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 in late March.

For several years now, this citizen journalist has been blogging about cross-country running in Bakersfield on Andynoise.com, a bare-bones site that focuses completely on local runners in Bakersfield. As just one example, he's taken and posted 61,000 pictures of high school runners in three years. It goes without saying that nobody in Bakersfield -- not even the local newspaper -- has done more to cover cross-country running events than him.


When we told Paul about Printcasting, he immediately saw its potential to get his content into a printable magazine form that he can take to cross country meets. We helped him with the printing costs for his first issue (an offer we made to all of our active publishers). As a result, a few weekends ago he handed out 500 copies of his Printcast at the Wolf Pack Invitational cross-country meet in Bakersfield that was attended by 700 athletes from 16 schools. We'll be printing up another issue for him for a second event, and have also sent a copy of his magazine to local sports shops and given them an offer for free advertising for one issue.

In addition to being a great case study for Printcasting, I think Andynoise says a lot about the future of journalism and the role that average people play in it every day. He's the perfect example of a journalistic entrepreneur, and he uses every tool available to him to find new ways to inform his audience. He publishes two other Printcasts in addition to Andynoise.com: one for the Bakersfield Distance Project and another for the Bakersfield Marathon Walkers. He's also active in Facebook, Twitter, Smugmug and any service that helps him serve his community of interest.

New Feature: The Edition Builder

The great thing about having active users is that they immediately tell us what they hate (really!), and we were caught off guard when the majority of users told us that they don't like the idea of automatically-generated editions.

As we probed into this more, we realized that they don't hate all automatic (people like Andynoise love how Printcasting pulls in content they've posted on blogs), but rather the lack of control over which stories appear in each spot.

In response, we've launched an entirely new path for creating a Printcast that we call the Edition Builder. Users can now choose every single article and placement, and also write or copy & paste stories from elsewhere (for example, from a Word document). But the real power is in the Story Finder, which lets you search through the 6,000 articles that have been imported into Printcasting. You can save them in a Story List (what we internally call "hunter-gatherer mode"), then drag and drop them into your publications.

This video shows how the Edition Builder works:

Initial reactions to the Edition Builder have been positive, but we're not stopping there. Over the next two months, we'll launch a completely new version of Printcasting that's tied more tightly to the node structure of Drupal 6.

Also, a new PDF generator we're experimenting with should allow much more flexibility and variability between templates, with headlines, images and story spots appearing in completely different places as you switch between them. Here's a screen shot of one of them, created by our Web designer Don Hajicek (who is also behind most of our site design and even some functionality):

We're also working to make Printcast subscriptions work more like an email newsletter tool that just happens to include a beautiful printable magazine.

Planning for More Partners

Finally, we continue to get inquiries from large companies and organizations that want to experiment with Printcasting -- and the nature of the inquiries in changing. Perhaps the most interesting development there is that not just one, but two membership organizations are now looking at Printcasting as a way to provide value-added news services to their members.

This was a pleasant surprise, but we should have seen this coming. Organizations of all types seem to be ramping up their content staffs (some even call them "newsrooms") just as newspapers are laying off reporters, and they always have a certain number of members who like the option of reading in print. In some cases, these organizations' members are telling them that they want them to do something to help save newspapers. Who would have predicted that?

Printcasting fits in because it's a "bridge" product that provides digitally aggregated content in a form that works great on a home printer. In the current economic recession, they can't afford as much paper and ink as they used to, so having a PDF version that members can print at home is appealing. And they all see the value of having instant handouts that they can take to real-world meetings. That isn't all that different from what Andynoise is doing with cross-country meets.

From a philosophical standpoint, this makes me wonder if membership organizations, non-profit news startups and the like will be the ones who carry the torch of the printed newspaper as "newspapers" reduce or eliminate printed copies altogether. But more likely, they will both end up in a happy middle-ground.

Oh, and one last thing about partnerships. Our objective has always been to spend the last 6 months of our Knight News Challenge grant period helping 5 other organizations make Printcasting work in their local communities. We have the ability to do that now thanks to some focused tests with MediaNews Group, but we won't delve into partnerships fully until around January.

If you or your organization are interested in being a partner, we'd like to hear from you. Please fill out this form. We'll contact you if we think there's a good fit.

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 to repeat it," as George Satayana said. If we can learn from what didn't work so well yesterday, perhaps we can collectively use that knowledge to help make things better tomorrow.

This is all the more important in the current economic climate, as even the smallest vulnerabilities of businesses are magnified -- sometimes fatally so. And just to be clear, while I work in newspapers now, I'm not talking only about them. This is true of many, many industries, most notably even relative newcomers with highly technical, highly intelligent employees. As just one example, when I worked at AOL, I saw many of the same group behaviors that I see in newspapers today.

The other night I started to explore this on Twitter with the question. "Why is it so hard for old companies with existing customers to change quickly?" People replied to me with additional ideas, and together we built the list below. But don't let it stop there. If you can think of other ideas please post them in a comment below. (Note: One thing we discovered in the Twitter conversation is that it's easy for this to turn into a gripe session about specific situations or industries, and the symptoms they show. There's no end of blog posts about that and they're not that helpful. Here, let's try to get to the root causes that apply to any mature business.)

With that, here's our short list...

Innovation Killers

1. FEAR: Too much money can be the enemy of progress.

This is perhaps the biggest irony of all, so I list it first. How can too much money keep you from innovating? It's because of a phenomenon that someone named Siddhartha Gautama -- otherwise known as Buddha -- explained a long time ago. It's because you're attached to it. That kills innovation because you're focused on keeping what you have rather than serving your customers' changing needs.

In general, successful companies are either too afraid to stop making money the old way or they're not allowed to. This is true even when a pool of money is decreasing. On the flip side, I have noticed that once revenue drops past a magical percentage, it triggers a panic which can result in a flurry of last-minute innovation -- but that's not a plan for success.

It's even worse for publicly traded companies. The shareholders they really work for, whom they have almost no control over, are often even more afraid. Or worse, they can't agree on a course of action -- with half of the shareholders punishing a stock when it makes drastic changes and the other half punishing it for not changing fast enough.

But this is also true for privately owned companies. If an inspired leader sees a storm coming that will likely result in a 30% drop in long-term revenues and tells the board of directors that it needs to proactively cut current profits 20% while it focuses on emerging business opportunities, what happens? That leader is most likely fired and nobody wins. A few years later, the company is still down 30% or more, but in this case without any game plan whatsoever.

I once, probably foolishly, told one of the leaders of a company I worked for that she would one day have to eat her own children to compete with free advertising. She looked at me like I was crazy, but this is basically what I was talking about. Sometimes you have to kill a large portion of your current business to preserve your future. Very few newspapers -- let alone many established companies -- have done that, and now they're paying the price of inaction.

2. BRAND ADDICTION: Companies are addicted to their current products and brands.

I'm surprised at how many businesses act as if their job is to protect a current brand from change, as if the brand itself is the customer as opposed to the audience. This blinds them to their customers, who are usually the ones driving the rapid change.

