I’ve been asked to speak at a conference in June and below is the abstract. Let me know what you think. Thanks, Josh.
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009: 5:00am. It’s 4 degrees without the wind chill. Joshua Karp, six unpaid interns, and a camera crew race between three CTA stations, handing out the very first issue of The Printed Blog, a brand new print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and online, user-generated content. In the midst of the meltdown of the newspaper industry, this small, completely bootstrapped team, has successfully launched a new print newspaper. A few days later, Time Out Chicago asks, “Is he crazy?”
Later named one of American’s Most Promising Startups by BusinessWeek, The Printed Blog redefined the print industry and the nature of journalism by actually launching a newspaper based on a completely new business model. Going from idea, to launch, to internationally
recognized newspaper brand in less than three months, The Printed Blog now publishes nearly 7,000 weekly papers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in four different communities in Chicago (Wicker Park, Lakeview, Loop, and Gold Coast Editions). In March, 2009, Editor & Publisher magazine asked its readers to consider: “Is this really the future of newspapers?”
Come join Joshua Karp as he tells the story of The Printed Blog; the ups and downs, the media frenzy, the business model, and the role of social media, and listen as gives his vision for the future of the newspaper industry. You can decide for yourself, “Is he crazy?” or is The Printed Blog what the future looks like… the newspaper for the next 100 years.
 If you’ve seen issue 14, then you’ve seen one of the newest additions to The Printed Blog: Guidespot.com. Guidespot is an up and coming website dedicated to collecting online guides created by awesome folks like yourself! The website combines creativity with user know-how and puts out an amazing batch of new guides daily.
It’s still growing, but it already has a fantastic team of contributors. You really feel like you’re a part of a community. The best part? You, the reader, can contribute to the guides. Guidespot recently added a commenting feature that allows you to leave a note on any part of a guide. That’s already in addition to being able to contribute to Community Guides.
In their own words, “Guidespot is a easy-to-use non-techy way for you to build a visual guide using interactive tools such as images, text, business listings and addresses, videos, links, and maps. Drag and drop the objects in your guide for a layout that fits your style.”
If you haven’t heard of Guidespot or you have, but haven’t created a guide yet, I recommend doing so. The atmostphere is fun and light-hearted so don’t feel pressure about making an extremely professional and dry guide. Have fun! Let your character shine through!
A few authors to check out:
Alex (Check out her guide on getting started with Guidespot.)
Jay
CoffeeSlut
Ethan
Keep up with all the new guides on Twitter @freshguides
If you’re on Guidespot and you think we should consider your guide for publication, let us know!
Click on the image to sign up. It’s free 
It’s no secret that communication technologies are bridging geographical and cultural gaps. With a little creativity, they are also proving they have the power to do much more.
In the Phillipines, for example, large-scale demonstrations organized via cell phones and SMS helped force President Joseph Estrada’s resignation, thus bringing about major political change without violence.
At the Northwood School in London, students use video conferencing technology to interact with pupils at primary schools in the U.S. and China. The children are quickly able to develop more intimate levels of cultural appreciation as a result, learning about Thanksgiving from children in Texas, and practicing Tai Chi with children in Hong Kong.
The service Videoletters.net captures video messages from former neighbors and friends throughout the war-torn countries of the Former Yugoslavia, broadcasting them via public access channels so those who lost contact during conflict can reconnect.
While remarkable and inspiring, these innovative examples lack the power and appeal of firsthand, personal experience. We do not live in a world of avatars. Our facial expressions are not emoticons. Existing interfaces for navigating the virtual world continue to evolve, but they are no substitute for real world interaction.
But what if technology could be harnessed to bend the rules? What if there was an innovative communications solution that could blur the line between virtual and real world interaction? What if there was a way to enable large-scale, face-to-face interactions between citizens all over the world…in real-time? It would be like opening a window into another part of the world.
Well, that window exists. And that window is a wall.
The Wall is a groundbreaking new project that aims to tear down geographic and cultural barriers like never before via the construction of monumental “smart” walls in locations around the globe. Designed to serve as audio-visual gateways, citizens of the world will be able to see, hear, and interact with their international ‘neighbors’ in an open forum that promotes empathy, dialogue, and unprecedented human collaboration.
Sound like a lofty goal? The Wall’s inspiring and ambitious mission is founded upon concrete, achievable pillars set forth by Joshua Karp – entrepreneur, optimist, and founder of The Printed Blog. Joshua believes that the greatest opportunities to change the world start with one person, a single idea, and the belief that anything is possible.
