reverse publishing

The Public Press www.public-press.org is a concept for the next-generation daily newspaper. We're organizing a group of journalists, technologist and nonprofit managers to organize a new newsroom for the San Francisco Bay Area that would produce a Web site, daily print newspaper and collaborations with nonprofit news-gathering organizations locally and nationally. We've built a simple Drupal 6 site that we will be growing in the coming weeks and months, and we plan to start publishing on the Web using this platform.

Three things have conspired recently to make me revive this concept, which I haven't worked on for a few months.

1) Lisa asked What would you do with [grant] money?

2) Then she mentioned the Tearsheet idea to Amy Gahran of the Poynter Institute. (Who previously published an interview with NoD member and Knight recipient Benjamin Melançon).

Here at BlufftonToday.com, I have a little bit of a different situation. We don't extract from print to post online (we have a separate online edition soon to be substantially upgraded), but we do want to reverse publish all we can.

To ease the process for the print news designers, my friends at Morris Digital Works have provided me with tearsheet.module, still in development. It exports items of your choosing based on certain selection criteria into a plain text output suitable for copying and pasting into design software. It is currently implemented only for events.