I live in Brooklyn. In my “neighborhood” there are about 90,000 people. So that should mean that it could support about 4 newspapers…if they had the right info in the right format at the right price.

I especially liked when you said ” Who thought a newspaper job would be worth more than making automobiles.”

The thing about cab drivers is that the only place they can sell their time is owned by the cab company. Not true about “freelance on steroids” or “entrepreneurs.”

The thing about information is that it only has real value in context. Yes all copy can be cut and pasted at will. It’s the last mile to the community where value happens.

Newspapers might turn out to make their money the same way lots of magazines have learned to make money. By being a voice for a certain kind of person and then selling them lots of other stuff they want. For example, events or books or CD’s or…. Then the real value a newspaper can give to their advertiser is a deep knowledge of their potential customers.

The news then becomes the best way to connect with a particular community. Given that issue is gaining intelligence about a particular community, the one size fits all of grabbing stuff from the web, or AP, won’t do it. Even if it’s free and even well written. If it doesn’t speak to the people in the room, it’s worthless.

In this model, news it is not an overhead expense. It just becomes part of the marketing budget. As part of the marketing budget, no need for pay for words. Besides, the suits, who mostly don’t understand journalism anyway, definitely think they do understand marketing and tend to throw silly amounts of money at it.

The Internet hit newspapers’ ad margins on both flanks.

You are right on about Craigslist. It spells doom for classified ads.

The search engine spelled doom to display advertising, since it enabled advertisers and customers to interact directly, eliminating the middleman of the physical advertising space. The Internet also flattened the cost of advertising, as a Web page is the lowest cost and the most flexible for advertisers.

As for the monetization of content, most news organizations cannot count on it. For one thing, there’s too much free content that fills the need for the average reader. Second, the Internet makes information easy to steal if it was behind a paid wall. Plain text can simply be copied and shared. Any sort of copy protection will be ripped, and news organizations are going to play a losing game by trying to keep ahead of the cyberthieves.

If news organizations can’t meter the content, they’ll make the money on the backs of journalists. If news organizations shutter their newsrooms, and change compensation from wages to remuneration for consumed information, or pay-per-click journalism, they’ve solved the monetization problem.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. For example, where does the cab company in your city make its money? If you said, fares … surprise, but no! Cab companies make their money off their own drivers! How? First, drivers are “independent contractors,” and the taxi is their shop, so they must pay for all the costs out of their own pockets. Second, drivers must “work” for a cab company, and must turn over a flat rate (not a fixed percentage) per day to the franchise holder.

News companies can just as easily make money by paying the lowest amount for content possible, especially if they aren’t growing their audiences.

Journalists wouldn’t settle for the crumbs they’d get, but the content void would be filled by bloggers, hobbyist writers or well-paid professionals who could use the compensation as secondary value, like the Amazon Affiliate program.

The driver is business. The hope is to screw up as little as possible. A good government’s job is to set the rules that allow that happen. Actually over the last few months of speculators betting furiously on the “market” Google stock has lost it’s stock momentum.

As for Microsoft, those folks had a great run on the way up. I think they will find their niches going forward. If i were working there, or actually anywhere except for yourself, I would hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Never forget the investment bankers..(10,000 got booted from Bank of America today.)

Re the market and arbitrage. Once you get into the money market the betting can get out of control. It’s a perfect example of the stupidity of crowds that lives alongside the wisdom of crowds.

But, in real world markets, then it’s: Produce stuff that is easy for you, hard for them. Then find people who want what you produce. Then make it easy for them to give you money.

It’s all about who is the “them”. For much too long the “them ” for newspapers were advertisers. Advertisers don’t care about the product. They care about the eyeballs. Now that there are better, faster, cheaper ways to deliver eyeballs, newspapers have to figure out who is going to value the stuff they can do easier than other people.

That’s why I think for newspapers, it’s a “back to the reader” problem. Start with that, and bring it to the marketplace. If it can find buyers, the business model will grow around it. And I bet there are lots of ways to find new uses for the Print product and the logistics networks that is part of many newspapers.

The underlying lesson is that in the media world, the more the more. It’s not a zero sum game. What I meant about monopoly position had more to do with the business model and was place determined.

When the number of newspapers in metro areas went down to 2 or 3 or 1, instead of 15 or 20 or more. It gave local newspapers a monopoly for local advertising.

Craigslist probably did more to hurt the newspaper business models than anything else. Classifieds were a great revenue stream. Very little space. Easy to place. Short sales cycle.
Once craigslist scaled that hurt. Meanwhile, shoppers and ultra local newspapers have continued to grow. But it’s not about journalism. It’s about giving people info they need to do what they want to do. Shoppers are successful because the ad listings are the copy.

