The two-year rollout plan for Printcasting

Our grant is pretty large, but there's a reason for that. Printcasting has three distinct phases over two years, and each of them is incredibly ambitious. Here's a brief outline of how Printcasting will unfold over the next two years.

* Phase 1: 9 months (Start of grant until roughly March / April 2009).
Define, design, build, test and launch the functionality that will make Printcasting possible. Hopefully a lot lf you can participate in beta testing.

* Phase 2: 9 months (Spring 2009 to Fall 2009).
We will market Printcasting in Bakersfield, California, using The Bakersfield Californian's 10 niche social networking sites and eight printed papers for promotion. Our existing print publications will continue to publish (this project is about growing market share, not moving people from one box to another). But we will use ads and deep integration in the sites to encourage people to create their own publications about local issues and interests that are important to them.

There will be a lot of "foot soldier" marketing to local consumers and businesses during this period, managed by a marketing evangelist we will hire in that phase. By the end of this period, we plan to see at least 100 Printcasts in Bakersfield, all with local content and targeted self-serve advertising.

The last major element in this phase is the one that's most exciting to me. I call it the "American Idol" aspect. We will track the number of downloads each Printcast PDF receives. If we see a popular Printcast that we think shows promise for wider distribution, The Bakersfield Californian will print and distribute it in places that are a good match for its target audience. We will also run some of our own sold ads in these publications -- testing out a possible new revenue stream for newspapers or companies/organizations that have printing capabilities. The objective is to get many more niche printed publications out into a local community than we could ever do with only our own resources. The "crowd" will take over the publisher role, and we will simply sell ads into their content in exchange for covering their printing costs.

* Phase 3: 6 months (Winter 2009 to early Spring 2010).
Assuming phases 1 and 2 are a success (which of course they will be! :-), we will sign up 5 partners in other cities and show them how to make Printcasting work in their towns. We'll also fully open-source the technology at this time. This phase is a long way off, but if you think you or your organization may be interested, feel free to identify yourself. If nothing else, we can make sure we involve you in the beta testing phases. There may also be some local market research you could do to help us make sure this product will work well in your city.