I had dinner with some friends a while ago and we were chatting about what Newspaper Club was up to. The conversation went something like this:
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.
