From Creative Economy Online comes a link to this story from the New York Times about a Chicago news publisher who has decided to hand out blog stories as free newspapers, splitting profits from advertising between himself and the bloggers. Claire Cain Miller suggests that some (though not all) free dailies are still in a good position as print news battles to stay afloat across the globe, thanks to the relatively constant value of local advertising:
'Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.
“All growth in the newspaper industry for the last 20 years has been in free papers, and the fastest-growing segment of that for the last five years has been in free dailies,” said H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado and past president of Suburban Newspapers of America.'
And the name of this new paper? Oddly enough, The Printed Blog.
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