Printcasting is a first of its kind online tool that assists users in dynamically creating customized newspapers and magazines comprised of information gathered from local news sources such as blogs, newsletters, news organizations, user content, and other Contributors.  Creating your own publication is as simple as adding the elements you want included in your publication through the easy to use Printcasting.com interface.  Without having to hire a team of editors, graphic artists, or authors you will be able to create your own, professional publication for distribution.

Publishers will also be able to allow Advertisers to place targeted advertisements in their publications and, in the future, receive a portion of revenue generated from those advertisements.  Publications created by the user may then be available for print, download, and distribution to Subscribers.

I wrote about the years-ago-created RSS to print application FeedJournal and it’s potential for a digital newspaper application last year, so Printcasting’s claim to be the “first of its kind” in this realm isn’t necessarily true, what is unique though is their attempt to monetize the resulting product with a simple ad creation tool (among other things).

Printcasting is a Knight News Challenge winner and their website is inviting so I decided to give it a try for Metaprinter.  I want to emphasize that the Printcasting site was in open Beta / preview mode when I did this so don’t judge too harshly.

Step 1. Definitely watch this instructional video before doing anything.

Printcast Your Blog from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

Step 2. Publish your blog and tweak the layout.

I had a problem with this part in that I wanted to use my Metaprinter logo in the header.  No problem with the upload but the Printcasting interface commands the blog Title and Tagline on, there’s no way to remove them from the header.  I got around this by resizing my header logo smaller and turning the text to white.  If you look closely though you can see the white type cutting into the bottom of the words “news media” in the screen capture below.  Not a huge deal but maybe in the future they will allow publishers to turn off the text in these locations.  Here’s a closeup of how the header looked before I tweaked it.

Step 3. Done!

When you are completely done a screen pops up giving you the option to email up to 100 people a link to your new Printcast and also gives you the embed codes for several different widgets like the one below.

How does the completed product look?  Pretty good except I didn’t expect the PDF to cut off my articles (I’m not that wordy am I?).  When they reach a certain word count (I guess), an automatically created tinyurl is placed at the end of the offending article and redirects the reader to the Printcasting site to complete reading the article.  Also all my hyperlinks in my articles are dropped which I can understand if the product is destined for print, but they’re dropped everywhere, the pdf version, the magazine view, and the quick read view.  Hyperlinks are a huge part of blogging, sometimes being unable to link out makes an article less usefull to the point of uselessness.    Here’s the PDF if you want to see how it turned out.

Step 4. Advertising

Just for kicks I started putting together an advertisement to see how easy it was and I am happy to report that the experience is pretty straightforward and intuitive.

What did I like?

• The entire process was straightforward and intuitive.
• I like the idea of being able to offer my readers a print version of my blog.
• Creating an advertisement was easy.
• I might be able to sell advertising on my printcast.

What didn’t I like?

• Not being able to turn off the Title and Tagline text in the header.
• My hyperlinks disappearing everywhere.
• My blog posts being cut off despite using only 5 pages in my pdf.
• Not being able to read the small text in  “magazine view” despite zooming in and viewing on a 24″ monitor.
• Not knowing what ads will appear in my printcast.

What I’m not sure about.

• #25 in the Terms of Use says Printcasting is for California Use Only.  um… can you explain this layman terms?  What am I, as an out of stater, opening my self up to here?
• Specifically, how is advertising revenue shared?
• How can I sell ad space on my printcast?

I hope to get someone from Printcasting or Bakersfield.com to respond in the comments section to clarify my issues.   What I’d like to see in the future is a paid feature where publishers can eliminate all ads from their printcast or select which ones appear / add their own.   If I can get the above problems corrected and gain control over the ad space or eliminate it altogether I might consider Printcasting as the print solution for Metaprinter.

UPDATE:

See Printcasting creator Dan Pacheco’s response below and check out his new post about revenue streams at MediaShift Idea Lab