Neville Hobson, popular PR blogger and my co-host on For Immediate Release, has pretty much given up on print.
Neville prefers to read everything online, including lengthy articles in business publications like BusinessWeek. He’s a poster child for the “print is dead” meme, even though statistics bear out that most people still like to read lengthy material in print. (How many of you print out long online articles? Don’t lie.)
Neville also doesn’t read print newspapers. Plenty of commentary has been written about the impending demise of the newspaper business. They’re not making the same kind of profits they were making 10 or 20 years ago, although they’re still very profitable with double-digit ROI that would make many other industries jealous. Readership among younger consumers is declining. But that’s not stopping the Dutch blogging service Starlog from launching a newspaper of their own, according to a Nis News report. The plan is to fill the weekly print newspaper with content from the blogs the service hosts. They’ll print 30,000 copies and distribute them (and, one assumes, the advertising they’re selling) free throughout The Netherlands. Starlog says they hope to attract enough advertising to compensate bloggers whose material appears in the newspaper’s pages.
The content will be organized into categories not unlike a traditional newspaper, such as politics and personals. Starlog’s founders-R. van der Lende and J. Kreek-will personally select the content from all but one of the blogs it hosts-only one didn’t react positively, according to van der Lende and Kreek.
So, what do you think, Neville? Is this one for which you’d be willing to stain your fingers with some good old-fashioned ink?
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
