A start-up in Colorado lets readers pick which articles they want in their magazine and then print it themselves, says a New York Times report.
The company, Printcasting, has a website www.printcasting.com on which anyone can put together a magazine featuring their own blog posts or articles and items from blogs and newspapers that have registered with the site. Advertisers can place ads in the publications. Readers can print a copy of the magazine or view it online or on a mobile device.
Some details: [Link]
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.)
The company is taking advantage of advertisers’ willingness to pay as much as 40 times more for print ads than for online ones — while it removes the costs of paper, ink, printing presses and a pavement-pounding sales force.
Mr. Pacheco, who used to work at AOL and helped start The Washington Post’s Web site, got the idea when The Californian started a Web site about the Bakersfield music scene. Advertisers kept asking when the magazine was coming, he said, because they preferred to appear in print.
“All my assumptions about print were wrong,” Mr. Pacheco said. “Advertisers wanted to be in print, and young people are interested in magazines.”
About 250 magazines have been created since Printcasting was introduced in March. A runner in Bakersfield blogs about high school track teams and then prints his posts to hand out free at meets. A newspaper carrier in Wasco, Calif., collects articles from local bloggers and publishes his own town newsletter, also distributed free.
The site is intended for amateurs, but Printcasting is attracting interest from newspaper publishers.
Last month, Printcasting signed its first big newspaper publishing partner, the MediaNews Group, which owns 54 newspapers in 11 states.
