Arguably, if you're in the car business today, you should stop making SUVs and start building fuel-efficient compacts. That's what people want.

But what if you lost $1,000 on every compact car you built? Would the move still make sense?

To be clear, I also believe we need to be developing multiple platforms and capitalizing on the relative strengths of multiple media. But I completely understand why people are resistant and skeptical. Many of them have poured hours into blogs or other online initiatives, and they've paid attention to the traffic that those features generate, and have noticed that the returns on their time/energy investment have, in many cases, been pretty slight.

As Addy noted earlier, there is skepticism as to whether these digital platforms, regardless of popularity with readers, will ever make enough money to sustain themselves. It's understandable that journalists would be reluctant to neglect a platform that they know is profitable to devote energy to one that isn't and may never be profitable.

It's also worth noting that worldwide, newspaper circulation is increasing, although that's primarily in developing countries where Internet access is less universal. In Europe, paid daily circulation is down, but circulation of free papers is booming. Readership of alt-weeklies in the U.S. continues to hold steady. Another interesting stat from the WAN report: In the U.S., 81 percent of online newspaper readers also read a printed newspaper at least once a week.

"Print" isn't the problem - lots of people, even young, tech-savvy hipsters, still read books, magazines, and weekly and daily papers. The only thing that's clearly becoming obsolete is the home-delivered-paid-circulation-newspaper-of-record.

Should part of this revolution should continue to include developing niche, free publications like the Voices and 7? Maybe at some point the entire daily paper will break apart into a series of free tabloids.

Again, I agree entirely that we need to aggressively develop digital platforms, but I'm not quite ready to give up on ink-and-paper. There may still be a lot of untapped potential there.

Ken,

I appreciate the point you're making.

But as I sit here (and I am listening to presentations from the other editors here, the more convinced I have become that print is a niche in and of itse;f.

I say that as someone who has devoted my life to print.

But the audience for print is declining, rapidly. while the appetite for news has never been greater.

We'll stay in print, but it can no longer be the primary focus of our newsroom. That is what it means when I say print is now "niche."

steve

The editosaurs in Los Angeles are marching toward the La Brea Tar Pits.

Is the audience for print declining because there's something wrong with the medium itself, or because of what we're doing with it?

Obviously, the answer varies widely depending on the individual. Some people only use paper to leave post-it notes for their roommates, others eschew TV and the internet and wish we could go back to using woodcuts instead of photographs. In between is a broad spectrum of people who use printed materials in some shape or form every day.

I think we get into a trap of using the word "print" as synonymous with the traditional daily newspaper model. The infrastructure for printing and distributing newspapers could be used in a variety of ways, perhaps to greater success.

Take the example of Cook's Illustrated magazine, which recently passed the 1,000,000-subscriber mark after 15 years of rapid circulation growth in an area where there is already tons of competition in a variety of media (Cook's Illustrated also has a subscription-based website and a show on PBS). The magazine is successful in large part because it is well-written, and has a clean, crisp, distinctive design, and has found a way to fulfill a need that its competition wasn't doing.

That may be a bad example - maybe we can never produce profitable niche print publications in this small of a market. But I bring it up to show that print publications can succeed if they find their audience and are done well, and that's why I'm concerned about the degree to which we might wind up reshuffling our resources.

For instance, the difference between a potential reader picking up a free tabloid or leaving it on the stand might boil down entirely to the quality of the cover design or the writing or editing. Deprive a publication like that of resources and it's guaranteed to fail, regardless of medium. But throw your best people at it and it might have a chance to succeed.

I realize it's not an either/or proposition, but I'm concerned that a culture shift too far in the other direction might cause us to neglect otherwise good opportunities to reach readers.

As a 22-year-old avid news consumer myself (and print newspaper employee, for disclosure), I disagree that the future of news is moving away from print and toward online. Breaking news, perhaps. But I - and just about everyone else of my age group that I know, whether they work in the newspaper industry or not - still turn to print for current information.

