Page design at Rue89.com looks a little like what splatters on the side of the carny Tilt-a-Whirl after you load it up with a buncha 10-years olds who've spent the day eating cotton candy and mystery meat hotdogs. I think the boxes up & down the sides are supposed to be clickable ads, but they were inert when I tried them... (click for larger)

The illustration here is of a new French news site that is apparently taking off at Rue89; I can’t decide whether the chaotic design is totally off-putting, or intriguing because it basically violates every rule of page design.  Also, I can’t hear the word “Rue” in a title without flashing to “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Or some B-movie villain twirling a moustache and chortling, “You’ll rue the day, Rex Manly!”

As a bonus, this week I’ve broadened the focus a bit to include some big-picture thinking from some of the unusual suspects; Doc Searls has a post wherein it is posited that what we think of right now as the internet is just a finger pointing in the direction of what this thing is actually going to grow into.  Which should fuel a couple of late-night dorm-room debates, if nothing else…

Jeff Jarvis comes out in favor of doing the exact opposite of erecting paywalls, and dubs it “Hyperdistribution”  http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/08/25/hyperdistribution/ In a nutshell, it’s the idea that news organizations have to splash their content all over the web to try to make up for the lower ad rates by compensating with larger audiences. Nut graf: “I have stood in and before no end of conferences when I or someone else recalls what that student said in The New York Times said a year ago: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Waiting for her to come to our site won’t work – and it especially won’t work if, once a peer links her to our site, she finds a wall. No, we have to take news to her.”

PaidContent.org says that “The Future of News is Scarcity” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-future-of-news-is-scarcity/ and that the mistake newspapers are making is that they are focusing on

A new take on the "trust/verification" function of news organizations.

the wrong problem. Instead of trying to come up with ways to preserve the content model that has worn out, he says that “every abundance creates new scarcities and this is where the news industry must go to make money in the 21st century. The scarcities created (and enabled) by abundant news are interesting stories, thought provoking analysis, conversation and community, and trust/verification. (snip) The successful news company of the future will have to take all this on board and deliver it with a radically lower cost base than this industry is used to.”

From the BBC, an article about what the music industry can teach television (and perhaps newspapers) about fighting with the internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/08/what_can_music_teach_telly.html Sample thoughts of what lessons to draw from the fight the RIAA has waged against its users: “Music biz teach TV? Greed, backwards thinking and lack of respect for the end consumer.” And “How to alienate its customers by treating them all as likely criminals.” One of the links will take you to this page, laying out the numbers of piracy of popular TV and movies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8224869.stm

Over at Media Bullseye, they reference Star Trek villains, in a piece entitled “The News Aggregator-Borg: Resistance is Futile”

Does this mean Arianna Huffington is going to start sporting external cyborg prosthetics? 'Cause that'd be cool...

http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2009/08/the-news-aggregator-borg-resis.html The author, Robert Quigley, is the social media editor for the Austin American-Statesman, and is considered one of the smarter New Media thinkers around.  He says that journalists should take the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to aggregating content in & around the web, pointing to the success CNN had in covering the attacks in Mumbai and unrest in Iran as examples of using the power of aggregation to shape & expand coverage.

Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has a heavy-duty track record, is calling out for business models to pave the way to “the Future of Journalism”: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html Y Combinator has a strong history of funding companies like Reddit, Omnisio and Zenter, and they are looking to dump money on anyone who thinks they have a realistic business model to support news production.  The RFS (“Request for Startups”) is being issued because, according to them, ” Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time. ”

Many people have pointed to the success of Amazon’s Kindle as proof that the future of news & newspapers lies in e-reader and portable devices like that. However, just as many people point out that Amazon demands 70% of the subscription revenues, which is spurring a lot of competitors.  Slate magazine has an article about how to compete with the Kindle http://slate.com/id/2226503 Basically, just look at what all the would-be competitors to the iPod did – and do the exact opposite. Key point: “The service matters more than the device itself. Every time I dismiss the Zune, Creative Zen, or some other MP3 player as an also-ran, I get letters from loyalists who insist that their gizmo far outshines the iPod. Sometimes they’re right-but what they miss is that the iPod isn’t a standalone device. It’s part of a music-delivery ecosystem, the most important feature of which is iTunes.”  Basically, the article lays out what publishers will have to do if they really want to deliver content to e-readers and make a profit.

