Interview with the blogpaper

A fire broke out in London this afternoon, and within minutes #sohofire was a trending topic on Twitter, with dozens of photos being shared online.

Digital communications are not only increasing the amount of easily-reached information but is also collapsing the hierarchy of the previous two centuries and upended traditional publishing. Anyone can now publish their thoughts, pictures and videos at little or no cost to a global audience.

I was recently followed by theblogpaper on Twitter, a new exciting news community. I emailed one founder Anton Waldburg earlier this afternoon who kindly agreed to answer a few questions:

Who’s behind the blogpaper?

theblogpaper was founded by Karl Jo Seilern and me (Anton Waldburg). I defined the outlines of the concept for theblogpaper during my final year at University (UCCA 2008), and finally managed to put the site together. Karl joined me 6 months ago, and is taking care of the business side. Currently it’s the two of us CEO’s (+one part-time intern:)) and we are negotiating with 3-4 people to join us on the advisory board. We are also in negotiation with several angels to join us for funding, contacts and advice.

Can you tell me me a little bit more about theblogpaper?

Our aim is to create a platform for bloggers, citizen journalists, photographers and other “content creators” to publish content online as well as in print. We believe that there are vast amounts of quality content online, which seem to be getting far too little attention.
The ultimate goal is create a platform for bloggers to reach out to new readers, increase their profile and redirect traffic back to their blogs. The main idea is that it should be as easy as possible to post content on theblogpaper.co.uk, making it convenient to get the chance to be published (of course only if the community “likes” your content).

So why print a newspaper?
Our goal is to create a simple platform for bloggers, citizen journalists, photographers and critics etc. that enables them to reach out to a new readership and gain recognition “outside their blogosphere”. On the other hand we want to publish theblogpaper in print to offer readers a weekly review of the “best content” that has been posted online, people who simply do not have the time to go through vast amounts of blogs, RSS feeds and Twitter updates…

How does theblogpaper work?
Three Simple steps:
1. Register at theblogpaper.co.uk and personalise your profile.
2. Post content (articles, photos or start discussions)
3. Rate and discuss content.

Now here’s the key: Members of community “decide” what articles, pictures or comments should be promoted to print. The highest rated and most discussed content will be published in the newspaper. In other words the community becomes the editor of the newspaper.

When can we expect to see the fist printed version of The blogpaper?

Well we set ourselves a deadline by the end of September. The reason being that we first need to create a critical mass of active users to generate quantity and quality content because otherwise we are not able to publish. For example at the moment we receive 30 articles a week which obviously isn’t enough to be able to filter out good quality content. We also want to test whether the blogging community is even interested in being published in print or participate in something like theblogpaper. Printing and distributing costs are quite high so we therefore have to first of all draw attention to theblogpaper so we attract users and advertisers.

We want to publish it as a free sheet in selected areas in London, similar to other free-sheets like shortlist, the Londonpaper etc, with the only exception that our content will solely consist of user generated content.

What can the community do to help theblogpaper?

At the moment the only thing we need is active users (writers, bloggers, photographers) (that’s why i am quite glad that you would like to post an article on theblogpaper). We believe that there is interest out there for bloggers and other journalists to participate but we have to get message out there and tell the community that we exist. We have an extremely tight budget when it comes to marketing, so we cant afford to do huge promotions etc. because we are going to need all the money once we start to publish the paper.

For more info go to:

- www.theblogpaper.co.uk/about
- http://twitter.com/theblogpaper
- Facebook group