Lots is being written these days about the newspaper industry.  As I’ve mentioned before I’m very impressed with what the Greensboro News & Record is doing with blogs, posting "Letters to the Editor" online and allowing comments (talk about free entertainment), opening their "pages" to the masses, etc.  So when their editor posts something on his blog about the newspaper business I read it, and then start thinking about it.

So after lots of thinking, starting and then deleting lots of posts about it, and finally just deciding I don’t know what I think about it, here’s what I’ve finally come up with about the newspaper business:

1. We have to stop thinking of it as the "newspaper" business.  In this day and age almost all newspapers are part of a larger media company, and as such the newspapers are really a piece of a media portfolio.
2. "Newspaper" is not synonymous "journalism."  One component of newspapers is journalism, but a newspaper is really a delivery vehicle for some journalistic pieces, some editorial pieces and (increasingly less) advertising.
3. Not all employees of newspaper (media) companies have the same goals. Journalists want one thing, ad reps another, and publishers something else.  What they have in common is that they want to stay in business, but they have a hard time agreeing on how to do that.
4. Newspaper publishers, or at least their parent companies, need not worry about declining circulation in and of itself.  They simply need to take whatever strategic direction allows them to wield the same influence in the community that the newspapers have traditionally enjoyed.  In fact I’m sure they would love to trade the capital expense that is the printing press for a bank of ever cheaper servers.
5. Journalists shouldn’t care one iota if the newspaper itself survives.  What they need to worry about is retaining their influence as the interpreter, the fact checker, the "trusted source."  They need to realize that they are just like every other professional out there: their name and reputation means everything.  They’ve been losing ground on the "trusted" front, but we still count on journalists to interpret the big stories for us, and we still need their investigative skills and inherent skepticism (at least the good ones).
6. To make sure that they don’t lose any more ground in the respectability arena journalists must effectively distance themselves from the columnists and entertainers (Coulter, Will, Cohen) and educate the average consumer on the difference between journalists and the rest.
7. Journalists also need to train themselves to utilize the new media that is out there to tell their stories better and more effectively.  They need to understand that while the written word is still their most powerful and effective medium, in the future it will be necessary to augment the written word with audio, video, graphics and probably as-yet-unconceived tool.
8. The news media industry is going to start resembling the movie industry.  By that I mean that instead of the traditional corporate structure where there’s an HQ with publishers, editors, reporters, photographers and graphics people housed together and augmented with a stable of freelancers there will essentially be an HQ with managers.  Managers will then pull together their product using a pool of professionals on an as needed basis.
   And the pool of professionals will increasingly be working with raw materials supplied by the public, the "citizen journalists" that everyone talks about. (I’ll detail some of my imagined scenarios in a later post).
9. Editors, writers, photographers, graphics folks (i.e. ‘the talent’) will need to be very entrepreneurial to survive.  (Dana Blankenhorn has been saying this for a while).  But those that do survive will thrive because they will no longer be beholden to one employer; they can hire themselves out to the highest bidder.  **Editors might actually be the managers that I mention in point 7.**
10. The news media companies will enjoy ever higher profits.  While they’ve lost significant ad revenue to Google and Yahoo! they still have the opportunity to dominate local advertising.  I think they’ll figure it out and will do exactly that.

Okay, enough for now.  That’s as far as my thinking has gone.