The question is, what kind of print do we turn to? I think that's where the focus ought to be - what needs to be in a newspaper to attract a younger audience that understands newsgathering in a very different way than the older readers who, let's face it, will probably continue to get their news from the paper?

I don't have time - and neither do many other people I know - to wait for often lumbering internet connections to load news video, find the right link for information or to sift through myriad blog posts and comments to find news.
Yes, we want our news quickly, simply and straightforward, but more often than not, we want it in print.

I do think that breaking news has already become, and will remain, firmly in the online domain. I also think that supplemental online coverage is increasingly demand - in other words, give me the necessary info in print, and then if I care I can find more online.

But the most valuable information - that which impacts our lives and helps us to understand the world in which we live - I believe is still most suited to print.

I know what you're facing, Steve, and I understand where you and other editors are coming from in this battle. But I'm not sure the goal should be to change from one medium to another. I think it should be to reevaluate the medium we already employ.

Sorry, should read "increasingly in demand."

I rarely pipe in these days but if my couple of cents has any value it is in the fact that I read print all the time--newspapers, magazines, books and I look online to immediate and international news but I find myself more and more glancing at the paper and reading in depth stories from The Inlander and OutThere Monthly because they are LOCAL papers with news about local events. I find it ironic that I can often find stories in The Voices that are neither local any more nor written by employees. And there are more and more syndicated stories that I have often read online the night before by the time it hits my doorstep in the morning.

What am I interested in from the SR? I'm interested in local stories about local people that have local impact. I don't get much of that anymore. The most recent, interesting story that I followed had to do with the twin Idaho men that went into the military and then on to serve their country. And I have to say that I did not agree with absolutely anything that came out of their mouths nor their politics but I looked forward to each time I found a story about them--I read it eagerly and with interest because they were people in this region with stories so different from mine yet accessible.

I didn't read them online; I didn't look for more online information about them; I read the stories in the newspaper on my couch and on the porch and with my coffee in the morning.

What do I want from the SR? I want stories, good and not so good, I want follow up from stories in the past. I want to know what happens a year from now to those families who lost their houses in the fires last week; I want why just once a month in April you devote time to child abuse and then it all but disappears for another 11 months.

Stories don't end after 1 column or 250 words or 30 lines; the stories of the people in the Inland Northwest continue.

I don't expect to read about Iraq in the SR. I don't expect to read about Wall Street in the SR, but I do expect to read about why the schools in District 81 can no longer get parents to volunteer in the classroom; I want to know why Kiemle and Hagood kicked out the owners of the Paper Garden because they were behind in their rent. Who isn't behind in their rent right now? I want to read about what's going on in the Valley because I rarely make it out that far and maybe I should. I want to read about the guy who gets up every morning at 4:30 to go back to work on the Central YMCA so that in a few months kids from all over the region will have a place to gather, off the streets, to swim, to hang out, to play basketball. I want to read about the fact that every month a group of women gather in a center and talk about their babies who died last week and last month and last year and how they go on anyways and how they long for another child but they are also scared because when they go out into the world and see other pregnant women, they freeze and are terrified of the thing that is supposed to be beautiful.

I want to read about what's happening not to banks all over the country but to the banks in Spokane, to the banks in the neighborhoods where the people who take my checks and deposit them are probably wondering how much longer their branch is going to be open?

I want to read about the Native Americans who lived here longer and more deeply than any of us ever have in this region and what more can they teach us about all of it and what the river looked like before we dumped our waste in it and what they might do to help us fix it or are we just too far gone to this modern place.

I don't want to read about how the newspaper is going out of print because 10 years ago they told us books were going out of print and the last thing I want to do is read my next novel on the computer or on some hand held device but we still turn pages and our kids still fight for the comics in the morning and my husband sits and does the crossword puzzle and so what I really want to know is why the SR doesn't just go out and write stories about real people and real news and quit whining about the state of the news? Tell me a story, tell me a story, show it to me in a photograph. You have some very talented writers and photographers and why don't you let them do the things that they do best?

Amen, Sarah.

To Sarah and palousereader,

I don't disagree with much of what you say.

I long for the old days when putting out a great newspaper was enough. Sadly, that is not the case anymore. Newspapers are no more immune from the changes we all confront than any other institution.

In 1999-2000, the SR had 165 newsroom staff, 154 full-time. We now have 116 of which 108 are full-time.

The number of local news reporters has decreased by at least one third. Photographers, copy editors and line editors, too. So, of course, there is less news in the paper, less depth and less context.

I would argue the journalists we have are doing as Sarah suggests. They still produce great journalism every day. They are as free as ever to do just that. But there is less of it. No one can argue with that.

I would suggest that Sarah and palousereader take a week's worth of papers and red pencil the articles that convey news or information they saw in the paper but nowhere else.

Circle the investigative and watchdog pieces and the personality pieces. Circle the hard, local news. Don't ignore packages such as Becky Kramer's wonderful series on the Spokane River. That certainly meet's Sarah's criteria for a good newspaper.

There remains no better, in most cases, no other source for the news we provide.

It's not the same. But what is?

steve

Correct, Steve, nothing is the same. The last quote at the end of this post proves that reporting on a reader who sued his local newspaper after it fired much of its staff and announced it was cutting pages.

This weekend's edition of NPR's On the Media has several relevant stories which can be listened to or read on-line at:

On the Media

I am very interested in what Sarah has to say.

However, I must point out in the office I work today a co-worker came into the lunch room where every Monday morning there are three editions of the S-R -- Saturday, Sunday, and Monday scattered across the table. She wanted one page. Front page of the Saturday 7/19/08 S-R to read the headline story about the Bush administration caving/backsliding/retreating on withdrawing Iraq.

Sure, people are concerned about abuse of little children in Spokane. I certainly am, having worked as a CPS social worker off and on for twenty years. But people are also interested in the policy of the militarists which will result in their children either paying with their bodies or taxes for the current and next imperialist misadventure. Sure, they could go elsewhere for that information but they shouldn't have to, unless the paper intends to change its entire long-established formula of micro-to-macro. Not everyone sees the local newspaper as exclusively a source for local news. When the story of concern for little children and the story about the war killing children grown into adults are tied together -- as they were recently by the story on increasing suicides by returned soldiers who sought care at the Spokane VA hospital and by stories about the role of Spokane psychological Mitchell and Jessen in designing U.S. torture policy -- then the newspaper plays the broader informational and educational role that it can and should.

In terms of a business model for survival in Spokane, the S-R clearly has to cover as much of the quite limited "Inland Empire" (i.e., captive audience) market as it can by covering the gamut with print, with internet, with radio, probably with music, information, classifieds, and everything else it can gets its grubby hands on (grubby in the sense of the profit imperative to which it is of necessity a slave).

By the way, here you can read or listen to NPR Bob Garfield's On the Media interview with Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth.
http://www.onthemedia.org/

Here is one excerpt:

Bob Garfied: You at The Post have the luxury of two classes of stock, most of it within the family and close associates. Has that insulated you from the pressures that have so afflicted Knight Ridder and Gannett, the previous incarnation of the Tribune Company, and other media corporations that are so utterly answerable to Wall Street?

KATHARINE WEYMOUTH: Well, I think it’s less the stock structure, although that plays a role, and more that the company overall, thanks in large part to our education division and cable, and a little bit our TV stations, is doing well, so that that does cushion the pressure for us a little bit. But it doesn't mean we don't have to stand on our own two feet, because we do.

On the same On the Media program, here is another relevant excerpt from the Garfield interview with media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Garfield: This whole issue gets to the odd symbiosis between mainstream media and the blogosphere, because the media needs the blogosphere to create more audience and the blogosphere needs the mainstream media to have the raw material upon which to aggregate, fulminate, bloviate. But in order for that to happen, the raw material has to have a business model attached to it. Do you believe that the AP really is in jeopardy from the Drudge Retorts of the world?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: We're starting to get a sense, at this point, 10, 12 years into the age of the World Wide Web, that there’s no zero sum here; that, in fact, there are ways that your paid for, ad supported work can echo through the free media spaces and benefit you, and there certainly can be huge leaks in the system that can perhaps detract from revenue you thought you deserved at some point.
But, you know, it’s not simple arithmetic, and we're still sort of feeling our way through it.

