Blogpaper

US: Is the internet killing newspapers? Joshua Karp doesn’t think so. Karp is the founder of The Printed Blog, an internet company that plans to print blog postings in newspaper form and circulate them free of charge in large American cities.

The first three issues of The Printed Blog were published in San Francisco and Chicago. It currently appears weekly, but Karp hopes to publish it twice a day in future.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” Karp told The New York Times. “There are so many techniques that I have seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”

Many techniques that work online could be tried in the print industry, according to Joshua Karp.

David Cohen of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers says free newspapers are often successful. “The free newspaper business model is still very workable. There’s a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times because they have to capture people’s attention,” Cohen commented.

Still, it won’t be easy for The Printed Blog to reach a large number of local markets. “It just sounds daunting,” says Cohen. “To me, that’s why the internet was invented.”