Brilliant or idiotic......

Found this over at Brand Flakes for Breakfast and thought it was worth a share.

So my peeps and homies (I am Dutch for those who don't know me) at The Amsterdam Weekly have apparently put a call out to its readers to pitch in and buy the editorial space for the next three issues.  Looks like their investors have retired and cash has started to become a scarcity.

Right.......so how does this work?

Well, each page of the paper has been divided into 204 blocks each block costing €5.

They plan on only printing what has sold. So, if you pay for the cover, they will print the cover.  So on and so forth.

So what do you think?

If your paper, weekly or magazine was in trouble would you pitch in and make sure that it stayed afloat?  Would you really care?

Briliant or idiotic?  I gotta give em credit for throwing it out, but I tend to agree with the comments over at Brand Flakes.  I would be pissed if this was what made it to my door step.

Would love to hear what happens.  Good luck.

Comments

[stevenmc]

Fortunately we've not come up against any anger. Mainly we've been receiving strong support from across the board. But we did dedicate an entire issue to explaining the concept before going ahead with the idea for the following three issues: http://issuu.com/amsterdamweekly/docs/amsterdamweekly_issue13_27march

We explained why we needed money and that if we don't get it quickly, we'll be gone soon. However, just asking for money probably wouldn't have been enough in this case. As has been mentioned on the other blog, it's tough to convince people to pay for something that's usually free. But by taking away content, we allow for two things. Firstly the readers who do care get to translate that to the physical product. They know which parts of the content they bought and they get to have their name in there, like a badge-of-honour. As for those who didn't buy, we always felt it important to remind them how drastic this is and that there are consequences of our situation. Initially that starts with them losing a piece of a story or part of the weekly agenda tips. If they still don't wish to pay, well, further down the line they'll possibly lose it all.

The whole concept came about in a very short space of time. Late on in that period, we considered softening it in some way. But in the end, nothing else had the same visual impact and felt as right to us. It's been a scary and exciting ride with only our own gut instincts to rely on.

And actually, the paper looks rather beautiful in its broken form - more so in print than online. It may be less readable (we do release a full pdf online) but it comes out like an eye-catching puzzle that you can still spend time with.

[Matt Haverkamp]

Thanks for stopping by the Perm and the follow up. I just gotta congratulate for having the stones to even launch this campaign. Most would just pack up and call it a day.

Good luck. I will stay tuned to see what happens.