Our perspective on print
Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, discusses the future and importance of print. This post was published in the Showcase Issue of The Printed Blog.
The Printed Blog is a publishing experiment. It’s the only subscription–based, weekly, print magazine, comprised entirely of blogs and other online content.
Bloggers create great content. Not every blogger, but a whole lot of them. There’s more wonderful content, created by people worth knowing, than you could read in a lifetime.
It doesn’t matter if you write for The New York Times and you get 1,000,000 hits a week, or if you live in your parent’s basement and get 10 hits a month — if you have something to say we’ll publish it — in print. The Printed Blog is a level playing field.
Too much of the world is created for the lowest common denominator, and frankly, I’m tired of homogenized, dumbed down content, that I’m expected to enjoy because it was written to appeal to the masses.
The Printed Blog is NOT for the lowest common denominator. If you’re not impacted by our content — by a blog post or photograph — then we haven’t done our jobs. If we don’t lose a few subscribers each time we release an issue, it means that we were gutless and lazy.
Bloggers and photographers create work that has value, they deserve to be paid, and we should pay them. That’s why we charge a subscription, and why we pay everyone who is published a percentage of that money, big blogger, or small.
And yes, you can find everything in The Printed Blog somewhere online, but so what — that’s not the point.
The point is, editors pick stories worth reading and photography worth viewing, and we present it in a beautiful print package.
That’s what you’re paying for. For the two or three or four hours of quiet enjoyment with a print magazine, that will surprise you, or delight you, or scare you, or excite you with every article, and every photograph.
It takes a certain kind of arrogance to say that, “print is dead,” or to think that someone needs to “save” print. Sitting down at a sun drenched dining room table with the massive printed Sunday New York Times is a privilege. The tangible act of opening the pages, straightening the creases, dirtying your hands — it connects you to history, to a time where the quiet, sincere contemplation of the world around you bettered your life.
The Sunday New York Times isn’t fast. It’s slow — it takes time, it’s deliberate, it has meaning, it’s romantic, it has tradition. The notion that we need to “save” this part of our culture is ridiculous… perhaps, however, for a moment, we need to shout above the din of innovation, and remind people that there are still things that are important.
Print and the web are not mutually exclusive — they’re just different. Not everything is better, just because it’s online.
Sometimes, I just don’t want to look at a screen, fumble with searches and links and load times and popups; I just want it in front of me.
Sometimes, it’s just nice to read something in print form.
I want Gawker in print. I want The Huffington Post, in print, and The Daily Beast. I want TechCrunch and Mashable. I want BastardLife, The Bloggess, and The Bitchy Waiter. I don’t care about your iPad app, I want Wired, in print, too, because not all coffee shops believe that wireless connectivity improves the taste of their coffee.
I worked to make The Printed Blog into what I wanted, and into what I couldn’t find anywhere else — the very best of the web, picked by editors I know and love, combined with amazing photography that I cannot see anywhere else, and presented in a beautiful print package, each week.
This is The Printed Blog.