That happened yesterday when I got an alert about a story on PaidContent.org claiming that The Bakersfield Californian is shutting down its community web sites, including Bakotopia.com and The Bakersfield Voice. This was news to me, and it didn’t jibe with what I’d heard during a trip to Bakersfield a week ago. And after about 15 minutes of internal reporting I learned that it was not only inaccurate, but the exact opposite of the truth.

Just to be crystal clear, those sites and brands are not being killed, but they may be transformed in response to accelerated change.

For background: I got many of those sites off the ground starting in 2004. While I gave up management of them when I started working on Printcasting, I always feel emotionally attached to them and want to see them succeed.

It turns out that the report was based on a misinterpretation of what another Californian VP told the AIM Group. I sent the link to Logan Molen, my current boss who is also a  senior VP and COO at the Californian. Here’s what he posted on his blog last night:

… Both Bakotopia.com and BakersfieldVoice.com remain at the core of a strategy we’re set to launch in the coming weeks and months that will truly – and finally — leverage the collective power of our local network of community sites and social connections.

But he also said that they are evaluating the return on investment of the associated print editions for those brands:

In deep recessions, any smart business would evaluate whether it makes sense to continue funding money-losing products, no matter the reputation. That’s why the print versions of fabled publications like Portfolio, Sporting News, TV Guide, Newsweek and others have either been shuttered or scaled back this past year.

The important thing to note there is that they’re evaluating the print editions, but no decisions have been made about them yet. And even if they were to stop printing weekly or bi-weekly magazines featuring the best content from those sites, the investment in the brands and online communities that define them remains intact.

Also, I’d like to point out that any decisions about those biweekly print editions have no bearing on what we’re doing with Printcasting, which is a “bottom-up” niche publishing engine. We’re focusing more than ever on promoting and integrating Printcasting in the Californian’s sites.

Ironically, just before I saw that PaidContent post, I’d set up a Printcast that features the latest music and movie reviews posted on Bakotopia. It’s called Bakotopia Spotlight and it may soon be promoted on the Bakotopia.com home page. You can see it here:

And earlier yesterday, we added this standing Printcasting widget to the Bakersfield.com home page:

Printcasting widget on Bakersfield.com home page.

We’re working on other local promotions for Printcasting for advertisers that will go out in the next couple weeks.

The larger lesson here is about semantics, and how different people interpret rapid change. To some, big changes are always seen as a move away from one thing and toward another, and to them that means death. In the last year, the chorus of people who talk about newspapers dying has reached shrill proportions. Their argument is overly simplistic: that people are dropping print products and moving to the Web. You can see that mentality expressed here by Paid Content, which confused a statement about two print editions possibly ending with the idea that the Web sites are being “shuttered.”

But there’s another, more accurate and much more positive way to look at this. The way the Californian delivers content from these niche brands is transforming in the heat of rapid external change.

I personally think that the concept of Printcasting makes more sense than ever in this economy. For example, if it turns out that it’s too expensive to print copies of a Bakotopia niche magazine for everyone to read (and that is a big IF), a series of Bakotopia Printcasts can be made available online with little to no ongoing effort. People could subscribe to them and print them at home, and the Bakotopia editors could still print a few hundred copies — versus a few thousand — to make available at local establishments and hand out at local events.

That’s not death, it’s metamorphosis. Let’s stop confusing the two.

Starting now, all ads placed with the Printcasting self-serve advertising tool cost $10, an amount that publishers can mark up per publication. In addition, 60% of every ad dollar is shared with publishers through their Paypal accounts, and 30% of every dollar is set aside to share with participating content providers in the future in proportion to how often their content has been used in Printcasts.

We’ve also made it easier for advertisers to place ads in each magazine by adding a “Place an Ad” button on the microsite pages. Click that, and you’ll see that your publication is automatically selected as a target (see an example here). This allows a business to advertise in publications they like by simply typing in the URL from the PDF printout (possibly in a sample copy that a publisher gives to them), click that button, pay and be done.

