Q&A with theblogpaper.co.uk: Putting 'the majority in charge' of publishing

Earlier this month Joshua Karp, founder of The Printed Blog, shuttered the 'handpicked newspaper' venture citing a lack of investment.

Karp had hoped the Printed Blog could apply some online media principles to a printed news product, including aggregating blog posts and user-generated content that had been ranked by an online community.

Yet despite its closure, Anton Waldburg and his team have not been deterred from launching a similar setup for the UK - theblogpaper, which aims to build a 'news community' online. This community will contribute written and multimedia news content, which will then be ranked by other users. More support for an item will push it into a print edition and also onto the front pages of theblogpaper.co.uk.

"Instead of few people controlling the majority of what is being published and therefore read, theblogpaper is aiming at putting the majority in charge," its website explains.

Journalism.co.uk caught up with Waldburg to ask him how the blogpaper, which is currently in beta and hopes to release its first print edition in September, will work.

How are you planning to fund/make money from the blogpaper?
[AW] It's purely based on advertising, comparable to other freesheets in London. We are very aware of the current situation of the advertising market especially in the freesheet segment, but we are hoping that our 'self-regulatory content promotion system' (in other words letting users choose via rating and commenting what to promote to print) will attract advertisers.

We believe that publishing 'the best content' (as voted and discussed by the community) could create a distinctive character for theblogpaper.

Readers get a quick weekly summary (in form of a newspaper) of quality content, or at least content that has been declared 'quality content' by a community rather than a few editors. Advertisers therefore are going to associate the content of their adverts with only the best content of the community, which we hope could make advertising in our sheet interesting.
 
How will you build the community around it?
We believe that the incentive for bloggers, citizen journalists and other 'content creators' to possibly be published in print; get feedback on content from a critical community; and redirect traffic back to their personal blogs, could spark the interest of some out there.

Our strategy is obviously to go online first and identify how the blogging community reacts to the concept.
 
What size team is running the project?  
At the moment we are two founders and we are talking to 3-4 people from the industry to become permanent advisors. We are also in touch with two angels [investors] and discussing possibilities for funding.

Why have a print edition?
The thought behind publishing a printed version of theblogpaper is that we believe that there are vast amounts of quality content online, which seems to be getting far too little attention.

Our goal is to create a simple platform for bloggers, citizen journalists, photographers and critics etc. that enables them to reach out to a new readership and gain recognition 'outside their blogosphere'.

On the other hand we want to publish theblogpaper in print to offer readers a weekly review of the best content that has been posted online, people who simply do not have the time to go through vast amounts of blogs, RSS feeds and Twitter updates.

Are you concerned given the fate of The Printed Blog?
We are not happy about The Printed Blog's failure. We would be in a much better position if The Printed Blog had succeeded.

We had followed The Printed Blog since it started in December 2008, because we were already working on theblogpaper site. We were amazed that it expanded so quickly to many different cities throughout the US. Another thing that was quite intimidating to us was that Karp managed to publish so quickly after the launch of The Printed Blog website.

Our aim is to focus on getting people's attention and involvement before we even start to think about publishing in print.

Should we reach critical mass of user interaction with theblogpaper.co.uk we can then focus on establishing the printed version in London. (If we don't manage to interest enough bloggers etc. to join there is probably no real interest within the blogging community in getting published in print, and for us really no point in proceeding.)

Another main distinction to the printed blog is our self-regulatory system which allows us to focus on getting theblogpaper published rather than spending too much time on editing (since the community is sort of editing the content via rating and commenting).

You can also read Waldburg's Q&A with the Online Journalism Blog and blogger Nikki Girvan's reactions to the project.

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