Michael Ingram’s third paragraph says it all. Advertising always has paid for the news. Advertisers will determine the fate of online newspapers. I would like to hear from advertisers why they aren’t buying online ads. Once they do, this issue is moot. Newspapers then will deliver news – and ads – instantly and effeciently on the web.

It’s because the amount you can charge for a web ad is so much less than you can charge for print ad that it doesn’t make enough money to support an outfit, unless the company has a very, very low overhead.

Then produce versioned newspapers to deliver to those neighborhoods articles about things that you already know people care about.

Then make the money by selling Local business and no profits (hospitals, day care centers, etc) that are close to those neighborhoods.

Walling off content on the net is just not possible. There are not enough people who will pay to get through.

I just don’t think that’s going to work, and on top of that I think it’s a head-in-the-sand kind of approach, or an attempt to turn back the clock. That ship has sailed (okay, I’m out of trite analogies now).

I think he’s got it pretty right.

Or go into the education business. Both supplying relevant content for on demand content specific workbooks. Or start schools and get the money that is floating around for education.

Consider the NY Times (or your good newspaper of choice) Graduate Institute of Journalism. Who wouldn’t want to pay $20 to $30K to go there, if they could get in? I bet you could fill the incoming class within 4 days of announcing it on a website.

Before airlines, the railroads had a window of opportunity. Once airlines happened, that window closed. Now I notice that railroads are pitching their core business – move lots of big stuff, cheaper than anyone else. But it took 50 years. Lots of people got fired and management time wasted by lobbying Congress for subsidies.

Same thing here. If newspapers had moved faster, they had a chance. But it was a very dangerous business. Consider AOL and Pets.com. You can’t really blame nice profitable newspaper companies to be risk averse.

But that was then. This is now. They better figure out how to use the web to identify fans, nurture them until they grow in to tribes. Then invent new stuff – mostly Print products – to sell to the tribes.

Time thinks it knows how to save your newspaper. But its “Modest Proposal” is delivered in a form that is remarkably modest itself – its 56 pages are barely thick enough to shim a coffee table, let alone support an entire industry.

Time may be girded in gravitas, but its physical presence lacks heft. The pot is calling the kettle black while newspapers and magazines head into the red.

Newspapers may want to fight back, but against whom? Craig Newmark, the guy who reinvented classifieds, or Al Gore, the guy who invented the Internet?

A recent commenter on Alan Mutter’s superb blog said, “The problem with media companies is that they don’t know how to build a successful website from scratch. Very few newspaper and local media companies have successfully established new web enterprises that weren’t leveraging their local brands.”

Mutter calls this failure “profound.”

“The reason young people don’t gravitate to newspaper websites is that most sites are more newspaper than web: staid, static and largely un-interactive. In other words, 1995-style shovelware won’t cut it.”

While Mutter delivers answers, Jeff Jarvis asks “What Would Google Do?” Based on Jarvis’ book, it’s safe to assume that Google would not deploy the kind of lackluster sites that Jarvis directed for Newhouse’s newspapers until 2005, where he was president and creative director. Ultimately, it’s these people who are responsible for the failure of newspapers to monetize online, which ultimately is driving the downfall of newspapers.

Here’s something else Google wouldn’t do: create new sites mired in old thinking. Globalpost, minnpost, voiceofsandiego and stlbeacon will fail because they merely replicate the content and revenue strategies that haven’t worked for newspapers. None of these can generate the cash they need to be sustainable. That’s why they depend upon handouts.

But consider this:

Sites like realpeoplerealstuff, videojobshop and tweentribune represent the new breed of news and advertising sites. These sites embody the new fundamentals: niche, youth, usability, UGC, geo- and demographically targeted advertising, stickiness, video, automation, mobile, distributive editing and fun.

These sites are coming to your town – with or without the local newspaper’s imprimatur. But they’re coming.

So go ahead. Pick up the current issue of Time. Its slimness speaks volumes.

I too am an OCB. as in Old Cranky Bastard. No longer in the game, watching and kibbutzing from the sidelines. So in the true Boomer spirit of “If everyone would only listen to me. . . ”

You said “The point was this: If no one’s willing to pay for what newspapers provide — in-print or on-line — they will vanish and the Internet will be a much less informed place.”

To which I respond, newspapers mostly delivered an inferior product since the invention of the mechanical web press. This revisionist bs about how great newspapers are is just make believe.

Our news is very inferior once you judge against the product that is delivered in the UK, France or Germany.

I was around during Vietnam War Days. I remember the news reporting then. It was about as dumb as the lead up to the war in Iraq. Nowadays it seems that everyone was against the war. That Walter Cronkite changed the world by showing war footage.

Please, give me a break. I was with folks who were against the Vietnam War starting in 1965. It was not pretty. I had to read IF Stone, a one person blogger in Print. and had to learn French (ugh) to read LeMonde.

So. . . .Uncle Stu,as one OCB to another,
having a vibrant press that functions to inform our citizens and nurture an intelligent, civic public discourse is a really good idea.

My bet is that it will be invented any day now.

As for whether bloggers can replace journalists, I didn’t refute that part of your argument because to my knowledge no one has ever argued that, and I certainly wouldn’t do so. It’s a false dichotomy. Blogs are just tools — anyone can use them, including journalists.

I didn’t say that Drudge Report and HuffPo are news sites (although the latter has done plenty of breaking-news journalism). I said that they had built large online businesses by aggregating attention and influence, and clearly have lessons to teach when it comes to doing so.

Do some sites “steal” content from newspapers? Sure they do. But Google — whom you mentioned specifically — does not, at least not according to any useful definition. The reality is that Google does newspapers far more harm than good, and more papers would benefit from thinking the way the New York Times does: open up access to your content, don’t close it off.

Re: your point in your last paragraph. As Chris Willis says, “Navigation and convenience are the new pipes”, and the companies that offer that best in any category manage to build scale online.