Him: “What kind of things do you print then?”
Me: “Oh well, all sorts of stuff really.”
Him: “Like local newspapers and things like that?”
Me: “Yes, some of those, but really just anything that people want to put on newsprint: comics, portfolios, wedding papers, wrapping paper.”
Him: “Wrapping paper?”

This seems totally normal to me now. Wrapping paper: of course! But that’s because I’ve spent a couple of years watching people print all manner of things, and now it’s a typical week when someone prints a newspaper full of wrapping paper, or a collection of beautiful lines, or photography about a bus stop.

But for our customers, apart from our blog posts, there’s no way of seeing the full range of stuff that other people are printing. We want to surface more of these fantastic papers; to give people a space to show off what they’ve made, and why and how they did it, beyond the reach of the printed paper.

So today we’re beginning that. There’s now an option on each newspaper in your dashboard to share it:

There’s space to write a few words about it, to choose how much of it you want to share, and to tag it with a few keywords. You’ll end up with a page like this one of prettymaps from my profile, that you can share with anyone:

And a profile page for you or your organisation that looks a bit like this one by We are Words + Pictures:

When we’ve got a few more newspapers shared, we’ll open the Newsagent: a portion of the site to allow anyone explore all the shared newspapers, searching by tag or description to find papers they might be interested in. And we’ll be featuring papers and publications that we love on the front page and throughout the site.

But that’s a post for another day. For now, give it a go, and let us know if you have any feedback.

Drop us an email to newspaperclub@newspaperclub.com, with the subject line ‘Beta Testing’ and the email address of your account. If you’ve got some of the details of the paper you made, that’d be great too. We can’t guarantee we’ll get back to everyone, but we’ll try our best.

The rest of you: the Newspaper Club Newsagent is coming soon.

Much of our inspiration for starting Newspaper Club is down to Aaron Straup-Cope, and his Papernet projects. Aaron’s thoughts on how paper and printed media can be a natural part of the web and the “network” encouraged us to play around, led to experiments with newspapers, and lo: Newspaper Club was born.

A lot of what we do at Newspaper Club is about making it easy as possible to access newsprint: to lower the barrier of entry and let people make whatever they want. We’ve built ARTHR, our layout tool, we’ve written lots of help pages, and we try and be helpful on email and the phone, all to try and make it as easy as possible.

But we want to make it easier for machines too. Because why should humans have all the fun? Machines should be able to make good looking newspapers too.

So, today we’re launching the alpha release of the Newspaper Club API. The API provides programatic access to ARTHR, letting you write tools and apps that generate newspapers from any content you have.

We’ve written some API documentation which should help you along the way. We know it needs fleshing out in places, but if you’ve got any suggestions for what we’re not explaining very well, please let us know.

As a demonstration, we’ve built a tool nicknamed The Telepaper, that turns a Readability Reading List into a newspaper with just a couple of clicks.

As luck and timing would have it, The Engineering Dept. entered this in Readability’s API contest and are very pleased that it won third place! Hurrah! (Thank you Readability folks.)

The Telepaper is a very simple Ruby Sinatra application that glues the Newspaper Club and Readability APIs together. All the source code is available on the Newspaper Club Github account, and you can try the application for yourself if you’ve got a Readability account.

If you’d like to have a go with the API yourself, you’ll need an API key from us. First take a look at the documentation, then drop us an email containing your Newspaper Club account’s email address, an OAuth callback URL, and a brief description of whatever you’re playing around with, if you know. We’ll have a web interface for this as we tidy things up and enter the beta stage.

We’ll be honest: this is going to be a bit of a learning curve for us. Running an API is hard. And mapping the concepts of print layout to an API is hard. So it’s likely that we won’t have got it right first time. Do let us know your thoughts.

And we’ll have news for developers interested in building services that generate newspapers using ARTHR’s layout technology. Our Newspaper Club API is in the process of being documented and tidied up. We’ll post here when we’re looking for people to be beta testers.

But today we’re just making a few changes to help us get ready for all that. When your ARTHR newspaper next refreshes (later today), you may notice that some of the typography has changed in places – the fonts style and sizes might look slightly different. You might find that stories start and finish in slightly different places, or that there is more or less room after them. Or you might not notice anything at all.

We’re making these changes today so that you have time to adjust your paper before our next print run on Tuesday.

As always, if you have any feedback on ARTHR, or anything else, please let us know at newspaperclub@newspaperclub.com.

The website will be offline from 2pm GMT on Thursday 17th March (tomorrow), for up to two hours. This is so we can make some behind the scenes changes to the site, including some performance improvements in ARTHR.

We’ll still be contactable by email, at support@newspaperclub.co.uk.

Anyway, as you were.

Update: This has been completed – we’re all up and running as normal.

(the picture above was taken from Hybrids, a show at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, that features some of the stuff that Newspaper Club has printed)

When we first started Newspaper Club we set a number of restrictions to make it as simple as possible for us to get up and running, and to limit the number of things that could go wrong.

One of those was pagination: on day one, you could only print a 12 page newspaper. It made it easier for us to calculate the shipping costs and deal with logistics, and it felt like a reasonable compromise – 12 pages is thick enough to feel like a proper newspaper, but not so thick that it’s hard to fill.

But we’ve grown up, and many of our customers want a bit more flexibility. So, from today, you can print anything from 4 to 64 pages (in multiples of four, obviously).

