Thanks for the link and it looks like it works well there, a bit like the TM plan and a move to a more sensible way of using community. It still smacks a little of using the audience to do the legwork so that they can reap the ad rewards but at least they are looking at print output based on their communities.

The daily me was something that DR Hill was something that needed to happen. All that stood in the way was the ability for the presses to do it cheaply and a level of understanding of the individual audience member beyond the one size fits all of the current mindset.

I agree with you that the idea of a daily me is, and should be, dead in the water for those that run the presses but perhaps that later point – getting a better handle on your audience – means you can go someway to using cheaper printing technology to reach a more specialised but, in the longer term, more committed audience.

The problem there is that the larger print organisations can’t afford, literally afford, to take their audience in anything more refined that a demographic. To go hyperlocal means, to borrow a phrase from an earlier post hyperpersonal and that doesn’t fit medium to large scale publishing on paper. The result is they increasingly can’t hit the demographics they need and can’t produce content that suits the demographic they do. Letting the community in as an equal or even controlling partner at a local level would seem one solution to explore given the move to embrace ‘community’ and the relatively successful models that are out there.

So perhaps the aim of my post was to suggest less of the Daily me idea and more the Daily We.

http://developer.tabblo.com/

You can see it in action on TechCrunch articles:

http://www.techcrunch.com/

- Craig

Interesting thoughts.

The hyper local or niche concept has been put forwatrd by a number of people as the future for newspapers.In some senses we already have it (eg community blogs).

As you point out it won’t work for all newspapers and perhaps the mark in the sand should be based on distribution and circulation patterns(it certainly wouldn’t work for a national paper)

The concept of print your own paper,I believe is a non starter.In a way the internet and its tools already provide the individual with a method of selecting his own news agenda.Taking this a stage further by printing a pesonalised paper is a stage too far.

The Gazette is a great example of what can be done and it would be good to see contributors supported financially, looking at many of the associations that write on the Gazette site this money could be channelled back to helping them provide more assistance.

I suppose there is even the option of doing a print on demand service, sites like lulu.com seem to be making it work, or even select the pages you want and then print!

As you highlight much of the tech is there, it’s whether newspapers are willing to sit around the same table as their readers and listen that will ultimately make something like this work.

All the best, Craig