London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own newspaper. | Hacker News Reader

London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own newspaper.

news.bbc.co.uk

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem."

Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

more than a year ago i started The Printed Blog www.theprintedblog.com we were the first print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other online content. we were discussed in every print newspaper in the world, including the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/technology/start-ups/22blo...) after going through around 300k of my own money (and some angel money), we couldn't sustain the business. i wrote about why here blog.theprintedblog.com

Yeah, I was about to comment about "hasn't this been tried before" because I heard calacanis talk about theprintedblog when it went under.

Thank you for posting your experience

here's a clickable link to the story, which is worth reading:

http://blog.theprintedblog.com/

quote from the blog: "Everyone said I was nuts, but I did it anyway." sorry for being indelicate, but given the outcome, perhaps "Everyone" was right? heh!

"16 issues, 80,000 print copies distributed, another 100,000 or so copies downloaded, and countless new friends, fans, and collaborators all around the world later, I may still be nuts, but I have zero regrets."

Doesn't sound like he's too worried about that. And rather foresightfully: " It won’t surprise me at all to find some of our ideas strategically implemented elsewhere in the months ahead"

it just strikes me as a strange thing to write in a crash-and-burn postmortem.

i'm not saying anybody should regret trying and failing. it's accepted wisdom around here that everybody has to do that, sooner or later. but at the same time, acting like you knew better than those people who thought it would fail from the beginning? a strange choice of words.

You pretty much have to assume you know better than everyone else right from the start... otherwise you'd just conform and get a haircut and a cubicle.

I've thought about making a special The Geek Atlas: London edition using this service (heard about it a few weeks ago). Doing it isn't a problem, now suppose I've got 5,000 copies how do I distribute them?

Why not use a service like HP's MagCloud? - http://magcloud.com/

They do printing and shipping.

My thoughts exactly. If they supplied the same distribution channels as existing newspapers then it would be worth so much more. I can see Failblog or IcanHazCheeze having their own daily paper. It certainly would be more entertaining than the negative depressing headlines of regular newspapers.

I see this as more useful for people who want to publish newspapers and don't have to worry about distribution. Mainly events or regular gatherings where their key audience is already there. Eg: Churches could use this for local news / events. Just leave a pile by the door.

(Edit for grammar)

The Onion started out as a newspaper and is still going very strong in print (690,000 subscribers according to wikipedia).

But unlike most publications, the Onion offers something of value.

I'm not a reader of The Onion, so what exactly is that value? (Could you give some details?)

Original humorous content.

You might enjoy this story about the unremarkable beginning of The Onion.

"The head writer of The Onion recounts his slacker twenties and the life-altering moment that shaped his personality. Todd Hanson is the head writer of The Onion, America's Finest News Source, where he has worked since 1990 and been paid since 1997."

http://feeds.themoth.org/~r/themothpodcast/~3/392365799/

Indeed, I did. I often listen to The Moth while walking my dogs, but I'd missed this one.

Or at least I think I did... I had to google it up because the URL you gave me had some sort of oddly broken redirect, so I'm simply assuming that he only did one Moth recording.

You're welcome. The only thing I dislike about The Moth is the life experiences related seem to be outside the three sigmas of normal people. But the beauty of The Moth is everyone is unique and yet so same and relatable.

You can hear Russell Davies, one of the founders of Newspaper Club, talking about the project that spawned the startup in his talk "Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)" from dConstruct last year:

http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/8908

He gives a very good talk, and it'd be even better if you had the slides too but I don't know if there's a video of the talk.

The guys behind Newspaper Club are some of the nicest you could ever meet.

Russell (one of the three) runs the Interesting series of conferences, which are genius. The year I spoke, I talked in a really circumlocutory way about names and URLs; other speakers included the guy who designed the new UK coinage, a guy who built a zoetrope out of a pair of Technics decks, one of the UK's top graphic designers doing a talk on the connections between music and design whilst playing along, projector remote mounted on the top horn of his guitar...

Basically, Newspaper Club rock.

Using existing infrastructure (the printing press) to open up to niche markets during press downtime isn't a bad idea for newspapers. The example of football (soccer) teams printing their own short-run publication and distributing it at an event may have a better foundation in the long-run than a daily local newspaper that has to be delivered door to door. Distribution is cheaper and they target a highly focused audience segment (which may interest advertisers).

I had a flash back to the punk zines of yore -- except those were printed at the office depot and the "copy count" was always off by around 80% ..

Not really sure what theyre going for with this. I wonder if this is something smaller organizations/clubs/groups could use to publish monthly newsletters.

Berlin based start-up allows anyone to print their own newspaper http://niiu.de/

That is a bit misleading. Niju only allows you to mash-up your own newspaper from several given sources, so that your individual newspaper contains only articles from categories (politics, culture etc) and sources you chose (NYT, several German papers etc). You cannot actually order your very own paper.

Just a couple hundred years too late.

I sort of (well actually the word is "definitely") thought this whole internet thing was about allowing anyone to PUBLISH - period.

Sort of solves the entire problem, eh?

To "print". Mm...

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