Joshua Karp had a dream: to create a new print newspaper in 2009 composed of, wait for it, blog posts. Karp launched his startup in January with great fanfare – including coverage from The New York Times and AIMGroup.com.

Now, just over six months and 16 issues later, his The Printed Blog project has fizzled out. The reason: he couldn’t sell enough ads to make a new print operation a viable option.

The model initially seemed sound enough, if kind of on the hobbyist level. Take free blog content (with permission), package that up, sell local ads, and give it all away at train stations. Other hyper-local print pubs exist, of course, though the reporting is original, not repackaged from what can already be found online (for free, we should add).

Each “newspaper” was printed on 11×17 inch sheets of paper. Ad purchase was self-service via the company’s Web site with pricing from $5 to $10 for classifieds and from $15 to $25 for business ads.

Karp started in San Francisco and Chicago. 80,000 print copies and 100,000 downloaded files were published before Karp was forced to shut The Printed Blog down.

Karp says he failed by moving too fast. If he had to do it again, he says, he would pick one train station in one neighborhood and publish only once a week to start.

Or maybe it was just a foolish idea in the first place. Quipped Bob Garfield, when interviewing Karp on National Public Radio in January: “Isn’t it kind of the worst of both worlds? You’ve got blog content minus the immediacy minus commentability minus correctability, all distributed the slow and expensive old-fashioned way at high cost.”

Karp may now go the way of his bigger newspaper peers: after putting six figures into the company through credit card debt, he may need his own personal restructuring plan. Karp said he raised $250,000 from angel investors and was close to raising a similar amount when the axe fell.

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