All of this is important for several reasons:

• First, we can finally tell publishers and content providers that they can use Printcasting not only to meet the information needs of their communities, but also to help pay the freight for reporting, content creation, printing and distribution. Like our fellow Knight News Challenge project Spot.us, we’re helping answer the question of how to pay for quality journalism.
• It creates a very compelling new way for local businesses to place affordable ads that they know will be seen locally. This is especially helpful for so-called “long tail” advertisers, that majority of businesses in every town that have very little time or money (and these days less money than ever before), but still need to market their services to stay open. These are businesses like nail salons, home contractors, local book stores, ice cream shops and the like.
• For newspapers, like The Bakersfield Californian and partners such as MediaNews Group, it creates a new way to reach those long-tail advertisers. One of the biggest problems newspapers are coping with right now is that most of their revenue comes from very large businesses. When two of them merge, or one ceases operation, it starts a snowball effect that these days leads to things like cost-cutting, layoffs and a corresponding loss of quality. For this reason, everyone who likes getting local news from newspapers has a vested interest in newspapers’ ability to diversify their revenue sources. Expanding their revenue to small businesses is one critical part of that.
• And finally, it completes the feature set we laid out 18 months ago when we entered the Knight News Challenge. From this point onward, everything we do will build upon and improve the core features in response to the feedback and usage patterns of users and partners.

Many thanks to The Commerce Guys and our lead developer Ron Robinson for getting this launched. You guys rock!

Find more info about on the Printcasting blog about how revenue sharing works and, if you’re a publisher or contributor, some important things you need to do to get paid.

I’ll post more soon about our agreement and what it means for the Printcasting.com user, but here’s the bottom line. Now people in Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area can create locally-focused Printcasts in a way that lets local readers and advertisers find them. Media partners like MediaNews simply seed those markets with content and use Printcasting the same way as regular users, but by doing that they also provide content that the community can remix into niche publications as well.

The experience on the Printcasting.com site doesn’t change much on its face, as all of the real changes are on the back-end. When you go to Printcasting.com, you’ll now see a search box to “Find Printcasting Near You.” Enter a zip code and it will tell you if there’s a site in your town. If there is, you’ll be taken straight to a site that aggregates Printcasts from your area. If not, you’re told to create a Printcast and tag it to your zip code. If we start to see a large number of Printcasts in that area, we’ll create a site like this one for Denver: http://printcasting.com/denver.

But we’re not opening city sites for the entire U.S. just yet. Because Printcasting is such a new concept, we need people to help seed their markets with content (from blogs and professional sources) and publications that use that content. And we also need people who are willing to do the local foot work, and meet with bloggers and community organizations to show them how Printcasting can help them communicate with their audience.

The most natural partners for local promotion are newspapers because they have local content, local people, and an interest in growing local audience and revenue. Printcasting offers a way for them to do that at lower cost while also leveraging content from bloggers in their communities. Local bloggers will also benefit through ad revenue share, assuming a newspaper chooses to use their content in one of their Printcasts, and that Printcast makes money. In this way, Printcasting provides a way for newspapers — long leaders in local community development — to work in partnership with local entreprenurial-minded content providers rather than in competition with them.

This is where MediaNews Group comes in. I met Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group’s Vice President for Targeted Products, a year ago at his Individuated Newspaper Conference (thanks to former Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple for the introduction!) Peter has been working on his separate I-News initiative, which will soon let readers of certain MediaNews Group papers create personalized editions that contain only the content they’re interested in. The approach is different from Printcasting, but the end-result is the same. It creates more opportunity for targeted advertising.

I think Peter is more committed to this idea than anyone working in media today, and he proves it by assembling an open-invitation conference every year about personalized news. Peter is the one who came to me with the idea of using Printcasting as an internal niche-magazine engine. While that wasn’t what we created Printcasting for, it made sense. Add to that his and MediaNews’ openness to letting citizens in their markets create publications — even with content that starts within MediaNews — and we knew that we’d found our first partner.

