Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

I’ve said this for years. The value of a newspaper isn’t that it’s printed on paper. It’s that the newspaper employs a staff of people to go out and gather the news. The printing press is simply a means of delivery. Until the Internet came along, it was a pretty good business to be in, the owning of a printing press.

Fine. Let them die. People will still need news, and entrepreneurs will find a way to make money fulfilling that need. The new model is for small online start ups. Some of them are trying a non-for-profit model. For others, a for-profit model is the best fit.

But as the media changes, so should the rules that the operate under. And that’s good. The public is dissatisfied with the news as practiced by the mainstream media. They find it shallow and sensational, and consider claims to be unbias to be dishonest. Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review has suggested new rules that will be a better fit as news gathering moved away from the media conglomerate model to the online blogger/citizen journalist model:

• Old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
  New rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.
• Old rule: You must present all sides of a story, being fair to each.
  New rule: Report the truth and debunk the lies.
• Old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
  New rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

THIS is more honest, and certainly more workable when you have single blogger/citizen journalists out there doing original reporting and trying to make a living at it. And lets face it, the contribution a part-time journalist can make is limited. To do it right , you’ve got to do it full time. That means citizen news organizations have to spend some time selling ads and les time trying to maintain the fiction they don’t have a point of view.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The public doesn’t really care about objectivity. What they want is fairness. They know that newspapers are affected by the need to sell ads, They know that reporters have opinions and those opinions inevitably MUST creep their way into their reporting. They know when someone is telling a reporter a bald faced lie or is spinning the facts. What they want is for reporters to be honest with them about these things.

These opposed rules work better. But the MSM won’t adopt them because that’s not how corporations do it.

Hat top: Poynter’s Romenesko.

But as little as a year ago, only a small percentage of people in the news business actually thought the change was imminent.  It was sorta like knowing that someday, we’ll all be using flying cars and going on vacation to the the Moon.

In case there are any doubters now, this ought to confirm for disbelievers that we are seeing the beginning of the death of the printing-press business model of news delivery.

The Seattle P-I is being put up for sale, and if after 60 days it has not sold, it will either be turned into a Web-only publication with a greatly reduced staff or discontinued entirely.

“One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division.

Emphasis mine.

This isn’t some weekly, community newspaper. This is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning paper in a major city. It follows a decision by the Christian Science Monitor to switch to online and print only once a week.

Last year, I offered some tough-love advice for newspapers. People laughed and scoffed. But it’s all happening, sooner than even I thought.

Change is scary.

I’m still thinking about my post about Scott Adams belief that it’s an economic fact that online will eventually replace print media. There have a been many predictions about the demise of the newspaper. Some of the dates in those predictions have come and passed. But ad sales DO continue to decline. Newspapers DO continue to lay off staffers, or not replace reporters who quit or retire.

Maybe they will still be around five years from now. Maybe not. But they almost certainly won’t be printed on paper 100 years from now. The only question is exactly when the last dead-tree newspaper will be printed. The trick for newspapers is to be one of those that make the transition to online.

Here are some radical ideas. All are based on the premise that the decline of print and the rise of online is NOT something to be staved off. Instead, it is something to be embraced and encouraged. It lowers fixed costs and lets news organizations devote the more of their resources toward paying people to gather the news, instead of killing trees and tossing paper on porches:

1. Hold a meeting of all employees. Tell them that effective immediately, their paychecks are coming from an online news organization. Tel them that job of print-only reporter/editor has been eliminated. Tell them they all have jobs as reporters for your Web site, as long they are willing to commit to it, and make the necessary adjustments to their newsroom culture. Oh, and if you are thinking of using this as an excuse to do away with unions or to outsource jobs, I hope you get hit by a bus. You would deserve to.
2. Make the following changes in your newsroom culture: Abandon the conceit that good journalism is defined as something that happens only in newspapers, and that since online journalism isn’t on paper, it cannot be good journalism. Readers do not buy your newspapers because it’s printed in paper. Ink on paper is a medium. The product the readers are buying is the reporting.
3. All deadlines are now “as soon as you get a story done that is reasonably free of spelling errors and typos.” Then put the article on line ASAP. Additional details can be added as they come in. Back in the ancient times, they called this “beating the competition.”
4. Take all feature content out of the dead-tree version of the newspaper. This includes the comics page, the bridge column, cross words, sports stats, stock prices, etc. Don’t give anyone ANY reason to go out and buy a copy of the paper. Put it ALL online instead. Your print version should be a stripped-down version of the online version, not the other way around.
5. Raise the price of single issues. The Peoria Journal Star charges $1 on weekdays. Double it. Then triple it if sales don’t drop enough. If senior citizens complain and stop buying, then, well, screw them. The survival of your news business is at stake. Senior citizens aren’t going to be customers in 10 years anyway, to be blunt about it. Besides, if my mother can get the news online, so can yours.
6. Restrict ad sales in the newspaper only to those who also buy ads online. After a year or two, stop selling ads in the newspaper altogether. Wean your advertisers off dead trees because it is in your interest to do so.
7. Start charging people to gain full access to your online content. Do it now. Don’t wait. Online subscriptions should be far less than the cost of a daily newspaper subscription. It should cost customers less because it costs media companies far less. Putting your local content online stinks for free stinks. It is stupid. You paid people to produce it, you paid syndicates for the features. You have the right to make a buck, and people WILL pay because your newspaper is STILL the only place they can get that much local content and the quality content I’m assuming your employees produce. And if you’re NOT producing high-quality content, you are screwed anyway. I am continually astounded at how many genuinely smart people in the news business think no one will subscribe to a news site for $5 a month, but will instead pay $365 a bloody year to buy newspapers out of ugly little news boxes.
8. Make sure the amount of news online on any given day exceeds the amount in the dead tree edition. Also, there’s no real reason to NOT give your online readers access to more comics and columns that you could fit in your newspaper. Stop thinking in terms of limited space. Remember, it is the ONLINE edition that has to be the premium version of your news content.
9. Train your reporters and editors to write for online. Readability is now the only consideration. Learn how to avoid journalistic shorthand. Stop thinking in terms of limited space. Think in terms of answering as many questions as possible, and giving readers the resources to find out more.
10. Do not hire bloggers to replace reporters. Guys like C.J. Summers and myself have a watchdog role to play, but the meat and potatoes of journalism is the full-time reporter who covers a beat. There is no substitute for an experienced beat reporter who knows where the bodies are buried and who works for a newspaper that likes to uncover the corpses (not that there aren’t bloggers who aren’t capable of digging up a body or two). Going online-only lets your newspaper spend money on reporters, not to ship rolls of paper and barrels of ink to your plant, then to deliver copies of your paper door to door. It’s the 21st-frigging-century for crying out loud. However, if you want to pay bloggers to provide added value and hits to your online product, feel free. Call me.
11. Take down the firewall between today’s online news and your archives. If anything, charge for new stories, and give away yesterday’s news for free instead. It is stupid that newspapers do the opposite. Make access to old stories at minimum easy to access as today’s stories. Someone reading about last night’s city council meeting should be able to click on a link to last week’s council meeting, AND the one five years ago when they discussed the very same issue.
12. You shall read and try to understand all 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Perhaps THEN you will understand why unsigned editorials fail in the 21st century.
13. Slapping Google Adsense onto your online site isn’t going to cut it. Learn how to sell online ads to LOCAL customers. Most online ads link to customer Websites. If your good customers don’t have good Websites, perhaps that’s a business opportunity for you.
14. Change your hiring policies. If an applicant has no blog, don’t interview them. The same with applicants with no HTML skills.
15. Want to civilize your reader comments? Limit comments to paid subscribers.

The newspaper company has launched a news operation in a town where the local (non-GateHouse) paper had largely ignored the web: Batavia, New York.
TheBatavian.com is an online news site that’s all local and 100% paper-free. By eliminating one of the greatest sources of expense – the printed paper – the startup in Batavia increases the chances of breaking even and – imagine that – making a profit in a business far too many people are writing off as too expensive.

I’ve been saying this for years. It costs just too damn much to deliver news on paper. The Internet is cheaper. A newspaper’s value isn’t the paper itself, but the news that’s printing on it. Instead of making readers subsidize the cost of printing and delivery, just have them pay a small subscription fee to get the news from the Web.

Here’s the problem. There’s no change at all to use The Batavian. There is just one ad. So, they aren’t making any money right now on it. And they have to compete with the newspaper.

So here’s my challenge to GateHouse — although it really isn’t if you think about it. Instead of looking for markets where the newspaper of record isn’t taking the Web seriously, trying going all online in a market where GateHouse owns the newspaper of record. That means closing the print version, and selling ads and subscriptions. The only “challenge” is having the guts to be the first do it. But without any real competition, success is more likely than it is in Batavia.