In my humble opinion, the newspaper business model hasn’t had that much to do with journalism for at least 50 years. It was about aggregating eyeballs to sell to advertisers. The journo stuff was a “nice to have”, not a “must have”. Things that are not “must haves” tend to wither and disappear with new competition.

What I think this implies is that the b model question is ” How do you get people to pay for stories that entertain and inform?” Job one is to produce articles that entertain and inform.
There are lots of experiments on the web and even within newspapers to do job one, with uneven success, so far.

At the top of the pyramid, I think the New Yorker is a model worth looking at. They seem to have many ways to monetize their content. Paradoxically it seems, they allow open access to all their content on line. But they produce a long tail with many ways to create revenue streams.

Meanwhile, the marketplace does drive innovation. Always has. Probably will for a long time to come. Maybe it is not the warrior, but the farmer. Given how our warriors of Wall Street have fared, it’s not implausible to think it might turn out to be the farmer that runs the future.

Two words: commodities exchanges.

This is a market mechanism that dictates the behavior of buyers, sellers … and speculators. We have some idea of what it is, and how it works in principle, but there’s a disagreement over the why? of it. None of the stakeholders wants to answer the contradiction that if “the” market is supposed to referee conduct through pricing, how come the whole point of the market is to find arbitrage in prices?

So, we must first understand why a market exists. Then, we must see whether it is a system agreed to by buyers and sellers alike. A market could be imposed by key players who make the market.

You mention Google as a company that can do good by doing no harm. I say, “Never say never.” What happens if Google’s free software to the public, no doubt a good, wipes out a major tech company like Microsoft? Well, there are thousands of employees looking for work. Google can then leverage this unemployment over its own employees and can coast on growth by undercompensating its work force. And that’s if capitalism is working properly. What if all of a sudden Google loses its stock momentum? Same result, but different cause.

Newspapers have had to worry about competition in the form of radio and television news for most of the 20th century.

The internet, though, is something different.

Never in the history of human civilization has information been so democratized. Never in the history of human civilization has there been a method of communication that was so widespread, so quick to gain acceptance and so affordable. It is also amazingly versatile.

It is a tool that has greatly advanced humanity.

So where does this leave news organizations? In a bad spot.

But it’s one that has been faced before. What we are seeing is not new. Most of the people who witnessed the last communications revolution, television, are now retired and out of the business. This is new to most of us.

It’s too early to bet on who the winners and losers are. There are just too many unknowns. As a generality, I will say that there will be a true oligopoly of media companies that offer the full spectrum of information: news, entertainment and PRAM (public relations, advertising and marketing) divisions all under the same umbrella. Most media companies today would all be under the Viacom, GE, Disney and News/Fox banner. That’s all.

With all the new phones, ultramobile computers, net books and pdas being released in the next year or so, we are going to see a massive increase in web browsing from mobile devices.

Maybe the answer to “Why has no one developed a business model where the print version and electronic version can co-exist in a profitable relationship?” can be found there.

My answer is a little different. I think newspapers have lived for too long in a monopoly environment. It’s hard to stay sharp without real competition. In some ways, they are the victims of their previous success. I think it’s a dinosaur problem.

Journalists and Print will find their new space. The internet will be part of it. But slow moving newspapers, maybe not so much.

I agree with virtually all of the comments made. For starters I like a tangible product in my hands. There’s nothing better than the morning coffee and newspaper or a magazine before bedtime. For me, it’s not very appealing to sit in an airport terminal and read the news on my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I supplement the physical media with online news everyday, and I share newsworthy items through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and delicious with my colleagues.

I have long stated that the media is not going to die. I believe it will continue to compress - we’ll see more magazines fold and newsroom layoffs - but there will never be a time (at least in my lifetime) when we won’t be able to walk out our front door and pick up the local daily newspaper.

To the point of the old guard and the new, young technologists. There is definitely a place in journalism for both.

But the question I have is how did journalism fall into its current state? The simple answer is the economy - reduced ad revenue equals reduced profit and layoffs. But is laying off journalists the answer? You reduce the quality of your product and you expect consumers to still buy it?

Other say the web is destroying journalism. What exactly does that mean? How is the web destroying journalism? Why has no one developed a business model where the print version and electronic version can co-exist in a profitable relationship?

I’ll admit I don’t have the answer but I am desperate to find one. Now for my plug. I started a blog - http://themediamind.blogspot.com/ - where I asked the question - what do we need to do to save the media industry? I welcome feedback to my blog posts and this reply as I hope to begin the revolution to save the media from its downward spiral.