But there are others out there who are equally interested. From the very beginning of this project we’ve received interest from organizations around the world — often newspapers, but also organizations such as universities and membership groups. It started as soon as we posted a prototype in the Fall of 2008, and it caught us by surprise. We’re responding to demand rather than going around asking people to participate, and that’s a good sign.

Between now and December we will continue to talk to interested parties and roll out more sites in more cities. If you think your organization may be a good match, please let us know! And regardless of that, please feel free to start using Printcasting wherever you are. If you enter your zip code (or international postal code) when you create content, that will be a sign to us to open a Printcasting city site near you.

I’ve been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started “citizen media” brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe. But it wasn’t until a wave of tornadoes went through my hometown of Denver this week that I realized just how far the revolution has come.

A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.

Just look at the experience of Lauren, my 6-year-old daughter, with her $68 Fisher-Price digital camera. On Tuesday, it vaulted us both into the local media spotlight within minutes after she captured footage of a funnel cloud forming over our house.

I uploaded everything to Flickr and Vimeo and posted links in Twitter. Minutes later, @CBS4Denver, the local CBS News affiliate, was broadcasting the footage on the air and interviewing me live over the phone.

That night, CBS came to our house to do a segment about my daughter and how she shot the photo on her Fisher-Price camera. Here’s that segment, followed by my video footage.

What’s most interesting to me is how naturally all of this happened, and how quickly a couple of tweets were picked up and broadcast all over the state. And it wasn’t just by CBS — The Denver Post, Daily Camera and Colorado Daily also pointed to it from their websites.

h2. How It All Happened

Rewind to last Sunday, when five tornadoes went through the Denver area, with one overturning a car and injuring a man taking pictures. Since then, everyone here has been on edge whenever strange clouds form. That day, I bookmarked a local Twitter search for the term Tornado and began monitoring it whenever I heard reports of strange weather.

When my daughter came into my home office on Tuesday saying there was a scary looking cloud outside, I checked the NOAA radar for Denver and didn’t see anything. I checked Twitter search and saw nothing as well. So we marched upstairs to take a look ourselves.

And that’s when we saw a strange, sideways, shoelace-like cloud that appeared to be growing:

I immediately grabbed my camera and starting taking pictures. It was at this time that I remember hearing Lauren say, “I’m gonna get my camera too!” It was ultimately her photo above that ended up on TV news, also spreading through Twitter via a few retweets that resulted in 400 clicks in just a few hours (according to bit.ly).

Here are the most popular Tweets that started the ball rolling:

I should add that I also addressed some tweets to the attention of @cbs4denver, which made it easier for them to find, as well as @denverpost. I subscribe to both of their feeds and had noticed them asking people to tweet tornado news on Sunday. This was an incredibly smart move by both organizations, as it immediately extended their newsroom to include everyone on the ground. The Denver Post, followed by the Daily Camera and Colorado Daily, ended up embedding my video on their home pages. Vimeo reports that the video has been played 729 times since then, with 400 views on the first day.

h2. How Breaking News Has Changed

This personal experience has really changed my view of breaking news, and opened my eyes to the revolution in news reporting that microblogging and real-time search are making possible. A year ago, I was skeptical of Twitter, thinking it was just another Web 2.0 darling that would quickly lose its luster. Now I’m starting to sense that Twitter, microblogging and real-time search are a new medium in their own right, distinct from being simply part of “the Internet.” They’re a new chapter in the digital media revolution.

This anecdote also shows how quickly breaking news spreads through Twitter, which, as a medium, is scooping not only local news organizations but also the National Weather Service, which did not declare a tornado warning in Broomfield until 30 minutes after we saw a funnel cloud forming.

This was even more obvious when the CBS 4 news crew arrived, fresh from chasing the storm all the way to Greeley, Colo., and still getting no direct tornado footage. Instead, they spent the afternoon visiting people who had already taken and broadcast their own footage online. There was once a time when a news station provided the main lens on a locality and thus the eye of common experience. Now, the news station’s role is shifting to be more of a spotlight on “everycam.” As Clay Shirky said in his book by the same name, here comes everybody!

