Newspapers used to be owned by people who loved the business. They existed to bring the news, to be shared, to be talked about, to be saved. To clip and tuck away, to frame, to hold on to an event, a milestone. People trusted it, identified with it. Loved it or hated it but felt it was their own. The owners were content to make a profit and keep the news paper running. Not to rape it for all its worth then sell to the next guy who didn’t give a hoot.

It’s a living breathing thing. Not cereal, not a car, not a new athletic shoe.

Get the greed out of the industry. It sickens me.

This means you have to focus, put energy in the things that make you strong and syndicate the things that cost you energy with valuable and equal partners.

Are newspapers the new magazines? With a release span of once a week magazines often have to write around the news, or make it. With todays (new) media consumption a newspaper reporting the news is often like a magazine. You already knew about it.

Newspapers have to focus on the things they are good at, this will make them more valuable, give direction and identity.

Most newspapers cater not too often to their local readers. When I pick up my paper, I am oftern reading about someone ‘out there’ — great, but is there nothing worthy to be written about the local business man/woman in my township? Going online and embracing local communties — and there are so many vibrant ones, would be a way to go to keep our newspapers going.

Short of that…. old style journalism dies! The words are “new media” multi-platforms, and that interprets innovation and survival.

http://www.vernasmith.blogspot.com

Somehow, expenses will have to be trimmed to stay inside of revenues. Just as it didn’t make sense to pay people to manually transcribe words once movable type was invented, it no longer makes economic sense to print words that can be viewed electronically.

The traditional newspaper model targets people based on where they live, but this needs to change: “You just canÂ’t target people by places, you target people by who they are.”…

If I owned a newspaper, I’d go out and do some reporting the old fashioned way: By dressing up in a Batman outfit and scaring the bejeezus out of my sources until they sang like a canary! And then, obviously, blog about it back in the Bat Cave.

What - Too much?

Do NOT go Gannett and focus on aggregating local tidbits like event calendars and photo galleries. Individuals and groups do that better than a company ever will. Instead, seek out these ground and find ways to incorporate their content — on their terms — into yours.

Work with organizations — businesses, non-profits, government agencies — to make it easier to publish their own news frequently, and co-sponsor it under your brand umbrella.

Use Internet feeds better. They’re not just for updates anymore. Look at a few Yahoo! Pipes applications as illustrations.

You have to keep the print element in there somehow because there’s still money to be made — a lot, really, even if it is downhill — but minimize the costs of production and distribution with small-format, convenient, 3-to-5-a-week niche publications — event guides, water-cooler news, local business news, local entertainment news, local government news, and broad-scoped opinion.

If it’s duplicated elsewhere on the Internet, link to it unless you have something to add. The wires can be incredibly useful if they’re localized — most papers miss this point.

Every paper should have a parallel entity — lawrence.com to the LWJ, for example — community-driven, youth-targeted, mobile-accesible, informative and entertaining site filled with useful who-what-where-when information.

The broadsheet should die, completely. People don’t like it? Carriage-drivers learned how to use cars; you can learn to read something that’s a different shape. Stop coddling codgers and tell them to get over it. No industry carved out its long-term survival by clinging tighter to a shrinking, deprecating market.

People who have gone online and aren’t coming back. A robust Web site for readers who have high standards about how a Web site should work and feel. Perhaps with “skins” at a click of the button for just the text, or just the bloggers, or Web 2.0 goodness, or irresistible multimedia, or streams and feeds.

People who love the feel of paper with a cup of coffee. A Sunday newspaper with classic, golden-age journalism, “the traditional newspaper for traditional newspaper readers.” Weekday papers, especially street sales, would be lean and efficient, for picking up in the coffee shop or pizza parlor while waiting for the order.

Partisans who want a paper that cares about the things they care about. Give them The Daily Olbermann, already. Or The Morning Steyn.

Why won’t people acknowledge that the incredible, boring, un-thinking, jejune, extreme left-wing bias of the print media is what did it in. No thinking person wants to read the same arrogant pseudo-intellectual day after day after day.

Face it. The content of the news paper sucks. Sure people will read it FOR FREE, but no one with half a mind will PAY for it.

I spend a lot of time reading from a screen. Not only is it my job but I read stuff I couldn’t find or find the time for or afford if hardcopy was the only option.

Reading the hardcopy paper is much faster than reading it online (RSS or not). In square inches or pixels/dots there’s no electronic display (certainly not one I can lift or take to the can with me) that comes close to what fits on a printed page. That day may come but it’s not in sight now.

There are many of us who like getting the paper. I skip the national stuff that I’ve already seen on the TV or online. I look at the local ads but never the national (or car) ads. My daily is part of a big group so they print stories from the group writers. I hardly ever read them. I only read stuff about local politics, business, some sports. If there’s no business model that supports selling me some paper with that sort of content, then I guess the newspapers fold. But I’d still rather not be tied to a computer or even worse some tiny LCD screen with eye-fatiguing print and tedious scrolling. To me online is not the answer.