The irony is that the single irreplaceable and scarce resource is the investment in human capital that lives in most newspapers. Technology are only tools for innovation and change. It’s only using experienced real people that create new value by using the best tools.

Given the bubble wrapped thinking of most people at the top of most pyramids, they can’t see this. You have politicians who think you build a nation with airplanes and “busyness’ people who think you build a newspaper with websites. Both mind sets are quickly moving to the dustbin of history, as we used to say way back in the day.

If they would concentrate alot more on business models that work by supporting the best parts of their human capital, they would get this all fixed a lot sooner with alot less collateral damage.

Given the new approaches to employment with freelance, affiliated independents, journalists who make their big hit with the book and the book tour, I’m pretty sure that different approaches could be invented in different specific situations.

As an aside, if the Obama Administration can get health care fixed so the fear of getting sick or of a family member getting sick is taken off the table and off the books of the newspaper companies, new solutions will have a lot more space to grow and scale.

What if the question was reframed: You know what killed off the newspaper industry?

What if the answer was: Payroll?

The Internet doesn’t just deliver content faster and at low or no cost — it can do it without baggage.

Media companies cannot. They have assets that can’t be valued down. You can’t give everyone Internet prices and still expect to pay your own costs, including and especially payroll.

An amateur — in the original root of the word, pursuing something for the passion of the craft rather than professional gain — video blogger could shoot news with equipment and software for a couple thousand dollars. How it’s all paid for is the amateur’s problem.

On the other hand, the VHF station has much more expensive equipment as well as the payroll liabilities of the people operating the equipment. They also have fixed assets like a newsvan and an office building.

If the audience is perfectly happy with the amateur’s efforts, why should the VHF station invest so much in fixed assets when the amateur can get an audience without worrying about the capital sinks?

The capital-intensive station has another problem: Slavery has been abolished. Fixed assets can be brokered and exchanged, humans cannot. The biggest change the economic conversion from chattel slavery to industrial capitalism created was move the humans from the assets ledger to the liabilities.

The bad news for anyone pulling a paycheck is that if the company values a human as a liability, it can be deemed useless and thrown in the trash just like a piece of broken or obsolete equipment.

At least the equipment doesn’t have the burden of sentience.

If you think what I have written was dark, nasty or downright vile, keep in mind that this is just free information so that journalists should “know their enemy” — in this case the business folks who hold economic fates in their hands.

I am one of the journalists, and I am not an advocate for the finance side. I want to make sure my professionals are ready in mind and spirit for the battle ahead.

Sadly, affairs involving money are the true Dark Arts of human civilization. The business world, much like the military, nurtures sociopathic tendencies. People with sociopathic tendencies tend to gravitate toward the fields that nurture their habits. Finally, success and humanity are zero-sum games. Success by necessity comes at the expense of humanity. And humanity is the avenger of success.

I am really glad I came upon this blog.

What is happening requires rethinking the content and the distribution. Let a million flowers bloom in these experiments. It isn’t one thing, it is a million things. Try them all and even the best ideas that fail might be the fertilizer for the future of our watchdogs. I think journalism is vital to our functioning democracy. But now is not the time to adapt old models. What works for the WSJ might not work for the NYT or Dallas Morning News or the Miami Herald or the local stringer in rural iowa or central China. You kids should be taking the chances to build the future your elders were almost powerless to stop.

The next piece is to refocus on news-on-paper to sell ads to make enough money to support the international news which has never been a very strong suit in American journalism.

The point is, that creating news, costs money. Local news costs much less money than reporting international news. I work as a freelance journalist and covered conflicts in africa. The amount of money that is needed to do minimal coverage could never ever be retrieved by web-ads or internet business models as they exist today.

Just thing about it, if you would charge people to read most of the articles at the NYT Website, hits would drop significantly. Just think about all the people around the world who visit this webpage and don’t have a possbility to do online payment. The whole idea of the internet as a business model is a very western oriented idea. Sure the internet is accessible throughout the world, but the second step, “uploading” money and therefore create revenue for the recipient is much harder to do.

I really would like the idea of extending everything to the net AND print and therefore make more money to pay for more and better stories. But up to now, the internet fails to deliver. May it be because people just don’t know how to handle it, may it be thats the way the internet works. Maybe newspapers and other news media should make a decision first, what they want to be in the future. It seems that the whole business is a little bit shellshocked because they just can’t make up their mind in which direction they want to go.

Web sites and most newspapers don’t have “readers”. They have scanners. If they find something interesting they might read the subhead maybe the lede, buy very few take the jump. I turns out that it’s much easier to scan a big print page, than it is to search a website.

The cost of engagement is much lower.

Re the internet and decline of news-on-paper. Newspaper circulation has been going down since the 70′s. I think it has a lot more to do with the two earner family and TV than the Internet.

This has nothing to do with innovation, or “getting it.” – especially when it comes to quality of journalism. Here’s what really happened-

Where once you, the reader of their content, had to pony up between a quarter and a buck to read their content, you’re now doing it online, for free. No, they don’t make much money from the paper sales, the point is that we readers are satisfying the urge for instant info gratification online now. That has reduced newspaper sales dramatically.

Numbers, take NYT for example. Their physical paper has btw 800-900k subscribers, not including newsstand sales. The website has far higher numbers, tens of millions of monthly uniques. Yet at the same time, NYT’s grosses from web advertising are far lower than those of the printed paper. It’s a few hundred million vs a couple billion.

Run those numbers again: the paper has under one million subscribers, and grosses a couple billion. The website has tens of millions of readers, and grosses a few hundred mil. And NYTimes.com is known to get *very high* CPM, relative to most other sites on the web.

That’s partly because, when you buy or subscribe to the paper, the publisher gets to sell the print equivalent of a bundle of web ad impressions to advertisers. Big bucks compared with web rates. That has been good business for them, until the last decade, when the web started becoming the replacement news source for readers.

Also, your idea that Twitter users will somehow replace trained journalists sharing the resources a newsroom has to offer is, well, ignoring the past. Yes, there will be more instances where news snippets arrive via twitter, just as they’ve also arrived by email, SMS, telephone, fax, horse courier and telegraph before.

It’s not the medium, it’s the content. To have publish-worthy content, you’ve got to have journalism skills.

Look at Indymedia/IMC for an earlier example of we-the-journalists at work. It suffered badly from credibility issues. Individual bloggers will have the same problems, unless they already have a reputation for their work.

How many times do you have to prove yourself to newspaper executives
before they start paying you to save their company from certain doom?

Hey newspaper executives, hire people like me and Pat Thornton to save your companies. Now. Seriously. What are you waiting for?

Death? Kamikaze suicide runs can’t last forever you know..

In general, I think you’ve got it right. But i think you have a blind spot to the idea that the natural advantage of newspapers is print and deliver. On the web they compete with Google. In print they have the field pretty much to themselves.

New products? Most definitely. But the money is to be made from new Print products. Use the web to aggregate the fans and to make it easy for them to buy stuff.