Josh Shear

Take five minutes to watch this presentation. Thanks to Susan Hall (Twitter) for passing it along.

First let me say that that newspaper is gorgeous. Decorate-your-wall gorgeous. And if you transfer those infographics to the web, they'd kill on digg. And yes, I'd probably buy it with some sort of consistency, because I like pretty things.

I wrote about 2,000 words about why I think this wouldn't work in the U.S., focusing on the fact that people who read newspapers like to read stories and people who write newspaper stories like having a place to show off their writing and more and more, the stories in this paper are being told with photos and graphics.

But I realized as I was writing, it's fairly obvious that readers don't enjoy reading quite as much as writers enjoy writing. So the fact that there might be no more than 200 words on a front page or 500 words in any interior spread isn't a problem for me.

I do, however, think it has a magazine-like quality that makes it less attractive as a daily news source and more appealing as something to look at slowly throughout the day or week. It makes me want to admire the artwork, not find out what's going on at school board meetings – I think I'd be distracted from the news.

But then, maybe that's just me. I like news, and I like the written word. Perhaps people would get more out of bigger graphics and shorter stories, though – USA Today has done very well on that model, and it's not a paper I pick up at all, which means I likely wouldn't be the target audience for something like this.

What do you think?

I tend to check Google Trends in the morning. It's one of the things I do in terms of a morning coffee ritual when I get to work. For those not familiar, it's a list of the things people are searching for on Google; typically it's updated every hour or so, but sometimes it goes on for a few hours before it updates. Whatever.

Frequently, it's people wanting to watch one of last night's TV episodes. There's usually something that's been featured either on The Today Show or Good Morning America. Sometimes there's sports scores. And sometimes it's people in a large enough market searching for school closings.

And then sometimes it's dead celebrities. The Internet loves to kill people. Failing that, maybe the Internet is retiring athletes mid-season.

Tuesday morning, there were two. The top search was justin bieber dead; the second hottest search was casey johnson dead.

Being a pop-culture-ophobe (OK, not really, but I'm pretty dim when it comes to this stuff), I'd never heard of either of these people. Which means that I had to wade through the search results to figure out who they were, never mind if they were actually dead.

Bieber, it turns out, is a 15-year-old kid who is some sort of pop sensation or something. He appears to be living and breathing and making teenage girls cry with his sensitivity instead of in mourning. This, apparently was not the first time the Internet killed Justin Beiber (via WikiAnswers:

Casey Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of one of the founders of the Johnson & Johnson Company (if you've ever read a label on anything in a bathroom, you've heard of them). She's also the daughter of Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets.

Casey Johnson is, in fact, dead. She died this week at the age of 30, and at this writing, we're not sure why.

So, what did we learn from this? That Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes was correct: Newspapers (and other traditional news outlets) are going to turn into truth filters.

While we'll get most of our news from places like Twitter or Facebook (not necessarily those places, but places like them), where we select who we get the news from so the news will be relevant to us, we'll still need places like The New York Times to tell us whether the news we got is actually true.

The lesson: If you're not sure, check with someone you trust. Don't freak out over something you heard from someone who heard from somewhere that something may or may not have happened, which means it absolutely did.

Just like in many aspects of your life, you need to actually use your brain to use the Internet effectively.

When The Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased their print editions, something happened that wasn't evident to either the save-the-newspaper or the dude-the-Web's-great crowd: fans of the Colorado Rockies and Seattle Mariners both lost local places to study box scores.

When I moved to Syracuse, I not only arrived in a town which places much more emphasis on college than professional sports, I discovered I was in a place where people by and large aren't baseball fans.

People here definitely have allegiances – I've met lots of Yankees and Red Sox fans, and a smattering of Mets fans – but by and large, these are team people, not baseball people.

There are some of us die-hards, who live for the smell of grass, the season's first hot dog, who keep score at games, and who study statistics.

Baseball fans? We're numbers people. There's something old-fashioned about that, for sure.

And while the Web is certainly a great place for box scores and statistics (it's bottomless, it's got great archiving ability, great sharing ability), there's something that seems right about having that stuff in a newspaper, isn't there?

Seattle and Denver still have print newspapers, but across the country, that could continue to change.

And ESPN.com's Jim Caple is worried about it.

Could bloggers and Web writers cover teams, get access to players, managers, coaching staffs, etc.? Cover both the news and analysis? Absolutely, admits Caple. But, he asks, could bloggers afford the travel and lodging expenses required to go on the road to cover a team?

Not likely, he says.

News flash: Newspapers can't afford to do it either. That's why they're cutting down on news hole and in some cases, stopping printing altogether.

Some former Colorado Rockies beat writers for The Rocky Mountain News have started InsideTheRockies.com, which is part of a project done by former RMN reporters called In Denver Times (which is in beta now and launches May 4).

There isn't up-front advertising evident, and it looks like In Denver Times is going to try out a subscription model. Is it sustainable? I guess we'll find out (and good luck; I'm always rooting for new Web sites, especially if they're doing original reporting).

Caple's right in one aspect: most people can't afford to travel with a team and cover them without the backing of Big Media.

But to successfully cover a team, I don't think that's necessary.

Follow me here. You do a league-wide network with localized editions for each team. You need two bloggers for each ballpark: one covers the home team every game, and the other covers the visiting team – senior partner and junior partner, if you will.

The person who covers the home team is going to be the primary expert on that team. The person who covers the away team is going to act essentially as a stringer for that team's hometown edition. Newspapers already do this for minor league baseball and hockey – they pay somebody on the other end to cover a game and get into the locker room for post-game quotes.

If a team is truly giving a hometown beat writer access, they'll accept a phone call if clarification or more information is requested.

The funding model for this is the same it is for any other online-only publication: you sell advertising, and maybe you can do some exclusive content (extended video interviews with players, perhaps?) for subscribers.

Why couldn't that work?

My first post on newspapers in 2009 went like this:

I was horrified to find out yesterday that at least one Connecticut lawmaker is considering a government bailout of a newspaper.

I'm still horrified by this prospect for the same reason: How can a newspaper impartially (read: critically) report on the government that funds it?

Well, it's been another week of devolution in the newspaper industry (if you consider dealing with the effects of refusing to evolve to be devolution).

The Christian Science Monitor has printed its final mass-market daily edition. Cox announced it will shut down its Washington bureau on Wednesday.

And that piece I wrote a few days ago about the newspaper crisis hitting home? AnnArbor.com is now live, which makes the impending closing of the print edition of the Ann Arbor News feel that much closer.

Andrea pointed me to a piece by Dylan Stableford on whether newspapers might go non-profit in an effort to save themselves.

Stableford's question stems from legislation introduced by Maryland Senator Ben Cardin that would allow certain newspapers to become 501(c)(3) organizations.

Why do we need legislation for that? The non-profit Poynter Institution owns the St. Petersburg Times, and you can write off a donation to Poynter, so is it really necessary?

There's a gray area here, in that a non-profit newspaper may be able to sell advertising under current tax law.

But there's some major problems here. If you actually read the legislation (PDF), you'll find that it says an eligible newspaper is one that publishes regularly and includes local, national and international news.

I'm OK with "regularly" – most papers come out with some frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). But the legislation appears to specifically exclude some types of publications. Niche publication? Nope. National (with no specifically local news)? Application rejected. Local weekly? Out.

Let's also not forget that to qualify for a 501(c)(3), an organization has to be non-partisan. So, no more candidate endorsements (which, by the way, is fine with me), but also no being critical of any government institution or politician, lest you be accused of being impartial. You'd better included representatives from the IRS on your editorial board, in your story budget meetings, and maybe you just turn over your assignment editor positions.

Maybe print folks think I'm not taking the newspaper crisis seriously enough. Maybe it's because readership here is strong (via Sean Kirst).

Or maybe it's because I just don't think that the Web is destroying journalism, but rather that Web sites help newspapers.

David Eaves points out that the fact newspapers are in trouble means that democracy and the exchange of ideas are healthy. In fact, after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online-only, some of the folks who didn't make the cut from the printed version to the Web site are working on starting competing sites. When the Rocky Mountain News shut down, it didn't mean Colorado Rockies fans are going to be left without coverage, it means that former beat writers have new opportunities.

So where are we? Moving forward, in some direction or other. As Yogi Berra once said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Some related stuff

» Gina Chen: Old journalism might be fading out, but let's make sure some standards stick around

» Jay Rosen: Here's some stuff you should read regarding where newspapers are heading

» Idea Lab: How much local news is in your newspaper?

