Dan Pacheco, senior manager of digital products at The Bakersfield Californian wrote a blog post over at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab blog about the newspaper's success in building profitable print media products around its Web products.

Despite all of my futuristic ramblings about the virtues of social networks, our niche print products are also doing great, and in some cases better than their associated Web sites. And when it comes to money, the growth in print advertising revenue continues to exceed that of the Web sites.

Let me state this another way. The youth-oriented Bakotopia.com that I started was a pure online-only brand for its first two years, and as a Web site it never made a significant amount of revenue from local advertising. A year ago we debuted Bakotopia magazine - which is like a "best of" rollup of the same content online - and the same businesses who had a million questions about online ads instantly wanted to buy ads.

Then, to my shock, the same people who contributed to Bakotopia were rushing out to get the latest Bakotopia magazine, even when they'd read the same content on their computer screens. We can tell that when a new print edition comes out, they start submitting content online again in the hopes that it will be selected for the next print magazine. This digital-print hybrid behavior is true across all 6 demographic groups we've tried it with, including youth, who are supposedly not interested in print.

Read the rest of Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0 at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab.

Pacheco won a 2008 Knight News Challenge grant to fund his Printcasting project. The goal of the project is to "allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication."