The Newspaper Club takes journalism centuries backward in order to make a giant leap forward for niche publishing.

The British startup is still developing – in beta - and looking for funds, but it was partially funded in July by a development wing of Channel 4, called 4 Innovation for the Public, or 4iP.

The project aims to allow anyone to mashup original articles or photos with other rights-free content from various registered content producers. Content slides into an automatically generated layout before it is run on a web press, as are newspapers like The Guardian.

Eager grassroots publishers may then distribute their newspaper as far and wide as desired.

Enabling printed blogs and conglomerations of online content is essentially a return to the Renaissance-era newsletters distributed after the invention and subsequent proliferation of the printing press.

And the World Association of Newspapers has recommended these be a part of newspapers’ attempts to stay relevant:

“Newspapers could create as many niche products as they want, which can be distributed in many ways: electronically via email, in pdf format, printed at home, or distributed as an insert to a traditional newspaper. The idea is to build many ultra-niche products.”

The Newspaper Club isn’t the only English startup sauntering into the printed blog space: complete with nonsensical moniker - and a very easy-to-navigate website - Sweeble also allows niche publishers to easily lay out their content for paper. It is the brainchild of Sue Greenwood, who teaches online journalism at Staffordshire University, and Greg Finney, who owns and manages an online shop for audiovisual equipment.

Because it involves home printers rather than a web press, Sweeble is perhaps more similar to a successful American cousin called Printcasting.

Already in operation, Printcasting works with a $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge. Further funds roll in from the 10 percent of the low-cost ad sales on the site that Printcasting collects after distributing the rest to writers and publishers.

Printcasting recently entered into a partnership with the 54 Media News Group papers, most of which are from the Pacific Coast. Those papers may now use Printcasting to enable niche content creation within their communities.

But Ben Terrett’s Newspaper Club appears to have a more European character. Prototypes exude the feeling of a bespoke magazine distributed at a trendy but personal local cafe.

Terrett got started with transposing online content to print about a year ago when he and a few buddies used their own funds to send 1,000 copies of a self-made newspaper around the world after they filled it with their favourite online content written by friends.

Terrett wrote

< about the experiment in the Guardian:

“Why did we do that? Well, we had an idea for a product of the future. A product where people could tag blog posts online and generate a properly printed newspaper. We figured the best way to see if that would work was just to do it.”

His development group, the

Really Interesting Group is now trying to advance the idea into a full-scale operation. They’re in talks with investors, printers and working on design.

Details about the ongoing project emerge here, on their staff blog.

Terrett’s effort, though not yet fully developed, has met with warmer reception than The Printed Blog, one of the pioneering efforts to print content mined from the web for a targeted audience. Unable to secure funds, it recently failed.

Published: September 15, 2009