The Printed Blog

Friends,

It is with great sadness that I must report that, due to a lack of outside investment capital, The Printed Blog is ceasing publication.

Despite a significant personal investment on my part, and the additional support of six or seven credit cards, we were unable to raise the minimum amount of money required to reach the next stage of our development. This was a difficult decision for us, but the financial reality of the situation demanded that we suspend further publication immediately, and indefinitely.

Last year, I had an idea. I wondered what would happen if some of the business model principles that work online were applied to the troubled newspaper industry. The more I thought about it, the more the curiosity got to me. So I registered a domain name, developed an action plan, and started the process of building a new kind of newsprint publication.

Everyone said I was nuts, but I did it anyway.

16 issues, 80,000 print copies distributed, another 100,000 or so copies downloaded, and countless new friends, fans, and collaborators all around the world later, I may still be nuts, but I have zero regrets.

Creating a new breed of newsprint publication from scratch was an amazing experience, and it was humbling to have been so prominently included in the global discussion on the future of journalism and the print media.

I’m disappointed, to be sure, but also looking forward to the future. I believe the next few years will be among the most exciting times in the history of journalism. The industry’s landscape is on the verge of major change, and when redefined, it will look a lot different than it does today. It will also function considerably better.

The wheels are already in motion – from aspiring startup companies like ours to specially designated departments operating within the largest media corporations… the future of news is taking shape as we speak. These are definitely exciting times.

I won’t revisit our countless accomplishments here. Suffice it to say we achieved more than anyone thought we would – for two very good reasons. First, for how “crazy” it was, the concept of The Printed Blog proved to have exceptional merit. It won’t surprise me at all to find some of our ideas strategically implemented elsewhere in the months ahead, as I suspect our relatively short run will have some long-term effect on the evolution of newsprint.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we got as far as we did because of the dedication and support of the community we created. Part one of the two-part blog post below thanks the many individuals who made our launch and early successes possible. We enjoyed tremendous participation from countless contributors and collaborators from day one, and for their support I will be forever grateful. Part two of the attached blog post offers some words of wisdom based on the lessons we learned along the way.

I’ve been contacted a dozen times over the past 6 months concerning granting a license for or entering into another type of partnership with The Printed Blog. At this point, I’ll do my best to help anyone who can make use of the work we did… just drop me a line.

As for what’s next for me, I’m not exactly sure. I could help transform a traditional media company, such as Tribune Corp., Playboy or The New York Times. If an investment banker would like to buy the Sun-Times Media Group and hand me the keys, I have a plan to turn them around into a new media powerhouse. I’m interested in things that Google is doing, and Microsoft… maybe a venture capitalist needs someone to help a troubled startup meet some complex objective.

If you would like to stay in touch, please add me as a friend on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Thank you very much!

Kindly,
Josh
Founder and Publisher
The Printed Blog

There are a lot of people to thank.

First, I thank my wife Elaine, for giving me the opportunity to pursue a dream, and supporting me when I had to work 20 hours a day for months and months.

Second, the team – bar none, the most talented and committed group of individuals I have ever had the privilege to work with. Special thanks to Jennifer Beese, one of the top social network managers in Chicago turned operations manager at The Printed Blog – we could not have accomplished as much as we did without her tremendous hard work and dedication, even when things got tough.

Thank you to Koray Girton, a gifted designer and great friend who left his family and flew to Chicago on one-day notice in the middle of January after a single conversation… simply because I asked him to.

Thanks to Terry Mertens, Michelle Doellman, Ion Olaru, Amanda Nyren, Todd Alexander, Erin Holness, Luke Trayser, Katie Huntley, Katie Killary, and Emily Schleier, all of whom were outstanding contributors who remained engaged through the very end.

Thanks to Steve Bunes, Whitney Faile, Drew Doleski, Lauren Omura, Mandy Murphy, Chad Koskie, Jamie Villarreal, Kelli Hartsock, Vladimira Yanevska, Brian Berg, Catherine Foulkrod, and Lindsay Baron, whose early efforts helped get The Printed Blog off the ground.

