The Flying Pickle

North America's most venerable print-it-yourself newspaper experiment came to an end this week, with the Toronto Star reportedly abandoning (E&P) its afternoon PDF TorontoPM on grounds that "time moves on, technology advances, and new, improved products replace old ones". By contrast, I heard a tale today from New Zealand of a community blog and news site, The Flying Pickle, that had been put together by local residents as the "Voice of Korokoro, Maungaraki and Normandale Community" (no, me neither). The interesting thing about the Pickle is that so freely available are the tools to do this sort of thing that they already have a 2,500-circulation web-to-print edition powered by Zetaprints that gets pushed through every door in the community. 

One door closes and another opens. Possibly it isn't viable to offer a print-it-yourself newspaper for the whole of Toronto (which reminds me I haven't heard much about the PDF experiments of the Guardian or the Telegraph since they launched a year or so ago, and the FT's was quietly abandoned without comment). But as I was saying the other day, the sort of scale a fully funded company works to isn't necessarily the sort of scale that a local web-to-print UGC news enterprise needs. If your community is just 2,500 (apparently only 40% of whom in the Pickle's catchment area are broadband-enabled) it might just now be viable to run this sort of enterprise using volunteers, the occasional local ad and the free tools that are lying around online.