An interesting development in news publications, but to be honest one I cannot see rivalling traditional means of taking in news. By traditional I mean blogs and journalists. It does have a very interesting niche to fill, but I ponder if its a niche which hasn’t needed to be created.
Theblogpaper.co.uk describes itself as:
“a news community which allows anyone to publish written and visual work online and in print. Rating and commenting, in other words the community defines what gets promoted to the front pages as well as to the printed version. theblogpaper aims to publish the first user-generated newspaper in London.”
It is certainly a user-generated first, but I guess there are already well-established blogs such as The Londonist who would argue that they are creating their own user-generated newspaper. (and doing it incredibly well)
My thought is that the way TheBlogPaper can make this work is by generating views through advertising which bloggers couldn’t drive themselves. However, my feeling is that most bloggers in London are well connected enough to get people to their own sites, this may just be an additional tool for doing that.
The development of the additional facility to end up in print may be an additional incentive but to make this work The Blog Paper need to firmly establish credibility. Perhaps this could be done by partnering as a free giveaway with the Standard or The Times, a type of London fanzine if you like.
It will be really interesting to see how this develops and I will be checking out the pages in excitement.
