The editor ccomments: I asked Alyson to qrite this after I received a Press Release. The thing is: content is already complete and it is much easier to get advertisers. Incidentally, blogtown gets 30,000 readers a month, we average 5,000 to 6,000 readers a month. Up from 3,000 at the begining of the year
For five years, Blogdowntown.com has been a useful resource for everything you have to know about Downtown LA, music, nightlife, culture, restaurant, fashion, news and entertainment, but they have decided to go countercurrent: Starting August 5th, a weekly print of blogdowntown will be available in stands, hotels, residential buildings, coffee shops and businesses every Thursday morning.
This is a surprising move in these days and age when every printed newspaper is going digital, but publisher and founder Eric Richardson thinks that ‘there is still something uniquely useful about picking up a paper. People respond to having something tangible in their hands whether it’s while having coffee or keeping a handy events guide close by.’
I am doubtful about this, since I used to pick up the LA Weekly every week, and I just don’t do it anymore since I look at it online, so why bothers?
There are already a lot of free newspapers in the Los Angeles area, probably more than 25, but I understand they cover only downtown which is undergoing a sort of revival right now, with for example the new L.A. Live entertainment complex, a center built around the Staples center. If they want to focus on downtown calendar and lifestyle they have to bring something new because the LA Weekly already does cover everything about LA, and there is also a Downtown News free paper.
Then there is the problem of using paper, and even though they are saying they are going all green about this (low emissions, soy-based inks, recycling of waste paper), with 25,000 full-color copies of 16 pages every week, it is still energy consuming.
So is print really dying? In a recent interview Richardson did with another blog about LA, LAIST, he said something interesting. Blogdowntown is an already successful blog as it is with 30,000 readers monthly who want to learn more about downtown new development. But the print will only be a recap of what they have been talking online, thinking that the news content of the paper will help draw readers to the website. And Richardson says that despite what everyone thinks, print is still a much more tangible medium for advertisers who put more money into it than in website. Would print be the next way for helping the development of online sites?