Digital/print hybrid the latest in publishing

'Printcasting' idea lets niche groups do their own thing

By Janet Forgrieve, Special to the Rocky

Monday, May 19, 2008

As print publications struggle with sagging readership and local advertisers work to find the best ways to reach their target customers in a digital age, one newspaper thinks it may have hit on a win/win solution.

Last week, a team from The Bakersfield Californian landed an $837,000 Knight News Challenge Grant to develop its "printcasting" concept as a way for niche interest groups to create their own publications using free Web content and paid local advertising. The team includes senior manager of digital products Dan Pacheco, who telecommutes from Broomfield.

The independently owned Californian already produces about 10 digital/print hybrid niche publications for various groups, including stay-at-home moms and young people, Pacheco said. Now, by giving groups the tools to do it themselves, that number can multiply quickly, he said.

"At a local level, whenever we do anything for a niche audience, that's where the growth is," Pacheco said. "We find a group that's not really being spoken to by the mass media, and we take a hyper-niche approach and get new people we weren't reaching before."

The team will create the technology and products for anyone to create magazines, newsletters or other publications, using Web content from blogs, social networking sites and other places people post information. Just as significantly, the products will give local businesses a way to target the audiences most likely to contain potential customers, he said.

"Local businesses are not comfortable with local online advertising when it comes to marketing their services," Pacheco said. "The printcasting idea is about building a bridge between that reality and the fact that, while people are increasingly contributing online content, they really like to see it in print."

With printcasting, advertisers will choose which publications they believe their target customers will read and advertise only in those. Advertising revenue will go to support the program and some also will be shared among content providers, Pacheco said.

The grant, along with $200,000 the Californian is kicking in, will fund the project's two-year development, Pacheco said.

This year's 16 grant winners, which included World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, were chosen from an initial batch of 3,000 applicants, said Gary Kebbel, journalism program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which began awarding the grants last year. The goal of the program is to spur innovation in the delivery of news and information using digital media. Grant winners must agree to make all of their technology open-source.

For Pacheco's team, that means the printcasting model of sharing local advertising, news and information likely will spread to new markets. During the third and final phase, the plan is to introduce printcasting into five markets outside of Bakersfield, he said.

"We'll be looking for markets all over the U.S. and maybe the world, and we'll talk to anyone who is interested," he said. "But not yet because first we have to build this thing."