New rules for newspapers

BrassTacks Design's Alan Jacobson offers some excellent and thought-provoking advice to newspapers hoping to survive the Internet age. 

1. Get real about the Internet

2. Tie journalists' pay to circulation

3. Ignore your loyal readers

4. Stop running news stories

5. Feed the cash cow

6. Drop the price

7. Solve the online revenue riddle

8. Promote as if success depends upon it

9. Join hands and sing Kumbaya

His design firm is partly responsible for the inverse-L craze that's so popular with the kids these days -- a layout I don't particularly like -- but you have to give the company credit for slapping some reality into publishers' heads. The Internet is fundamentally changing the business and pushing newspapers to more radical changes than they've been willing to make so far.

As Jacobson puts it:

The Internet is not evolutionary like the telegraph, telephone, radio or television – it's revolutionary like Gutenberg's movable type, because it provides everyone with a powerful publishing technology. It's not merely a new way to publish – it's the democratization of publishing. Freedom of the press no longer belongs to those who own one.

Furthermore, the Internet allows virtually everyone to publish (i.e. HTML, myspace, blogs, etc.), search (database) and communicate (email) – three killer apps in one. Nuthin' else comes close.

The job prospects for scribes were pretty bleak after Gutenberg. Our future could be just as bleak unless we act quickly and decisively.

His most controversial advice is to "stop running news stories," at least in print. Instead, he argues, breaking stories should go to the Web, and context and analysis should appear in print.

He has a point. But there's nothing print can do context-wise that's not online, too (see Slate, which excels at these types of stories). And frankly, analysis is cheap (see just about every cable TV news program on the air).

There are a couple of things newspaper companies can do better than the Matt Drudges and Digg.coms. (Besides actual journalism, that is. Lost in all the hubbub is the fact that few bloggers actually report news. They gather, link to and comment on the news -- something that should be exploited, not feared.)

In print, newspapers still do a far better job with graphics and photos. Newspapers should use them more.  I don't mean just running things bigger. My fiance recently did a graphic explaining the case of a years-ago local murder. A co-worker of hers mentioned that the graphic did such a good job telling the story that he didn't need to read the reporter's text.

And nobody covers local news like the local newspaper, whether online or in print. Newsies often moan about cutting overseas bureaus and a trend toward deemphasizing national and international news.

I say good riddance. The cuts leaves more room for local news. Local newspapers need to shake off the mindset that they're the sole source of news for local readership. That might have been true before 1994 or so. But today, national and international news is a mere click away at The New York Times, Washington Post and BBC -- which do a far better job at it anyway.

No, these notions aren't ground-breaking. The real challenge will be figuring out how to make money from online advertising. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for that one.