by Matt Barr

Meanwhile, author of bestselling book on pottery recommends newspapers use more clay

Via the Army of Davids review aggregator blog (*) comes a pointer to Glenn Reynolds' piece in TCS Daily on how to save newspapers. Like Prof. Reynolds, I'm in favor of saving newspapers. Unlike him, the first thing I would do would not be to eliminate the paper part of the paper.

We are approaching a time I'm sure when Internet access will be as ubiquitous as access to TV signals. But we're not there yet. Even if you would put video files online with your news stories on your paperless paper we're certainly not to the point where broadband is ubiquitous. I wonder how many Instapundit readers access that site via dialup. Prof. Reynolds' favorite customerspeople, the people who buy books about their own underrated greatness and power written by Prof. Reynolds, are all broadband-slinging Web maniacs. Most newspaper subscribers aren't.

But newspapers aren't making their money selling news anyway. I recently re-subscribed to the Akron Beacon Journal for five dollars a month for Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The price is made possible by the fact the ABJ may be on the chopping block and the fact that the more people who get Sunday's ad inserts the better for the paper's bottom line. They'll lose money (probably) on the subscription side with a bunch of five dollar a month subscribers, but make it up by being able to tell Sunday paper advertisers they have lots and lots of readers. Prof. Reynolds has getting the news to (broadband-enabled powerful beyond their imagination Mighty Mouse) readers all figured out but not ads.

Yes, ads can be delivered on the Web -- I don't know if you've noticed -- but it's way more annoying and far less effective. Arm reporters with camera phones and Web-enabled PDAs for on the spot multimedia reports all you want, and the 45 or so percent of the U.S. population with broadband connections will be well served. But advertisers want to get print in people's hands. Everyone can read and use inserts, flyers and coupons, and the promise of almost half the market being able to go online and print something out isn't a one-for-one substitute for that. (Far, far less than half in more rural areas, of course, where news coverage is also harder to come by.)

Once you look at the plight of newspapers from the perspective of it being advertisers whom they have to satisfy first and not readers, the bit about ditching your printing presses and distribution infrastructure and plugging the savings into writers and reporters and citizen factcheckers starts not to work. As a reader -- I almost never look at the Sunday paper's ad inserts (but my wife only reads the Sunday paper for that reason) -- I would love to see more balanced and thorough reporting from the Beacon Journal (and for Sheldon Ocker to go away), but I don't have the leverage Prof. Reynolds seems to think I do.

Am I predicting the reinvigoration of newspapers and that the Web will never deliver local news and ads? Of course not. I'd be surprised if it weren't happening most everywhere within 10 or so years. But if I bought a newspaper or was thinking of starting one I wouldn't just hire all sorts of good reporters, rent some Web space and have at it. It wouldn't work today. (Is Pajamas Media raking in the dough? All those house ads I keep seeing on their sites tell me no.)

This isn't even to mention the unions, which Prof. Reynolds does, but thinks will see reason if you lecture them about horses and buggies. No doubt.

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