In that vein, Editor & Publisher asks “Will E-readers Help Save Newspapers?” http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004007001 It appears that the

I tried to look at this on the Kindle. Not so good.

USA Today is hanging a great deal of hope on e-readers, along with a lot of other leading publishers. Nut grafs: “What’s interesting about e-readers is that they will most likely resemble the best aspects of print. The missing link, however, is the advertising model. (snip) Without advertising, newspapers stand very little chance of making any meaningful revenue from the e-reader platform.”  The article goes on at length to address many of the technological, social and business obstacles standing in the way of just eliminating the costs of paper distribution in favor of sending Quark page layouts to a Kindle-like device.  Oh yeah – and here’s a link to the announcement of the Sony device http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685746.html

At the Knight Digital Media Center, the possibility of establishing “membership options” to charge for news is dissected: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/rather_than_a_pay_wall_consider_membership_options/ This borrowed somewhat from Mark Cuban’s suggestions (covered last week) to build a “News Junkie” membership which offers multiple services.  The ASNE chat that this comes out of is located here http://208.88.72.149/tabid/122/Default.aspx (you do need to be a member or paid subscriber to see this – and yes, I recognize the irony inherent in all that).

Speaking of Cuban, he’s off on another unlikely crusade – this week, he’s decided that the internet has been “dead and boring for a while now,” and that two new technologies WebHooks or PubSubHubBub are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!! (emphasis his) http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet-is-about-to-change/ If you can get past the jargon (i.e. “Cloud-based distribution hub”), there might be something there. I’d be interested to see if he’s got any money invested in these, he’s banging the drum so hard. To me, it sounds like just another variation on “push”

Why do these wireframes look like the Tinkertoy stuff I made when I was 6?

technology, where a publisher crams information down the pipe to subscribers before it makes it available on the website. Me? I prefer the AP news alerts I’ve set up on my iPhone. For free. If you’re interested, Impact Media has a slightly more measured description of PubSubHubbub http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk/blog/internet-news/what-is-pubsubhubbub/

If you’ve got the time for a “think piece” about what the long-term solutions to the revenue problems faced by companies trying to migrate their analog businesses to a digital platform, check out Doc Searls (one of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”) in “Thinking outside the Internet box” http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/08/28/thinking-outside-the-internet-box/ Here’s the Keanu Reeves “Whoah!” moment: “I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid “The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites.”

Another “deep thought” piece comes from Fast Company, setting out “Three Possible Economic Models” for the digital future: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/three-possible-economic-models-part-ii This is not directly related to the paid content debate, but it’s some interesting thinking on what kinds of companies are going to be viable in 10 years or so.

A piece on MinnPost talks about how the Journalism Online project launched by Steve Brill to such fanfare, perhaps … overstated … the number of newspapers that have signed on. http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/08/19/10972/star_tribune_not_part_of_online_fee_venture Apparently, the Star-Tribune and Pioneer-Press have not, in fact, signed up.

This is a post from last week that I’ve just gotten around to including – Alan Mutter writes “Why aren’t we paying for news?” http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-arent-we-paying-for-news.html Be sure the check out the comments section – there are notes there from some papers that recently either went behind, or emerged from paywalls. In the article, Mutter blames fear of change as the reason that everyone is talking about paid content, but very few people are actually doing it – yet. “Publishers can’t figure out how to charge for content without throttling their web traffic and the online advertising that comes along with it. (snip) Individual publishers are afraid to move unilaterally to begin charging for content but also unable to coalesce as a group around a common philosophy and platform for doing so.” Part 2 of Mutter’s epic trilogy is here: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-stops-publishers-from-charging-for.html And he winds it all up with: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-publishers-can-make-web-content-pay.html

Journalism.co.uk takes on the issue of free vs. paid content by stating that “Free is just another cover price” http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/08/

In the little time I've spent here, I actually quite like this scrappy little paper. Damn shame Rupert kicked it to the curb...