The Printed Blog had a number of editors I would like to thank: Jeff Pelline, our managing editor, Laurel Dailey, our photography editor (and to Brandon Oeling, who helped us with photography at the end), Mark Cope, Claire Bidwell Smith, Carley Marks, Matthew Nickerson, and many others helped who us comb the blogosphere for the web’s best content.

Thank you to Edward Domain who proved that we could indeed sell ads successfully
for The Printed Blog.

Thank you to John Swift of John S. Swift and Co. – hands down the best printing company in the US. If you need something printed perfectly, and competitively priced, count on John Swift. He was a fantastic partner.

Besides the team and our few investors, we couldn’t have published issue one without the bloggers, photographers, and many other talented content providers. Thank you one and all…

To Neal Boulton of BastardLife, Jenny Lawson of TheBloggess, Adam Hircsh of Mashable, Mark Cuban of, well, Mark Cuban…the four of you were early contributors who set the stage for the 2,000 plus other bloggers and the 1,000 plus photographers who made the paper what it was. You have my heartfelt thanks and my apologies that we couldn’t make a go of this.

Thank you Yelp, Eventful, We Are Hunted and Guidespot for allowing The Printed Blog to syndicate your contact BACK into print.

Thank you David Segre of Wilson Sonsini for taking us on as a client.

Thank you to Fred Hoch at the Illinois Technology Association for giving us space and helping us through the most formative stage of the company’s growth.

While not a single venture capitalist would fund us, most of those with whom we met gave our business serious consideration… I will name names (the people I actually pitched, either in person or over the phone), as too often venture capital firms get bad press from an entrepreneur whom they did not fund.

Thank you Al Wasserberger for setting up the first meetings.

Thank you Stewart Alsop, Fred Gibbons, Jeremy Liew, Andy Sheehan, Mark Jacobsen,
Kevin Efrusy, and Daniel Ciporin. We also got a one-line response from Mike Moritz and what I think was a personal note from Ann Winblad, but I’m not sure. These nine venture capitalists, and Dave Segre at WS, are really decent people. They asked good questions, were thoughtful, and told me why they did not want to invest. I think they all should have, but some of these guys passed on Google, too. The only bad experience I had was with a VC firm in Chicago, and I’m not going to name them here… you can look up my review at www.thefunded.com.

I’d like to thank all of the people who handed out the paper in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, some of whom I still owe money… it wasn’t easy, in Chicago for certain, to hand out all of the papers in sub-zero temperatures…but you did it.

Thank you to Chris Snyder, formally a writer for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog, for noticing my Craigslist ad and writing a post. It was this single post that got the attention of the New York Times.

Thank you to the hundreds of print media representatives, tens of thousands of bloggers, and hundreds of thousands of commenters who took time and space to write about The Printed Blog, good or bad.

Thank you to the TV stations, in the US and abroad, that filmed us and put us on TV (and who did a bunch of live spots, too); thank you to National Public Radio, American Public Radio, Radio Classic in Paris, and the two dozen other radio stations we appeared on. And thank you to the thousands and thousands of people following us on multiple Twitter accounts and our Facebook page.

Thank you to all of you who did advertise with us. I hope the experience was worth it.

And finally, thank you to our readers all over the world. Since handing out our first issue on that frigid morning in late January, we distributed nearly 80,000 physical copies of our publication and watched people download it tens of thousands more times. Thank you for taking a portion of your day and devoting it to our paper. Thank you for your kind words and e-mails, in every language you can imagine.

I’m what you would call a serial entrepreneur, I suppose.

For me, that means I’ll work to save up some money, then I’ll spend it all trying to get a startup off the ground. Alternately, I might be what you’d call a man with a gambling problem. But let’s not split hairs.

