Editor’s note: Gary Kebbel is the Journalism Program Director for Knight Foundation. Below, he talks about Village Soup, which has recently received coverage for reinvigorating print circulation through an online model. Village Soup is using its strength as a digital news, information and advertising platform to preserve and strengthen the information flow in communities in MidCoast Maine.

The company has bought six failing weekly newspapers and plans to strengthen and integrate them into the successful Village Soup online news group. Village Soup owns two other newspapers that it started to reverse-publish content from two local online Village Soup sites.

Village Soup is a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner with a proposal to re-create its successful digital platform in open-source code so that other communities easily could start online news sites.

You can read a recent article on Village Soup and their recent acquisition here; for more, visit the Village Soup site.

What do you think about this “technology version of your basic man-bites-dog story”?