Another Newspaper Folds

In the news today, the death of news, in the form of the end of a major daily newspaper. I've previously noted the troubles the newspaper industry is having and so this news comes as no real surprise. Still, it seems like an important event for our culture and our way of life, to say nothing of the health of our democracy. Am I worried? No, not really, there are so many more media outlets now than there used to be that I'm taking a very contrarian view of the popular lament over the end of newspapers. The newspaper business merely needs to adjust to new market realities, I have confidence that they will survive in some form. There will always be a market for news, they just need to figure it out. Perhaps they need to stop printing newspapers, just get away from paper and save that expense and go totally digital.This report from The Business Insider points out the ridiculous cost of using dead trees to share news in the digital age:

Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead. [...] What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

The New York Times Company is not going to send every subscriber an e-text reader, but they should immediately offer subscribers the option of receiving digital delivery instead of paper. Every newspaper should do this ASAP. And by digital I mean every conceivable form of digital delivery they can manage to negotiate a contract for. I want to go to iTunes and buy a daily paper, any paper, and read it on my cell phone or computer, and if I'm paying for it, I want the paid version to offer exclusive content not available on the free website.

Newspapers need to understand one very important thing, they have always been in the community business, and community is what Web 2.0 is all about. They need to leverage the new social networking services to rebuild on the web the local community people used to enjoy reading their local newspaper. A big city daily newspaper was like the heartbeat of a city, it reflected the culture and sensibility of the area, and that needs to be recreated on the web. A digital newspaper should be a community portal offering news, opinion, shopping and entertainment and all scaled in a manner friendly to any user at any level, from plain text to Second Life-like virtual environments. And let's not forget one-click no hassle online subscriptions with options for every budget. I'm convinced that if they take this path, they will survive. If they think they must continue to follow the old business model based on a printed product funded by advertising and meagerly supplemented by subscription fees, then they will fail.