How to Save Newspapers

In today's Business Casual column, I write about how to save newspapers from being chewed up and spit out by the Internet.

Let me add a few things that wouldn't fit into the column.

On the World Wide Web, (I hate this cliche) size matters. When people go on the Internet, they often are drawn to large sites because they're easy to find and full of content. It's not like the old days where people depended on their local paper for all the in depth news just as they exclusively depended on their local grocery store for home supplies. The Internet has opened up the world to make it closer. Now it may be more convenient to buy groceries or other items from an Internet store thousands of miles away, just as it often is more convenient to read news or search for other information through the Web site of an organization whose geographic location may also be thousands of miles away.

So people go on Google or Yahoo and through those sites they may end up reading a Daily Breeze article. The problem is the Daily Breeze and other newspapers are losing readers and ad dollars while Google and Yahoo are awash in ad revenue. After all, advertisers are going where the eyeballs are.

These online giants are eating our lunch, which we the newspaper industry have packed for them. They're using our content to make money that we should be making. Newspapers need to cut out the middleman and have online visitors go directly to a unified newspaper Web site, which would share revenue with the newspapers providing the content.

The Web site can be organized into a national, regional or local format depending on each visitor's preference. The logistics would be tough to work out. There may be friction, turf wars (like between the LA Times and NY Times). Who's articles get better play? This can all be worked out later. The first thing is for newspapers to commit to this idea.

Instead of the first stop for online readers, newspapers are increasingly becoming a niche product for news and news advertising on the Internet. That is because no individual newspaper can compete in size with Google or Yahoo. But together newspapers can compete and even dominate.

The issue of anti-competitive actions like creating a monopoly may appear to be a major stumbling block in establishing a unified online newspaper presence. But this can be dealt with because we wouldn't be creating a monopoly at all. The information on the unified Web site would be largely available on the home pages of individual newspapers. Also, newspaper content may also be found on other Web sites. If my idea would lead to a monopoly, how would it be any different than the dominance of Google or Yahoo, which is the home page of millions of people.

In addition, a case can be made that newspapers no long have a monopoly on news. There's wire services, 24-hour TV news networks, magazines, blogs. Newspapers are already in the midst of major consolidations just to stay afloat. They're not dominating, they're just surviving.

Take the satellite TV industry. A few years ago, EchoStar was blocked from buying DirecTV because regulators said the union would limit competition. Now, with cable and phone companies all competing for pay TV subscribers, a joining of the nation's two major satellite TV providers is again being considered with less fear of regulatory interference. In fact, the two satellite TV giants may have to join forces just to stay competitive, never mind creating a monopoly.

Also consider that the best way to maintain diversity of ownership and perspective in the ever-consolidating newspaper industry is to create a large online hub that can generate revenue for individual newspapers. That will keep newspapers in the black, thereby allowing them to continue operating as independent publications or part of smaller, less corporate chains.

Whichever way you look at it, creating a Google of newspapers makes sense.