A Colorado start-up called Printcasting sees the future of journalism and it is this: People putting together their own magazines featuring their own blog posts and/or posts from other blogs as well as other newspaper and magazine articles. Gross.
Reports the New York Times:
Printcasting, which is backed by an $837,000 grant from the Knight Foundation's program to find digital models for local news, hopes to attract new readers and advertisers to print publications. Dan Pacheco, the senior manager of digital products at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper, who founded the start-up, says reducing the costs of producing magazines is the way to bring them back. (He has not quit his day job and works remotely from Colorado.)
Would-be publishers choose a name and template for their paper on the Printcasting Web site. Then they can fill it with articles they have uploaded to the site or search topic feeds, like food or travel, to find articles that others bloggers or newspapers have uploaded.
Advertisers also create ads on the site and choose which magazines they appear in, without the help of sales staff. All ads start at $10 an issue (no matter how many copies are printed), but each publisher can choose to charge more than that for their publication. Printcasting keeps 10 percent of any ad revenue and gives 30 percent to the writers and 60 percent to the publishers.
Didn't The Printed Blog, which was supposed to revolutionize publishing, try doing basically the same thing? This seems like just another bad idea destined to fail.
A Path to Magazine Editor and Publisher [New York Times]
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