27/comment-free-is-just-another-cover-price/ They dissect the real reasons behind the demise of Murdoch’s thelondonpaper freesheet, and conclude that “thelondonpaper isn’t closing because the model

was flawed, but because News International either couldn’t make it work in the current economic climate or was unwilling to give a paper, still in its infancy, the time it needed to become commercially viable.”

The Newspaper Innovation blog writes at greater length about thelondonpaper, and whether this is really the death knell for the freesheet model http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/index.php/2009/08/24/freesheet-no-longer-viable-model-and-other-myths/

For readers interested in what’s happening with the whole “let’s regulate that crazy, dangerous internet” debate in Europe, the European Journalism Centre has a long post up about all the laws being debated around The Continent that might affect journalists http://www.ejc.net/about/blog/media_laws_spur_summer_debate_autumn_actions_likely/ The proliferation of laws designed to criminalize filesharing shows that RIAA and MPAA lobbyists are still very much on the job.

King Kaufman gets a little lathered up by the column in the LA Times that I linked to last week, writing that “We must kill press freedom to save it” http://open.salon.com/blog/future_of_journalism/2009/08/25/we_must_kill_press_freedom_to_save_it Somehow, I don’t think that managing editors are going to be going around holding up a Zippo to the printing presses anytime soon, but OK, he’s upset. In fact, about halfway through he gets into an imaginary conversation, which quickly turns into what the Brits call a slanging match. Viz: “Have you met the people, Tim? I hear they’re lovely once you get to know them. They’re the ones who have been saying for years, with their actions, “If you charge us for online news, we will abandon you. We do not support newspapers or anyone else charging for online news except for news that’s highly specialized.”  King’s basic point is that by trying to form a consortium to crush internet competition, the news industry is in fact acting against the public interest, rather than for it.

Trying to get users off their asses, to participate? Well, hot-button issues like the "Skank" blogger case are a good way to start...

In a slightly more constructive piece, Dan Gillmor, one of the authors of We the Media, announced that he is launching Mediactive, a site dedicated to getting the audience more involved in the news, but transforming them into “active users” rather than “passive consumers.”  The announcement piece is here http://mediactive.com/2009/08/24/moving-along-mediactive/

The Nieman site has a piece up on how the New York Times is monetizing its journalists by offering online courses in the Knowledge Network, to be taught by Times columnists http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/newspapers-find-a-new-way-to-monetize-their-journalists/

Two journalists are attempting to sell “kits” that would allow recently laid-off journalists to establish hyper-local news sites http://www.jiltedjournalists.com/News.html The effort is being called Dailytown.com, but the kits don’t seem to offer much beyond what a savvy online journalists could do with a custom WordPress install.

Interesting experiment – reminds me of WindyCitizen.com.

A couple of French startup web-only news sites called Rue89 and Demotix, are experimenting with multiple unconventional revenue streams,

but agree that “paid content is a dead end” http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/03/04/the-future-of-online-journalism-according-to-rue89-and-demotix/

And finally, just for reference, the Columbia Journalism Review sets out the difference in value between a print and an online reader – a print reader generates about $709 a year, while an online reader only generates $46 http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/post_11.php

Just a quick late-night hit while I prepare to shoot an interview tomorrow at KCET.

I’ve spent much of the last couple years of my life trying to come up with case studies, strategies, training programs, tools and mash-ups of all the aforementioned, all aimed at illuminating a clear pathway for the newspaper industry to follow to save itself from “The Crisis.”  My last big project was the Audience Planbook for the NAA, which was supposed to lay out a step-by-step process to building new businesses that take advantage of the technological innovations that have changed the way we get news.

