Challenge winner Printcasting expands through partnership with MediaNews

Good news for citizen journalists, and kudos to our News Challenge buddy Dan Pacheco. Snip...

“We’re excited to take what’s worked in Bakersfield and see how it plays out elsewhere,” said Dan Pacheco, Printcasting’s founder and Senior Product Manager at The Californian. The project has received interest by people in almost every continent, and especially from newspapers.

“We’ve known for some time that local readers and advertisers respond well to printed content as long as it speaks to their unique interests. This started with citizen-journalism pioneer The Bakersfield Voice in 2004, and was then proven with Bakotopia.com, which provides content for the ad-supported Bakotopia Magazine.”

MediaNews Group, which also has its own experiments with “Individuated News,” will be using Printcasting initially as an engine for its own staff to create niche magazines that use content from MediaNews Group writers, supplemented with content from local bloggers. “By using Printcasting, it’s easier and less expensive to create new magazines and see how they resonate with an audience before investing more time and money,” said Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group’s Vice President of Targeted Products.