Here are some excellent solutions for saving the printed word.

By the way, I don’t like the word “tip” because it brings baggage from another context. Primarily, that “the man” makes the real money and the worker gets crumbs. But who’s “the man” in the online journalism situation who gets the meaty sums? Even Google is willing to gather trillions of fractions of pennies off the floor in the form of ad impressions.

R.I.P.

What would make newspaper CEOs and publishers listen?

Money. Shareholders. Advertisers.

Who gives a damn!

We do.

Unfortunately, these so-called titans in a dying industry have our balls in a credit-crunch, and we have nowhere else to go. The majority of scribes are clogs in a printing machine, like it or not. But we all need to make a living and we happen to like what we do, most of the time.

After all, it’s the only salaried game in town.

Pssst! A little secret …

We – not publishers – are the newspaper.

Without us, they are simply accountants of the Fourth Estate.

“I don’t create anything,” Citizen Kane said. “I own.”

And what, exactly, do they own?

That is, besides the scribes who churned the copy … that created the eyeballs … that sold the advertising … that made them rich and powerful and beyond the reach of those on the editorial firing line? But, hey, we sometimes get a free turkey at Christmas!

Meanwhile, what are we doing about this never-ending story?

Sitting on our ass, making with the mouth, grasping at straws, and, as Steve Outing said, starting to act like “waiters” and hoping for a few crumbs to fall from the table. This is not quite in context, but you do get the image, don’t you?

“Tips” for a journalist?

Ya gotta be kiddin’!

We don’t need a business model for newspapers; We need one for ourselves.

How can we, as fellow scribes, make the publishers, the investors, the number-crunchers, the advertisers, and the general public accept and adopt the only existing alternative to newspapers: The Net and the digital delivery of news.

If we have failed in trying to convince newspaper publishers to see things our way, and the many truths and facts of our economic and industry situation, they deserve to go down the tube, slow but sure. And we are allowing it to happen … to us.

We have tried to find the answers with their eyes.

It’s time to use our own.

Your suggestions are so simple, and yet they do so much good. It often seems that execs in industries under great strain miss the obvious easy fixes and only look for big ticket items or litigation.

I’m shocked at the amount of non-local coverage still in many newspapers today. No, everyone doesn’t need a DC reporter, and how many movie reviewers does one country really need?

There is a lot of low hanging fruit that you point to, and I hope more newspapers start plucking it.

But I do fear that Chris is right. Many newspaper companies may simply have too much debt and be in a death spiral.

I work on the web at a small daily and I think one of the keys to understanding the problem is in recognizing the true structure of newspapers. Fundamentally, newspapers are complex organizations in terms of human workflow and moving information, burnished in the context of producing a daily print publication. And because the business hinges on the unyielding deadlines of a printing press, and always has, change tends to be slow and incremental. So, now we’ve got an organization where everybody – from the CEO to the journalists to the ad sales staff to the pressmen – thinks in terms of a highly evolved process that resists change. In this system, change is either a problem to fix or something new to consider suspiciously. And along comes the web, blows it all up, and demands: INNOVATE! Change not just *some* things, but EVERYTHING. And that demand is made of an organization optimized for little to change, where innovation has largely been absent from the culture because it hasn’t been necessary.

From the outside looking in, the snails-pace movement of the newspaper industry is fustrating, even depressing to watch. But it’s not impossible to understand: there is a big difference between prescribing change and the heavy lifting required to actually implement it.

Indeed, many U.S. newspaper leaders have not shown that they understand that change management is a process. Your post actually points them down the CM path. Publishers will have to create new and different print and digital products that serve a wider range of niche needs.

Web Video, I would add, should be looked at invested in as a core digital product. On many levels there is room for creating a unique digital proposition and also earn the highest ad rates available online.

So many news bosses have not understood the potential for building out a rich Web video strategy. They looked to TV for style and then to packaged solutions like “video players” for playback. Wrong, and wrong.

Too bad. There is so much more potential but so much of the thinking is not based on user patterns and expectations. Only they seem to be based on old rules of broadcasting.

Point number 1)
If you design it so your ads to travel with your video content then you are on the right track. Give away the embed codes to your clips, engage the viral distribution networks of your users . . . Geesh – there is so much potential to build viable, branded and unique video products, services and experiences for people and advertisers.

Just boggles the mind that these companies are led by people without the experience or vision to carry out life-saving initiatives like this.