The good news is that we're finally seeing some movement with newspapers. More and more are creating new brands that go after audiences that didn't read the newspaper anyway, or extending their brands to audiences like Facebook and Twitter. But think of how much further along they'd be if they had started four years ago? (Side note: At the Bakersfield Californian, where I currently work, new brands have increased our audience by 100,000 individuals in a city of only 330,000. This can work, but it takes time.)

The bad news is that many still think that creating separate brands means they're killing or competing with existing brands. I'm reminded of this every time I see a niche brand that is "Brought to you by" a newspaper. This mindset only makes sense if your goal is to better serve an existing audience, but it's usually a bad idea if you're trying to grow your audience. It's the vestige of protectionism, and you can only hope that the new audience isn't turned off by the marketing tag.

Just to be clear, I'm not opposed to building and growing existing brands, but in today's fragmented world I think that "one size fits all" brands have limited appeal. My advice to mature information companies is to think of their brands as "wrappers" for capabilities and expertise. They deliver solutions to customers. But every audience prefers different packaging, so if you use the same brand for everything you end up polluting their potential.

3. PARANOIA: Companies assume everyone is their competitor, as opposed to potential partners or members.

This is something that affects business people of all types, including sole proprietors. The other day I was talking to a friend who was starting a technology consulting business in a tourist town. I gave her the name of someone else I know there who could help her out. A cloud passed over her face, and she told me, "Oh -- I don't want to talk to someone who's in the same business because they may compete with me."

If you multiply that mindset by a few hundred or thousand, you can see how paranoia can be ubiquitous in many large companies. But in my opinion, the entire premise of this argument is disproven by the open source movement, which shows that sharing leads to more opportunities and lower costs for everyone.

A corollary to this is that information businesses in particular never talk openly about their problems. This makes absolutely no sense because, in my experience, everyone will eventually find out if your traditional business model isn't working. Your current customers are also most likely to want you to succeed, and they may even be able to help you out if you're more honest about challenges up front.

4. BUSINESS BLINDNESS: Most innovation is on the consumer side, but not with the business model.

Finally, the biggest hindrance of all is that core business models don't fundamentally change until it's too late -- and that's a huge problem. You can innovate your ears out on the consumer side, but if you can't eventually grow revenue to pay for that it doesn't matter.

I was reminded of this three years ago when former Knight-Ridder exec Brian Monroe addressed winners of the Knight-Batten Awards. I wrote about his chilling words then, but I'll repeat them here for emphasis.

He told us about how the Knight Ridder newspaper chain -- which has since been sold -- was a pioneer in using digital technology to better inform citizens, "but that wasn't enough. In the end, our shareholders didn't believe in our ability to be relevant in the future. They placed more value in our assets when sold than they did in our future potential."

He said that everyone needed to innovate even more quickly or history would repeat itself and more newspapers and news providers would go out of business. He was right. Lots of innovation has happened, but it hasn't been enough. As a result, people in places like Ann Arbor, Mich., have no daily newspaper.

Power of Fear and Attachment

How is it possible that this could happen when there was so much warning? I think the answer is clear in #1 above: the paralyzing power of fear and attachment. But it also comes down to how businesspeople are motivated and compensated. If you feed your children based on a percentage of sales, are you going to do anything to upset the department store that makes up 20% of your salary? Probably not -- until it's too late and two department stores merge or one goes out of business.

To summarize, innovation is hampered by fear, brand addiction, paranoia, and insufficient focus on the business. What else? Post your ideas here. If we can make a good list, maybe some people who can make a difference will read it and help break the cycle of mediocrity.

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 each magazine by adding a "Place an Ad" button on the microsite pages. Click that, and you'll see that your publication is automatically selected as a target (see an example here). This allows a business to advertise in publications they like by simply typing in the URL from the PDF printout (possibly in a sample copy that a publisher gives to them), click that button, pay and be done.

• First, we can finally tell publishers and content providers that they can use Printcasting not only to meet the information needs of their communities, but also to help pay the freight for reporting, content creation, printing and distribution. Like our fellow Knight News Challenge project Spot.us, we're helping answer the question of how to pay for local journalism.
• It creates a very compelling new way for local businesses to place affordable ads that they know will be seen locally. This is especially helpful for so-called "long tail" advertisers, that majority of businesses in every town that have very little time or money (and these days less money than ever before), but still need to market their services to stay open. These are businesses like nail salons, home contractors, local book stores, ice cream shops and the like.
• For newspapers, like The Bakersfield Californian and partners such as MediaNews Group, it creates a new way to reach those long-tail advertisers. One of the biggest problems newspapers are coping with right now is that most of their revenue comes from very large businesses. When two of them merge, or one ceases operation, it starts a snowball effect that these days leads to things like cost-cutting, layoffs and a corresponding loss of quality. For this reason, everyone who likes getting local news from newspapers has a vested interest in newspapers' ability to diversify their revenue sources. Expanding their revenue to small businesses is one critical part of that.
• And finally, it completes the feature set we laid out 18 months ago when we entered the Knight News Challenge. From this point onward, everything we do will build upon and improve the core features in response to the feedback and usage patterns of users and partners.

Find more info about on the Printcasting blog about how revenue sharing works and, if you're a publisher or contributor, some important things you need to do to get paid.

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 been open to anyone since March, but there wasn't a way for people in other cities to create and find locally-targeted publications for their areas. Now people in Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area can also create locally-focused Printcasts in a way that lets local readers and advertisers find them.

Partners like MediaNews Group will seed those markets with content and use Printcasting the same way as everyone else, but by doing that they also provide content that the community can remix into their niche publications. When we begin to charge for self-serve advertising (which we plan to do very soon), MediaNews -- just as any content contributor -- will receive a portion of ad revenue from Printcasts that use their content. Likewise, if MediaNews -- just like any Princasting publisher -- creates Printcast publications, and they use content from local bloggers, those bloggers will receive a portion of the ad revenue. In this way, Printcasting's partnerships also create grass-roots partnerships between professional and "citizen" media that is mutually beneficial to both parties.

The experience on the Printcasting.com site doesn't change much on its face, as all of the real changes are on the back-end. When you go to the Printcasting.com home page, you'll now see a search box to "Find Printcasting Near You." Enter a zip code and it will tell you if there's a site in your town. If there is, you'll be taken straight to a site that aggregates Printcasts from your area. If not, you're asked to create a Printcast and tag it to your zip code. If we start to see a large number of Printcasts in a particular area, we'll create a site that features it like this one for Bakersfield: http://printcasting.com/bakersfield.

But we're not opening city sites for the entire U.S. just yet. Because Printcasting is such a new concept, we need people to help seed their markets with content (from blogs and professional sources) and publications that use that content. And we also need people who are willing to do the local foot work, and meet with bloggers and community organizations to show them how Printcasting can help them communicate with their audience. I invite you to register your content and create Printcasts, then let me know so that I can start to see where new geographic communities are emerging. If enough people use Printcasting from a particular area, that's a sign that we should open a city site there.

