Jan 13, 2009

Blog on paper

From The Media Blog:
Yesterday Wired.com's Chris Snyder reported on a new venture that aims to create an off-line newspaper made up entirely of repurposed blog posts. Called The Printed Blog (slogan: "The Best of the Web on your Newsstand!"), the company aims to create, per Mr. Snyder, "a twice-daily free print newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts."
Publishing blogs on paper strikes me as being a bit like selling tickets to a 7-year-old's play. Blogs are, for the most part, transitory in nature, designed to momentarily focus the attention of an increasingly distracted public. They are baby steps into a new frontier; markers at the head of an unfinished path; always forming but never fully formed. Once they are extracted and placed in a more permanent medium, doesn't the very thing that makes them a blog disappear?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm all for letting them experiment and see what comes up...good luck!

Gary Scott said...

I'm not advocating that they stop publishing the blogs, I'm just wondering if they're still blogs after they're published?

Anonymous said...

Gary,

There is a lot more than transitory content to what makes a blog appealing.

Inside information, interactivity (which will be lost in print form - at least immediate interactivity), interest in a particular subject, etc.

Gary Scott said...

I'm not saying good blogs don't exhibit a range of qualities. But which qualities are distinct to blogs? And can these distinct qualities translate to print?

Anonymous said...

Seems like a very backwards plan to me. What's the idea, to capitalizing on the dying print advertising market?

Anonymous said...

It's all Frank Pine's fault.