In the Loop: January 22, 2009 Archive

What's black and white and read all over? Blogs now apparently.

Posted at 12:48 PM on January 22, 2009 by Sanden Totten (2 Comments)

What are the best things about blogs?

1) They can be posted quickly 2) You can leave comments in real time 3) You can click your way to related articles, posts or videos.

Help, my paper is covered in blogs!Photo by Faungg via Creative Commons

Now imagine taking all those things away and what do you get? A new business venture!

The Printed Blog is a Chicago based company that is doing just that - printing blogs. It'll be a free weekly paper that has ambitions to go daily. It'll have different content for different neighborhoods, even letting people vote on which posts to publish. And the whole thing will be supported by the old standby, printed ads.

Before you judge it doomed (like I immediately did) factor in this:

"All growth in the newspaper industry for the last 20 years has been in free papers, and the fastest-growing segment of that for the last five years has been in free dailies."

That's a quote from H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado and past president of Suburban Newspapers of America. On top of that, the Printed Blog has no reporters salaries to pay, they'll set up printers in the homes of distributors to reduce circulation costs and businesses can buy ads right on their site so sales folks aren't necessary either. That's some low overhead.

But for me it all gets back to that first question. What's a blog without the internet? We'll see if that is a question The Printed Blog can answer without ending up the punchline.

Comment on this post

"God Save the...Butter?"

Posted at 7:58 PM on January 22, 2009 by Steve Mullis (1 Comments)

You know I'm all for artists making money on their image, it's part of being a celebrity. But I think this may be the most selling out-iest moment in rock history, considering it's a guy who so vehemently decried such behavior.

John Lydon, he of Sex Pistols fame, selling butter.

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