I’m not so delusional and narcissistic as to think that I have some revealed, holy wisdom that can turn around the momentum of a massive, multi-billion dollar industry by myself.  But I had hoped that maybe my voice, along with the voices of those who I recruited (shanghaied? hoodwinked?) into writing chapters in the Planbook for me, would spur some kind of change.  This hope has grown harder to sustain in the last couple of months.

And then there’s a straight brass-knuckles shot to the chops like this, on the Xark! blog:

What will these media executives do when that reality hits them?
When these debt-burdened chains, stripped of journalistic talent by a
decade of profiteering, their web traffic reduced by 60 percent by
their paid-content follies, their pockets emptied by the cost of the
proprietary paywall systems offered by Journalism Online LLC and other
opportunistic vendors, what will they do?

Will they buck up and
go back out into the fray with fresh ideas and leadership? Or will they
fold, casting bitter eulogies to their own imagined glories as they
exit the stage?

The chances of them adapting well to another
failure are dubious. Remember, these are the same people who have acted
as if there were no other options, even when those options were
practically gift-wrapped for them. As if Newspaper Next never happened. As if commerce hubs and C3 and all the interesting, exciting ideas that are practically everywhere today do not exist.

They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And in many cases, they’re literally paid not to get it.

America’s
journalism infrastructure – from corporate giants to non-profit
foundations like the American Press Institute and the Newspaper
Association of America – is funded by dying companies. So when you hear
about efforts to save newspapers (and, by extension, journalism),
understand that answers that don’t return the possibility of double-digit profits and perpetual top-down control aren’t even considered answers. They’re not even considered.

They’ll do anything to survive… so long as it doesn’t involve change.

Click on over and read the rest of the piece. And then go to the comments section – because the action is always in the comments – and check out the long, impassioned note from someone trapped in a sinking newsroom.

Do not count me – yet – amongst those who hope that, well, now that it’s (allegedly) become clear that newspapers are fated to die, then let’s just get this over with.  I still think that they can turn things around – the recent LA Times excellent Mapping LA project is a great step towards building the kind of hyperlocal database and information exchange network that could take off and fulfill all those dreams about the possibilities of digital local coverage.

While I am all for the development of the new content & biz models touted in Xark!, I don’t think they are ready – yet – to step into the line of fire and take over in collecting and distributing the information that we need to be able to function effectively as a society. Hell, as a civilization.

The anger in the screen on Xark! is palpable, and I will cop to feeling it on more than one occasion.  But I am not yet ready to give in to it. to throw in the towel and just lean back and toast marshmallows over the flames.

Curmudgeons skip directly to 7:50 or so, for the juicy bits. If you are in a crowded place, please allow at least 10 feet of safety space in all directions for when your head explodes.

This is the first part of the rather incendiary keynote speech by Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.com, at the OMMA Hollywood 2009 conference. The keynote’s title is “Advertising, Riots, Twitter, Facebook and the Depression,” and in it, Calacanis cheers the death of newspapers and “Old Media,” and lauds paid search as the “most powerful advertising medium ever created.”

Not coincidentally, Mahalo is a paid search company.

Along the way, Calacanis also trashes social media advertising, showing screenshots of drunken parties to “prove” that all advertising on this platform is unwelcome, intrusive and doomed to die.

Highlights:

“Gosh, newspapers didn’t see this coming, did they? I mean, the newspapers were reporting on their own demise for a decade. And they still couldn’t change it.

It’d be as if you’re the Titanic and you haven’t even left port yet.  And they’re like, “By the way, there’s a lot of icebergs to the north.” And you’re like “OK, thanks.” A day later, it’s “Icebergs are still there.”

They’re like, “Full speed ahead! To the icebergs, as quick as possible!”

