And lo another 4iP investment to unveil. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The brainchild of Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Tom Taylor, it allows users tag online content, collect and curate the stuff they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The development kicked off earlier this month and you can read their amusing and alarmingly honest blog on progress so far. Great team, great idea, great business model.
‘It’s like a print driver for these monsters!’
Newspaper Club is designed to make it really easy for any group of people to take rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic newspaper format. It might be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a yearly “best of” printed product for obsessive bloggers.
Newspaper Club will combine the ease and collaborative power of digital with the accessibility and friendliness of the physical. The quality and breadth of online content is growing but 30% of people don’t yet have access to the web and for those that do sometimes reading online is not as pleasurable nor as practical. Laptops don’t take as kindly to being scrunched up or having toast and jam dropped on them. You never willingly leave your laptop on public transport for someone else to read and you can’t wrap your chips in a 23” monitor.
At 4iP we’re passionate about getting the best of the web to a wider audience and, when combined with initiatives like Talk About Local , Newspaper Club will give communities - both online and offline - a more effective voice. Revenue for Newspaper Club will be generated by taking a small percentage off the the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to larger corporate clients requiring a more sophisticated service. The BBC are the first customer using a very early version of the system for an internal newsletter.
You can sign up for the beta here and the team are hoping to launch to the public in late summer.
Update: TechCrunch had some nice things to say about Newspaper Club.
