Your community already said it.
Nobody had time to publish it.
Pulper is a sandbox where members drop in fragments, software assembles a draft, and a small group decides what runs. It comes out as an edition: online, and on paper, with a front and a back.
Community publications do not die from a lack of contributions. They die from a lack of an editor.
Somebody has to gather, sort, cut, lay out, and produce. That work is unpaid and mostly invisible, so it falls to one person and stops when that person gets tired.
That constraint just changed. Software can do the gathering, the clustering, and the layout. What it should never do is the deciding.
Anyone contributes
Speak it, type it, or add a photograph. It is tidied into an entry without anyone having to write an article.
Software assembles
Entries that say related things drift together into islands, and the islands become the articles. It never publishes on its own.
People cut
A small group gets a nearly finished draft, a fixed number of slots, and ninety minutes. The deciding is the point.
An edition is finished, which is the entire point
It comes out, it has an edge, and then it is over. You cannot doomscroll a printed page. Pulper renders a real tabloid newspaper as well as a web issue, from one layout, so what an editor approves on screen is what comes off the press.
- Tabloid, 11 × 17in
- Whatever the community keeps
- Print PDF and a web issue
- Everyone who cut it
Cash’s Crew Rescue, Leoma, Tennessee
A donkey rescue with over a hundred animals and a membership that pays to be part of it. They had the same problem a town has: plenty happening, and nobody with an evening spare to assemble it. Their first edition is above.
115
16
1
Every bounded community has a paper in it.
Towns, neighbourhoods, school districts, and audiences that chose each other.