“The first mantra of the newspaper business, according to API, seems to be, ‘By god, the users will pay, because we say what we have to offer is valuable.’ The second seems to be, ‘If anybody messes with our stuff, we’ll force them to pay.’ And the third might be: ‘Businesses that are paying us should pay us more.’ ”

Here’s my take after five years of innovation from the ground floor at what is considered a very good, forward-looking newspaper. Their suggestions are depressing because they’re too little too late to save what once was. The last chance to start any of this was five years ago at best, which is not surprising since even the best newspapers have been operating under 10 to 30-year-old assumptions.

But I haven’t completely given up. Putting my optimist’s hat on for a second, I do think there is lots of opportunity for local journalism and media. It has nothing to do with technology, and all about branding, distribution and marketing.

In my opinion, the worst assumption of all has been that people prefer one big brand to meet all their information needs. This takes the root of current newspaper problems beyond a simple “print vs. online” issue, and straight to the core value of the product (or for those who have them, products) you offer.

It’s not that different from the geocentric view of the universe that Galileo correctly identified as false, but the Catholic Church fought until the bitter end. Likewise, newspapers, and many large media companies, still assume that they are at the center of the local universe, when in fact they’re really planets spinning around suns which orbit galaxies. They still have an important role, but until they realize that they’re one part of a larger system they’re operating out of an illusion.

Ask your friends and family where they go first for news, and you’ll learn that it’s usually via a portal like Yahoo, through search, or through a news search aggregator like Google News. And after that, blogs and “microblogs” like Twitter. In most cases, the news on those sites is really links, often deep into sites to read just one story. After they read a story on one site, they hit the Home button on their browser to go back to the portal, search engine or blog of their choice.

This to me indicates that people prefer choice to a “walled garden,” which is also why I think the thick client-based AOL and MSN services ultimately failed and were repositioned or shut down. Thus, whether your medium is in print or Web or mobile or magazine stands (and these days it needs to be in all of those and more), you need to have your brands out there where your audience is.

In this context, keeping everything walled inside your single daily newspaper, or even your newspaper Web site, is futile. The only winning content strategy with a future is niche publishing, and if you’re lucky a network of niche audiences that you can advertise to across all media. To continue the scientific analogy, you need to make your content readily available and desirable on every planet in your solar system.

This of course means that the big daily newspaper brand as we think of it today is gone in most peoples’ minds. In its place is a very large, but increasingly focused, niche product. That’s what newspapers, news organizations and companies that own them need to be thinking most about. Everything else is ancillary.

As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we’re seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from the community — which is not bad for the first month, and before we’ve done any serious marketing.

I’ll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog).

The new feature we’re most proud of is a new tool that lets you create your own masthead using a photo from your hard drive.

Our development team is going down a punch list of 34 near-term projects like this. And in parallel, we’re starting on the next big round of features that will launch in early summer. Those are:

1) Ad payment and controls
We’re now working with The Commerce Guys in Jackson, Michigan to build out a straightforward, secure way for businesses to pay for ads (currently free during a trial period). Publishers will also be able to reject individual ads — or all future ads from a particular business — before those ads can appear in their Printcasts. All of this should be available in a testable mode in May, and ready to launch in June.

By the way, for you Drupal fans out there, we’re really excited to have Ryan Szrama, the lead developer on the open-source Ubercart module in Drupal who recently joined the Commerce Guys team, working on the ad payment project.

2) Revenue Share
The Commerce Guys are also helping us build out a very sophisticated, but user-friendly, system that shares advertising revenue. We will be providing more information about how this will work in the future, but here’s the gist.

Whenever a business places a self-serve ad in a Printcast, 60% of that money will immediately be passed on to the publisher via a Paypal account deposit. 30% will be set aside in an escrow account which is shared with contributors on Printcasting.com, and that escrow will be split among them every quarter in proportion to how much their content has been used. The final 10% will be maintained by the Printcasting network to cover ongoing hosting, development, maintenance and transactions fees.

