How would you save this industry?

We need to stop sending people to other sources for news as well.

Couched in the "we need to be more local mantra" is usually a statement like, "well, they can just get that on ESPN or CNN anyway." That's exactly the wrong tact to take.

We do need to be local, but not at the expense of other news our readers will care about. Instead of saying, "Well they can get those scores on ESPN," why aren't we trying to keep our readers with our product and our website? People are lazy. If they can get all their news in one spot, I guaran-damn-tee they'd prefer to do that than bouncing around between reading the paper for a local score, going to their computer to check ESPN for a national score and turning their TV to CNN to get the latest on the election. If we'd try to get as much of that stuff as we can into our product, people wouldn't have to go elsewhere and give someone else their money/attention/ratings/webhits.

 

Well, I have to disagree, as far as the part about media companies going private. I think that will happen, at some level or other.

 

Had an interesting conversation with my boss about this today.
His idea: Spin off the newsroom as a separate entity from the rest of the paper, so it can sell its content to whoever would buy it, kind of like a wire service.
But we do it local. We as a newsroom dominate the market for local news, business, sports, entertainment. We report and write our news, and sell it to a print newspaper, TV, radio, Google & Yahoo, whoever, who get their revenue by repackaging our content and selling ads to run alongside it. A bit like the wires do.
Essentially, we decouple from any particular medium, cut out the costs of those who don't actually report, write or edit the news (sorry page designers and traffic-cop production editors), plus the crazy overhead of the print product, and focus on gathering and selling the news. That's it.
Interesting idea.