 am
Tim,
Wonderful choice of words! You inspired todays bloviation at my blog. The post is called People Are Talking at Newsless.org. Thanks for getting the brain working. Here's the link:http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2009/01/people-a...
Michael Josefowicz
14 Jan 09 at 1:27 am
MinnPost in Print was not designed to be our profit center, but a break-even way to (a) publicize MinnPost.com and (b) meet the needs of potential MinnPost readers who don't (yet) feel comfortable getting their news online. We scrapped it because we couldn't sell ads into it, and because we learned that very few of our readers were reluctant to go to the online version. On the other hand, our first-anniversary 40-page tabloid, Best of MinnPost, was profitable. I'm not smart enough to figure out yet what that means, but it suggests that your idea of an occasional print publication synthesizing the best of an online site might work.
Joel Kramer
14 Jan 09 at 2:00 am
A local music/art magazine in the Twin Cities is doing something along these lines. It's called Rift. They started out as a print publication, then ceased to exist for a while before returning as a website. Now it's publishing sporadic "best of" print editions that also include content from a few partner website. The publication schedule is determined by reader donations. There's a donation widget on the homepage, and when they reach their goal they print another issue. http://www.riftmagazine.com/
Dan Haugen
14 Jan 09 at 3:55 am
Roll up the digital work into a recoking into a print artifact — this seems to be the emerging paradigm for the role of digital work in academia, NOT primarily because of cost, but because of the relative recognition of and prestige for the different forms. Write the blog, create the public site, edit the online archive, and then use that work / those documents as the basis for an article or more.
The web then becomes the train line, and print outlets the station. This could be an emergent (and highly generalizable) structure.
Tim
14 Jan 09 at 5:06 am
Just one thought.
Instead of publishing on the basis of the calendar, publish on the basis of events and the news cycle.
The world of news is lumpy. It speeds up and slows down. The calendar is a remnant of the Cartesian world, which was a rough approximation at best, invaluable for the industrial revolution but now less and less relevent. As his been well said here, the news is a process. And real life is process. Our readers want the right information in the right form at just the RIght Time.
The right time is a function of their interest. Focus is a property of journalists. Interest has peaks and valleys. The trick is to insert Print at the peaks.
From what I read at the link, I think you are already on this track. "Print editions will the legislature is in session". nice touch. PDF's to download and print. Nice. Could you put ads on the download version, then sell the notion of completely targeted advertising, with some kind information about the downloaders going to the advertisers? Of course careful, careful. But there might be a way to make this work and not destroy the necessary trust. Maybe contributors would be willing to pay $X a month to download with some extra inside content?
Once you get to a critical mass of downloads, maybe a digital POD version, mailed for money?
Also, this is a jewel "The data in the School Guide works better as a weather report than a report card." Think the Weather Channel? When the hurricane hits everyone tunes in. Meanwhile, thousands stop by to see if it's going to rain next week
Michael Josefowicz
14 Jan 09 at 2:22 am
Thanks for the clarification and addendum, Joel. … message transmitted wirelessly through the cyberwebosphere.
From: IntenseDebate Notifications
mthomps00
15 Jan 09 at 1:56 am
Dan, thanks for the info. It's a great use case.
Michael Josefowicz
15 Jan 09 at 12:00 pm
"Could a quarterly publication including synthesis of months of online coverage of, say, schools in a given locality find a small, but lucrative subscriber base of school administrators, teachers, parents and students?"
Catalyst Chicago could probably answer this question for you. It is exactly what you describe.
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/
cholke
21 Jan 09 at 7:15 pm
Another use case. Thanks.
Michael Josefowicz
21 Jan 09 at 10:44 pm
Catalyst seems like a great idea, but there wasn't a single ad in their print edition. How is it funded?
Chuck McShane
31 Jan 09 at 4:43 am
Good question. I would frame a little differently. How does the Print work in the publishing ecology that creates revenue?
Michael Josefowicz
31 Jan 09 at 12:56 pm
@Matt,
Just wanted to share. The conversation here has been very thought provoking. Some of those thoughts are starting to crystallize in a post I just did at http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2009/01/whats-ri...
I'm hoping you will find it interesting. Any comments would be much appreciated, either here or there.
Michael Josefowicz
1 Feb 09 at 4:22 am
"In my taxonomy development efforts, I started with interviewing SMEs, and users. It was a difficult process and what I ended up with was a Controlled Vocabulary (agreed upon language used to tag documents and assist in search), different from a taxonomy. A controlled vocabularly organized hierarchically, with a broad term and a narrower term for each entry, becomes a Taxonomy." from the link above.
Michael Josefowicz
1 Feb 09 at 1:45 pm
Just came across your blog on Google. Interesting post, you bring up a few good things to think about. Good luck with the blog.
Chris Kindle
14 Feb 09 at 4:17 am