They did nothing. They deserve to die. Don’t cry for newspapers, it’s great that they go out of business, because new things can take their place that are better. Much better.

(snip)

Don’t cry for journalism.  Rejoice, because a new journalism is being built, today, as we speak. And it’s going to be better than the last one.

(snip)

“They deserve to go away. Goodby, good riddance.”

The keynote was obviously designed to provoke a reaction (more than one conference attendee muttered “linkbait” after listening), and it certainly did that, as every other session after this opened with the panel trying to refute Calacanis’ claims. I’ll post John Battelle‘s rather more measured keynote tomorrow.

I have a few reactions to this, and I’ll post some more with the other three videos in this series.  But to start with, the notion that newspapers did nothing at all about the internet is absolutely false.  The industry has tried to engage with online since before there was an internet (you’ve probably all seen those videos from San Francisco, showing the early paper over video screen tech of the 80s). The problem is, that the battlefield on which newspaper have been trying to engage has shifted radically.  First, it was the fight between portals – Prodigy vs. CompuServe vs. AOL.  Then it was Netscape vs. Internet Explorer. Yahoo vs. Google. Facebook vs. MySpace.

Newspapers are a $50 billion a year industry, with tremendously expensive production and distribution infrastructure, grown up over centuries.  If the Tribune chain had just splashed kerosene over the presses back in ’92, and declared in the flickering light that they were shifting every penny over into becoming a competitor to AOL … well, they probably still woulda wound up about where they are.  But along the way, there would have been tremendous dislocation – millions of readers not getting information.  Millions of readers turning to competitive print products that would have made billions.

So the newspaper industry has tried incremental solutions. Right up to this point, where, as we see in Seattle & Denver (despite what Jason sneers at, there are plenty of people who want to read what he dismisses as “boring” stories about local government, taxation, schools and crime) the papers are being forced to migrate to the web under conditions that are nothing short of brutal.

It’s all very well and good to talk about the exciting news products that are “being built today, as we speak.”  But I know many of the people that work at these small, struggling web news outfits. They are up against the wall, just trying to keep the broadband bill paid.  They are not going to be able to devote thousands of man-hours to digging through documents and making connections, and going out and doing original research (i.e. interviewing people to get things that are not archived on the magical, all-seeing web). Maybe this will be solved someday – but it ain’t the case today, and that’s when we need it.  We need this kind of enterprise reporting, or this country is going to implode, because society is angry at the economic collapse, and nobody’s really been able to dig deep enough to explain it. At least, not in a way that holds up & makes sense for more than a month or so…

If I sound like a bit of a curmudgeon here, well, it’s hard to watch this and not get a bit grouchy. I agree with Jason on the broad points – that Big Media has sinned, and is paying the price; that ad dollars are shifting to where the consumer eyeballs are, and that this trend is only accelerating.

But dude? Less of a gleeful grin.

While the concept of a bailout for newspapers (and allegedly for good journalism) seems attractive at first blush, I fear that in practice, the billions in bailout funds would suffer the same fate as the billions bestowed upon the banking industry.

That is, they would be swiftly pocketed in the form of “well-earned bonuses,” and only a few crumbs would make it down to the level where the money would actually do any good.  While I’m not in the “burn baby, burn” camp the way many other digital triumphalists have been (and there’s at least a faint whiff of that hereabouts), I think that dumping fat stacks on media conglomerates will not solve the underlying problems of the crumbling of business models.

Now then – a Manhattan Project (of sorts) to build solid business models to support quality journalism? That would = the hoary “teaching a man to fish” paradigm.

I know faith in The Invisible Hand is in short supply these days (and where it can be found, it’s usually being in the stocks in the town square, being pelted by posters on Angryjournalist.com), but the fact is that there is a demand for something to perform the function of information dissemination that newspapers do/have done. If the Drug Wars have taught us anything, it is that where there is a demand, and money is attached to that demand, there will correspondingly be a supply.