In 50 cities around the world, 50 interactive video walls will be constructed in large, open and accessible urban hubs. The walls will be approximately 1000 feet long by 50 feet tall by 15 feet thick. They will be built using high definition monitors, video cameras, speakers, and microphones. They will be constructed to be impervious to weather and vandalism, and designed with respect to each individual city’s unique heritage and urban plan.
How will these walls work? They will interface in tandem with sister walls in other cities according to a rotation of eight-hour intervals, with schedules made public through a predetermined schedule.
A man in Chicago will meet face-to-face and interact in real-time with a woman in New Delhi. A boy in Mosul will play rock, paper, scissors with a girl in Amsterdam. Speeches, lectures, rallies, protests, discussions, concerts, classes, field trips, commerce, games, love affairs, arguments and more will occur across the wall…and across the world.
The Wall will inevitably bear witness to horrors and atrocities as well. Thus, it will ensure we do not turn a blind eye to murder, theft, persecution and injustice. Imagine how much faster violence would end and peace would come if people stopped averting their eyes.
The Wall presents an opportunity to dissolve barriers between cultures and create an environment of global discourse on an unprecedented scale. A strong global community begins with citizens capable of facing realities honestly – and those realities can only be fully understood through real world interaction.
Where the Internet has facilitated virtual world interaction on a global scale, the Wall will encourage real world interaction on the same scale. Something remarkable and inspiring, indeed.
Follow The Wall Project:
Facebook
Twitter
Not quite as fun as baking cookies from scratch. And much less delicious.
Thursday night, a few brave souls from The Printed Blog staff - Josh, Jeff, Jenn, and Todd to be exact - stayed until the wee small hours to cut and paste (literally) all seven editions of The Printed Blog issue 13 together. In addition to exhaustion (everyone had gotten up around 4 a.m. that morning to distribute issue 12 throughout the city), the
crew faced the challenges of creating a work space (they cleared and lined up five tables from one end of the office to the other), reconciling image arrangement with editorial flow (for our latest issue, we’ve chosen to pair content with related images, transforming layout from something akin to a genius-level sudoku to all-out insanity), and carpal tunnel syndrome (imagine working on a computer all day and then enduring the wrist-numbing tedium of cutting out each and every blog post, photo, advertisement, header, syndicated module and icon to fill 22 unique 11×17 inch pages).
Working through phases, the team whittled away at issue 13. Here’s a rough rundown of the steps they took:
1) Clear and line up tables. Apply masking tape to mark space for each of 22 pages.
2. Pray and make an offering of three reams of paper and your Design Intern to the Layout Gods.
3. Print and cut out each blog post, photo, advertisement, header, syndicated module and icon.
4. Place each blog post, photo, advertisement, header, syndicated module and icon in its appropriate masking tape-marked space.
5. Drink Red Bull.
6. Trim each blog post, photo, advertisement, header, syndicated module and icon down and try to arrange them in a logical, methodical manner. Break a sweat. Look at your watch. Realize that even if you finish in the next hour, you’ll only get four hours of sleep. Curse the day you were born.
7. Continue to arrange and rearrange each blog post, photo, advertisement, header, syndicated module and icon, focusing on building a solid, satisfying, coherent read from cover to cover
8. Excuse yourself to use the bathroom, where you crumple up in a ball and cry.
9. At 2:30 a.m. realize that somehow, miraculously, you and your teammates have made an AWESOME issue 13, the BEST issue of The Printed Blog yet. Congratulate each other.
10. Clean up, go home to sleep for three hours and return the next morning to edit.
Many thanks to the team who put together issue 13! Your hard work has made a truly amazing product!
(This is why you never see the TPB Team out and about at all of those fantastic meetups and tweetups on Thursday nights!)
More photos can be seen here.
GiveForward is throwing an AWWEESOOMMME charity trivia event is this Thursday, April 30 at Mad River benefiting Climate Cycle (a really cool green non-profit in Chicago)
Besides being for a really great charity and keeping polar bears from going extinct, there’s a $500 cash prize for the winning team and sweet door prizes (like wine tasting for 6 and a party at Kiehls for 10)
 If you’re interested in helping an awesome charity or just rock at trivia games, register here. Tickets are $25
Use the coupon code “TPB” to get 50% off.
