Is this Really the Future of Newspapers?

By: Mark Fitzgerald If Joshua Karp is right, the future of printed newspapers is a handful of college-age journalists working from whatever conference room is available in one of those office "hotels" in the Chicago Loop. They read blog entries submitted by the hundreds for a free-distribution print publication that someday will be so hyperlocal it changes versions depending upon at which mass-transit stop it's distributed.

In nearly every aspect from its physical appearance ? stapled-together sheets of glossy white paper not quite the size of a Berliner format ? to its very name, The Printed Blog is an odd candidate indeed for the future of print. And yet a dozen newspapers from The Irish Times to The New York Times reported on the young upstart before it had published its second weekly edition.

The attention is not because of any publicity wizardry by Karp, an unprepossessing 36-year-old management consultant with no publication experience, who looks exactly like someone who created and then sold the government procurement software maker Freerain Systems that is partly financing the Printed Blog. Karp thinks he reflects a continuing passion for print even in the Internet age.

"I personally hope newspapers don't go away," he says. "It's a different experience, tactile, physical. It makes demands on the reader, as opposed to appealing to attention deficit."

Since it seemed to him no one else was doing anything about the future of newspapers, last May Karp wrote up a one-page business plan for a templated publication whose make-up could be nearly automated and printed in short runs of 1,000 copies or less, using content from bloggers who give permission, and selling a lot of ads at very low CPM (cost-per-thousand). Bloggers and online readers would determine what would appear in dozens of versions.

"Everybody pretty much told me it was a bad idea," he recalls.

Karp persisted, though, and the paper launched in late January with 3,000 copies distributed at commuter train stops in Chicago and San Francisco. The Printed Blog expanded to Manhattan on Feb. 12, with Karp distributing copies outside the New York Times' headquarters to proclaim, he says, "the real future of citizen journalism." He has offers to publish versions in cities from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Johannesburg, South Africa, he says.

The Printed Blog looked expensive in its first few issues, with stunning photography and colors that snap. The paper combines this with a certain homemade, maybe anarchistic, approach to content. On the paper's flag, beneath its name, the tagline reads, "Tagline Would Actually Be Nice Here."

For those issues, Karp was bringing in maybe $600 an issue in advertising, and spending about $5,000 just in printing. But by late February he had cut production costs by 40%, and was hoping to halve that by renting his own press. Karp believes his paper can make money as it rolls out across U.S. cities and beyond. "Once I get this worked out for one location, we can use the same model and very inexpensively scale it. And if each [location] clears just $1,000 a week and you've got 100, 150 locations," Karp says, ending the sentence with a nod of his head that seems to contemplate the future.