Sharing revenue at all is fairly radical for anyone, including a newspaper. But we’ll also be giving much more direct revenue to the citizen publishers on our network than most revenue-sharing services do, and for a simple reason. We feel that publishers bear the highest burden for the success of everyone on the network, and the network itself. They’ll be footing most of the bill for printing, distribution and marketing of their publications to their own communities of interest, and contributors will only benefit when they do. If they incur the highest costs, we feel they should get the highest reward.

Note that the percentages above reflect only our current thinking, and they could change. One reason we can keep our portion so low is because our expenses are covered by the Knight Foundation through the end of May 2010. After that date we hope to be able to keep rev-share proportions steady, but much will depend on how much ad revenue is coming in the door by then, and how it compares to network expenses. In that sense, our own future success is also dependent on the financial success of publishers on the Printcasting network. And we like that, because it automatically aligns our interests with the interests of Printcasting.com participants.

Do you think these percentages are too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know.

3) “City Hubs”
As I’ve written about before, from the beginning we have seen organic demand for Printcasting in other cities. Our original plan was to extend Printcasting to five other cities starting in December, but based on all of the interest out there — which includes interest from other newspapers — we will be starting this rollout sooner.

City Hubs will be geographically-targeted launching pads for partners in other cities to promote Printcasting. If you don’t live in Bakersfield and you want to use Printcasting, be sure to add your zip code to your Printcast at setup. This data will be used to surface your content on any future city hubs we may roll out.

I can’t share which cities will be first because the partners have not been announced yet. But do let me know if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring a city for our national rollout.

4) Print on Demand
If you’ve ever ordered photo prints from a site like Shutterfly or ordered an on-demand book on Lulu.com, you understand what we want to do here. Imagine an “Order a Printed Copy” button on every Printcasting.com microsite and you get the idea. You click that button, enter payment details, and a few days later get a copy of the magazine at your doorstep (or perhaps pick it up at a local print provider).

When I started this project a year ago I assumed there would be numerous print services that we could tap into using free Web APIs. I was wrong in that assumption. Most of these types of companies don’t have full open APIs, although some are beginning to work on them. Now that we’ve launched, we’re finally making progress with getting some large printing companies with national footprints to talk to us, so I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to add printing functionality sometime in the summer.

That’s the news from Printcasting.com this week. In the future: more about revenue sharing, and how it can benefit individuals, organizations, and also newspapers and printing companies.

This entry was cross-posted on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. You can read that version here.

For those of you who haven’t followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded
project, the gist is that Printcasting lets anyone participate in niche magazine publishing, and if they do a good job they also stand to benefit from advertising revenue when we begin charging for self-serve ads. It’s an admittedly radical idea to come out of a newspaper at a time when many newspapers are cutting back or shutting their doors. As a result, we’re starting to attract media attention, with positive mentions in The Miami Herald and Business Week.

But that’s all talk. We’re launched, so now instead of telling you about it you can jump in and try it out. One fun way to do this is as a Printcasting subscriber. With the permission of Mark Glaser, we’ve set up a Printcast for this Idea Lab site. Check it out here:

And for members of the Printcasting Community site, here’s a widget that promotes a Printcast version of this blog:

The thumbnails above comes from a special blog widget that’s available for any Printcast. Click on it to flip through a facsimile of what the printed version will look like. To get a copy to print, click the Download link. And if you want to receive an e-mail whenever a new edition is available (which happens about once a day for the PBS Idea Lab blog), click “Subscribe” and provide your e-mail address.

It’s also really easy to get a blog widget to promote your own Printcast, or one that you like. Just find a Printcast in the directory (or your own), then click the “Share” link at the top of the page. Copy and paste the HTML code into your blog template, and your blog or Web site promotes a printable PDF version for those who may want to print it out or read offline. When a new edition is published the thumbnail and link will update automatically.