(and drink specials: all you can eat/drink for $15)
Also, the trivia questions are not environmentally themed. (They’re regular old pop-culture, history, music sports, etc)
The event will be a lot of fun! The TPB team wishes we could be there - we’re trivia gangsters - but we’ll be putting together issue 15 that night. So go win some prizes and have a bit of fun for us!
(It’s team trivia. so it’s best if you come with a few others but it’s not necessary. Singles and duos will be paired up on larger teams.)
Oh…and don’t forget the green costume contest. Prizes will be awarded to the individual and the team with the best “green” themed outfit (Green can mean anything. So be creative!)
NEW - Wednesday (8-9 AM)
Erie & Rush
Wacker & State
Aon Center
Thursday (6-9 AM)
Belmont Red Line
Damen Blue Line
*We won’t be distributing at Southport this week*
NEW - Thursday (8-9 AM)
City Hall
Daley Plaza
Two North Riverside
NEW - Thursday (4:30-6 PM)
Union Station
Ogilvie
The Printed Blog has gotten some incredible press coverage since launching in January of this year. (As I write this post a reporter from Japan is interviewing our founder Josh here in the office).
The big question everyone from the media to people on the street are asking though is this one: “How do you make money?” The short answer: Advertising. The long answer? Much more interesting.
The Printed Blog is unlike any other paper currently being produced. We are techinically a newspaper yet look and read like a high-end luxury magazine. Our content is created by big media bloggers and unknown individual bloggers that happen to write interesting, engaging blogs that deserve to be heard. Our advertising is going to be the same.
The term I am using to describe what we offer to our advertisers is “Socially Engaged Advertising”. Socially Engaged Advertising (or SEA) is possible because of the nature of TPB: We come out once per week and are therefore timely like a newspaper- but we are much more hyper local than any MSM (mainstream media) publication can be. Our twitter stream aready has 2600+ followers and grows daily. Our staff blog is starting to attract followers as well.
Because of what we are and what we are doing, not only can we present an advertisement to our reading public (currently over 80,000 people/month in Chicago alone) we can engage readers of TPB with our adveritsers. Let me explain this better through examples:
A condo owner trying to sell his unit contacted me recently to find out the price of running an ad to sell his place. (TPB ad prices are affordable enough for ANYONE to advertise… our ad rates are seriously effective too!) As he and I talked, I told him why not have an open house as well? And not a traditional open house– a socially engaged open house. Thanks to tools like twitter (and our upcoming social network) we can reach out to our readers in a way the Chicago Tribune or New York Times can only dream about.
We can tweet everyone on a Friday with a message: “The Printed Blog tweet-up tonight at Tom’s condo: 123 Main Street. 8 p.m.”
In the above example, not only will we run his ad but we’ll have a meet-up at his place. We’ll meet some fans of TPB, and Tom can show off his condo. Even if no one at the tweet-up is looking to buy, they may know someone that is and tell their friends a few days later about the sweet place they were at that also happens to be for sale. And Tom might make new friends. SEA at work!
We are currently printing in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We are also going to be having all sorts of meet-ups, tweet-ups and every other kind of networking you can imagine. This allows us to meet our readers, find new bloggers, and let our crowd know about the companies that find TPB to be as exciting as our readers think it is. Bloggers (and those that read them) tend to be more intelligent and socially engaged than the typical Joe or Jane Q. Public on the street and they support the brands that support their passions. (I once bought Degree brand deodorant because they support a show I love on the Sci-Fi channel called Eureka).
We can do for major media brands what we can do for local advertisers in each city we publish in. Say a wine bar in San Francisco (I love wine bars in San Francisco) wants to purchase advertising in TPB S.F. edition. A wine bar sounds like a great place for a tweet-up to me. Because we care about our readers AND our advertisers, we can always schedule a tweet-up at the wine bar on their slowest night of business– so in return for a small ad buy they are suddenly discovered by wine drinking readers of the TPB and increase revenue as a result.
The major media brands? The same. You can bet we are going to let our loyal readers know what we think of who we partner with. TPB is not in the business of just taking money from any major advertiser that wants in. We are being inundated with calls and are being a little choosy about who we do business with. We want our readers to know that our big guns (in terms of advertising) are companies we personally would do business with. And since we really like them, when we engage with our readers we will happily let them know why we support the brands we do and why they support us. Call it a mutual admiration society between our brand, their brand, and our audience. SEA is going to evolve in new and exciting ways- and The Printed Blog is going to lead the way.