When we first announced our intention to partner, we said we'd work with any locally-focused organization that had expertise in using print to build community. The most natural partners are newspapers because they have local content, local people, and an interest in growing local audience and revenue. Printcasting offers a way for them to do that at lower cost while also leveraging content from bloggers in their communities. Local bloggers will also benefit through ad revenue share, assuming a newspaper chooses to use their content in one of their Printcasts, and that Printcast makes money. In this way, Printcasting provides a way for newspapers -- long leaders in local community development -- to work in partnership with local entreprenurial-minded content providers rather than in competition with them.

This is where MediaNews Group comes in. I met Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group's Vice President for Targeted Products, a year ago at his Individuated Newspaper Conference (thanks to former Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple for the introduction!) Peter has been working on his separate I-News initiative, which will soon let readers of certain MediaNews Group papers create personalized editions that contain only the content they're interested in. The approach is different from Printcasting, but the end-result is the same. It creates more opportunity for targeted advertising.

I think Peter is more committed to content personalization and what he calls "individuation" than anyone working in media today, and he proves it by running an open-invitation conference every year about personalized news. Peter is the one who came to me with the idea of using Printcasting as an internal niche-magazine engine. While that wasn't what we created Printcasting for, it made sense. Add to that his and MediaNews' openness to letting citizens in their markets create publications -- even with content that starts within MediaNews -- and we knew that we'd found our first partner.

But there are others out there who are equally interested. From the very beginning of this project we've received interest from organizations around the world -- often newspapers, but also organizations such as universities and membership groups. It started as soon as we posted a prototype in the Fall of 2008, and it caught us by surprise. We're responding to demand rather than going around asking people to participate, and that's a good sign.

Between now and December we will continue to talk to interested parties and roll out more sites in more cities. If you think your organization may be a good match, please let us know! And regardless of that, please feel free to start using Printcasting wherever you are. If you enter your zip code (or international postal code) when you create content, that will be a sign to us to open a Printcasting city site near you.

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 the birth of a completely new -- and arguably better -- breaking news system that involves everyone.

Just look at the experience of Lauren, my 6-year-old daughter, with her $68 Fisher-Price digital camera. On Tuesday, it vaulted us both into the local media spotlight within minutes after she captured footage of a funnel cloud forming over our house.

I uploaded everything to Flickr and Vimeo and posted links in Twitter. Minutes later, @CBS4Denver, the local CBS News affiliate, was broadcasting the footage on the air and interviewing me live over the phone.

That night, CBS came to our house to do a segment about my daughter and how she shot the photo on her Fisher-Price camera. Here's that segment, followed by my video footage.

What's most interesting to me is how naturally all of this happened, and how quickly a couple of tweets were picked up and broadcast all over the state. And it wasn't just by CBS -- The Denver Post, Daily Camera and Colorado Daily also pointed to it from their websites.

How It All Happened

Rewind to last Sunday, when five tornadoes went through the Denver area, with one overturning a car and injuring a man taking pictures. Since then, everyone here has been on edge whenever strange clouds form. That day, I bookmarked a local Twitter search for the term Tornado and began monitoring it whenever I heard reports of strange weather.

When my daughter came into my home office on Tuesday saying there was a scary looking cloud outside, I checked the NOAA radar for Denver and didn't see anything. I checked Twitter search and saw nothing as well. So we marched upstairs to take a look ourselves.

And that's when we saw a strange, sideways, shoelace-like cloud that appeared to be growing:

I immediately grabbed my camera and starting taking pictures. It was at this time that I remember hearing Lauren say, "I'm gonna get my camera too!" It was ultimately her photo above that ended up on TV news, also spreading through Twitter via a few retweets that resulted in 400 clicks in just a few hours (according to bit.ly).

Here are the most popular Tweets that started the ball rolling:

I should add that I also addressed some tweets to the attention of @cbs4denver, which made it easier for them to find, as well as @denverpost. I subscribe to both of their feeds and had noticed them asking people to tweet tornado news on Sunday. This was an incredibly smart move by both organizations, as it immediately extended their newsroom to include everyone on the ground. The Denver Post, followed by the Daily Camera and Colorado Daily, ended up embedding my video on their home pages. Vimeo reports that the video has been played 729 times since then, with 400 views on the first day.

How Breaking News Has Changed

This personal experience has really changed my view of breaking news, and opened my eyes to the revolution in news reporting that microblogging and real-time search are making possible. A year ago, I was skeptical of Twitter, thinking it was just another Web 2.0 darling that would quickly lose its luster. Now I'm starting to sense that Twitter, microblogging and real-time search are a new medium in their own right, distinct from being simply part of "the Internet." They're a new chapter in the digital media revolution.

This anecdote also shows how quickly breaking news spreads through Twitter, which, as a medium, is scooping not only local news organizations but also the National Weather Service, which did not declare a tornado warning in Broomfield until 30 minutes after we saw a funnel cloud forming.

This was even more obvious when the CBS 4 news crew arrived, fresh from chasing the storm all the way to Greeley, Colo., and still getting no direct tornado footage. Instead, they spent the afternoon visiting people who had already taken and broadcast their own footage online. There was once a time when a news station provided the main lens on a locality and thus the eye of common experience. Now, the news station's role is shifting to be more of a spotlight on "everycam." As Clay Shirky said in his book by the same name, here comes everybody!

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 the community -- which is not bad for the first month, and before we've done any serious marketing.

I'll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog).

The new feature we're most proud of is a new tool that lets you create your own masthead using a photo from your hard drive.

Our development team is going down a punch list of 34 near-term projects like this. And in parallel, we're starting on the next big round of features that will launch in early summer. Those are:

1) Ad payment and controls
We're now working with The Commerce Guys in Jackson, Michigan to build out a straightforward, secure way for businesses to pay for ads (currently free during a trial period). Publishers will also be able to reject individual ads -- or all future ads from a particular business -- before those ads can appear in their Printcasts. All of this should be available in a testable mode in May, and ready to launch in June.

By the way, for you Drupal fans out there, we're really excited to have Ryan Szrama, the lead developer on the open-source Ubercart module in Drupal who recently joined the Commerce Guys team, working on the ad payment project.

2) Revenue Share
The Commerce Guys are also helping us build out a very sophisticated, but user-friendly, system that shares advertising revenue. We will be providing more information about how this will work in the future, but here's the gist.

Whenever a business places a self-serve ad in a Printcast, 60% of that money will immediately be passed on to the publisher via a Paypal account deposit. 30% will be set aside in an escrow account which is shared with contributors on Printcasting.com, and that escrow will be split among them every quarter in proportion to how much their content has been used. The final 10% will be maintained by the Printcasting network to cover ongoing hosting, development, maintenance and transactions fees.

