Josh Shear

Most people who write about the industry aren't declaring newspapers dead yet, but some are starting to give them one last crack on the noggin toward that end.

The latest bigger-city bad news is that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will stop printing in five weeks if no one buys it, and may consider an online-only publication, but only outside of its joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times.

David Swenson and Michael Schmidt proposed a preposterous idea in the New York Times last month: set up endowments to save newspapers, turning them non-profit and sustainable.

I don't know exactly what it costs to run a newspaper, but the story says that the Times, for instance, would need a $5 billion endowment to get going.

I'm sure this is plausible for a few papers. Figuring that no self-respecting newspaper would accept a government-funded grant, high rollers would probably put up the cash to sustain papers like the Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and LA Times.

But what about newspapers in smaller communities? Sure, they require less of a start, but could newspapers in mid-sized markets like my hometown of Springfield, Mass., my adopted hometwon of Syracuse, N.Y., and other cities like Hartford, Austin, Oklahoma City, etc., put together $800 million endowments quickly? [Yes, I'm pulling that number out of thin air, based on the suggestion the Times would need $5 billion.]

I'm betting that under that model, we have maybe a half-dozen nationally distributed, well-funded papers, and hundreds, if not thousands, of newsletters and blogs that recall the early days of yellow journalism in America.

I'm not ready for that model.

Those people who point out the benefits of maintaining newspapers in communities look to papers' large newsrooms and ability to do meaningful enterprise journalism.

I'm not going to argue with that. At all. That enterprise journalism is my favorite stuff to read. I'll read books of it. And I prefer it in print, even over on a computer screen, but especially over radio or television.

But those who are calling for newspapers to stop offering free online content are pointing to enterprise journalism – which is expensive – as the reason readers should pay for online content.

But it's clear to me that Stu Bykofsky and like-minded pundits aren't reading their whole newspapers, or taking in their newspapers' Web sites as a whole.

At any given time, a newspaper Web site might have a link or two to a current enterprise piece from its home page, but the rest of the offerings are wire or locally written national stories, along with the same crime, fire and man-on-the-street stories I can get on TV or radio with just my antenna – without paying for it (outside of having the equipment and signal, something I also need if I'm going to read a newspaper online).

Tim Rutten points out that the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times charge for online content, but he neglects to mention that they're not general interest publications.

A lot of academic journals also charge for online content, but again, most of us aren't interested.

Rutten does offer a good pricing model: give media sites an antitrust exemption and set tiered pricing (as long as it's affordable). But other than that, he still relies on the notion that newspapers primarily do enterprise reporting, which simply isn't true.

The fact that people are visiting newspaper Web sites (even if they're not spending very long on those sites) clearly isn't lost on people; what is lost on people is the same thing that has been lost on Chrysler and GM for the past several years: the reason we're not willing to spend good money on the product is that the product doesn't necessarily meet our desires.

Bykofsky calls for a $5/month charge for newspaper Web sites; ostensibly that would be in addition to a subscription charge for the paper version, and he doesn't mention what sort of mobile offering would accompany that.

I'm going to offer a model that I'd be willing to pay $10, maybe $15 a month for, that covers all three.

• Printed Edition: Once a week, delivered with my Friday mail, a 30- to 40-page paper, 90 percent of which is two or three long-form enterprise stories with a couple of good photos and a description of associated online multimedia content, with the ability to comment on the story and multimedia.

The rest of the paper contains digest items listing the miscellaneous crime, courts, safety, etc., news, alerting me where online (in a mobile-friendly format – more on that in a minute) I can find more info.

Delivery by mail means newspapers don't have to pay as much for distribution – no sending laden trucks far and wide, paying for gas, drivers and vehicle maintenance. Friday delivery means I can spend the weekend with it, when I have time and the desire to sit down with a couple of cups of coffee, and read slowly, turning pages.

• Mobile News: You know when I most want crime and safety news? When I see fire trucks returning to the station, or when I happen by several police cruisers on the street. It would be great if I knew exactly where to go for that news.

On my mobile device is also where I want my sports news – and by sports news, I primarily mean game updates. I want scores, injury reports, and other game notes as games are happening; a game analysis could come later, still maintaining a mobile-friendly layout.

• Online Content: Everything should be online. The news hole is bottomless, the multimedia options are limitless, and opportunities abound for interaction between readers, between journalists, and between journalists and readers. Lead with your enterprise stuff, and make it obvious where I can find the other stuff. The enterprise stuff is where newspapers beat other media types, and heck, if you want to team up with local TV news teams to have them provide the day-to-day crime and fire news, great. I don't really care where it comes from; if you've got four teams (three TV stations and a newspaper) covering a break-in, you're going to have four nearly identical stories.

And that leads me to one other thing that journalists have been hearing about, but for the most part have been doing poorly: interaction. Gina Chen (a colleague of mine) offers some great tips for journalists. It's not enough to be using social networking sites: you have to be social with them. I wrote more about this in my wishes for newspapers in 2009.

Let's not put newspapers on the cart yet. Let's get rolling to make sure their best work continues to shine.