The Italian newspaper Il Riformista will begin a special blog supplement next week with a four page printed section featuring articles from bloggers.
Italian bloggers who publish via the Il Cannocchiale system, which is closely associated with the paper, will have the option of marking their posts for submission to the newspaper.
As far as I know this is the first time any newspaper in the world has produced such an initiative. Il Riformista, which is a centre-left publication, is not a big circulation paper but this certainly seems a smart idea in terms of building on their community of readers.
For the bloggers I would think this is a good incentive to come up with interesting and original material. I’d be interested what the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Matt Welch think about this.
I can’t see such an approach taking off with bigger papers although I reckon newspaper websites, who after all are in the link business, might begin to run more regular reviews of weblogs.