If you have more time you can create a Printcast using feeds people have already registered, including some very good ones from The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. To get your own site’s content into your Printcast or make it available for other Printcasts to carry, simply register your RSS feed. All of these tasks take only a few minutes.

You can also print a few copies yourself and leave them at local coffee shops, bars, your local library, or anywhere that people in your community may be looking for local information. That’s exactly how we plan to start local promotion of Printcasting in Bakersfield, starting out with the 3,600 blogs on the Californian’s eight social networking sites. In addition, those sites have more than 53,000 public user profiles, which is a good indication of active participants who may take 5 minutes out of their day to register a feed or set up a Printcast.

That’s how our outreach will begin, but as with all local products, traditional street marketing is what will make Printcasting a long-term success. Our marketing evangelist Tom Webster — armed with mouse pads and t-shirts — is already setting up meetings with places such as the Kern County Library, which after one demo offered to let us use their computers for community training. The library’s Web site also has RSS feed content, so we’re showing the librarians how they can automatically feed their online content into printable flyers that people can take with them. Tom is also planning a series of blogger brunches to get bloggers on board, and also collect feedback.

Just because our initial rollout is complete doesn’t mean that we’re finished with development, though. This week we’re testing out a feature we call “review and approve,” which is akin to the copy editor telling the publisher to give a publication one last edit before it goes to the presses, and we hope to launch that very soon. We’re also gearing up to work on something a journalism major like myself never expects to be involved in: integrating e-commerce payment into the ad tool. To be honest, this is something we’d hoped to have finished by now, but we intentionally put it off so that we could give the core product the focus it deserved before launch. (Since we planned to make ads free for the first few months anyway, this doesn’t hold us back at all and may even make local advertiser outreach easier — especially in this crazy economy.)

It’s been a big year, and a very big week. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and given us suggestions, feedback and moral support. Do us a favor and post a link to your Printcasts in a comment. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or need help.

The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader.

This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces in place to publicly launch in Bakersfield later this month. Here are some excerpts worth mentioning:

“… 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.’ ”

And later on …

“This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. ‘Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,’ Pacheco says. ‘[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.’”

That accurately sums up what we’re trying to do with Printcasting. Thanks to senior writer Olga Kharif for good reporting.

Of course the real story will begin once we launch later this month and are able to point to how regular old people are using Printcasting to make their own magazines and newsletters. Our local outreach is already starting in beta, and I can tell that what people do with these tools will ultimately be far more interesting than the tools themselves. The same has been true of Bakotopia and other social-media initiatives — connecting with people and allowing them to connect with each other is what the user-generated content space is really about.

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

We’re finishing up a few last features before we launch in Bakersfield (more on that here), but the rollout to early adopters has already begun with a post on Bakersfield.com by Tom Webster, the new “marketing evangelist” the site. Then later this month, we will “launch” — which simply means the URL changes to remove the “beta”, and heavier marketing begins.

As a Knight News Challenge project, Printcasting is focused on local news and information. For that reason, during the next few months most of our marketing efforts will focus on outreach to people who live in Bakersfield, with more to-be-determined cities rolling out in the future.

But as I’ve written about before, we have a lot of people following us from across the world (since I wrote that post a month ago, more than 100 more people have joined our Printcasting social network to bring its membership up to 325). So we invite anyone who has been following us to go to http://beta.printcasting.com and do any and all of the following: register your blog feeds, create Printcasts using your feeds (and those of others), and place self-serve ads. Then share your feedback by posting it online or sending an e-mail.

