As I also said, there are already equivalents of the what your product would be doing online. If you break it down, very simple aggregator sites like netvibes do the job very well. There is also the glorious rss feed. There is also twitter and facebook– all readable everywhere.

Anyone who wants to read the Colorado Independent can do so from everywhere there is internet or where iphones or blackberries can get a signal. So what are you saying exactly? The only fragment of the mediasphere that costs and is not fully integrated is print. And that’s why it is rapidly fading.

Since you're clearly not a personal believer in print as a viable medium, I'd ask you to re-read what I've said about how Printcasting works anywhere you need it to: online, soon mobile, and in print. Who knows — maybe we'll even make automatic Podcasts one day. Perhaps we should change our name in the future to Mediacasting.

There's a good reason we're focused on print. It's where the money is at the moment, and it behooves you and all bloggers / citizen journalists who want to get paid for your hard work to pay attention to that. Print also makes a lot of sense the more niche and local you get. I've spent 15 years building purely online content brands and social networks at places like AOL and The Washington Post, and The Bakersfield Californian. In the end the online ad rates don't pay the bills, but when you feed that content into magazines the print advertising does.

By the way, for Printcasting in particular, I don't personally believe breaking news will ever be a driving factor. Magazine usage patterns don't mesh well with breaking news. If anything, people will use newsy Printcasts in the same way they use Time magazine: to catch up with all of the news they care about, but were too busy to catch when they were working, driving to taking care of their kids.

I do think that something like Peter Vandevanter's I-News concept could meet that need for some audiences that prefer to read the news on paper in the morning. But even he will tell you that he doesn't care how people choose to read content. If everyone one day decides to stop reading in print, and all of the advertisers who pay more for print suddenly and inexplicably decide to switch to 37-cent online ads, he would be the first to say “move everything online.” But that's not the present reality.

What is a reality today is fragmentation. If you — including Colorado Independent by the way — want to be truly relevant, you need to be everywhere your target audience wants you to be. If you factor print out of that picture due to your personal biases you're really shooting yourself in the foot and doing your own audience a disservice.

For the record, I'm not fully cynical on the print-your-own model. I just don't think it's a long-term plan. In my cafe, every single person has a laptop — either open on the table or in a bag at their feet. Not every cafe is like that, clearly. But to me that looks like the future.

I like magazines. I still think they're a great deal and that there will remain a market for them. But that's because they don't compete with the web the way newspapers do. They are a high-end physical product. They deliver stories not tied to the news cycle in the same immediate way as websites– they don't specialize in “daily” news that every one reads by the hour online.

I will pay for a well-edited glossy mag or New York Review of Books. Oh yeah I will. But I'm not interested in a paper zine of hit-and-miss blogs I can read online. That's just me. As to the nonprint version, aren't there already all kinds of aggregator sites where we share one another's curating?

I sincerely wish Printcast success. You're clearly wrestling on the ground with the media shift and for that I salute you!

First I just have to ask: have you thought of talking to Peter Vandevanter about how his experiment went before reporting how you think it might have went? It's not my project, but my understanding is that it went pretty well, with advertisers offering to pay twice as much as the initial ad price because they thought it was too low. It would be better reporting to ask before making a snap judgment.

As for Printcasting, I think you're misunderstanding what our experiment is about. We're pursuing a completely grass-roots, bottom-up approach to print publishing that is more like the blogosphere itself than the top-down, traditional model of most newspapers. We provide an open service that anyone can use (even you!) to easily and quickly create printable content that leverages the work they've already done in online content management systems.

What this means is that if you're a local blogger, you can make a printable magazine of your blog to leave around at local coffee shops, thus increasing the local reach of your audience. (If you're publishing online only, it's easier to get readers from the other side of the globe than in your own back yard). And if you have an organization with a newsletter, or you want one, you can create one much more quickly and cheaply than before. In addition, all of the content you may publish online can feed your newsletter, thus reducing your work.

For example, check out this cool magazine some just made in Houston called Blaq Vixen Beauty: http://bit.ly/9eCyD Imagine being a woman of color who finds this at a local hair salon, and tell me that it's not cool that it was done by someone who previously only had a blog. Then tell me why it's not cool. This is Zine Explosion 2.0, but powered by the blogosphere.

Printcasting also has the potential to pay for your printing costs via a self-serve advertising system that local businesses can use to easily and quickly place affordable ads in niche magazines. You as a publisher get 60% of every ad that's placed, and the content providers you use get 30% (and you're the content provider, your share is more like 90%). Since local niche print ad rates typically start at $50 CPM and could go as high as $200 CPM (compared to 37 cent per thousand for online ads), that's a great thing for content providers and hopeful publishers.

MediaNews Group is interested in the Printcasting model because they see that it can also be used by them to create many more niche magazines at much lower cost than they could by purely traditional routes. This isn't what we originally designed Printcasting for, but when they asked us if they could use it in this way, our response was “sure!” We're interested to see how it works out. They're working in the same even playing-field as people on the street who make Printcasts for their organizations, but they can “give back” to the rest of the Printcasting community by making some of their content available.

Finally, if you actually use Printcasting you will see that it doesn't require printing at all if that's not your preferred medium. You can view all Printcasts online, in either a page-flip preview mode or a web-friendly view that is similar to a feed reader. We're working on a mobile view as well. The reality is that in today's fragmented media world you need to be everywhere people want you to be. And at a local level, being available in a printable form — which exists in the same physical space where we all live and breathe — is crucial.

So I can understand your skepticism — I have a mostly-online background myself, having worked at AOL and Washingtonpost.com, among other places — but you really should give Printasting a try. Even though the Colorado Independent is skeptical, we still welcome you into your community.

-Dan Pacheco, Founder of Printcasting.com