Sharing revenue at all is fairly radical for anyone, including a newspaper. But we'll also be giving much more direct revenue to the citizen publishers on our network than most revenue-sharing services do, and for a simple reason. We feel that publishers bear the highest burden for the success of everyone on the network, and the network itself. They'll be footing most of the bill for printing, distribution and marketing of their publications to their own communities of interest, and contributors will only benefit when they do. If they incur the highest costs, we feel they should get the highest reward.

Note that the percentages above reflect only our current thinking, and they could change. One reason we can keep our portion so low is because our expenses are covered by the Knight Foundation through the end of May 2010. After that date we hope to be able to keep rev-share proportions steady, but much will depend on how much ad revenue is coming in the door by then, and how it compares to network expenses. In that sense, our own future success is also dependent on the financial success of publishers on the Printcasting network. And we like that, because it automatically aligns our interests with the interests of Printcasting.com participants.

Do you think these percentages are too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know.

3) "City Hubs"
As I've written about before, from the beginning we have seen organic demand for Printcasting in other cities. Our original plan was to extend Printcasting to five other cities starting in December, but based on all of the interest out there -- which includes interest from other newspapers -- we will be starting this rollout sooner.

City Hubs will be geographically-targeted launching pads for partners in other cities to promote Printcasting. If you don't live in Bakersfield and you want to use Printcasting, be sure to add your zip code to your Printcast at setup. This data will be used to surface your content on any future city hubs we may roll out.

I can't share which cities will be first because the partners have not been announced yet. But do let me know if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring a city for our national rollout.

4) Print on Demand
If you've ever ordered photo prints from a site like Shutterfly or ordered an on-demand book on Lulu.com, you understand what we want to do here. Imagine an "Order a Printed Copy" button on every Printcasting.com microsite and you get the idea. You click that button, enter payment details, and a few days later get a copy of the magazine at your doorstep (or perhaps pick it up at a local print provider).

When I started this project a year ago I assumed there would be numerous print services that we could tap into using free Web APIs. I was wrong in that assumption. Most of these types of companies don't have full open APIs, although some are beginning to work on them. Now that we've launched, we're finally making progress with getting some large printing companies with national footprints to talk to us, so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to add printing functionality sometime in the summer.

That's the news from Printcasting.com this week. In the future: more about revenue sharing, and how it can benefit individuals, organizations, and also newspapers and printing companies.

For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the gist is that Printcasting lets anyone participate in niche magazine publishing, and if they do a good job they also stand to benefit from advertising revenue when we begin charging for self-serve ads. It's an admittedly radical idea to come out of a newspaper at a time when many newspapers are cutting back or shutting their doors. As a result, we're starting to attract media attention, with positive mentions in The Miami Herald and Business Week.

But that's all talk. We're launched, so now instead of telling you about it you can jump in and try it out. One fun way to do this is as a Printcasting subscriber. With the permission of Mark Glaser, we've set up a Printcast for this Idea Lab site. Check it out here:

The thumbnail above comes from a special blog widget that's available for any Printcast. Click on it to flip through a facsimilie of what the printed version will look like. To get a copy to print, click the Download link. And if you want to receive an e-mail whenever a new edition is available (which happens about once a day for the PBS Idea Lab blog), click "Subscribe" and provide your e-mail address.

It's also really easy to get a blog widget to promote your own Printcast, or one that you like. Just find a Printcast in the directory (or your own), then click the "Share" link at the top of the page. Copy and paste the HTML code into your blog template, and your blog or Web site promotes a printable PDF version for those who may want to print it out or read offline. When a new edition is published the thumbnail and link will update automatically.

If you have more time you can create a Printcast using feeds people have already registered, including some very good ones from The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. To get your own site's content into your Printcast or make it available for other Printcasts to carry, simply register your RSS feed. All of these tasks take only a few minutes.

You can also print a few copies yourself and leave it at local coffee shops, bars, your local library, or anywhere that people in your community may be looking for local information. That's exactly how we plan to start local promotion of Printcasting in Bakersfield, starting out with the 3,600 blogs on the Californian's eight social networking sites. In addition, those sites have more than 53,000 public user profiles, which is a good indication of active participants who may take 5 minutes out of their day to register a feed or set up a Printcast.

We're also gearing up to work on something a journalism major like myself never expects to be involved in: integrating e-commerce payment into the ad tool. To be honest, this is something we'd hoped to have finished by now, but we intentionally put it off so that we could give the core product the focus it deserved before launch. (Since we planned to make ads free for the first few months anyway, this doesn't hold us back at all and may even make local advertiser outreach easier -- especially in this crazy economy.)

It's been a big year, and a very big week. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and given us suggestions, feedback and moral support. Do us a favor and post a link to your Printcasts in a comment. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or need help.

This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces in place to publicly launch in Bakersfield later this month. Here are some excerpts worth mentioning:

"... the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. 'If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],' Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. 'This is cheap and targeted,' Pacheco explains. 'Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads.' "

And later on ...

"This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. 'Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,' Pacheco says. '[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.'"

That accurately sums up what we're trying to do with Printcasting. Thanks to senior writer Olga Kharif for good reporting.

Of course the real story will begin once we launch later this month and are able to point to how regular old people are using Printcasting to make their own magazines and newsletters. Our local outreach is already starting in beta, and I can tell that what people do with these tools will ultimately be far more interesting than the tools themselves. The same has been true of Bakotopia and other social-media initiatives -- connecting with people and allowing them to connect with each other is what the user-generated content space is really about.

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

"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 and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press."

I'm reposting my comments on Jay's blog entry here, as I think they speak to how Printcasting is primarily about preserving the news and information function of local communities in a sustainable way. Our use of print (or more accurately, printable content) supports that goal, but we're not intentionally trying to "save print."

The reality is that the future of print is digital, and there's no reason to print every single publication people create. We do want to print and distribute the highest-quality publications that come out the other end of this grand experiment, and only where the potential for ad revenue is higher than what those editions could receive from online self-serve ad revenue alone. This approach turns traditional print business model upside down, and also inside out thanks to the way it invites collaboration with people in the local community.

Here are my reposted comments, with a few additions:

I indeed do not claim to know 100% that the Printcasting experiment as currently defined will work exactly the way we except, but thanks to the Knight Foundation (which funds the project via the Knight News Challenge), we will have 15 months after launching to tweak things based on local community response. We will learn a lot during that time, make changes where we need to and end up with something that is more than just a theory, and hopefully a big success. For the record, I do believe it will be a big success -- I just can't point to anything that proves it will be. That's the nature of innovation. It all comes down to making intelligent bets and staying flexible.

Our objective is not so much to "save print" as it is to find new, sustainable ways to meet the news and information needs of local communities -- beginning in Bakersfield, but ultimately serving many different local communities.

Our idea for Printcasting came out of our experience in Bakersfield of creating multiple niche-focused social networking sites. We noticed that the brands that had a lot of user-generated content and printed magazines that locally distributed that content attracted more ad revenue than the sites that had less user-generated content and no print component.

