1. Syndication Within Existing Print Media

That is, give or sell content to the newspapers and magazines. The papers steal already and I syndicate stuff in Montage. This is easy, could just negotiate with the various Life/Mirror Mag type sections. Issue is payment (if at all) they pay jack shit for one, and micropayments aren’t feasible. They could pay to one source and then that body divies it out, ie Kottu.

2. New Newspaper

This has significant overhead and I think would fail. Whackster says ‘If we could find a publishing house and sell them the concept, they may be willing to give it a go. That’ll take care of design, publishing, promotion, distribution etc.’ but I know from experience it doesn’t work like that. The publishing houses here aren’t very mature and they won’t take care of anything at all, they’ll just fund it. I have tried this model multiple times and failed.

However, it gives much more freedom. The issue is distribution. However, I think a small print run distributed free with Pizza or Room Service stuff might have a small Colombo impact. Dunno.

You are missing a terribly important element and that is content – who are you going to get to blog? Content is king. Also what is the payback model for contributors? how do you want to localise an issue – the good bloggers tend to write about what they find interesting and not specifically local. Mind you most of us are drawn to Kotthu or Achcharu to troll thru what others with a common nationality are blogging about…another issue is periodicity – how often do you print?

This is however a great idea – but it needs some very serious thought in to making it practical. Google recently bailed on their Print ads (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/google-bails-on-print-ads-and-newspapers/) and this could be a solution to their problems (also in gaining traction in emerging markets beyond the web). Work on this idea and I think you may be on to something with some real traction here…

If we could find a publishing house and sell them the concept, they may be willing to give it a go. That’ll take care of design, publishing, promotion, distribution etc.

How about like a Syndicate thing, where mainstream newspapers can buy content from. Good stuff go to the syndicate, The likes of DM can buy, syndicate-guy gets a cut, the blogger gets a cut. But I guess the pay wouldn’t be that great.