Idea Lab

Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've had a busy few months with Printcasting, launching some significant new features and engaging in a number of partnership discussions. I'll get into the features and partners later in this post, but what I'm most excited about right now is that people are using the service to bring previously all-digital content into the physical communities that they serve. Andynoise: Citizen Sports Journalist The best example so far is a sports enthusiast named Paul Anderson in Bakersfield, California who goes by the online moniker "Andynoise." He's now one of 400 publishers who have collectively created 1,500 editions since we launched...

• October 23, 2009
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How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past. This is an important exercise because, as many of us were reminded in the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" series, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." Or if you prefer the non-geeky version: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned...

• August 3, 2009
• 4 comments

Printcasting Launches Paid Ads, Revenue Sharing

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We just reached another big milestone on Printcasting with a feature that we think will redefine how publishers perceive and use the service. Starting now, all ads placed with the Printcasting self-serve advertising tool cost $10, an amount that publishers can mark up per publication. In addition, 60% of every ad dollar is shared with publishers through their Paypal accounts, and 30% of every dollar is set aside to share with participating content providers in the future in proportion to how often their content has been used in Printcasts. We've also made it easier for advertisers to place ads in...

• July 15, 2009
• 2 comments

Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm very excited to announce that Printcasting.com, my 2008 Knight News Challenge project that democratizes print magazine publishing, is expanding to more U.S. cities. And I'm equally excited about the first partner: Denver-based MediaNews Group. Here's a link to the full press release about our arrangement with MediaNews. We're in discussions with other newspapers and organizations and will add more partnerships throughout the year. So what does this mean for the average person? Up until now, the Printcasting site was focused on Bakersfield, California -- in keeping with the geographic focus objective of the Knight News Challenge. The site has...

• June 28, 2009
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How My 6-Year-Old Became a Citizen Journalist

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started "citizen media" brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe. But it wasn't until a wave of tornadoes went through my hometown of Denver this week that I realized just how far the revolution has come. A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we're witnessing...

• June 15, 2009
• 5 comments

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead for Printcasting

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grassroots outreach is well under way. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity. As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we're seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from...

• April 20, 2009
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Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few. For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the...

• March 17, 2009
• 16 comments

Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept. The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader. This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces...

• March 9, 2009
• 5 comments

Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing. "Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success." And later ... "I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments...

• February 20, 2009
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Putting Our Plane on the Runway

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta is just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch. In development, all of our focus is on completing a few last critical features, including the creation of automatic, self-updating Printcast editions. And we're making great progress! In the marketing camp, we're busy tweaking messaging, writing FAQs, giving live demos and building...

• February 12, 2009
• 2 comments

Printcasting.com Helps Spark a Global Movement

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever since the Knight News Challenge was first announced in 2006, I've been fascinated and inspired by its open nature. While the primary goal of the contest is to fund great ideas for new local news and information projects, it has a larger mission. It also requires those projects to eventually be released under open source licenses. To me this has always meant that News Challenge projects have a responsibility to a larger community of people who will one day repeat our successes in their communities.

• January 23, 2009
• 3 comments

Preview the Printcasting Local Ad Tool

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets. Even though it's the holidays, the Printcasting team is not slowing down. All we can think about is March...

• December 31, 2008
• 3 comments

The Day Print Didn't Stand Still

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, after 6 months of planning and hard work, we officially launched Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, in alpha. We're still busy finishing up the remaining functionality while responding to the excellent feedback and ideas we're getting from alpha testers. And we are going full speed ahead toward a March 2 launch of Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. Thanks to those of you who have helped us out so far! If you would like to be an alpha tester, there's always room for one more. But I have to say that I can't think of a more ironic time...

• December 16, 2008
• 2 comments

Printcasting Prototype Video

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I mentioned in my last post, Printcasting is finally beginning to take shape. We're very excited to have a working prototype that performs the very basic tasks: pulling in RSS feeds, flowing feeds into print templates, and placing targeted self-serve ads. You can see it in action in this 8-minute video: Printcasting Prototype Demo from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo. There are a lot of things that still aren't working in the prototype, which I get into in the video, and the design is still intentionally "wireframy" at this point. So why are we showing it? First, since our public...

• October 10, 2008
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Meet The Printcasting Team

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most exciting times in the development of any new product is when concepts begin to give way to reality. That's the phase we're entering now with Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing and make print advertising affordable for local businesses. After three months of working with conceptual mockups and user interface flows, we're finally able to click through a set of Web pages connected to a database that generates simple magazine-style PDF files. In the coming weeks and months we'll be sharing more of that with you, starting with videos and, as soon...

• September 16, 2008
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Ideal Printcasting Publishers

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the roughly 14 years that I've been in the online industry, I've learned that it's really easy to focus so much on what you're going to build that you can easily forget about why you're building it and who's going to use it. The key questions to constantly remind yourself of are: Who's going to use what you build? How will it help them solve problems in their daily lives? How will they find out about your product, and what will keep them coming back? This is especially easy to do with a project like Printcasting, which is simultaneously...

• August 15, 2008
• 1 comment

It's Time for a Revenue Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Chicago this week, I had a conversation with fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn (creator of the very cool Spot Us community-funded reporting system) that got me thinking. David is skeptical of relying too much on advertising to fund journalism. He has various reasons for this which he can explain much better than I, and he has some good points. One thing that we can both agree on 100% is that advertising that is not fair and honest is incompatible with the goals of journalism. But where we don't completely understand each other yet is over the idea of...

• July 24, 2008
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How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers?

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Next week I'm leading a discussion at a conference run by the Knight Digital Media center about innovation within newspapers. The topic of the conference is "Transforming News Organizations for the Digital Now."They've asked me to talk about two things: The "ecology of innovation." What type of environment fosters innovation best?Provide examples of innovation that helps journalists to transform. I have my own thoughts about this, informed by my work in Bakersfield as well as at previous companies. I will share those ideas here soon, in addition to anything that comes out of the panel discussion. But to make sure...

• July 8, 2008
• 8 comments

The Print on Demand Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I delve more into Printcasting, I've been learning about the relatively new and growing POD movement -- which stands for Print on Demand. And every new leaf I turn over is another confirmation of what we suspected when we originally entered Printcasting into the Knight News Challenge. There's an all-out technology revolution happening with print which, until now, newspapers have largely missed out on. Here are just a few examples. For this first one, I have to thank Medill student and journalistic-programmer Brian Boyer who introduced me to the service. When I met Brian at the MIT Future of...

• July 2, 2008
• 11 comments

Prepping Printcasting for Mass Adoption

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've spent the last couple weeks with my head in the wires, so to speak, thinking about things like technology platforms. And lest you hear that term and begin to tune out, stay with me. The reality is that in today's media, all of us are need to be a little semi-geek (to quote Amy Gahran from last year's News Challenge contest). First, I have a significant decision to report. After a lot of thought, discussion and hand-wringing, we've finally settled on a technology platform for Printcasting: Drupal. And we have contracting needs galore. If you're a Drupal developer (or...

• June 30, 2008
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Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the 13 years I've been involved in online media, I've learned firsthand how dangerous it can be to be lead by ideology. Ideals are great, but if you become too invested in them they can blind you to the real needs of the customers you're trying to serve. And when it comes to innovation - which is part of the brand of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper where I work - the temptation to drink your own Kool-Aid is huge. So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco,...

• June 18, 2008
• 6 comments