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MyTake May 2, 2009, 12:01AM EST

Newspapers Must Evolve or Die

BusinessWeek.com reader Gregg Mizuno says newspapers should go weekly or even biweekly to compete with breaking news on the Web

By Gregg Mizuno

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BusinessWeek.com reader Gregg Mizuno graduated from the University of Southern California in Architecture. Besides designing buildings, he is a graphic artist and furniture designer.

As a California-based media hound, I read Olga Kharif's article, "The Online Experiments That Could Help Newspapers," with great interest as it concerned a new business model for newspapers being tested by The Bakersfield Californian.

As I commented on her story, daily newspapers need to transition to weeklies or biweeklies. If newspaper companies put all of their in-depth stories into concentrated newspapers, people will be far more willing to buy them at higher prices than the currently watered-down Sunday editions and the six puny editions that run throughout the week. If newspapers are publishing stories that were already covered by cable and broadcast news or the Internet, they might as well use news aggregation services on their Web sites for things that do not require original reporting.

Further, newspapers need to dedicate their Web sites to serving free ads, with the exception of competitively priced job listings and real estate ads. This is the only way to fight Craigslist and other sites that are sapping classified ad revenue from papers. My third suggestion: If the papers haven't already done so, they need to transition to print-on-demand, with distributed print houses throughout their coverage areas, as well as allowing POD throughout the world so people can get the Los Angeles Times, for example, for a low price. This could entail cooperation with bookstores or coffee shops (or both) that already have their own distribution chains.

Some background for my views: Concurrent with the rapid decline of the economy, we have seen the precipitous failure of newspapers around the nation, with The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe seemingly next on the extinction list. Let's dispense with the niceties regarding the role they play in our Constitution insofar as the First Amendment is concerned, or the history of print dating back to the 1400s and the Gutenberg press. What concerns me is that delivery of news has remained relatively static in spite of massive technological transformation under way.

The decline of the newspaper can be traced to four relatively modern events:

Free Web browsers: The beginning of the end was the release of Microsoft's free Web browser, Internet Explorer, in 1995. To the chagrin of Netscape, IE became the dominant browser, and with its ubiquity the floodgates of information were opened. People rushed to get their content online. Many tried to control the flow of information by monetizing it, but many more media brands were willing to give away information for free to gain a foothold in the nascent Internet.

Craigslist: Craig Newmark's game-changing Web site was the second event that greatly contributed to the decline of the newspaper industry through an attack on its traditional revenue model. Spreading from San Francisco since 1995, Craigslist has given people the ability to post classified ads for free, with some recent exceptions. Newspapers could not compete with this ad paradigm shift.

RSS: As early as 2000 but catching fire around 2005, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds provided a free and easy way for the aggregation of news, stories, blog posts, and all types of information that Internet users felt was pertinent to their lives. With RSS, not only is information free, it's also quick and easy to grab the latest news from the Internet without having to visit your newspaper's Web site.

Google Ads: Google's ability to place ads everywhere online meant it could monetize the Internet by a seemingly transparent method; using AdWords meant that even small blogs could provide a source of income to Google.

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