Good luck, I don’t see this working. Just my opinion.

Mr. Sherman: Go for it. It’s a worthwhile and, in many respects, gutsy experiment. Tell your critics to go pound sand. They are not your customers anyway, so who cares what they think?

1) We will be weaker–mightily–without them, as a society and citizens and

2) They are dying, in their present form and what used to work, isn’t and won’t.

Accept these as truths, if you work for a paper, and go forward from there. If you deny either of these–and I think too many people in this industry are–and you will be one more of the dinosaurs yourself.

As The Eagles sang in one of their songs: “Get over it”.

Mo Rage

It’s the same with newspapers as it is with old gentlemen who wear suits to the office. (I used to work for a men’s clothing store).

Every time a hearse takes another senior to the cemetery, it’s one less person who will read the newspaper.

The younger the person, the more they use the computer and the less they need, want or read the paper. Get used to it, ladies and gentlemen.

This experiment may work for a little while but it’s like the pilot who turns his engines off on his plane, mid-flight–pretty soon the plane starts going down.

Mo Rage
The Blog

PS. And I don’t trash newspapers in person or on my blog.

What newspapers need to do, hopefully, is 1) either keep on staff or hire back good reporters who can and do attack local issues hard, especially local government, etc. With harder-hitting news, they have a better and more valuable, important product to put out. As it is, most all these news organizations are slashing their staffs and cutting back the paper and reporting but expecting everyone to continue to want the shoddier product they’re putting out. Again, for a local example, see The Kansas City Star.

2) Have a much better product online–one that a) reflects how the paper looks, for starters and b) is easy to work with and search. Once again, for an example of how NOT to do an online newspaper, see The Kansas City Star at http://www.kansascity.com.

We need to trasition to clean energy–I know, different subject–hopefully, as soon as possible and with photovoltaic cells and transition to online newspapers and reporting so we can, as said above, stop leveling forests, to create this mush so we can spend 20 minutes with it and then throw it in a landfill.

Simple as that. (Tongue firmly planted in cheek).

Mo Rage
The Blog

“Have they any thoughts on why their no doubt vital, unique and irreplaceable content only adds up to a pitiful 12,000 circulation as it is?”

Gee, I don’t know … maybe because they’re in a relatively small market? Newport’s population is about 25,000.

We’ve all made rods for our own backs by loading more and more exclusive local content on to our websites, free for anyone who cares to look. Most realised long ago it was a mistake but no one has yet come up with a viable way to reverse it.

The Newport News probably has a better chance at making this work than, for instance, a paper like the Washington Post because its strength is in its local news, targeting a local audience. Every readership survey I’ve seen shows an overwhelming demand for exclusive local content, covering the issues that have a direct impact on the daily lives of the readers in their own communities. That readership package includes the ads, for products and services in their area.

So if the Newport News has strong, exclusive local content available only in the printed paper (or on line at an inflated price) it may have found an answer to the problem we’re all facing _ how to remain profitable while generating enough revenues to sustain the news gathering.

Some of the posts to this get right to the heart of the problem facing all newspapers _ they expect to get all the news they want to read on line free as of right. Logic says that can’t continue. Journalists are paid to cover the local issues that you want to know about. If there’s not enough revenue generated to keep them employed the issues won’t get covered. So news has a value.

The real question here is how much value readers of the Newport News place on that exclusive local content.

Web reality check.
Most people won’t pay for web content. Example: Charge 1 dollar a month for Myspace and Facebook and those sites will be ghost towns.

No one pays for news online: We’ve trained them not to pay for it and there are too many sources where news is free including home built news services.

Advertisers hate advertising online:
Anyone that has half of an insight on web surfing knows the attention span of an online user is as much as a 3 year old. Even the term “web traffic” isn’t having the punch with advertisers as the industry thought it would.

Mobil news.
I can’t think of any ad I look at less than a mobil news ad. I wonder if the advertisers know that? Of course they do. That’s why advertising revenue on a mobile device wouldn’t cover 1/2 the pay of the person maintaining it. AP mobile offers mobile news for free with your local news on it, with you logo on it if you’re a subscrber. How can you compete with that?

In closing, just like print the products we create can’t just be “cool products.” They have to make money. Maybe news organizations need to reinvent the newspaper. Maybe it’s more niche products than a single big newspaper. The web can be a useful too to push these new directions newspapers create. But “the web is our future” is starting to become more of an ego issue for newspapers than a solution.