Why would the people who drove us to this precipice know how to turn things around?

That’s the real problem. Most newsroom managers, CEOs and publishers don’t have viable solutions. They grew up working for, and later running, monopoly companies. They’ve never known true competition.

Many — if not most — large mainstream newspapers will begin to fail over the next 10 years. It is what it is. It may be too late for many companies to be turned around.

I also fear that the organizations that are in dire trouble don’t have the political will to try something drastic. It seems like many of these companies would rather die remaining print first than trying to survive by becoming something much different.

Maybe many news leaders don’t want to succeed in a digital future. Maybe they didn’t sign up for that.

I don’t really know. But I fear it is too late already for many companies. I’m starting to tire of worrying about the past (and offering suggestions that no one in power takes seriously) and beginning to focus on how we can make new, modern journalism companies.

Why in the world would anyone think that the very people who put the industry into these straits could conceivably be people who could admit that how they’ve managed the industry for so many years — the guidance, ‘vision’, and leadership they’ve given the industry — was so demonstrably wrong and who have the intellectual capability and flexibility to so radically change all that they’ve ever thought and done?

Newsprint is inanimate and not at fault. The news isn’t at fault. The newspaper companies’ mid-level and lower-level employees aren’t at fault. The fault for the crises that the newspaper industry is in is clearly that of the CEOs and senior executives of these companies.

As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Indeed, those CEOs and senior executives are the last people who can solve these problems. The fact is that they are the people who’ve driven the industry off a cliff during the past ten years.

Almost all of the executives who gather behind closed doors at the API’s crisis ‘Summit’ are people who clearly — indeed, how much more obvious can the obvious financial reasons be? Do we need to have business school professors spell it out? — deserve to be sacked by their companies’ stockholders and should not be continuing to manage their companies business at this time. Were this crisis about some other industry, that’s what the their newspapers’ editorials would be saying.

My experience with newspaper CEOs and other top leadership within the business is that they are struggling mightily to come up with new ideas, but are not at all comfortable with discussing the process in public.

The reasons for this are as different as the people themselves, but often touch on one or more of these:

- A sense that the pundits, the bloggers and the tweeters can’t possibly grasp the subtleties of the business and should stop talking endlessly about how bad the business is. I heard this a lot over the past three years or so.

- A belief that the discussions around the executive table are private and, thus, not grist for discussion in the blogosphere. I know I subscribed to this, more out of a sense of duty than of a belief that this was the best course. This is why I did not blog and rarely commented while I was an officer of the company (and why I still don’t use any of the Christopher Buckley-quality inside stories I watched play out over the years. Stays in Vegas.)

- Ill-advised competitive considerations. Why discuss our strategy in public? That’ll just give the playbook to our competitors. I didn’t agree but, again, considered it compulsory, so rarely floated ideas for comment/advice before we launched new initiatives.

- Hubris. A sense that we’re just smarter than the rabble.

- No time. This is probably the one that’s truest currently. With all hands busy patching holes in the battleship, there’s no time to enter into what can be seen as thumbsucking in public.

Chuck Peters is a breath of fresh air, who just might bust open the cone of silence. But there are lots more like him, struggling behind the scenes. I worked with a lot of very smart people who started ringing the alarm about newspapers four and five years ago. These were people at mid- and high-levels of local operations around the country who tried to create a sense of urgency around the business model, which they saw as veering in the wrong direction. But a wider conversation – at least an honest wider discussion of the looming disaster – always took a back seat to short-term efforts to jack up revenue or cut expenses.

I don’t think there’s a publisher working today who doesn’t finally get it (OK, there’s one…). But like the driver watching the airbag FOOMP open in his face who “gets” that his day just turned to crap, it’s a little late.

I think it would be great if those publishers engaged with you here. I just wouldn’t hold my breath.

You and I were approaching the same topic at the same time last Sunday. I laid out my thoughts, and my list of key tasks at http://cpetersia.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/new-mindset-for-new-game-highlights-new-tasks-performed-in-new-organization-which-develops-new-shared-mindset/

I know the headline is a bother, way too long, but I was trying to make the point that we cannot achieve the new mindset required without fundamentally altering the tasks we perform and the organization of those tasks.

Your list of 11 fits right in with what we are trying to do as a company. #7, including the micro-personal, will take a pretty big change in approach, and I am spending a lot of time in that area, both work flow and technology.

#8 was a new idea, which we are exploring further this week.

My blogs of last weekend, which include references to posts by you and Mark Potts, are being studied by our management team, with focused discussions this week on the changes we need to make to implement these concepts now.

I am going to work on another post this weekend on the fundamental change in local information. It is coming. The only question is whether we will participate in creating the elegant organization so that our communities can be strengthened by our efforts.

Thanks for pushing!

Chuck