Prior to The Printed Blog, I started two companies. One I raised money for (via angels, < $1,000,000) and it failed. The other I didn’t raise money for and it succeeded (built a product, got customers, and sold the company to our number one competitor).

The one that succeeded was not a financial windfall, but it was nice to have an idea, start a company, build a product, earn revenue, get a team, and then sell the company to our top competitor, all without a penny of outside funding.

Here are some things I learned from my experience at The Printed Blog:

1) If you have a compelling vision for the future (not necessarily for a business), you can get incredibly talented people to work for free. Post an ad on Craigslist. It’s far easier to sell a vision of the future, than the reality of the present.

2) If you have a good idea, don’t let yourself get pulled away from it: Stay focused! This was probably the biggest single lesson that I learned too late, and if I had realized it, we may not be shutting down.

I recall the day I conceived The Printed Blog. It was last year, and I was working on two other startups, both of which required online advertising to be successful. I remember thinking that it was going to be a really long, hard road to build tools for online advertisers, and then to sell the ads. I wanted to do something that I thought would generate revenue quickly.

It occurred to me that I could: 1) get blogs for free, 2) get photographs for free, 3) layout a paper in PowerPoint or Word (I’m not a designer, but I get the gist of it), 4) go into a neighborhood myself, go door to door, and sell ads for cash, 5) Xerox the whole thing at Kinkos, and 6) hand it out myself at a train station.

The fact is, if I had done that, I very well might have been able to sell enough ads to make that one issue profitable (I’m 100% certain I could have). Then, I could have added another neighborhood, and another, and so on.

Why didn’t I do that?

Well, I got distracted by all of the press we received. Once we were in The New York Times, and I was getting interview requests from radio and TV and newspapers all over the world, I started to think that I could build the newspaper for the next 100
years.

Instead of focusing on one thing – revenue – on a small enough scale to prove our model, I decided to try and publish the paper in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles… I got carried away, and we spread ourselves too thin too fast.

So stay FOCUSED! Prove your model incrementally… and if you happen upon something that gets people excited, be very careful.

3) Don’t write a long business plan. Write a good summary, have a good presentation, and have a good revenue / business model. Know what you’re going to do (yourself), but don’t sweat over a great business plan. I suppose this might only be true for really early stage startups, which is what I’m familiar with. Anyone can meet with a good venture capital firm. If you’re right for them, they’ll accept your e-mail. If you’re wrong for them, you don’t want the meeting anyway. Everyone has a phone number… call and ask for them.

4) If you think you can get revenue, do it. I told everyone we should focus on having a great product, i.e. really beautiful issues of The Printed Blog, and everything else would fall in line. This was not the case. While we did get a lot of press, and a lot of people interested in our publication, at the end of the day attention is only icing on the cake.

The cake is revenue… and if I had focused on an okay-looking, black and white Xerox’ed version of The Printed Blog and made sure it was filled with advertisers, chances are I’d be in much a better place today, and probably funded.

5) If you’re looking for money from a venture capitalist, make sure you have a venture capitalist DEAL. I couldn’t convince a single VC that The Printed Blog would make them billions of dollars. I think they understand two things: 1) Virtually none of their investments will return a billion dollars, and 2) If they aren’t as totally certain as they can be, if they haven’t totally convinced themselves that it’s possible, then forget it. They need to “see it.” Your pitch needs to be fiction-less (the fewer people involved in revenue generation, the better), and scalable – you better be able to get large, and fast.

The Printed Blog could be very successful and net $25 million dollars a year. And that would make for a very good business, but is there a liquidity event for it? Is the Tribune Corp. going to buy it? We’d better put the bankruptcy judge on our Board.

Side note: I’m not entirely convinced Sam Zell really exists… I think he’s a Jim Henson puppet designed to exact revenue from a group of bankers who did bad things in their past lives.

6) Finally, the most important thing you have is time. Make sure you spend it on the right things every day. What are the right things? You’ll know soon enough if you’re not spending your time on them.

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