Doc Searls believes that newspapers have a future:

Print is a huge advantage for newspapers. Always has been, always will be. (Unless, of course, the cost of dead trees becomes prohibitive, in which case lumber and other tree-dependent businesses are toast as well.) Friends in the newspaper business tell me the folks on Wall Street no longer like print. It's all gotta be online these days. To them it's all about "content" pumped through "pipes" like the one that's pouring text on your eyes right now.

Well, I think I'm with Matthew Ingram, who disagrees. The problem is simple: a general newspaper targets a broadcast audience, and that's exactly the audience that's withering right now. I've siad before that I think the future of local newspapers is with increased local coverage, but even that's problematic - how many people who live near you care deeply enough about (say) school board politics to actually read a paper (and support the advertisers in it)?

There's another problem too, and it has to do with those advertisers - why do thye want to be in the paper now? Most of the revenue for papers has been in classified ads, not the page ads. All of that stuff is moving online, to places like eBay and Craigslist. I don't see that coming back to print any more than I see a revival of the yellow pages business.

I have sympathy for this viewpoint from Doc, but again, there are issues:

The first of those was Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds . Sure, daily papers make advertising money by selling inventory on the free Web versions of the papers that subscribers pay for. But by doing that they're also dissing both those subscribers and their legacy franchise. Put more simply, they're competing with themselves while cheapening their main product.

Like Matthew Ingram, I'm not at all sure how media outlets can get away with that. For good or ill, the model is ad supported news, and that genie simply is not going back into the bottle. I'd agree with Doc insofar as the archives being opened up (and paid for via online ads) - but I see no way of forcing all fresh news behind a pay-wall. On that point, Doc conceded after some other feedback.

Here's what I think is going on: the media business is in the midst of a large business model change - it's happening in music, it's happening in video, and it's happening in news. The paper media is simply the front line where most of the carnage is happening (just Google "newspaper layoffs" for an idea). What we're watching now is the classic denial stage on the part of the current crop of business owners: they know the old ways, and they would rather not change. Sadly, they don't have that option.

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