This is all growing out an essay on the op-ed page of the NY Times and chittering in the Twiterverse, as the nervous journalists see the vultures staring downward, and big guy in the hood with the scythe striding through the newsroom.

By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.

Well, allow me to respond to that one.

Not to get all Reagan on you, but that is complete and utter madness. Newspapers are so important, so crucial to our lives, that it is the duty & obligation of the government to preserve them?

Wow.

OK, it’s a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex.  You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism – yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.

Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve. Allison Fine is onto this issue:

So, the fundamental premise of the need to endow newspapers and preserve them at public expense is that false information exists on the Internet? Of course it does, as it does on TV, on the radio (should we also consider endowing Rush?) in magazines, and in many, many newspapers. Which media would the authors like to choose as being least likely to contain false information? And which medium do they think did the best job of  bringing the lies and corruption of the Bush Administration to light — hint, don’t look at newspapers, Josh Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo website would be a much better bet.

So, the fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable is specious. But that isn’t my biggest issue with the article. It is the naive assumption from those outside of the nonprofit sphere that 1) nonprofit status is intended for companies that don’t have a viable business model, and 2) raising billions of dollars in endowment funds is doable, particularly in today’s economy.

If anything, the effect of billions spent on preserving the newspaper format as it is, without any changes, will mean that we’ll all be getting print products dumped on our doors that are increasingly ad-free.  Yeah, there will be a number of advertisers who will still be there because the eyeballs are there.  But the trends of readership of mass print products are not heading up (niche and community newspapers are another story).

Worst of all, the preservation of a business model that is clearly no longer functional will suck the oxygen out of the room for the products that should (and are, in some cases) being developed to do the job that newspapers have done.  Artificially propping up newspapers in their current form will stifle the innovation in the marketplace, and long-term, only make the inevitable collapse worse.

We’re kinda seeing that take place in the real estate and credit markets right now. The government artificially propped up the economy for eight years with crazy spending and stupid low interest rates.  Instead of hard work & ingenuity to produce real growth, it was Free Money Day Every Day, as real-estate speculation in areas like Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Miami & L.A. led to the “$30,000-a-year millionaire” who made $10,000 in arcane mortgage kickbacks every time he/she signed his/her name to a loan document.  The results of that are the global economic meltdown we see occurring right now.

Meanwhile, driven by the market economics, ESPN is starting to experiment with setting up a disaggregated local blog network to cover sports at a granular level.

ESPN sees the writing on the wall. In their industry they need strong stories to promote sports and strong sports to drive interest to their stories.  A fan that is underserved by his newspaper is less interested in following his team on ESPN.  Additionally, there is big advertising money for ESPN if it can become the resource for local sports.

This is a long term proposition, however. Even the mighty ESPN cannot yet afford to hire 30 beat writers to cover each NBA team. Instead it is working towards its goal by teaming with independend bloggers in a win/win/win proposition.  The bloggers have a chance at monetizing their efforts, ESPN can become the central resource it wants to become and fans can get the information they want as a new, viable local sports media business model starts to thrive.

First was this bit from the Economist, about how professionals are starting to really flock to online social networks:

On LinkedIn, the market leader, members have been updating their profiles in record numbers in recent weeks, apparently to position themselves in case they lose their jobs. The two most popular sites, LinkedIn and Xing, have been growing at breakneck speed and boast 29m and 6.5m members respectively. And, in contrast to mass-market social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, both firms have worked out how to make money.

The article goes on to raise two interesting points 1) if Facebook can start becoming friendlier to business users it might start actually making money, and 2) professionals are shit-scared about the economy and looking at social networks as great “Career Insurance” places to schmooze people you met once at a conference, snarfed their biz card and never had a use for.old friends.

Next to this was a piece from BusinessWeek, another in the seemingly endless series of kidney punches from the biz community about how newspapers are doomed, done for, goners, forks stuck into them and vultures already descending.