» Also, was I self-referential enough to fulfill Paul Dailing's requirements for becoming a death of newspapers blogger? (Hat tip to Alana Taylor.)

I can't imagine that you've missed the news about the state of the newspaper industry. If you have, go spend three days reading about it, and talk to me when you've left the corner you've been rocking in.

Colorado's oldest paper, The Rocky Mountain News – which was actually launched in the Kansas Territory, before Colorado existed – has dedicated its Web site to the paper's shuttering weeks ago.

Photo of empty Post-Intelligencer box
by Brian M. Westbrook. Used with permission.

Washington's oldest paper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped print publication last week but is thriving online, to the point where you would have to actually know there was once a print edition.

The Christian Science Monitor will go to primarily online in April (they'll print a weekend edition, and have some other print offerings for subscribers, but nothing you can buy on the stands on a daily basis).

Gannett, which owns USA Today and a hundred-plus other newspapers across the country, has announced new furloughs as we move to the second quarter of 2009.

With all this going on, CNN wants to know what newspaper readers are going to do.

It's all felt very close, considering I once was a newspaper editor and reporter, before moving on to spend two years in grad school bitching about the decline of local news in newspapers (that was the unofficial name of my program).

And now I work for a Web site that's affiliated with a newspaper (they're owned by the same parent, but operated independently).

Operating independently, we don't take a direct hit when something happens in the newspaper industry. We're more like the person on the corner when the SUV slams into the hatchback, hoping we're standing just far enough back to avoid flying steel.

I'll be honest, it's been tough watching newspapers go down, but to some extent, the ivory tower in me is saying, "I told you so." But this week...well, this week, one of the newspapers in our chain announced it will go online only this summer. Another is planning to publish three days a week come June.

The newspaper chain my company is associated with announced a company-wide series of 10-day furloughs, apparently including my site's affiliate, The Post-Standard.

Some anonymous commenters are flat-out saying that production problems with this morning's paper may have been sabotage in the wake of the furlough news.

For the record, I very much doubt that.

Some people are still trying to save newspapers as printed products, but I've moved onto the fence. While I still enjoy kicking back with a Sunday paper and a cup (or three) of coffee, but let's face it, Clay Shirky gets a few things right.

Printing presses are expensive to buy, build, and run. Newsprint costs fluctuate, but overall, rise steadily. The price of distribution rises and falls with gas prices, which, as a whole, are going up, even if there are peaks and valleys.

I'm more interested in saving journalism than necessarily the printed product. I will always prefer reading longer pieces on paper, but with shrinking newsholes, we're getting shorter pieces overall anyway.

I have some ideas for making sure journalism survives – and that journalists thrive – but it seems like printed newspapers have spent a lot of time avoiding change.

And now, that avoidance is hitting really close to home. I'm hoping my colleagues hang in there, because I enjoy working with them, they're good people, and many of them are among the best in the country at what they do. Good luck, folks. I hope there's light at the end of this tunnel.

With thanks to Alana Taylor for pointing it out.

The video that used to be above but was taken down by the user was essentially this piece from TJ Sullivan offering a really bad idea on how to save newspapers.

Sullivan says that from July 4 to July 10 this year, papers should stop offering free content online by blacking out their Web sites.

Let me include the disclaimer here that I work for the online component of a newspaper – its Web site, where they offer news free – before I tell you this will help further damage newspapers.

Before you read the rest of this post, be sure to catch up (if you haven't already) on my thoughts for a paid online newspaper I'd subscribe to. Go on, I'll wait.

Back? Good.

Now, why do I think this is such a bad idea (apart from the timing, which requires newspapers to make do with what they've got for another five months)? Let me count the ways.

• Web sites do not replace the printed edition. Many people who are in-market who read a newspaper's Web site also subscribe to the printed edition. The majority of people who read newspapers' Web sites without subscribing to the newspaper are local ex-pats, now living out of town, for whom subscribing to the print edition would be both cost-prohibitive (who can swing $7 or $8 a day and $12 on Sunday to have the paper mailed to them?) and time-insensitive (it's not breaking news if I get the paper a week later – heck, you're not even reporting on the latest football game anymore).

• Web sites increase news hole. By offering only the printed edition, do you (a) simply cut out a lot of what your reporters write, or (b) go ahead and print everything that they'd write for their blogs, because it's still content people want?

