Newspapers are (were?) beautiful. They've served as repositories for historical events and made tangible the fleeting moments that mark our individual and collective human experience. But newspapers are an endangered species. The recent crumbling of the economy has only hastened this imminent death, and as ad sales continue in a downward spiral, it's even more difficult for newspapers to stay in business. It's not a pretty picture.

While all of this is going down, there's a man in Chicago starting something he calls The Printed Blog. According to the Times, Joshua Karp is planning to reprint blog posts on paper. Yes, that's right. The mix of local and national blog content--given away free by bloggers--will allow Karp to eliminate one of the biggest costs of running a newspaper besides production: staff.

Karp has an interesting concept, but does the market for this newspaper even exist? Won't The Printed Blog face the same fate so many other printed newspapers do these days? When Karp says something like, "We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content," it makes you wonder if he's given this idea a lot of thought, because the concept isn't unique. In fact, the advent of newspapers was entirely due to "user-generated content" in the first place--it just wasn't called that back when the printing press was invented. What we now call "users" were just people who had something to say.

I'm not as cynical as Seth Godin about newspapers. I actually understand why people feel nostalgic about them. At one point in time, a local newspaper was the only thing that connected citizens, and made tangible the fleeting moments I referenced earlier--births, deaths, and all the other minutiae of daily life. But now they're as anonymous as the internet, so what's the difference? And Seth's probably right that no one will miss the mass-produced drivel that populates most big newspapers, but they will miss the type of newspapers that solidified small communities and linked people with no other means of connection.

Back in 2006 and 2007, I was working on a research project at Brandeis that required me to read loads of old newspapers on microfilm. All of these newspapers--from the 1920's through 1940's--were from Minnesota and North Dakota, states that saw a huge amount of mostly Norwegian immigrants at that time. As people settled, much like they did in other states, they had families, put down roots, and newspapers served as a tangible record of events in the community (and even discussed the best crops to plant for the best harvest). It was personal, and it was meaningful.

I can appreciate what people like Joshua Karp are trying to do, but he's got to sell this plan differently. Instead of publishing blog posts that people could just read online, make news relevant again--make it local. Sell the customization aspect of your network, because the bottom line is that the news cycle we know as the gold standard today is too fast to relay in print days later. The only way to resurrect the printed newspaper is to make it relevant and highly customized to the specific communities you're serving.