As the business model supporting the general-interest printed product (the daily newspaper) began to crumble, while the business for niche digital-print hybrid products remained steady or increased, we asked ourselves, "what would need to happen in order for this new niche model to replace what we're losing in the general-interest space?" The answer was that we needed not just a handful of niche sites and magazines, but hundreds or thousands, all in a network that was supported by affordable self-serve advertising. We then submitted that idea to the Knight News Challenge, got funding and got to work.

I also want to point out that we're not assuming that all delivery of Printcasting publications needs to be via physical printing. And since the focus of our product is democratized publishing, where anyone can be a magazine publisher, we also don't want that. As with blogs and any type of user-generated content, there will be a wide range of quality and we will only invest in printing those that merit printing. Does this assume that a large quantity will be of low quality? Most likely, yes. Look at the blogosphere. Most of what's out there isn't up to the quality standards we expect from The New York Times, but it does have its fans who are willing to apply a different quality standard in exchange for getting the niche information they don't get from their newspaper.

Another theory we will be testing out is what I think of as the "American Idol" approach to print publishing. After a few months of outreach, we anticipate having a hundred or more Printcasts out there. Most will be subscribed to online so that readers who want to be informed receive an update in e-mail about new editions. They can read the content online -- in HTML form as well as in a "pageflip" view of the PDF -- or download and print the magazine on their home printers.

We will track each Printcast's online traffic and PDF downloads, as well as reader ratings, and use that information to identify high-quality citizen publications that we think could attract even more advertising revenue if they were printed in larger quantities and locally distributed.

Here's just one example of how this may play out. Numerous people at the Californian over the years have suggested creating a local wine publication, but creating that ourselves would be risky. It would take a lot of up-front investment in design, planning, sales outreach and content creation, and it may take many years for such a publication to break even. It could also fail.

With Printcasting, we'd reduce our risk and increase audience engagement by partnering with the community to generate a great new local wine magazine. We know there are people in town who know far more about wine than we do, and some are already blogging about it. Others -- such as local wine shops -- could write wine columns in their sleep, but they may not be doing it yet because they don't have an online audience to make it worth their while. We'd reach out to all of these people and get them to register their content (or post it on Printcasting.com), then in 5 minutes make a self-updating wine Printcast that features their content. Others may come along and create their own Printcasts about wine, or use the wine reviews in Printcasts with a slightly different focus. We may print a few thousand copies of our wine Printcast, or possibly even a citizen-produced version, and place additional pages of ads in it.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of other Printcasts may have a good online following of people who print copies from home, and those Printcasts will be supported by self-serve ad revenue alone. Each will each make a little money and reach only a handful of people, and that will work just great for their publishers and readers who are currently getting no compensation for their online content.

Some topics may be so niche that we would never, ever want to invest in printing them ourselves. But no matter -- the community is full of people with home printers, and they can use their $60 ink cartridges to print them out if it's worth it to them. I should also point out that the Printcasting network will take a small portion (around 10%) of ad revenue from all Printcasts to support this activity, so it will be in our interest to foster wide adoption of mostly-digital subscriptions.

The revenue from the self-serve ads as well as the additional ads we sell would be shared with those bloggers. Why do that? We want them to continue contributing high-quality content, and letting them share in the rewards is one way to motivate them. But it will also cost far less to share a portion of ad revenue than it would to hire a writer or two or three to write about those topics -- let alone a publication designer, dedicated salesperson, and so on.

As you can see, while we will be using the print medium in some cases, this model is completely different from how print-based media businesses operate today. It merges the best of the Web with the best of print, and throws out all the inefficiency and waste.

I also hope that Printcasting will remove once and for all the artificial, largely institutional barriers that exist between "the print side" and "the online side" at most newspapers. In the Printcasting model, all content originates online, and flows into print where the ad revenue can support it. If not, the content is still printable by millions of home printers where readers think it's worth the cost. The dividing line between print and online departments, not to mention staff and community, will become very difficult to discern -- as it should be. Then we can all get along with the business of serving new audiences, collaborating with them and supporting our efforts with shared revenue.

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 lists of potential citizen publishers, bloggers and businesses for our outreach plan. We've even brought a new person into our team, Tom Webster, who will focus exclusively on evangelizing Printcasting locally in Bakersfield. Tom is a well-respected, active blogger on Bakersfield.com (our newspaper's main site), and he has a lot of ties into the local community.

And in the middle of all this, international attention on Printcasting continues to grow. I was interviewed by Nora Young from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's technology show, "Spark". You can listen to that show and read about some other projects with similarities to Printcasting on the Spark web site.

We'd love to get more people into the beta test (and it's easy -- just request membership to this group and I'll let you in). But we know that most people just want to see what we're up to. The video below provides a glimpse into the most important piece of the product: the magazine-creation machine. You can watch a publisher on the beta site choosing feeds, layouts and design elements to create an automatically-generated PDF that can be used to print an 8-page magazine.

Printcasting Publisher Demo - Closed Beta from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

It's fun and just a little embarrassing to compare this to the prototype video I posted four months ago, not to mention the early concept video from 8 months ago, which consisted of a few sketches and a Powerpoint. It's a reminder to me of the iterative nature of product development, and the importance of continually refining ideas until you get them right.

I'm certain that a few months after we launch and hundreds of regular people in Bakersfield are using Printcasting to create their own magazines, there will be even more changes that are driven by how people use the product. And when we compare that version to what we have now, we'll look back and see how far we've come as we have very likely renovated major pieces of the house that is Printcasting.

This may sound like a big ball of stress, and sometimes it is, but it's also what makes creative people tick. Good product people live to take risks and help ordinary people do extraordinary things with technology. To do that right, you have to be excited by the idea of endless creation and re-creation that's informed by how people respond to what you put out there. All of us working on this project can't wait to see our assumptions tested by the hyperlocal community of Bakersfield, and respond to their feedback with something even better. In that sense, beta is simply a practice run for the next 15 months or more of our lives. We can't wait!

That's why one of the first things I did for our News Challenge project, Printcasting, was to start a blog and online community using the Ning network. We've used that community to solicit feedback about specific approaches, to coordinate alpha testing and provide periodic updates on our progress. But underneath all of that, there's something more powerful happening. A national and, increasingly, global movement is forming of people who want to make print relevant in the digital age. We will maintain this site after our launch under a new community.printcasting.com subdomain.

With hardly any promotion and a few Twitter posts, Printcasting.com now has 191 registered members [link] of all ages. The youngest is a tender 20, and the oldest a sprightly 77 (the average age is 39). The bulk (65%) are from the United States, with the largest concentrations being on the East Coast (22%), Midwest (20%) and Californian (18%). They work in a variety of professions, including art, engineering, printing, publishing, new media, law and small business. After Printcasting launches in March and, later, rolls out elsewhere, it will be interesting to see if that mix is repeated at a local level.