Finally, the last story on this On the Media edition starts this way, with Brooke Gladstone saying:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: News organizations, editors and bloggers all are dealing with the financial difficulties newspapers face, but what about readers? What recourse have they if they're upset with a paper’s efforts to downsize? They could write a letter, cancel their subscription, or even —sue? That’s the line of attack chosen by a newspaper reader in Durham, North Carolina.

Attorney Keith Hempstead recently filed a lawsuit against h

(remainder of the last quote) --

Attorney Keith Hempstead recently filed a lawsuit against his local paper, The News and Observer, and its parent company, McClatchy Newspapers, after they laid off 70 employees and announced cuts to the news pages. He says he’s mad, and he’s not going to take it any more.

We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors ned to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

Focus on stories. On writing and photographing stories. On people in the community. Not on a niche but on this community. On including content in the paper that is for and about the community.

I admit it. I'm selfish. I want to read the newspaper for things that I care about. And things that I care about are local things.

My wife already said it. A million people have said it. I can get AP stories all day long on Google. And if I want to read those stories, I turn to Google every time. So when I get the paper (which I do every day), I turn directly to local content, locally written and locally important. There is very little national news that I read in the S-R.

So here: focus on being a local public service first, and decide how to make money with that public service rather than by trying to invent readers with contests and promotions, then you'll have yourself a newspaper. Something that the community cares about. Something that I care about.

I don't have any real confidence, by the way, that many newspapers are going to figure out just what they have to do to create a desirable following within a community. Newspapers (and most businesses, frankly) have a tendency to group together in one giant sinking life-raft and shout "we're sinking" really loud, grabbing at tentacles that look so appealing (Podcast! Video! Social Networking! Twitter! Oh my! Look at all these glittery toys!) rather than wade ashore to offer something of value the people playing volleyball on the beach.

We're here. What we want is a newspaper. I can get video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, uselesscasts and egocasts from a million other places. I do not want to get them from my newspaper. I do not want reporters and photographers and editors doing more (tweet, blog, pod, trash) with less (time, resources, blessings of the editor). I want them to drill down. Take some necessary losses. Lose some of the blogs. Some of the multimedia. It just is not what I'm turning to my newspaper for.

I recognize I'm posting this on a blog entry, and I further recognize just how cynical my post is likely to be received. But the S-R is still one of the best games in town, if not the region, and I'd rather see it flourish as a newspaper--or even die as a newspaper--than die as a social networking tweetcast.

I've gone on overlong. But I mean every word.

I'm a news junkie and prefer to get my news from the local paper which is hopefully filled with local stories, local features, and local reporters covering local events. I disagree with Steve wholeheartedly that the paper version of the news product is dying. It dies when local coverage stops. It dies when the advertising hole grows and the news hole shrinks. It dies when there aren't enough reporters to cover what's happening in our communities. Subscriptions in North Idaho have declined 30 percent since you reconfigured the North Idaho news room. The lesson is people want local news about their community. And for North Idaho, the definition of community is North Idaho -- not Spokane, not the valley, but North Idaho. The Spokesman has lost credibility on this side of the border. You'll continue the downward slide when you rob the newsprint product to dabble in what you call new emerging markets and products. Don't be fooled again.... we want newsprint exactly like Sarah called it.

Steve, Carla and the S-R gang:

All of us in the industry are going through the same dilemma and the troubling part for everyone is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. All of us are coming up with the new model(s) on the fly and innovation has to be at the core.

I just returned from a seminar on the East Coast while you were both on the West Coast and our conversations were apparently a mirror image of yours.

One presenter said the revenue model is probably trailing the newsroom changes by anywhere from 18 months to 5 years. If true, what will be the long-term impact on our resources?

Right now, newsrooms can only do their best to produce compelling content across multiple platforms that connects with our audience.

As a native of Spokane and a former S-R staffer, I wish you all the best in trying to find the Rosetta Stone.