• Newspaper Web sites have their own writers, too. Yes, newspapers provide the vast majority of content for their Web sites. But almost every (at least mid-size market) daily newspaper Web site in the country has other bloggers or beat writers. Will you spend that week printing their work, too?

• Newspaper Web sites provide a space for people to interact with reporters and with each other. Are you suddenly going to expect your reporters to exchange lots of phone calls with readers? If 200 people send the same e-mail to your local college hoops beat writer, the writer typically can just post a response in a blog. You either risk cutting out that interactivity, or you risk losing your reporter. You also lose the ability for people to interact with each other – and a week may be just long enough for people to find a different forum and never come back.

• Newspaper Web sites have different advertisers. Because they attract more of a national audience, affiliated Web sites attract different advertisers than the printed paper. If you lose the ads for a week, you lose some advertisers forever, and others you lose until you can bring traffic back up to what it was.

• A Web site is a great marketing tool for the newspaper. Every business needs to be on the Web today. Every. Business. If you sell nothing but toothpicks, it will cost you next to nothing to have a permanent billboard with a potential audience of billions of people. If anyone was thinking about signing up a subscription, or thinking about advertising, that week, and can't find your contact info on a Web site? You're out of luck, sorry.

The answer is not shutting down the Web sites, it's charging for them, plain and simple. Sullivan's driving thesis is that America needs newspapers. Not true. America needs good reporters doing good journalism. When it comes down to it, the main differences right now between newspapers and their Web sites are:

• People pay for newspapers.
• Newspapers cost (a lot) more to distribute.
• Web sites provide (near) infinite news hole, easier and less time consuming interaction, and the ability to include video, interactive graphics and sharper photographs.
• Newspapers have a bigger environmental impact and get your hands dirty.
• Newspapers travel better.

OK, great, so what we've found out is that newspapers travel better, and people are paying for them.

But people don't seem to care about the portability issue these days (maybe we appreciate that more in northern climes, where we're more likely to bring one down to the lake to read, rather than stay inside for the short outdoor season).

Sullivan, by the way, has set up an online petition, and almost exactly three days after he posted it, he has all of 103 signatures, including himself, "Close down these propaganda outlets," and "I. DisagreeButThereAreNoComments."

So what it comes down to is, we need to find a working model for paid newspaper Web sites. I'm totally OK with that, given the right model.

Journalism is not broken. The printed newspaper as a delivery vehicle might be, but there's a great call for journalism, particularly online. And if you tell people to pay for it or they won't get it, they'll pay for it.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that he'd rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers, he was really talking about journalism. He didn't have radio, television or the Internet as a delivery vehicle.

What are your thoughts?

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.

Wish I had seen Adam Reilly's post on dailies in The Phoenix (via Romenesko/Poynter before I wrote my screed this morning.

Reilly touches on some of the same stuff I do: the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit papers as signs of the times. The future of papers being good reporting on the Web. Collaboration.

He also gets into deep cuts and niche coverage.

One thing he doesn't touch on didn't occur to be until I remembered what The Phoenix is: a free paper that is frequently fat. As in, a huge newshole.

You know how it supports that big newshole? Advertising. Specifically, adult personals: there's a large section each issue.

A lot of newspapers aren't going to be willing to accept this kind of advertising – my employer and its sister sites used to take personal ads (not the adult sort), but it went more family-friendly – but it could be a good bailout for some establishments.

Why are we still mourning the non-loss of the newspaper when it could be really easy to fix?

I was horrified to find out yesterday that at least one Connecticut lawmaker is considering a government bailout of a newspaper.

Look, I understand newspapers are having a hard time, but do newspaper publishers and lawmakers expect readers to think a newspaper will report objectively on a government that funds it?

Pentagon Papers? You want to run those? Well, we'll be taking back that $5 billion check. Good luck!

Even some college newspapers operate independently of – including paying rent to – the institutions they serve.

But newspapers are facing a stark reality right now: Readers are buying fewer papers, advertisers are fleeing, and the costs of newsprint, payroll, overhead (rent, utilities, etc.) and distribution are mainly on the rise. One major national newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, will go to a weekend edition only, with daily focus going entirely online come April.

Detroit's two major dailies, the Free Press and Detroit News, will go down to thin (32-page) editions three days a week, with full editions three days and one Sunday edition between them.

