Blogs serve as fodder for free printed dailies

Despite the headline-grabbing bankruptcies of an increasing number of sizeable newspaper empires, this start-up guru thinks he can use bloggers for the content in a new string of free printed dailies. I guess he's offering bloggers a percent of ad revenue if their article appears in a particular edition. He appears to be primarily interested in local news and images though, so unless you're visiting San Francisco or Chicago, you'd better not start counting your coins yet.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

The first issues of this Internet-era penny-saver will appear in Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes eventually to publish free neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many cities around the country.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”

As pay newspapers lose readers to the Internet, where they can read the same articles without charge, many free papers have held their own.

“The free newspaper business model is still very workable,” said David Cohen, a founder of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, a group of free weeklies south of San Francisco that was sold to Knight Ridder in 2005 and is now owned by MediaNews. “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.”