Amid the din of naysayers who insist that newspapers are on the verge of death, a new company wants to start dozens of new ones, with a twist.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities across the United States.

The first issues of that Internet-era penny-saver are to hit Chicago and San Francisco next Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes to eventually publish free hyper-local neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many U.S. cities.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated subject matter,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that possibly I could apply to the print industry.”

As pay newspapers lose readers to the World Wide Web, where they can read many of the same articles without charge, free papers have held their own.

“The free newspaper business model is still very workable,” said David Cohen, a founder of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, a group of free weeklies south of San Francisco that was sold to the media company Knight Ridder in 2005 and is now owned by MediaNews.

“There’s a huge readership that wants the local news,” Cohen said, “and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in poor times considering they have to capture people’s attention.”

Still, Karp does not have to look far to see how difficult it is to be successful in the newspaper business these days. Tribune, whose holdings include The Chicago Tribune and a free daily, The RedEye, filed for bankruptcy protection in December.

Karp is betting that he can build his business work by combining the best of the print and Web models.

The Printed Blog will publish…

[Source] dhiram