A high-profile attempt to revive the flagging newspaper medium with a new business model has gone belly-up. Chicago-based entrepreneur Joshua Karp announced yesterday that The Printed Blog, a newspaper he founded last year that took all of its content from the Web, is suspending publication indefinitely due to a lack of outside investment capital.  

16 issues of The Printed Blog were printed and 80,000 copies were distributed.

The Printed Blog received a lot of media attention last year, with The New York Times and Wired writing stories about it and BusinessWeek selecting it as one of “America’s Most Promising Startups.”

To create the newspaper, stories and photos were taken (with permission) from local blogs and web publications, laid out, printed, and distributed in four Chicago regions, as well as San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Local advertising was sold on the cheap ($15-$25 per ad).

Though Karp was unable to find success with the venture, he does believe the concept of a printed version of Web content could be viable in the future. “For how ‘crazy’ it was, the concept of The Printed Blog proved to have exceptional merit,” he wrote on his blog. “It won’t surprise me at all to find some of our ideas strategically implemented elsewhere in the months ahead, as I suspect our relatively short run will have some long-term effect on the evolution of newsprint.”