New project, the blogpaper, re-directs crusade to "put the majority" in charge of publishing to London.

Posted by Christie Silk on July 20, 2009 at 11:18 AM

The fast-moving world of news media demands innovation, and there is little guarantee of success. Yet, as the foundering of the Printed Blog experiment in the US has shown, efforts at something new, whatever their success, emerge to inspire and inform. Thus, a new project, the Blogpaper is being developed in the UK based on a similar concept to the Printed Blog whereby content generated online is collated into a printed newsheet.

The project is in its beta stages. In theory, the blogpaper will be the collected effort of an online "news community", which will create written and multimedia content, to be ranked by fellow members of the community. If a piece of content receives sufficient support, it will be printed and moved onto the front pages of the site. The project aims to widen participation in publishing decisions, so that rather than a select group exerting control over what content is published and consequently read, the "blogpaper is aiming at putting the majority in charge".

In an interview with journalism.co.uk Anton Waldburg, explains how his team will learn from the trial and error of the late American experiment in terms of funding, content generation and sustainability.

The creation of an online community from scratch is hardly an easy task for a start-up project to set out as a primary goal. However, Waldburg believes that bloggers and online news seekers are likely to be motivated by a number of incentives offered by participation: there are good chances that one's work will be published in print, the ranking system encourages critical evaluation and the online connection means that traffic will be redirected to personal blogs. The pursuit of this community is strategic in the avoidance of the enthusiastic risk-taking that may have been the downfall of the Printed Blog: efforts to create the community will be made primarily online to ensure that there is sufficient interest before any moves to print are made. Only once the online project has " reached critical of user interaction with theblogpaper.co.uk " will the team consider printed publication in London.

The project will be funded solely by advertising, like other London free sheets. The founders, however, are not naive as to the uncertainties of advertising as a sustainable revenue stream in the news world. They hope that the novelty of the project's "self-regulatory content promotion system" will attract advertisers. As the content has been deemed "quality" by the citizen community, moreover, advertisers can be sure that the advertisements are associated with the best content, as judged by community and therefore perspective consumers. This characteristic, additionally, implicates the users in the editing process, which allows the team to concentrate their efforts on publication.

The vision of the Blogpaper is exciting for a broad band of creative persons: it will give bloggers, citizen journalists, photographers and critics the opportunity to reach a different and wider readership "outside their blogosphere". Publication on the basis of peer approval, moreover, suggests that the published content will be of quality, fulfilling a responsibility to those within the print readership unwilling to sift independently through the abundant amounts of online content. The concept generated much interest across the Atlantic and there are many reasons which suggest that this could be recreated in the UK. The American project fell, moreover, to a flawed business model rather than to a redundant concept, and it appears that the blueprints of the Blogpaper project have taken heed of such errors.

Source: Journalism.co.uk