Wednesday, May 19th 2010
Back in the early days, when we had no idea whether this was a good idea or not, we took a lot of comfort from the nice things that Jeremy at magCulture said about us. He seemed to like what we were doing and he knows a lot about publishing.
So we were really delighted when Jeremy used us to make a 4th Anniversay Best of magCulture Paper. And even more delighted that it’s for sale. We really like it when we can help create something that people can sell, it’d be brilliant if we could become a platform for other little businesses.
Anyway – you can get a copy of the magCulture here, and you should. It’s only £4 in the UK. (£5 for Europe, £7 for the rest of the world.)
(pictures from magCulture, hope that’s OK)
Friday, May 14th 2010
Our friends at BERG launched Schooloscope this week. It’s a lovely piece of work, sweeping up all sorts of impenetrable data about schools and making it glanceable, readable and accessible. You can tell they’ve really worked hard on the details and, having glanced over their shoulders a little while they’ve been making it, we can attest to how they’ve worked to turn inherently judgmental and binary data into something fair and nuanced. Schooloscope’s perspective is that of someone neutral and informed, it’s therefore a brilliant tool for comparing schools, for exploring a terrain that’s completely baffling to many parents. It’s a superbly intelligent platform for data.
If you’re already connected to a school though, the portrait they offer of your school probably won’t feel adequate. Deliberately neutral government data will never do justice to what someone involved with a school feels about that particular school. All of which struck me because we’ve just printed a newspaper for All Souls School in Westminster – an unashamedly un-neutral paper celebrating all that’s good about the school – aimed at recruiting more kids and parents.
It’s a lovely piece of work and made me realise that Newspaper Club is a platform too and perhaps an especially good platform for people with particular points of view. (More pictures)
And, it should be noted, both platforms are supported by 4iP.
Monday, May 10th 2010
One of the many surprises at Newspaper Club is seeing what people do with our platform.
For example a few people have got in touch about making a newspaper for their wedding, which is a brilliant idea. Here are a few pictures from the newspaper Iain and Sophie made and sent out to all their guests.
Sunday, May 9th 2010
We’ve set up a Newspaper Club Flickr account and we’ve filled it with some wonderful pictures of newspapers we’ve printed taken by the superb Russell Duncan.
We’ve also set up a Flickr Pool where you can add any photos you may have of Newspaper Club papers.
We probably don’t talk enough on this blog about some of the gorgeous papers you’ve created. That’s all about to change as over the next few posts I’ll showcase some of them.
Monday, April 26th 2010
We’re half way through a two day Newspaper Club Away Day session.
We have all come together to discuss how we improve Newspaper Club. Things that have arisen from the Beta, working out what features we should add and just generally discussing what we do next. It’s nice to pause and take stock.
When I say ‘we’ there are five of us now as we’re pleased to introduce two additions to the Newspaper Club team. Anne Ward and Gareth Williams. Anne might be familiar from I Like, she’ll be handling Customer Relations. Gareth has a background in finance and running a large successful business and he’ll be handling Business Development.
Often as a business grows the founders find out very quickly where their skills lie and where the gaps are. A mistake people often make is thinking they can do everything themselves. That’s a trap we’re determined not to fall into. Anne and Gary have already made a significant difference to our small team and we’re excited about working with them on the stuff we’ve been talking about today.
Friday, April 23rd 2010
One of the joys of working for Newspaper Club is being able to help lots of beautiful physical things appear in the world. Lots and lots:
Protein Journal is “part magazine, part trend report, part marketing brochure”, which they’re producing every couple of months to give an insight into their doings and thinkings. And it looks great:
They’ve put the PDF online for you to browse, but if you ask them nicely, they might send you the real thing.
Friday, April 16th 2010
One of the many joys of working at Newspaper Club is getting a chance to see beautiful things like this.
Andy Smith is an Illustrator and he’s chosen Newspaper Club to made a showcase of his work.
He’s printed a limited edition run of 500 newspapers featuring 12 illustrations, one shown on each page. Gorgeous.
You can find out more about Andy here.
Should you wish to print 500 colour newspapers it will cost you £500 inc VAT and delivery.
Thursday, April 1st 2010
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.
Saturday, March 20th 2010
Last week we were in Austin, Texas to speak at SXSW Interactive. We also went to hear other talks, to meet up with friends and to investigate taking Newspaper Club to America.
We thought it would be a good idea to print a newspaper while we were there and seeing as our panel was at the end of the week we thought we would include content generated during the conference.
Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing contained articles kindly written for us by Matt Jones, Bobbie Johnson, Clay Shirky, Warren Ellis, Dan Hill and James Bridle.
Chris Heathcote made a Buzz Word Bingo for our panel, David McCandless sent us a beautiful infographic, we included some Noticings from the week and we added a Walking Paper for Austin.
But my favourite bit was the centre spread. Foursquare and SimpleGeo very kindly gave us some anonymous checkin data from which Michal from Stamen made this gorgeous map of foursquare checkins during the conference. If you checked in on Monday, this was in the centre spread on Tuesday afternoon.
To make the newspaper we found this little nook inside the conference centre and set up a mini BRIG studio for two days.
The panel seemed to go really well and people seemed to like the newspaper which we handed out at the end.
Because our panel had Spime in the title, Bruce Sterling himself turned up. Luckily Twitter seemed to think he liked it.
One of the things we spoke about was analogue friction. Problems you encounter when making stuff in the real world as opposed to just on the web. We experienced this first hand as we neared the deadline for our newspaper just as Ev Williams started his keynote.
First they nicked Michal’s chair.
Then Engineering started to feel the pressure.
Then we tried to upload the files just as all the @ev’s brought the conference wifi to a halt. Eventually we had to go outside and upload via Michal’s MiFi.
We made it just in time.
We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped with the paper and thanks to everyone who came along to the panel.
Tuesday, March 16th 2010
While the Newspaper Club team is Stateside, business continues as normal (more or less) back at the UK ranch. We got a nice bit of publicity on BBC News the other day. Media tycoons wanted: Make your own newspaper gives a pithy overview of how Newspaper Club started and what it has achieved so far. Ben Hammersley, Editor at Large of Wired magazine describes us as “stupidly exciting” which is nice, and our Russell (Sales & Marketing) claims that print isn’t dead. If you’re wondering what we’re all about it’s a good place to start.
We’ve had a lot of enquiries because of it (hooray!) and are printing and quoting like mad. If you’ve asked for an invitation we’ll get one out to you as soon as we can - within 48 hours or so. If you’ve been waiting any longer than that please check your spam folder as chances are it’s in there.
Tuesdays are Print Deadline Days (2pm to be precise) so hurry, hurry if you want to make this week’s run. If you don’t, don’t worry – there’ll be another one along next week.