Maybe they will still be around five years from now. Maybe not. But they almost certainly won’t be printed on paper 100 years from now. The only question is exactly when the last dead-tree newspaper will be printed. The trick for newspapers is to be one of those that make the transition to online.

Here are some radical ideas. All are based on the premise that the decline of print and the rise of online is NOT something to be staved off. Instead, it is something to be embraced and encouraged. It lowers fixed costs and lets news organizations devote the more of their resources toward paying people to gather the news, instead of killing trees and tossing paper on porches:

1. Hold a meeting of all employees. Tell them that effective immediately, their paychecks are coming from an online news organization. Tel them that job of print-only reporter/editor has been eliminated. Tell them they all have jobs as reporters for your Web site, as long they are willing to commit to it, and make the necessary adjustments to their newsroom culture. Oh, and if you are thinking of using this as an excuse to do away with unions or to outsource jobs, I hope you get hit by a bus. You would deserve to.
2. All deadlines are now “as soon as you get a story done that is reasonably free of spelling errors and typos.” Then put the article on line ASAP. Additional details can be added as they come in. Back in the ancient times, they called this “beating the competition.”
3. Take all feature content out of the dead-tree version of the newspaper. This includes the comics page, the bridge column, cross words, sports stats, stock prices, etc. Don’t give anyone ANY reason to go out and buy a copy of the paper. Put it ALL online instead. Your print version should be a stripped-down version of the online version, not the other way around.
4. Raise the price of single issues. The Peoria Journal Star charges $1 on weekdays. Double it. Then triple it if sales don’t drop enough. If senior citizens complain and stop buying, then, well, screw them. The survival of your news business is at stake. Senior citizens aren’t going to be customers in 10 years anyway, to be blunt about it. Besides, if my mother can get the news online, so can yours.
5. Restrict ad sales in the newspaper only to those who also buy ads online. After a year or two, stop selling ads in the newspaper altogether. Wean your advertisers off dead trees because it is in your interest to do so.
6. Start charging people to gain full access to your online content. Do it now. Don’t wait. Online subscriptions should be far less than the cost of a daily newspaper subscription. It should cost customers less because it costs media companies far less. Putting your local content online stinks for free stinks. It is stupid. You paid people to produce it, you paid syndicates for the features. You have the right to make a buck, and people will pay because your newspaper is STILL the only place they can get that much local content and the quality content I’m assuming your employees produce. And if you’re NOT producing high-quality content, you are screwed anyway. I am continually astounded at how many genuinely smart people in the news business think no one will subscribe to a news site for $5 a month, but will instead pay $365 a bloody year to buy newspapers out of ugly little news boxes.
7. Make sure the amount of news online on any given day exceeds the amount in the dead tree edition. Also, there’s no real reason to NOT give your online readers access to more comics and columns that you could fit in your newspaper. Stop thinking in terms of limited space. Remember, it is the ONLINE edition that has to be the premium version of your news content.
8. Train your reporters and editors to write for online. Readability is now the only consideration. Learn how to avoid journalistic shorthand. Stop thinking in terms of limited space. Think in terms of answering as many questions as possible, and giving readers the resources to find out more.
9. Do not hire bloggers to replace reporters. Guys like C.J. Summers and myself have a watchdog role to play, but the meat and potatoes of journalism is the full-time reporter who covers a beat. There is no substitute for an experienced beat reporter who knows where the bodies are buried and who works for a newspaper that likes to uncover the corpses (not that there aren’t bloggers who aren’t capable of digging up a body or two). Going online-only lets your newspaper spend money on reporters, not to ship rolls of paper and barrels of ink to your plant, then to deliver copies of your paper door to door. It’s the 21st-frigging-century for crying out loud. However, if you want to pay bloggers to provide added value and hits to your online product, feel free. Call me.
10. Take down the firewall between today’s online news and your archives. If anything, charge for new stories, and give away yesterday’s news for free instead. It is stupid that newspapers do the opposite. Make access to old stories at minimum easy to access as today’s stories. Someone reading about last night’s city council meeting should be able to click on a link to last week’s council meeting, AND the one five years ago when they discussed the very same issue.
11. You shall read and try to understand all 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Perhaps THEN you will understand why unsigned editorials fail in the 21st century.
12. Change your hiring policies. If an applicant has no blog, don’t interview them. The same with applicants with no HTML skills.
13. Want to civilize your reader comments? Limit comments to paid subscribers.