So who would profit from a disappearing newspaper? Local TV and cable, for starters. The city daily is still the biggest single media entity in virtually any market. Its main pitch to advertisers is brutally simple: We have more craniums to dent with your message than anyone else.

(snip)

Which brings me to a disquieting conclusion. The obvious venues for all this displaced journalistic energy are a gazillion new independent online endeavors, be they individual blogs or bigger efforts like MinnPost.com. They will make for fascinating media ecosystems within individual cities, and some will become hits. It is much less certain whether ad dollars will follow. Ultracheap classifieds site craigslist has simply “destroyed revenue,” [emph. mine - dlf] says Dave Morgan, a former newspaper executive who founded behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and revenue that no longer exists won’t shift to new ventures. Others point out that key newspaper advertisers—local auto dealers and realtors, say—already have many outlets for ads online, not least of which are their own Web sites or national sites such as Cars.com that serve up targeted ads.

For those sensing untapped riches in ads from pizzerias and dry cleaners, well, good luck, says Borrell. “Local is a very unorganized and dirty business,” he says. “People look at local as this one-ton gorilla, but in fact it’s 2,000 one-pound monkeys.” And no publisher can afford to sit down with a city’s 2,000 small fry to sell each a $50 ad. The bitterest pill of all for newspaper denizens is that, while nature abhors a vacuum and all that, in this case there may not even be one left to fill.

Yowch. So newspapers will all just die, and by this point in time, they’ve become so irrelevant and useless that nobody will even really notice that they’re gone?  Sheesh.  Start passing out the pistols & hemlock in America’s newsrooms, eh?

El Tiempo

I’m going to have to disagree with this nihilistic conclusion.  Yeah, I know the local online niche ad market is impossibly fragmented, and it would cost a publisher more to pay an ad sales rep than that person would produce in revenue.  Solution: don’t pay the ad rep.  Do what El Tiempo in Bogota calls “auto-pauta,” or DIY ads.  BTW, I really do recommend you click through on that link to El Tiempo.  They are one of the smartest operations out there, they are making piles of cash off internet ads, and they are constantly (ruthlessly, relentlessly) refining their approach.

Moreover. When you look at what the social networking sites are really selling their users, you start to come to the conclusion that what a local newspaper – correction: what the local newspaper of the future – offers can be a lot more compelling.

Think about what the users really want from these social net sites.  Chatting with friends, yeah sure. Blowing your own horn in a socially acceptable way, yessiree. Looking for the next step up on the ladder? Well, yeah … but the problem with a lot of the listings on the social net services is that they are from all over the place. Yeah, you can filter them. But we all know that most of the really good jobs are never spamadvertised like this.  We find them through referrals – which is where recruiters/headhunters come in. And local friends & business acquaintances.

One of the fastest-growing areas on LinkedIn is the “Question” section, where pros reach out to other pros in their groups, and ask something that’s on their mind.  They’re trying to have conversations.

That should be taking place at a newspaper site.  Sooner or later, it will.  Either the papers will replicate it and include it in their future selves, or they will do a Borg takeover.  The paper is a much more logical place for this kind of activity – it includes access to the reference materials from the past, a panel of trained experts to step in and help moderate the discussions, or kick new discussions off with provocative questions, and a huge archive of relevants facts and materials that can be used to make the conversations that much more valuable.

Example: One of the questions I’m participating in on LinkedIn is where to put your money now that the market is tanking so badly. There are some very smart market analysts chiming in here. But it would be nice to be able to have a window/panel open on the screen showing the various stock tables, and perhaps links to content locally that makes the point that some foreign markets are going to be able to ride out this storm, while others just get crushed.

The fact that biz users, those who have education & disposable income, have had to range far afield in search of information that they need to use in their careers, is an indictment of the lack of creative thinking at newspapers.   It will take time and effort to reverse the momentum … because the very users that papers covet most are abandoning papers.