Jon Fine tells papers to 'steal from Google'

Imho, expanding and clarifying my comment on Jon's blog, and to answer your question, it is not sound strategy - for a hardcopy newspaper.

A daily news paper, by definition, provides news and information. Increasingly local and regional news, to be sure, but information that you did not know, every day. They are already becoming nothing more than vehicles for department store sales, often pages at a time, and in particular for the NYT, ads of luxury brandname goods. If they choose to take the strategy you've highlighted "grab 100% of their ad budgets, give them unlimited pages" - it would ensure the following:
- you would not then be a "news" paper
- the few column inches left by current advertising would diminish further
- you'd be left with a "brandname" version of the junk sales leaflets that are left in our mailboxes.

This 'steal from Google' strategy works for Google because the web is dynamic and content churns, the ads show up on the side. In static print, like a newspaper, if they focus on taking over all advertising budgets, it will be a case of print any news that fits into any space left after all the big budget ads have their space.

I know lots of publishers are starting their own search engine called congoo. They intend to prominetly feature their own content and share equity amoung themselves.

It’s a daring idea. Here in Boston we have the local metro paper that is competing rather well with the Globe and Hearald for eye share of the riding public. Giving good editorial content away to customers for free appears to work for them.

I was thinking that for Google, people come to the site because everyone is listed on the site (not really, but the perception is that everyone that matters is in the organic section). Google makes it easy to start advertising, from letting you bid at a lower rate, to targeting your ads to geographic areas or off google websites.

For a paper to do the same, the paper would also have to be the best resource in the community. Niti makes a good point in their comment. The paper would quickly fill up with advertising rather than editorial content. However, Niti also made a point about the design of Google, and how it’s always rapidly changing. I wonder if there's a way to change the layout design of a newspaper to include some of those online elements? Obviously the online version of the print publication can do this already, but what about the print version.

Stephen, could you send this question to your magazine's layout design and see what they think. This is a question beyond my newspaper layout experience (none). Maybe again this is all about design.

Maybe Mr. Fine is suggesting: forget about your "newshole" budget and make the paper as big as it needs to be to accommodate BOTH advertisers and the news on a given day. I don't think he's advocating turning our dailies into shoppers. Whether this would actually make any sense economically is the question.