

London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own newspaper. - RiderOfGiraffes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8559813.stm

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

Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/)

------
karpj
more than a year ago i started The Printed Blog www.theprintedblog.com we were
the first print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other online
content. we were discussed in every print newspaper in the world, including
the New York Times ([http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/technology/start-
ups/22blo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/technology/start-
ups/22blogpaper.html?_r=1)) after going through around 300k of my own money
(and some angel money), we couldn't sustain the business. i wrote about why
here blog.theprintedblog.com

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

<http://blog.theprintedblog.com/>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
mos1
Original humorous content.

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

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

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

~~~
mos1
Indeed, I did. I often listen to The Moth while walking my dogs, but I'd
missed this one.

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

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

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

<http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/8908>

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

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

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

Basically, Newspaper Club rock.

------
gr366
Using existing infrastructure (the printing press) to open up to niche markets
during press downtime isn't a bad idea for newspapers. The example of football
(soccer) teams printing their own short-run publication and distributing it at
an event may have a better foundation in the long-run than a daily local
newspaper that has to be delivered door to door. Distribution is cheaper and
they target a highly focused audience segment (which may interest
advertisers).

------
empire29
I had a flash back to the punk zines of yore -- except those were printed at
the office depot and the "copy count" was always off by around 80% ..

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

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

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

------
teye
Just a couple hundred years too late.

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

Sort of solves the entire problem, eh?

------
sleepingbot
To "print". Mm...

