Would you pay for a “blog newspaper”?

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I fully understand the appeal of reading blogs on the morning commute: it often beats what’s printed in newspapers. What I can’t quite get my head around is The Printed Blog recently started by Joshua Karp.

In a world of iPhones, BlackBerrys, Kindles and 3G-enabled notebook PCs, why would I want to pick up and pay to read only moderately recent blog entries over which I have no control and no immediate way of communicating back with them or seeing the ongoing conversation?

“I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers, but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form,” Karp said. [Read more…]

Dvorak says ‘Newspaper publishers are idiots’

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if you’ve been listening in on the last week’s episode of TWiT, John C. Dvorak gave a compelling commentary on exclusivity of news with today’s media.

Dvorak’s column for PC Magazine last Friday was based on the notion that the New York Times is considering a pay to read subscription model for the news. He adds that most of the news we read is syndicated anyway — there really isn’t a lot of relevant news items happening within your thirty mile zone that’s actually published. Almost everything is syndicated!

The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?

Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story. Then came the revelation. “Hey, these newspapers are all doing the exact same thing! Why do we need so many of them?” [Dvorak]

The future of print isn’t with newspapers. It’s probably with books. Oh and yeah, maybe with the small community papers that prints exclusive news relevant to your little town.