This is a really big milestone for a project that started over a year ago by me filling out a few forms on the Knight News Challenge site. Since then, we’ve gone through many iterations of PRDS, designs, prototypes, and now alpha and beta. Many people have made this possible and it’s hard to list them all, but I would like to specifically thank the following:

• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian for giving us the funds and other support to make Printcasting happen.
• Mary Lou Fulton, my boss and long-time colleague and friend for encouraging us to submit our concept to the Knight News Challenge — and all of the great marketing and outreach ideas.
• Justinian Hatfield, for helping us fine-tune the proposal, and lending his image and likeness — as well as his camera and tripod — to a video we submitted with the proposal.
• Lead developer Ron Robinson for, well, turning Printcasting from a concept into a working tool … and then some!
• Designer Don Hajicek for design, Drupal consulting, camaraderie and wicked funny jokes that continue to keep everyone sane.
• The good people at Photon Infotech for ongoing development and testing in conjunction with Ron.
• Tom Webster, our brand spanking new marketing evangelist, for jumping into Printcasting with such fervor.

We are now on the verge of entering the next phase of our project: going out on the street to show how various individuals and organizations in Bakersfield can be citizen publishers. I’ll continue to post updates here, on Printcasting.com (which will change to Community.printcasting.com after we launch), and on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. But it’s important to take a step back and be proud of what we’ve built. Ahh ….

OK now that that’s out of the way, back to the grindstone! The real hard work (and the most fun part) is just beginning.

It’s the day that the Rocky Mountain News ceased publication after nearly 150 years of continuous daily production, and Denver became a one-newspaper town.

This hits me and people like me especially hard for several reasons, but among them: I grew up in Colorado and find it hard to imagine the state without an institution that has helped define what it means to live here. I once worked as a journalist in Denver (for The Denver Post, which is now the sole survivor in a long newspaper war). And finally, since moving back to Colorado 5 years ago, I have developed personal friendships with several people at the Rocky based on our shared vision for digital journalism.

Among those friends are editor and publisher John Temple, who I now consider to have been one of the most innovative, entrepreneurial-minded people working in traditional news organizations in the last 5 years. Also, online editor Mike Noe, who I went to college with at the University of Colorado, but only started to get to know when I moved back to the state.

For those who are tempted to think the Rocky, and many other newspapers, are all about a printed medium that is supposedly completely going away (an idea I think is preposterous by the way), you should look at what the Rocky has done in the digital space in recent years.

Just as one tiny example, their online video coverage has become top-notch, and just as good as — or even better than — what you see on the nightly news on TV. You can see one final example of that in a video posted on the Rockymountainnews.com Web site, embedded at the bottom of this post. It’s on Vimeo, so it should be there if the Web site goes down tomorrow.

Another is citizen journalism pioneer YourHub.com, which was championed by Temple and fostered by Mike Noe and others, including Travis Henry who is now at Examiner.com. It endured much early criticism, but is now making money and — from what I hear — will continue to be maintained by The Denver Post.

And not to be forgotten, the Rocky’s mobile site has been one of the best local mobile news sites focused solely on Colorado. The Denver Post has since developed and improved its mobile site, but as someone who uses those sites every day, it’s clear that it has mostly followed the direction of the Rocky’s. I think that goes for a lot of other digital initiatives.

Just to be clear in case you missed it, I’m saying this as someone who proudly worked for The Denver Post in the mid-1990s and helped them get their first Web site going. It’s in my DNA to feel competitive with the Rocky, but looking back I have to say that they were definitely leaders when it came to things like design, format (I will really miss the broadsheet paper), and their understanding of and embrace of online community and digital journalism.

Yesterday Scripps said it would now focus its efforts on selling the brand, masthead and archives of the Rocky, so maybe it will have another life. But if not, I like to fantasize about the now-former Rocky staffers who built IWantMyRocky.com continuing coverage in some fashion, even if it’s just online.

But don’t rule out print in some fashion, even if it’s only via a digital-print / print-on-demand approach like Printcasting. Some type of traditional daily print newspaper is also not out of the picture. Just look at what the former employees of the San Juan Star did after their paper folded. They’re now starting a new, leaner, meaner daily called the Puerto Rico Daily Sun.

Here’s the touching video the Rocky staff put up on their Web site today. If the link goes down tomorrow, I hope someone will put it back up somewhere so that we can all remember how the Rocky Mountain News went out in style. We’ll miss you!

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.