Learning of the Seattle PI’s demise was very disheartening…and that is why even though your logic is undisputable, in a situation like the PI’s, saving the Sports page would have done little to stop the hemorhagging…yours is a solution for only part of the problems that plague our nations’ papers….and saving one section of the local paper would help your business and that newspaper division’s bottom line, but how would it make their foreign bureaus, out of town bureaus profitable? How would it pay for the movie critics? Or the book critics? Make them profitable…no easy answers.

There needs to be more regulation on the number of media outlets one conglomerate can own. The NY Times and Trib Co models have been exposed as failures. For everyone. It’s tantamount to Clear Channel driving everyone to pay radio…which is a failure in as much as charging people to get their news on the net would be. The newspapers should have stuck to their guns with the pay per view model. Instead they panicked and gave away the farm.

There are no easy solutions when everyone fancies himself a writer, and newspapers are a casualty of choice in this country. By casualty of choice, what I mean is that we as a populace are overburdened with an abundance of choices. We can get our news anywhere, we can ask a web browser a very specific question and get an answer uniquely detailed to our needs. Why comb thru a paper? We are already at a computer for work in a lot of cases.

Also, how are we going to compensate for the fact that people are so rushed in their day to day that they don’t have time to sit and reflect on the news at breakfast, or sit down and read the paper at lunch?

The most effective era for the newspaper was when they still maintained evening delivery. A man would come home and have his martini and the daily news. He didn’t feel the need to have his news right away, prematurely reported in many cases. Yesterday’s man seemed more patient, able to wait until news was accurate, and well written.

It’s organic competition that drove newspapers to compete in getting the news out as fast as possible. But you don’t undercook food to serve your customers faster, so there has to be a balance. And for print media, there is no substitute for the time that goes into the process, as far as the recipe for success. Web based media can put what amounts to twitters up in a matter of seconds, but is it really better?

I love to read the news on the web, and I think that a very simple solution to help save the print divisions of their newspapers would be this:

Simply charge everyone who gets their news on the net $5.00 a month to their credit card, and bundle in access to every newspaper in heavily populated areas…this is way cheaper than they would pay for a home subscription and it would include access to all the newspapers.

Money could be distributed after someone derives a program to determine which papers got the most hits, that way merit is still rewarded.

This would easily lead to 100MM a month or 1.2B a year to be split up…assuming 20MM people out there just go ahead and sign right up with their debit cards.

Waddya think?

I think the idea of beat writers is great but needs to avoid newspapers and focus on the new age of media- interactive online newspapers and articles, email, iPhone aps, Facebook aps, etc. It’s safe to say that our generation will log on Facebook more times in a month than they will sit down and read a newspaper in their entire life.