One thing I didn't anticipate is that 35% of the membership is from outside the U.S. Those members come from 28 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. Every week we find ourselves talking to people in other countries who are working on the similar problem of how to make print more relevant in the digital age, and a few who hope to be able to work with us in the future. There is no way we will ever be able to provide Printcasting to all of them, and certainly not in the early stages of the project. But it's my hope that this online community will serve as an ongoing meeting place for people who are interested in digital-print projects.

A journalistic print-on-demand revolution is definitely brewing, and I believe this year we will see it explode in a big way through multiple projects. In fact, the term "Printcasting" is already being used in a generic way. This Spring I'll be on a World Association of Newspapers panel in Barcelona, Spain titled "Printcasting", and I will be joined by a mysterious European counterpart which I've never heard of. Other projects like The Printed Blog are emerging that, similar to Daily Me before, take a slightly different spins on RSS-to-PDF technology.

The other day someone even told me he'd heard of this new Printcasting thing and I should look into it, which made me smile since I personally coined that term a year ago and am about to launch the first site on the Printcasting.com domain. Rather than see these other efforts as competition, I think about how much more we could all do together. The Knight News Challenge's open-source requirement sets the stage for that to happen.

So what are we hearing from our community members? Quite a bit. When people join Printcasting.com, they have the option of answering two questions that appear on their public profiles. One is, "Why are you interested in Printcasting," and another is "What do you think are the biggest problems to solve with printed newspapers and magazines?" What follows are the answers I find particularly inspiring or thought-provoking. If you run across someone you'd like to talk to more on Printcasting.com, feel free to send that person a message or create your own profile. That's part of the mission of the site.

Overheard on Printcasting.com ...

• Karen Magnuson, editor and Vice President of news at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, is interested in Printcasting because of its niche focus (the Democrat and Chronicle has 11 different audience-focused web sites and print products in Rochester). She believes the biggest problems newspapers need to provide are providing the right content for the right audience at the right times, and creating a business model that produces the right kind of revenue to make a solid, consistent profit. On a similar note, the newspaper's general manager of custom content, Jane Sutter, says "The future of the media industry depends on us being innovative in how we communicate information and how we help others to communicate information."

• Peter Vandevanter, VP of targeted products for MediaNews Group, says he's interested in  "print self-actualization -- the highest run on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs -- for everyone."  He says the biggest problems with newspapers today is "the popular perception (and reality) that newspapers and magazines are unrelated and unresponsive to the specialized information needs of the individual." I should add that Peter is doing his own part to push print customization along, having held three international Individuated News symposiums so far, with a fourth planned for Washington, D.C. in June. I plan to attend the summer session. If you want to join us, sign up here.

• Michael Riordan at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Open Publishing Lab says, "We are doing related research and developing similar projects at the RIT OPL." After I saw this, I made a visit to RIT and learned more about what RIT is up to. Their Innovation News project (http://opl.cias.rit.edu/category/category/innovation-news) is fascinating, and has obvious overlap with Printcasting. RIT is also working on a project funded by HP Labs that would automatically turn content from any Web page into a printable publication. (If you want to see an example of a site that already does this, check out Frank Worsley's Zinepal.com). 

• Brian Parks, a contract carrier for The Bakersfield Californian, lives in nearby Wasco, CA. He wants to use Printcasting to mobilize local actors, stage technicians and theater goers around the local arts scene. "For me, public performances of many kinds are what really give the public at large a better sense of who we are. If only more people took an active interest," Brian writes.

• Patrick MacDonald, publisher of MacDonald Advertising Services, says, "I think we could use printcasting to reach our audience more efficiently. In general, newspapers have lost sight of the value of connecting people to events, goods and services, and, perhaps most importantly, each other. I believe the key is to stop selling products to advertisers that the newspaper produces and move to a 'media house' mentality and start selling audiences that it creates using collaborative links and more user-generated content."

• Kim Breshnahan, a community weekly newspaper producer based in Canada, is working on a business she called http://newsinaminute.net. It would be a small local publication franchise designed for waiting areas -- restaurants, bars, hotels, doctors offices -- and would include quick relevant local news. She wants businesses to have a simple way to update their own ads.

• C.J. White from Shaker Heights, Ohio writes, "I've looked high and low for a solution to the problems that Printcasting seems to be solving ... my eyes are tired and dry after working at the computer all day...the last thing I want to do is read my news on it." He goes on to say, "Printcasting will address many inefficiencies. When I read a newspaper, I am interested in maybe 10% of what is printed. When I read a magazine, it's at most 25%. I'm not alone. That's a lot of wasted time, money, paper and advertising."

• Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News, and also a former Knight News Challenge winner, writes: "I think print will remain an essential part of news organizations for a long time. While much of the focus these days tends to be online, I think there is a tremendous amount of innovation to be done around print news." He says the biggest problem to solve in newspapers is "creating a print version that fits the way people live their lives and consume media. I think this means that rather than having a single printed version, newspapers need many version that are as customized as possible. I think this project is a great step toward reaching that."

• Richard Stone, a consultant in Cameron Texas, says "The business model [of newspapers] is no longer self-supporting. Small, hyper-local newspapers may survive the next decade but I fear for suburban papers and larger daily publications."

• Catherine Kirkland, a Vice president at Universal Press Syndicate, saying she's looking for new ways to sell and distribute their comics and columns. I personally like this idea because of the possibility of professional syndicates and "citizen" writers operating out of the same media ecosystem, all motivated by the prospect of ad revenue share. And I think it's possible that Printcasting publishers would be willing to pay to have popular comics and columns like "Dear Abby" in their magazines.
  

• Todd Smith, publisher of the Caledonian Record in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, says he has been trying to develop something similar to Printcasting there.  "We don't do anything novel. We simply pay people to gather information that is readily available to anyone. Then we sell the information directly and the audience to whom we've sold. The problem in the future will be how we will pay people to gather the information. Plenty of stuff is easy to get but there is always other stuff that it takes a skilled (and determined) person to gather. One of the best ways to ensure those people will continue to exist is to pay them for their trade. The revenue shortfalls from print-to-web is what I'm concerned with, generally."

• Stephen DeVol, executive producer at the Dayton Catholic Worker Movement. He's interested in Printcasting as a possible new model for creating church bulletins. The revenue generated would go back to the non-profit Catholic Worker Movement to help cover the cost of members' housing. Most interesting of all, the CWM is already doing something like this manually for Catholic parishes using Microsoft Publisher templates and a network of stay-at-home moms who put networked copy machines in their spare bedrooms.

• A woman in Israel who works for a weekly magazine targeted to an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem says she's looking for a solution that will create an automatic print edition from their Web site. Why bother, you may ask? She says their community "in general avoids the Internet because of easy access to controversial content. I have not seen such a solution yet and your seems perfect for the task." My take on this is that feeding digital content into printed products could be an effective way to bridge the digital divide for certain communities that are never going to get online. You can lay all the broadband cables you want, but some people will never want to read content on a screen. Printcasting creates an automatic bridge between those worlds.

