There but for the grace of, well, somebody...

This "Teetering 10" list from Douglas A. McIntyre. The good news: My current employer isn't on the list. The bad news: Ten other papers are, including a sister publication (Cleveland) and a former employer (Boston).

Editor's Note: A repudiation of McIntyre's list came out a few days later on the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Facebook journalism. Or not.

Joshua Benton posted this interesting, if not particularly scientific, survey on the Nieman Journalism Lab today. The most interesting part of all came in the comments. One idea the commenters seemed to like was to offer a basic level of news for free, while charging for "premium" information. That's a vague prescription for reform, but it would be significantly better than we have at the moment. Advertising would continue to be the primary revenue vehicle for the "basic" service, and user fees would become the primary revenue source for the premium services.

It's a thought.

Bottom's up

David Carr, in his Sunday column, stated the obvious: "At the best of times, newspaper publishers are not a risk-taking bunch, and these aren't the best of times." The list of the risk-averse goes far beyond publishers, actually. Many (if not most) of the people in senior leadership in any newspaper company were groomed, elevated and trained to be good stewards of mature businesses. Innovation and entrepreneurial spirit weren't part of the equation. And probably shouldn't have been at the time. But the times, as we know, have changed. The question is whether we can hold on long enough for a new generation to take over before many of our companies cease to exist at all.

So what do we do? Carr advocates collusion between papers in different markets as a path toward a sustainable future business model. It could work. But I think all those risk-averse editors and publishers and vice presidents of marketing are scared enough at the moment that they're looking wild-eyed around the country for anybody with a great new idea. Innovate, in other words, and everybody else will follow in a hot flash if it seems to be working.

We don't need to collude, or try to scrap the Newspaper Preservation Act. We just need to be bold despite our leadership, to find ways to innovate in spite of the systems we work within. When some of us come up with new ventures that start to get traction, the sheep will follow in short order. We will collude without ever having to collude. So much simpler that way.

Just for the record, Carr is right about free content, aggregators, commoditized ads and even the JOA law. It's just that we don't have time to be playing political games at the moment. Better to take control and start writing the industry's new business plan from wherever you happen to be sitting at the moment.

Electronic editions

Electronic editions are strange animals. These are the .PDF versions of newspapers that many newsrooms put online in addition to their regular Web sites. They're betwixt and between the old world and the new -- exact replicas of the print newspaper in a digital form. As a news consumer, I've never been a huge fan. If I want to read a newspaper, I'll read a newspaper. If I want news online, almost any Web site is going to be preferable to reproductions of a printed page.

But that doesn't mean there might not be legitimate reasons for a newspaper to offer an e-edition, at least during an interim stage while the industry sorts itself out. They're fairly cheap to create, for starters. We've already done 99% of the work gathering, writing, editing and designing the news in a format many customers are comfortable with. All that's required is to arrange to ship .PDFs of the final pages to an FTP site where a vendor can do its magic and put them up by morning. Oh, and to pay that vendor a fee.

The vendors that offer these things are getting better with functionality, too. So e-readers can download their daily papers as MP3s, or have them translated into multiple languages, or optimized for mobile, or clipped electronically by subject, or read alongside related multimedia content. They seem to be especially popular as tools for Newspaper in Education programs, making them available to teachers and students as curriculum aids. (And saving big papers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on newsprint and ink and distribution from the bad, old NIE days.)

It's possible to use them in other ways, too:

* Reducing circulation stops by making them available to vacationing subscribers

* Offering them instead of or in addition to redelivered papers for subscribers who have delivery problems

* Open them up to all subscribers during adverse weather, which can delay delivery across entire areas

* Make them available to school and public libraries

* Promote them as a more environmentally conscious way to subscribe

* Promote them to non-English-speaking groups, through the translation programs

* Make them available to readers looking for a single-copy purchase

* Offer them to would-be subscribers outside your (ever-shrinking) print distribution area

It's also possible to throw them in free for subscribers who already pay for print. Give those folks a bonus for sticking with us, allowing them to take advantage of all that new functionality. (Audio downloads, mobile optimized version, translation services, clipping service, etc.) And just make it easier for them to read the paper when they're not at home. Boost retention, in short. In this day and age, that's worth quite a bit all by itself.

Here's another idea from a newspaper executive who shall go nameless at a paper I won't identify for the time being: Use the e-edition to continue publishing features and services that get dropped from the print newspaper. Not running the business section every day anymore? Include it with the e-edition, anyway. Dropping classified ads on Mondays? Fine, run them with the e-edition. Losing space for 10 comic strips in the print newspaper? Put them in the e-edition. At a time when newspaper subscribers are legitimately feeling like they're getting less from us all the time, it's one bulwark we can throw up against defections.

At the end of the day, e-editions are not an answer for any of the big issues washing over the industry. This is just not an important part of any strategy to move forward. But these strange animals might be one more small way to keep in the game while we sort out those more significant issues. At this point, we should take every victory -- of any size -- we can get.

Rant of the day

I'm getting tired of the endless blog entries and articles and water cooler discussions about how The Wall Street Journal has figured out how to make customers pay for content online. It's true, but that's not really the point. A large percentage of the Journal's subscribers -- in print and online -- get the paper at work (or through work) and expense it to their employers. It's a unique model, and for more reasons than the paper's (very good) journalism.

That said, we in the big regional newsrooms absolutely, positively must come up with ways to charge for our content in the digital realm before too long. Right now, we're the recording industry in the age of (pre-lawsuit) Napster.

We have to continue to be the highest-quality provider of news in our markets, too, of course. We can't let that slip, no matter how small the newspaper actually becomes as advertising slip-slides away. Otherwise, we won't have anything to sell digitally or otherwise, and we're sunk.

But the bottom line is that advertising will not pay the freight in the future. Or not nearly as much as it's paid in the past. We have to reinvent our distribution model to put more of that burden on customers, whether they like it -- and whether we like it -- or not.

This gives me the chills...

A Colorado Congressman is gloating over the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, saying the death of traditional journalism (his words, not mine) is generally a good thing.

For government and corporate officials looking for more of a free pass, with no pesky reporters asking questions and demanding documentation, that's probably true. For the rest of us, who depend on a little transparency in our leaders and institutions, maybe not so much.

One future bizz model, courtesy of Michael Hirschorn

(Read the full article here, which deals with the possibility of The New York Times killing off its print edition.)

"What would a post-print Times look like? Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow The Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication...

In this scenario, nytimes.com would begin to resemble a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting. This combination has allowed the HuffPo to digest the news that matters most to its readers at minimal cost, while it focuses resources in the highest-impact areas. What the HuffPo does not have, at least not yet, is a roster of contributors who can set agendas, conduct in-depth investigations, or break high-level news. But the post-print Times still would."

For the sake of argument, let's say Michael's right. Could this kind of a model work at regional papers? Maybe so. It's getting easier to imagine many things that only months ago sounded like wild implausibilities. To the extent regional papes dominate their markets for news -- which, by and large, they do -- they have the same kind of leverage the Times has nationwide.