Soccer Dude has embarked on a daunting quest: saving the free world, and along with it, journalism and my ability to continue making mortgage payments. How, you may ask? By participating in the Bakersfield Californian's new business initiative, Printcasting. It's a way for schools, clubs and other organizations (including youth soccer teams) to create their own digital newsletters and make a little money in the process. The business end is explained below, but for me, the nuts and bolts will work like this: I write articles and gather other content, post it to this blog and, via an RSS feed, it's automatically downloaded to my own Printcasting magazine, which I hope to roll out in summer 2009. For now, I am posting soccer-related columns I've written over the years in the Bakersfield Californian, including the one about my team's 2008 county championship, which I continue to brag about ad nauseum.
As for the business model, here's an excerpt from a March 2009 Business Week article that lays it all out.
Your Own Digital Magazine, Anyone?
Newspapers had hoped that their Web sites would help them replace evaporating print revenue. But an online ad typically garners one-tenth of the revenue of a print ad, estimates Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute. "The phrase in the industry is, 'You are trading dollars for dimes,'" he says.
But in the middle of it all, the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. "If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer]," Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. "This is cheap and targeted," Pacheco explains. "Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads."
The entire article is here.
To learn more about Printcasting, go here.
To return to the Soccer Dude main page, click here.
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