As all of these comments show, the real beauty of democratized publishing tools is that everyone can dream up new ways to use them. It will be exciting to see how much more they do when Printcasting is available to everyone, and I'll watch other initiatives with interest.

Even though it's the holidays, the Printcasting team is not slowing down. All we can think about is March 2, 2009 when we launch live in Bakersfield. We're busy implementing changes to the Printcasting publisher experience after some great feedback from alpha testers. And I'm happy to still have great things to talk about and show off.

Our next test will focus on local self-serve advertising. But don't just take my word for it -- see it in action in this video preview:

Why are we doing this? It's about meeting local businesses where they're at. If we can do that more effectively, we will secure a much-needed revenue source that will continue to fund quality local journalism.

But making local self-serve advertising work with small local businesses is no cakewalk, and it will take us time to perfect it.

I've written in the past about our goal to make it as easy for small local businesses to create print ads as it is to write an e-mail or post a blog entry. Most of these long-tail advertisers have small ad budgets of $10,000 - $30,000 per year, and that means general-interest newspapers (or general-interest anything) often aren't a good fit for them. While some may experiment with pure-online ads such as Google AdWords, the reality is that placing an ad in a global search engine isn't the best way to bring local consumers into your store. Contrary to what you may hear, locally-focused businesses depend on local consumers, not eBayers all over the planet. If they didn't, would they have brick-and-mortar storefronts to begin with?

In Bakersfield, we have found that smaller niche print publications that are fueled by online user-contributed content are a great way to serve these types of businesses. But because they have less to spend, it's hard to generate enough revenue by relying on salespeople alone. Thankfully, self-serve tools make it possible for the salesperson to do more than simply sell an ad. The salesperson can sell an ad-creation service that is self-sustaining -- teaching the local business to fish and giving them a new fishing pole, if you will.

I don't mean to bore those of you who come here to read about journalism. Hey -- I'm a trained, degree-holding journalist myself. But I've come to learn over the years that local journalism is possible today because it serves the interests of local people that advertisers call consumers. And local journalism is paid for by also serving the needs of local businesses who rely on those consumers.

I know that there are other models people are experimenting with, such as David Cohn's incredible Spot.us community funded reporting project, and that's great. But I also know that local advertising is what pays for most local journalism today.

I have also been around the block long enough to know that there is not ever just one smoking-gun solution to everything. Funding the journalism of tomorrow will require a mix of creative new solutions. Since the need for local businesses to advertise locally will never go away, it would be foolish for local media companies not to apply the same kind of revolutionary thinking to advertising as they have to consumer-focused things like user-contributed content. (And isn't self-serve advertising just another type of user-contributed content anyway?)

Thus, Printcasting's advertising tool is not just a way to make money, although that is an obvious benefit. It's also a way to begin to have a more meaningful conversation with the small businesses that newspapers aren't reaching today, but are key to their future. I'll go as far to say that the future of small mom-and-pop shops and locally focused media companies are so interlinked that one cannot exist without the other.

But I have to say that I can't think of a more ironic time for us to be putting the finishing touches on a new print project.

Based on what you may have read (or even seen on The Daily Show), Newspaper Armageddon is in full swing. In just the last two months, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy, the Christian Science Monitor announced plans to end its daily print edition, Scripps announced its intention to sell the Rocky Mountain News, and Detroit's two newspapers planned to move to three days a week. Next year, blogger Mark Potts predicts more big changes, and I think he's right.

The immediate temptation is to assume that print is going away completely, but it's more complex than that. What's really happening is that economic conditions are accelerating changes in consumer and advertiser behavior. This is forcing companies of all types, including newspapers, to finally make radical changes to stay afloat. And unlike some Eeyores out there, I find this invigorating. This is actually one of the most exciting times to work at a newspaper because it means that the barriers to change just fell by half.

To paraphrase a character in the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, history shows that humanity doesn't evolve until it's standing at the brink. Right now that's exactly where newspapers are. Next year, expect to see smart newspapers moving quickly away from the status quo -- huge overhead, one size fits all, poorly targeted ads -- and toward a new model that is more efficient, community-driven and personalized than ever before. And expect advertising to be more highly-targeted, measurable, and self-serve.

That's where Printcasting and similar customized-print initiatives fit in. The Seybold Report recently interviewed me for a story about customized newspapers. In addition to Printcasting, it summarizes other custom print projects. Most notably, in February MediaNews Group plans to launch a customized newspaper in Los Angeles called I-News. What they're doing is personalization or individuation, which is slightly different from what the democratized publishing focus of Printcasting. But their approach is so similar that I regularly get together with project brainchild Peter Vandevanter to share ideas.

IFRA Magazine also recently printed a four-page spread on Printcasting that puts it in the larger context of custom print content.

Of course, some of you are surely asking, "Why even bother with print? Why not just go completely digital?" 

It comes down to a simple truth that even the most hard-line digerati will admit to. Physical stuff matters when it's personal to you. Just as one analogy, how do you feel when you get a holiday card in the mail? Do you throw it in the trash, or happily stick it on the fridge or mantle? Even though you may have seen the same exact same photo on Facebook, getting a hardcopy is special as long as the content is targeted and meaningful to you.

This feel-good effect of "stuff" only increases the more local and niche-focused it becomes. I think this is why an advertiser is quicker to buy an ad in a printed niche magazine than an ad on a Web site -- ironically, even a Web site with the same brand and content as the magazine.

We experienced this first hand in Bakersfield with Bakotopia, a social networking site I started for the Californian in 2005. Despite high traffic and audience engagement, it wasn't embraced by advertisers. But in 2007, we created a print magazine that carried the same content as the Web site (sort of a "Best of the Blogs" index).

In that year, Bakotopia more than doubled its number of advertisers, with 78% of them unique -- meaning they were new and not just carryovers from The Bakersfield Californian. Young readers also like the Bakotopia print edition, with Scarborough surveys showing a doubling of readership since the print edition started -- a fact that is at odds with the assumption that young people don't like print. We find that they use the print magazine and online social network interchangeably. Why? Because together they form one brand that speaks uniquely to them and their interests, and even includes their content.

There's a great lesson in there that you won't see reflected in any punditry-filled story about the supposed "death" of newspapers. Most people aren't unsubscribing from newspapers because they're printed, but because the content isn't as relevant to their unique interests as what they read online. This begs the question of what happens if you make more relevant, local, printed and printable content available. Will we see the opposite effect that we see in newspapers today? Printcasting will test that theory by allowing anyone to be a local niche print publisher.

As my colleague Mary Lou Fulton said recently, consumers have been telling us for years (as evidenced by declining newspaper subscription numbers) that one-size-fits-all isn't working for them. Now newspapers are finally forced to confront that issue head-on.

