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Bio: I'm Senior Manager of Digital Products at The Bakersfield Californian, where I've spent 4+ years developing new products. The most well-known are social media sites Bakotopia.com, Northwestvoice.com and Bakersfield.com, all of which also have healthy print components.

As of May 14, I'm now working on a new project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (via the Knight News Challenge) called Printcasting. It's an effort to build better bridges between the worlds of user-generated content and print, and extend the concept of citizen journalism to allow anyone to be the actual publisher of a printed product that contains user generated content. We'll do this by letting people map blog RSS feeds to PDFs that appear in templates of their choosing. Local ads will flow in via a similar mechanism, powered by a simple self-serve advertising tool we will build.

Sound a little crazy? So crazy it just might work, even? Well, that's the idea behind the News Challenge. If this sounds interesting to you, join the discussion about it at http://printcasting.com. Review our concepts and plans and weigh in. It will be worth it, because by the terms of the News Challenge grant, at the end of 2 years (maybe even sooner), you will have access to everything we build under an open-source license.