MyTake May 2, 2009, 12:01AM EST

Newspapers Must Evolve or Die

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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.

Story Tools

While the Google search engine became popular because of the accuracy and relevance of its search results, AdWords was the linchpin that would effectively create a dependable source of income for Google, marking the beginning of the end of mainstream newspapers.

To make this quartet of events worse, the deepening global recession has hastened the final coda of many newspapers. Although they have tried to respond, newspapers seem unable to articulate and execute a real strategy beyond cutting costs and services while raising prices for advertisements and subscriptions. This response is merely a Wall Street-driven reaction in full ignorance of the agents of change driving papers' demise if they don't evolve. I believe this is the wrong approach that will simply lead to the eventual collapse of newspapers.

That's why newspapers must publish on a biweekly or weekly publishing schedule in order to survive. It seems counterintuitive, in light of the immediacy of the Web, to publish with less frequency. In fact, some newspapers have already begun this transition. Consumers no longer think of daily news; news is served to us by the nano-second on the Web and on our smartphones and handheld devices.

Highlight the Best Stuff

Smart publishers will push what was daily news reporting online, then collect and publish their best digital reporting into a weekly collection of articles combining the most read, most discussed, most e-mailed, most blogged, or simply most thought-provoking stories in print. At the end of each of these stories, editor-selected opinions should be added to bring a balance of views.

In addition, the use of full- or half-page color images should be scaled up dramatically to draw people into buying printed newspapers. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; eye candy is a simple device to further differentiate between the online and print editions.

Newspaper Web sites will need to change as well. To start, they should collaborate with smaller papers to cover local news while aggregating broader news from national and international sources. At the end of each collection of articles from national or international sources, smaller local papers should attach a local perspective. Blogging by newspaper journalists creates a community, which breeds loyalty and readership if reporters and editors interact with readers and commenters and blog in order to spark and sustain a conversation.

As for the advertising model, it's not news that newspaper revenues are plunging. So why wait: Change! The online advertising model may improve if newspapers eliminate the middle man—the DoubleClicks and similar services—of the Internet. Instead, newspapers should repackage their print ad sales to include online ads. And believe it or not, those transient online ads do not encourage retention of their information; they are Attention Deficit Disorders, rewiring our brains to stop paying attention the moment we navigate to another page and back.

Classified Ads and E-Ink

Classified ads need radical reform to bring them back to newspapers. First, newspapers must create a unified, national classified database to rival Craigslist, allowing readers and Web surfers from across the country to access listings for jobs, apartments, and collectibles. Second, papers need to stop charging to post ads for anything except real estate and jobs. Third, those real estate and job ads should reduce their minimum price to $10 an ad, with a nominal click-based fee on top of that. These ads would be the only ones printed and posted online, while the free ads would be available only online. Finally, these free classified posts would contain paid, third-party advertisements of simple text-based click-through ads that are geographically tied to the classified posts.

Finally, if they haven't already done so, newspapers need to get on the E-Ink bandwagon to spread their reach beyond the physical borders of their print subscriptions. The future is in color E-Books, but as the Kindle is showing, black-and-white E-Ink is successful right now. Not only can this technology save print costs, but it offers a potential way to deliver news to rural areas as wireless technologies improve.

The drastic steps we're now seeing, from closing newspapers to death by a thousand cuts (in salaries, jobs, and newspaper sections) is a short-sighted, panicked response to the economic crisis. These steps by newspaper owners do not address the broader issues of why this once-esteemed medium has been in decline for at least the past decade. The current economic malaise presents an opportunity, however tough, to force newspapers to face broader issues and change with the times.

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