I fully understand the appeal of reading blogs on the morning commute: it often beats what’s printed in newspapers. What I can’t quite get my head around is The Printed Blog recently started by Joshua Karp.
In a world of iPhones, BlackBerrys, Kindles and 3G-enabled notebook PCs, why would I want to pick up and pay to read only moderately recent blog entries over which I have no control and no immediate way of communicating back with them or seeing the ongoing conversation?
“I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers, but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form,” Karp said.
I don’t think the newspaper apocalypse is coming soon, if at all, even though print publishers need to change and adapt to the online landscape. However, I really don’t think there’s the market for creating a daily paper for something that lives online, particularly as blogging now relies more than ever on social media and social networks and that, by nature, can only be handled on the web.
Even if the model were to work for a couple of years, the notion that advertisers pay more for print than online is also fading fast.
In his favor, Karp kept things local. Maybe there’s a place for this, even if it’s an additional section in an existing local paper? I’m still skeptical, though.