Not only are we going to be the newspaper for the next 100 years, we are going to be THE place for advertisers for the next 100 years as well.
Greetings! Josh here, founder and publisher of The Printed Blog. Back in December, TPB was a mere idea. Just a few months later, we’ve set goals and made huge strides toward making TPB the newspaper for the next 100 years.
January 27 was a big day for us: we published our inaugural issue, distributing 3,000 copies in Chicago and San Francisco. Since then, with the help of a dedicated staff across the country, The Printed Blog has expanded to 6,000 copies in four cities (Chicago, New York, L.A. and San Francisco).
We have doubled our circulation in less than three months, earning the attention of noted publications around the world, including The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Le Monde, National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune.
In those whirlwind three months, we also expanded our Chicago circulation into four neighborhood-specific editions (covering Wicker Park, Lakeview, the Loop, and local universities), partnered with Yelp and Eventful to offer syndicated content specific to each city, set up a hyper-local, affordable ad model, and offered our most frequently published bloggers the opportunity to maximize blog recognition by including a logo alongside their content.
But we’re not stopping there. We recently set the goal to distribute 100,000 copies of The Printed Blog in Chicago alone by year-end! We’ll accomplish this lofty goal with your help – through your photo and blog submissions and continued readership.
I would like to thank you again for your support. You have helped turn The Printed Blog from an idea into a reality.
People at The Printed Blog make up a pretty intelligent bunch. There is all kinds of brain power running around this place…. therefore multiple people= multiple brains. BRAINS. Every time I hear the word “brain” or “brains” I think of zombies and their never ending quest to dine on our grey matter whilst their leader, drenched in blood and holding aloft someone poor stiff’s spinal column slowly groans out a hearty cry of “BRAAAIIINNNSSS”.
To make matters worse, last week I read Cormac McCarthy’s award winning book, “The Road”. For those that don’t know McCarthy, he also wrote “No Country For Old Men”- like that book, “The Road” is being made into a movie soon as well– and after reading the book last week I don’t find the idea of eating people so funny anymore. “The Road” is a dark, disturbing book. People are eaten. It also isn’t the point of this blog post. So I am moving on lest you all get really, really scared of the “The Printed Blog” and think we are all cannibals.
Speaking of cannibals- today is distribution day for the newest issue of TPB. What does distribution have to do with cannibals? We all were up around 3:30 a.m. today and everyone knows that 3 a.m. is The Zombie Hour. And Zombies eat people. AND Cannibals eat people. AND we were all up during Zombie hour…so eating people was on our brains this morning. (ZOMG- “brains”) We were up that early because we wanted to be in place by 6 a.m. to catch all the fine citizens of Chicago at their El platforms and train stations so they could get their hot little hands on the newest issue of The Printed Blog.
Being up during The Zombie Hour makes one loopy. By 11 a.m. we had all been up a longish time, and once we were back in the office our Assistant Publisher Michelle Doellman started a conversation. About Cannibalism. (side note= on twitter look up #thursdaytrends @doellmi–that’s her…our own little she-cannibal)
 She posed this question (or something close to it, but the thought is the same): “If you eat a piece of yourself, does that make you a Cannibal?” On its face, the question seems ridiculous. Who eats pieces of themselves? Luke and Jenn vigorously started debating what exactly constitutes “eating oneself” and I know many of you are taking a dark turn with that phrase, as did Michelle. (again, see twitter #thursdaytrends @doellmi) I realized that I occassionally chew my fingernails when I am thinking. (okay, not occassionally. Always.)
And then I thought, chewing my nails isn’t “eating myself”. But then I also thought, “Wait– would I chew someone else’s fingernails?” and of course I answered by thinking “it depends on whose nails we are discussing- never say never.” But I am PRETTY sure I wouldn’t chew someone else’s fingernails because the “eww” factor is pretty big on that one. Think about it.
Finally, consider this: After the Apocalypse and during the Zompocalypse (Any Apocalypse automatically gives rise to a Zompocalypse, natch) what would happen to our beloved icons of corporate America? Would the Hamburgler really start stealing food to survive? Would KFC substitute the word “children” for “chicken” if there was no more food? Would Ronald McDonald……EAT PEOPLE???
The Printed Blog. We think about stuff.
-Edward “Not a Cannibal” Domain
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