This is an interesting reverse phenomenon.

We’re used to traditional media being massaged into (‘poured into’ might be the more appropriate term) digital formats to create new distribution feeds.

So I was intrigued by the way a Swiss-based startup, Small Rivers, lets me pull in digital feeds from Twitter and Facebook, and create the look and feel of a newspaper.

Here is a look at my newspaper for today, 28 January, 2011.

http://paper.li/heyangelo

Now I grant, this smacks of a vanity press affair, but if we think slightly outside of the ‘Daily Me’ the ease of generating an aggregation of  content might be give us  different approach to corporate newsletters. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, or pull them in via an RSS reader. These custom news sheets, could be open up a new level of variable data print options, too.

Many years ago I managed a Print On Demand for a Marcom portal. It seemed liked the coolest thing at that time, but seriously lacked the kind of customization I was always asking for. That was because it lived inside a print company –tied to an Indigo machine— and not a digital content aggregator. Today, an organization with a team of writers who create content in a handful of social media channels could collaborate on a newspaper, and not even think of themselves as being in the news business. They could be marketers, researchers, videographers and bloggers whose output is turned into a news channel once a week.

No Indigo required!

In related news:

• The Tablet Newspapers are coming!
• iPad Newspapers via iTunes.