That's a big challenge to be sure, but don't confuse it with the idea that print as a medium will disappear. As I play with our Printcasting alpha, I can already see a future where print is just one of many valuable expressions of digital content. What one person reads online, another may read as a printout, and yet another reads on an Amazon Kindle or E-Ink Reader. And the producers of the content and publications themselves will run the gamut from newsrooms to local organizations to blogger co-ops. Is that exactly the same as what we're used to in the daily printed newspaper? Of course not, and that's what makes it interesting. Local newspapers are now in a position where they have to change or potentially die. Let the evolution begin!

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 launch is still five months away, we want to start getting early feedback so that the final product is as easy to use as possible. We've done that with a few groups so far, including representatives from Adobe, HP Labs and MediaNews Group,  Rich Gordon's Media Management class (which works under the banner of Crunchberry project) and of course Bakersfield Californian employees. Their feedback has already proven invaluable, and now we want yours. Please post any ideas or questions at the bottom of this post. Or, if you prefer to contact me privately, I can be reached at dan at printcasting dot com.

Second, we hope that seeing the prototype will get your creative juices flowing about how the technology could be used in your geographical area. We will initially launch Printcasting in Bakersfield, California, but by next December we plan to have five other organizations signed up to Printcast in their towns. We've already heard from a couple of interested parties (newspapers), but we want to case the net wider than just newspapers, and also include more than just U.S. companies.

We've stopped work on the prototype and are now working around the clock to get a more full-featured alpha ready for November. Let me know if you're interested in being an alpha tester. You can also join the Printcasting.com social network, which among other things will add you to a mailing list that we use to provide updates about the project.

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 as possible, prototypes and betas that you can play around with to provide feedback. None of these will be the final application -- which launches in March -- but they will allow us to work with the larger community of people who have an interest in Printcasting to help us make the final product that much better.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a little about the team we've assembled that's making this happen, and how we're getting from point A to Z. I'm excited to put the spotlight on them because I know that they're all extremely excited about Printcasting and want it to be a big success. We want everyone to feel a sense of ownership of Printcasting because it's an open source project. That begins with the people I mention below, but you can also get involved (more on that later).

Transition Plans

The hardest and most important thing I've done this year is build a new team while transitioning from my other duties. For those of you who are just now entering your ideas for next year's Knight News Challenge, take note. The planning process for your transition should begin in your head as soon as you fill out your entry form. We started our planning in February of last year when we learned that The Bakersfield Californian was a News Challenge finalist.

While Printcasting was proposed by three of us -- myself, Justinian Hatfield and Mary Lou Fulton -- it quickly became clear that we couldn't all drop what we were doing to make it happen. And we felt that it was paramount to have at least one full-time staff person responsible from start to finish. I began the emotionally difficult job of planning my eventual exit from the exciting social media work I helped start at the Californian back in 2004.

Fortunately, Justinian was ready and willing to step into my shoes, and he remains a trusted Printcasting advisor, stakeholder and friend. And Mary Lou has been incredibly helpful in an oversight role for the company. She will be even more involved in the second phase, when we launch and market Printcasting in Bakersfield.

Finding the Lead Developer

Printcasting sounds like a simple idea, and to the user it will definitely feel that way, but underneath it's a complicated piece of software with a lot of moving parts. While it uses an open-source foundation (Drupal), the most essential components -- the ones that create a magazine using variable content -- are custom code.

We knew that we'd be best off with a full-time staff developer. We found the right mix of skills and passion in Ron Robinson, who had done some contracting work for the Californian starting in January. At his previous job he built a system that lets people create print layouts for books that feature their own photos. He was truly the right person for the job at the right time, so as soon as we got word about our grant we extended him an offer.

Crafting the User Experience

All the rest of our budget (the majority of it) is for contractors. Our most urgent need at first was for conceptual mockups to help us think through the user experience. I began putting out the word for user interface designers as early as March. While we talked to a lot of qualified individuals and firms, I ultimately decided that I needed someone who I knew would understand the vision of Printcasting.

Tom Dellecave, an old colleague from AOL who now operates his own company Second Wind Media, did a great job creating an initial UI. You can see his work in the concept presentation in this video on Printcasting.com.

At this time we also began to think more about the visual look, feel and layout of the PDF magazines and newsletters Printcasting would generate. This is an area where The Bakersfield Californian has a lot of talent, and I was fortunate to get some initial help from staff designer Glenn Hammett.

Writing the Code

During this time, Ron was poring over a 55-page Product Requirements Document I'd written and attempting to fit that into a technical architectural plan. Around the middle of the summer he'd settled on using the Drupal framework, based on its modular architecture and large and growing community. We began putting out feelers for PHP developers with experience in Drupal who could work with Ron as a virtual development team. After once again talking to lots of different companies and individuals, including five which provided proposals based on our specs, we chose Photon Infotech out of Chennai, India.

Before now, the furthest I'd ever personally outsourced anything to was Canada. Working with a company on the opposite side of the globe was and still is new for everyone on our team. After one month we're very happy with the knowledge, commitment and responsiveness we're seeing from Photon, and I'm surprised to find that the Indian developers at Photon are more communicative and customer-focused than some U.S.-based developers we talked to. And while this isn't the only reason we chose them, it's also really great to know that we're getting two full-time developers working on Printcasting for the same cost as one half of a developer in the U.S. or Canada.

I should also mention that having our own full-time staff developer who manages the contract developers gives us the flexibility and confidence to outsource in this way. I feel strongly that it's important to keep the vision of a product very close. Once you have the right core team it makes sense to fill in the holes with contractors whose physical locations are less important.

Designing the User Experience

Once we chose Drupal, we knew we needed someone who could translate Tom's conceptual thinking into designs that would work on any Drupal site. And aside from that, we needed a designer who could create everything from the graphics, templates and themes that Drupal needs to the content and ad templates that Printcasting will generate.

When I stumbled across Don Hajicek, formerly of Boulder Drupal shop pingVision, I knew I'd found someone special. You will get to see Don's work soon, but let me just say that sometimes I think he understands the value proposition of Printcasting better than I do. Perhaps this is to be expected of someone who started out as a print advertising designer in Chicago, competed with his local newspaper using what we now call a "hyperlocal" Web site, and started his own Web design firm.

Don will subcontract as needed to Greg Hines, a developer who understands the ins and outs of Drupal themes and architecture. Both Don and Greg are very involved in the Drupal community, which excites us because they'll be able to help us spread the word about Printcasting to thousands of Drupal sites when it's provided as an open source module.

What's Next?

Thanks to all of the people above, we're now finally hitting a running stride with Printcasting. Among our next milestones are to release a rapid prototype for feedback, launch an alpha before Thanksgiving, and release a series of increasingly open betas between then and February. That will give us plenty of time to polish the edges and -- who knows -- maybe even squeeze in a few extra features before we launch in Bakersfield on March 2.

Join the Team!
I've talked a lot about our team, but it's a lot larger than the people listed here. Do you want to help shape the direction of Printcasting? Join our team of advisors on the Printcasting.com social network. We'll be using the site as a launching pad for testing and feedback. There are 102 members already, and there's always room for more. The more input we get over time, the better the final product will be when we open source it. Hope to see you there!