1) Why does everyone think that they'll have trouble from blogs for republishing? It's huge extra exposure - I feel that you'll get tons of people interested.

2) Go away from publishing blog posts to stories about the bloggers (egos), about how they started their idea, features on getting started, new stories by bloggers, etc. The TOPIC is blogging, not the posts that they've written. Remember that and you have your focus.

3) It's simply not a topic covered by any major magazine

The bad -

1) Magazines are indeed dying. Ad revenues are down and continue to drop.

2) It's ironic to cover such a new media with such an old one and the irony will hit people as they read it.

3) You're going to need a good deal of money to start this up and do circulation.

I'm liking the idea of getting it in an area where the readers may not have access to the internet (specifically plane rides). If I know I'm going to be on the plane for 4 hours and I can't use my laptop for the internet, what better way to calm the panic than by having a magazine full of 10-15 or so blogs that I can read?

i hope u liked the above. And please apologize for using mobile lingo, i am on my mobile phone :)

First, logistics of the physical stuff, thankfully http://magcloud.com/ was recently launched so barrier to entry is considerably lower.

Second, getting the permissions from bloggers to syndicate their content. There's plenty of issues here. Foremost being that most blog content are... well... blog content. They're pithy, short, fluffy, sugary, whatever. If you find higher quality material then you have to pay for it. The established bloggers might not be interested in sharing control of their content.

Do note, however, that I'm a tad bitter when it comes to magazines. I would actually enjoy browsing them if they were not so expensive and the information not so out-dated (and AdBlock were available as a plugin).

1. I think the risk to bloggers not being fine with is overblown. Everybody loves free publicity - and if some of them are not keen, then just drop them. The internet is big enough to find enough interesting content.

2. You can do it in a subscription model. People come to your site and upload their details - preferences etc. You promise them FREE magazines through mail covering their topics periodically. They have nothing to loose. Once you have enough people covered you can get paid for highly targeted ads.

3. Offline model might work well on an on-demand basis. You might want to tie up with local printing shops and send them the formatted material on-demand and always updated. They sense local demand and print based on that. Kind of like a franchisee model.

4. The things to highlight are highly targeted content - ( I have never seen an old school magazine which has more than 15% relevant content to me) and almost up-to-date - (I rarely see a news item in an old school mag which I havent read about online)

Newspapers and magazines are in trouble.

Ad revenues to newspapers nationwide are down double digits this year. The top 100 advertisers have shifted over $ 1 Billion in ad dollars to the web from print and tv.

Going from what is growing to what is dying doesn't make any sense dkokelley.

It seems similar to the format you're imagining and was definitely successful from a quality standpoint. The people who read it, enjoyed reading it.

That's different than saying it was a huge commercial success or that there's so much good writing that you could fill a themed magazine each month.

Like everything else, though, the trick is finding the sweet spot in the market where you can make a buck and provide value to other people.

Who is it worth money to, in order to read your mag? Is it people who are offline -- the internet illiterate? Seems like it would be people looking for good content and not using one of the aggregation engines/sites out there. I'm just guessing, but perhaps that is a pretty tight niche. Something like older people interested in penguin farming but who don't own a computer.

If you can identify/find this niche, then I think you're halfway there. But the idea is only "cool" because in the back of my mind I think there IS such a niche. Beats me what it is, though.

Be aware that your niche may not be readers. It could be magazine providers. For instance, doctor's offices provide magazines for people to read while they wait. There might be a nice niche in there where you could provide content based on the doctor's type of practice and clientele. I'm sure you could identify, for instance, 40,000 foot doctors in the United States. Maybe 20% of them (I know, Chinese Math, but this is back-of-napkin-stuff) would be interested in providing internet "recap" material for those waiting in their office. Eight thousand docs at $40 a year, and you've got a nice niche business for yourself and maybe a couple other people.

The potential problems of your idea to think about:

1) Many blog posts are written in a conversational style, and their purpose is to collect relevant links, comment on something, or spark a discussion. Basically, many blogs can be characterized as conversation platforms - reprinting them to paper will lose this dimension.

2) For reprinting you would need to pick up essay-like blog posts, which have their own merit without reader comments or inbound links. And those are not easy to find, so you can encounter similar issue like "normal" magazines - how to find good content.

3) When we are really talking about magazine (not newspaper), the important parts are also design and photos. You will really need (to pay for) professional photos to make the magazine engaging.

4) distribution - another big pain in the... how will you distribute?

To sum it up, if I would like to make money from blogs, I would rather go to a path of either:

1) republishing the blogs online (might have sense if you add value by grouping interesting stuff together)

2) trying to run blog network myself and share revenue with authors

3) start a blog myself and pay writers per post (or per visitor numbers).

Based on this sample of one, your doubts are justified: These guys went out of business in a bit less than 1 year.

Of course, there's a lot of ways to run a paper or magazine, so maybe a different approach would have worked better. I never found Boston NOW especially interesting... it was mostly wire-service filler with a sprinkling of no-name bloggers.

1. You will need to get permission from every blog author you want to include in the magazine

2. How will you go about finding blogs to include?

3. People that are interested in reading blogs are pretty handy with Google and would be able to find relevant posts themselves.

4. A lot of blogs are very similar to one another and I noticed that any given day you will have a few blogs writing about the same exact thing. A monthly, or even weekly, magazine may not be frequent enough to capture everything of interest to the average blog reader.

An idea you may want to consider is just having "channels" of blogs and then having people sign up for the various "channels" they are interested in, providing them with a daily feed of posts. You can also try including this feed into the Kindle, maybe something can come of that.

The other issue is.. will people used to reading blogs actually read print material of the same type of content? The nature of some of the content might make it outdated and so on

Issue 1 is on sale at Amazon and Lulu. We're looking for essays for Issue 2. If any of you would like to send me an essay formatted correctly on the template, I'm sure I'd love to print it.

Ginger Mayerson

Editor, J Bloglandia

Personally I don't care for the idea. A good accumulator of interesting content is OK, but I don't like physical magazines (they tend to clutter my home and I hardly ever read them anyway). Make it readable on mobile phones, that would be sufficient for me.

I'm thinking more along the lines of businesspeople - "Blogs for the rest of us" you could say. Is there a potential demand for blogs off of the internet?

blog => [annotated, photo] book

Many of my friends are popping out kids lately. They have beautiful pictures and witty comments. I'd like that bound and organized into a book.

the key is to have the magazine be custom made by the subscriber

i.e. outsource the editorial to the user

There is something to be said for the beauty of the printed word - I say go for it. Good luck!