These may not be happy times, and while it may be the end of the newspaper as we know it, that's not a bad thing; it's just a change. It's not even the first one newspapers have undergone – I wasn't around when radio and TV were born, and I was in high school when CNN showed up, so I don't know what the panic looked like, but this new Web thing is no longer new, so stop whining and start listening.

Your newspaper's Web site is not your trained circus monkey. Learn how to make it work not only for, but also with you. Most newspaper-affiliated Web sites – including the one I work for – use stuff from the newspaper as their primary content. But they also have other affiliates, bloggers and staff on-hand to help them compete. While you as a newspaper might be the only daily print game in town, and you see local TV and radio news as your primary competition, the Web site is competing with other news sites around the country for eyeballs.

Here are some things you can do, with tips from Gina Chen, Martin Langeveld, Jeff Chandler, Chris O'Brien, and me.

Journalists vs. bloggers is a myth. Get over yourself. You've been on your beat 25 years. You have a shiny laminated press credential with a 2x3 photo of you on it. Big deal. That gives you historical background and access. It doesn't make you any smarter than anyone else. If a die-hard college basketball fan happens to be younger than you, it means her institutional memory doesn't go back as far as yours does, but her knowledge of the current team runs just as deeply as yours does.

While you're running around getting quotes from coaches and players she can't get, she's reading their Facebook and MySpace pages, chatting online with other fans, and reading 20 different sources about the team, some connected, some not. Yes, she's reading your stuff, but she watched the game, so she's skipping your game story and going after the anecdotes and analysis you had to put in your blog, since you could only get 22 inches into the paper.

Sorry, but as a fan who pays a lot of attention – and who maybe happens to be a lawyer or an accountant – her analysis of the team is probably as valid as yours.

A blog is just a publishing platform – and it's a good one. Plus: it's bottomless. Let's say your a columnist for a newspaper. You write four columns a week, each around 25 inches. If you're a good columnist, you could probably take November and December off and have the paper run 100 inches a week of stuff you had to cut. But you can't do that, because the stuff is no longer relevant, and given the state of the industry, you're worried that if you don't show up for a couple of months, you won't still have a desk in January.

Enter the blog.

You have a pretty much "bottomless," interactive publishing tool. While the newspaper is essentially one-way communication – sure, you print your e-mail address and phone number, but of your paper's 300,000 subscribers, what do you get, 50 calls a week, maybe 100 if it's a touchy subject? – people can read your column online and comment on it immediately. You can then add your replies in another comment, and then you have...oh my, a discussion!

And you're not limited to the 25 inches you get in the paper. While newsprint, ink and distribution costs are increasing, server space is cheap as heck. Write all 100 inches you put together. Post all 50 photos you took, not just the one they had room for in the paper. Got an audio recording you did for the column? Post it. People love that stuff. Video? Great. Can't put that in the newspaper, might as well not waste it as source material only you get to see.

Don't shun conversations. If you're writing for a newspaper, it's probably for two or more of the following four reasons: (1) you know a lot about something, (2) you're a good researcher, (3) sources trust you, (4) you can string a couple of paragraphs together. In fact, it's probably reason (4) and at least one of the other three.

This means there are a lot of people reading your stuff who could be doing your job if either they wrote better, or they wanted to take a pay cut and do something else.

That's not derision. That's just to say that while what you're doing is important, there are other people who know just as much as, or perhaps more than, you do, and you could enrich your writing, your career and your life by listening to them.

One of the things I loved about being a reporter was that if I had to write a story about a bakery, I had to rely on a couple of other people (and maybe a little bit on the Internet, an encyclopedia, and a dictionary) to tell me everything I needed to know. I don't have first-hand experience running my own business, I don't make bread, I don't have hungry customers to make recommendations to.

I might learn a lot about a bakery through writing a feature piece on it, but it shouldn't end there. If I post it in an interactive environment, other people with more intimate knowledge of different aspects of the story – being a business owner, being a baker, being a customer – can chime in, and not only will I learn something, my piece becomes more interesting because of it, and I may even glean some new story ideas.

Seriously, we're still talking about whether we should link externally, even if it's to a competitor's Web site? Chances are, you're probably not the go-to expert on your beat. You write about local bike paths? Know all about ISTEA and TEA-21? Know all about where funding is coming from for the local intermodal transportation projects? Great. You want to know why some unemployed 42-year-old shlub living in his parents' basement in suburban Nebraska is getting more page views on his Blogspot blog than you're getting on your newspaper-sanctioned (and, let's face it, employer-required) blog?

