I’ve been through this in the print industry for the last 5 or 10 years. It’s a good idea, but if the incentives stay the same it won’t work.

2. ” The faster the paper disappears or becomes a niche product, the sooner a digital-dominant culture can emerge and rebuild the business plan.”

It’s not the paper or digital. It’s paper + digital. Just the right tool for the right job. The Paper is not the problem.

Alan Mutter did a great series of posts describing in granular detail why this won’t work for an ongoing newspaper business.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/02/can-newspapers-transition-to-digital.html

If Hearst has the time and awesome execution and keep the fixed costs low, it all sounds very similar to the what I’ve been hearing on the blogosphere for a while.

You’re right that a lot of people have latched onto the “paid” portion of the memo and missed so many other parts of it, most at least somewhat promising.

I mentioned this on Jarvis’s blog, but it bears repeating:

If Hearst wants to hold back some of its precious newspaper content and “only” make breaking news, blogs, databases and photo galleries available online, “only” wants to create microsites and “only” plans to do a better job of linking and aggregating, well that sounds like a pretty good web experience to me.

Of course, it’ll probably speed the death of the paper in the bargain. That’s probably not the plan, but this approach will further marginalize the printed product and demonstrate how digital is an exponentially better medium for reporting and story-telling.

And that’s a good thing. The faster the paper disappears or becomes a niche product, the sooner a digital-dominant culture can emerge and rebuild the business plan.

I like what Hearst is up to a lot more than the knee-jerk reaction of just “put up the pay wall” that we’ve been hearing from a lot of quarters in the past month.

(We now return you to real content.)