Hurrah! Head on over to the pricing page to find out what it’ll cost you.

In addition, we’re now able to offer lower quantity full colour runs – now as few as 300 copies, down from the 500 minimum before. We know that you want even lower quantity colour runs, and we’re working on it, but we’re not quite there yet.

Usually, the body text in ARTHR is fully justified, but poetry and song lyrics with single line breaks tend to hard on the eye. We’ve added an option to let you mark a story as being left aligned, so your poems come out a treat.

We’ve also added a help guide popup, explaining briefly how ARTHR works, and some tips and tricks for using it. And next to that is a download PDF button to make it easier to quickly proof your newspaper.

And finally, it’s a bit quicker, but we’re still working on improving the performance further.

As usual, if you have any trouble with it, just let us know.

The sun is streaming through the windows, Mr Scruff is on the stereo, the England game is this afternoon, it seems like a good time to tell you all how we’re doing.

Good. We’re doing good.

More specifically, we’re doing the following things;

Tom is sitting next to me, he’s currently talking to a printer but he’s also writing code so we can offer international shipping. We’ve got a delivery company lined up, we’ve done a few test shipments, we’ve sorted out the pricing, we’ve just got to get the website working so y’all can order and pay. Which isn’t that easy. Each different order is a different weight which costs a different amount to ship to each country so making that intelligible on the website is a bit of a challenge. Seems to be coming together though. Tom reckons it’ll be finished this week. We’ll have an announcement on here when it’s up and running. Please note, it won’t be the whole world just yet. Just North America and Western and Central Europe for now. Details to follow.

Anne is up in Glasgow answering emails, taking orders and dealing with printers and customers. Getting her involved was one of the smartest things we could have done. Every time Ben or I are inclined to issue sarcastic advice to troubled customers she’s there just in time to stop us. Behind the scenes we’re also working on adding a bunch of community features to Newspaper Club – that’s where Anne will really come into her own.

Gareth’s doing all sorts of CEO stuff at the moment. (He’s not the CEO yet, but we’re hoping he will be soon.) He and I have been preparing investor documents so we can talk to people about raising more money for TOP SECRET PLANS. They must, of course, remain top secret but do not, as heavily rumoured, involve buying the Daily Mail. Gareth’s also been talking to printers up and down the world and we’re getting closer to our holy grail of being able to offer runs of just one paper, in colour. It’s not far now. Maybe a couple of months away.

Ben has mostly been doing designing – he made our lovely new front page. And we’re talking about getting some new templates done and we have a TOP SECRET PLAN to get a font made that’ll be specifically tailored to Newspaper Club purposes. That, of course, is TOP SECRET.

And I’ve been doing all sorts of TOP SECRET THINGS involving getting people to do new and interesting things with newsprint. And if you were to imagine that I was using TOP SECRET THINGS as a cloak for NOT DOING ANYTHING you’d be very wrong.

Ipex is the largest printing technology trade show in the English speaking world, and it’s on at the moment. So I decided to go.

I knew it was going to be big, but nothing quite prepares you for 11 halls of the Birmingham NEC. It’s absolutely huge.

That’s not surprising when you get inside. There are companies that must have relocated their entire industrial operations into the NEC for a week. Vast stands, with massive machines churning out demo print after demo print. Robot arms lifting parcel after parcel of newsprint. Conveyor belts with box after box going round and round. And it’s all shiny, clean and, dare I say, beautiful.

Technology trade shows are the same the worldwide. There are suited men wearing wrap-around microphones demoing hypnotising high-speed lamination machines. Huge bags of publicity materials to avoid. Branded 32MB USB sticks. Prize draws for obscure pieces of technology.

I came away slightly surprised that the technology is still marching towards printing more copies, faster and glossier. I guess that’s valid for certain section of the industry, but that’s not what we’re trying to do.

We’ve made it no secret that we’d like to be able to print one copy of a newspaper, on demand, shipped to you, preferably in colour. If we were called Glossy Magazine Club, we’d be there. But the thinner paper of newsprint is still an issue for many of the short-run machines.

That said, there are a handful of companies making strides, and at risk of breaching our strict “under promise, over deliver” policy, hopefully we’ll be there before too long.

And it made me more excited about Newspaper Club. At its simplest, we wrap all of these amazing technologies and systems in a friendly face; something that the printing industry finds hard to do. And printing is going from strength to strength – presses are still being bought, and they’re getting smaller, less polluting and more efficient.

Overall, despite leaving the NEC smelling of toner, it was a day well spent.

The Engineering Dept are currently on a mini-tour of the US, following SXSW (see previous). Somewhere on a mammoth train journey between San Francisco and New York, they managed to find the time to add a couple of features to ARTHR, which are live now.

First, one of the most requested changes: captions for images.

You can now add captions to images, allowing you to describe what’s going on in them, to provide credit to the photographer or to provide link to the Flickr page, for example.

We’ve also added more image position options (see the hastily sketched diagram below!), and you can now force images to fill 1/3rd or 2/3rds of the page. It’s not ground breaking, but hopefully it’ll give you a little bit more flexibility when laying out your pictures.

And we’ve fixed a couple of bugs that some of you had noticed – especially when changing your newspaper’s cover. As always, if you spot anything amiss, or if something doesn’t work for you, just drop us an email.