Newspapers are not going to survive the next round of losses. The use of paper is at the heart of the problem.

Its a disconnected medium and has such a lousy ROI that businesses can better serve their client base through the limited coverage of broadband services than they could get through the use of newspapers.

The only way to salvage things is to separate the news from the paper.

My own views are three fold:

1) Revenue implosion in the press will continue unabated because the other way of doing business (on the web, using a client’s own web services,) is so much more capable, controlled and rich in feed back to those clients.

Why should clients pay good money to “p*ss into the wind” on a disconnected medium like print, radio or television when they can use a presence on the internet and the web to:
• do better SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) including geographic location based services,
• advertise with much sharper ads, in a competition-free environment, with much greater depth, to a much more select audience, who even came to the site of their own volition,
• using what even media is needed (print, audio, video, delivered from their own servers directly to the recipient,)
• capture potential customer information,
• make a sale right then and there, converting them from potential to current customer,
• do follow up CRM and
• do any problem resolution one-on-one.

This turns the entire business of business into a consumer-demand driven modality.

Guess what media isn’t very good at?

Demand driven anything.

It can’t listen to you in the least.

It can only SHOUT AT YOU!

Anybody who is depending on the sale of advertising for their survival had better find the magic formula for crossing the gap from the megaphone to the web right now or they’re crippled, dying on their feet and about to discover that the meaning of “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” doesn’t just apply to endurance dancers in the 1930s.

That the answer to the problem is:

2) “The paper part of the newspaper is dead … Get over it.

The only thing that will remain is going to be vanity presses like HP is proposing with their printing service [ http://magcloud.com/ ]

We didn’t fight for the rights of the buggy whip makers either … Suck it up.

Journalism however is definitely NOT DEAD.

It has been democratized, popularized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.

If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.

We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.

The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.

Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.

This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp.

Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.

a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.

b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.

c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with with their business model.

d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)

There is a business model that would work, it would
•) let news gathering organizations gather news,
•) let readers read,
•) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds.”

3) Separating “News” from “papers” is the first half of the problem..

That would cut the costs of reporting “news” to the barest minumum.

Google indexing of news is a non-issue. It can definitely be handled without a problem by co-opting them while hanging onto the “news” and letting go of the information when its the “olds”.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds can let people know that there is some new information file somewhere while keeping that file hidden from Google. The generation of the RSS feed can be automatic and consist of an alphabetical list of the words of interest in the information and a snippet of the content after which a person can decide whether it is of interest or not. The information file itself is instantly accessible, but on a subscription or a one-time-charge basis.

The other half of the problem is finding a partner to handle the money aspect.

Someone who:
• nobody expects to work for free,
• is quite used to small sums,
• can act as a non-lending bank,
• can issue small denomination pieces,
• has the required international agreements,
• has the necessary IT infrastructure to handle RSS requests,
• is already in the business of information distribution for “franking” or FOR MONEY.

That someone sounds an awful lot like “The Post Office,” doesn’t it?

If you want the “news”, you pay for it, from your “news” provider, paid for through the Postal Service.

If you just want the “olds” you can use Google to search for it.

*I can’t really call in the press anymore since I’m trying to dis-intermediate it and free it from any association with the invention that was used to represent it.