It's because that shlub looked around the Web and linked to almost the exact same piece you wrote in 30 communities across the country, where it's also happening. It's that person who looked for other people who think they're experts but only fit that description locally, and found a national pattern – or even better, found a solution in St. Louis for a problem in Portland.

At the same time that you might need to realize you're not the only person who knows a lot about your beat, have some confidence that your voice is important. If it means linking from your piece to some seemingly far-off Web competitor like the Washington Post or Talking Points Memo, do it – your readers will see you as a valuable resource leading them to interesting stuff, and they'll come back to you for it.

If you got your story idea from a local competitor, so be it. Build on their story, then credit them via a link with finding it first. Local readers are also paying attention to other local media. They saw it there first, and you're not fooling them. But crediting the competitor could lead to collaboration, either at the reporter level or at the institutional level, and collaboration leads to great things. One of the tips Gina Chen had was for newspapers to create the "next big thing." If collaboration can lead to that, why would you skip the beginnings?

Listen to your readers. They know something. Don't tell your readers what they should think is important. Work with them to find out what they think is important.

In their book News Around The World (which I helped edit and which I can't believe is retailing for a hundred five dollars), Pam Shoemaker and Akiba Cohen found that across 10 countries, when asked separately, editors, journalists and readers rank the importance of stories pretty much the same.

There are, of course, some culture differences, particularly among editors if there's some state control of media, but handed a list of assignments or headlines, pretty much everyone recognizes important stories when they see them.

So when you rank a story highly – putting it on top of a Web page or on A-1 – and your readers slam your news judgment, work with them on it. Don't pretend you know better. Also, if they stop reading, you don't have a paycheck, so sometimes you have to give them what they ask for.

Revise your publish schedule – and definitely don't sit on stories until they come out in the paper. This might be the single most important thing newspapers can do with the Web. The first newspaper Web sites were entirely "shovel-ware" – reporters would write stories for the paper, and after they made sure the paper went to print, they would just copy and paste their stories onto the Web.

That would doom your Web site now – and if you're still doing it, stop.

Unless either it happened two seconds before you were going to press or you've been the only news organization working on the story for three months, by the time they get their paper, most people already know about a story. When you run a banner headline about Israel and Hamas going to war in Gaza, you need to recognize that people probably have already heard about it. If they didn't see it on the Web at work, they saw it on the evening news, or heard it on the radio on their commute home.

Don't think the morning newspaper is the first people are hearing of it; you don't need to give them the bit they've already read or heard. Give them the local angle. And don't wait until tomorrow if you have it today: if you put it on the Web at 4:00, people will read it, and they'll say, "thanks, newspaper, for being first with that." Tomorrow, it's, "gee, thanks, newspaper, but I knew that already."

You can take what you put online, refine it, cut it to fit the newshole, and run that in the paper for people who have a morning routine of sitting with the newspaper over coffee, or who read it on the bus.

And then there are feature pieces of general interest that maybe someone else is working on. If an athlete sat out injured last season and the new season is approaching, you're probably working on a piece on that athlete, but so are all the local TV stations and any bloggers who happen to cover your beat (even if you don't put much faith in them).

So, you've written your piece, and it's slated for the newspaper in three days. Well, why are you sitting on it for the Web? If a TV station runs it first, or a blogger runs it first, and the staff at your affiliated Web site picks it up, they'll link to that TV station or credible blogger, and you'll be mad because you got scooped.

Well, you would have been first, but you decided to sit on it, because of a production schedule. Boo-hoo. People who get the paper are going to read the story when it comes out, but if you can get the story (in some form) online now, you can be credited with being first, rather than with being three days behind everyone else, even though you had the story.

This post came out sounding a bit on the negative side, but it all leads to me wanting to see newspapers succeed, even if they're not doing it in paper form. A lot of TV stations aren't being watched on TV anymore, and people are listening to many radio stations over the Internet, since they have high-speed Internet connections but not radios at their desks or in their home offices.

The great thing about newspapers is deep resources – very few TV or radio stations, or Internet-only news sites have large staffs covering a region. And it takes very little extra work to put good work from those staffers on the Web in an attractive and useful manner, and more quickly than their competitors – both local and national – can get the news together.

Here's to a great 2009!