Stripping out the emotion of The Times-Picayune story itself, every newspaper faces the dilemma of connecting quality journalism with valued audiences and getting someone (advertisers? consumers?) to pay for them.

Let’s face it: the blank-check journalism model whereby a newsroom does what it wants as an island unto itself – disconnected from the audience it serves and the rest of the news company that supports it – is a major contributor to circulation declines in the United States.

That will continue to be an issue no matter the ownership models of the future: private-sector, foundation, non-profits, and more.

I said as such on a recent blog post at INMA: http://www.inma.org/blogs/earl/post.cfm/what-rapid-changes-in-u-s-newspapers-in-past-30-days-mean-to-us-all.

I don’t know whether the Advance model in New Orleans and Alabama is the correct model. Yet they have ownership willing to break with the old model of the past and aim to create new value. Isn’t that a better outcome than those exiting the news business?

Would we have felt better about ourselves if we continued to tweak around the edges and continued to scale downward – inch by inch – the newsroom relative to advertising sales? Or are we better off re-thinking the strategy and reaching for a foundation to build?

I am confident when the changes kick in October 1 that this will be a more interesting story than it looks like today. The publishing cycle of The Times-Picayune will be only about 25% of the bigger story of re-positioning the brand, multi-platform publishing, and enthusiastic support for great journalism.

Is a seven-day print newspaper the only model that can succeed? There are many models worldwide where newspapers publish only once a week, and that is their anchor for ancillary activities during the week.

Will a market be better served with the equivalent of three Sunday newspapers per week, or should we amortize that energy over seven smaller editions?

We should stop lamenting changing a system that, clearly, is broken.

Where was the outrage as circulations plummeted from the 1970s to the 1990s as we ramped up the sizes of newsrooms?

Where was the outrage as newsrooms were spared cutbacks in the past two decades as we killed the “oxygen” that would have connected audiences to journalism – sales, marketing and research. Newspapers spend only 1% of revenues marketing to consumers and only two-tenths of 1% on R&D, according to INMA data.

Someone somewhere has to break the cycle. Maybe it starts in New Orleans.

Stripping out the emotion of The Times-Picayune story itself, every newspaper faces the dilemma of connecting quality journalism with valued audiences and getting someone (advertisers? consumers?) to pay for them.

Let’s face it: the blank-check journalism model whereby a newsroom does what it wants as an island unto itself – disconnected from the audience it serves and the rest of the news company that supports it – is a major contributor to circulation declines in the United States.

That will continue to be an issue no matter the ownership models of the future: private-sector, foundation, non-profits, and more.

I said as such on a recent blog post at INMA: http://www.inma.org/blogs/earl/post.cfm/what-rapid-changes-in-u-s-newspapers-in-past-30-days-mean-to-us-all.

I don’t know whether the Advance model in New Orleans and Alabama is the correct model. Yet they have ownership willing to break with the old model of the past and aim to create new value. Isn’t that a better direction than those exiting the news business?

Would we have felt better about ourselves if we continued to tweak around the edges and continued to scale downward – inch by inch – the newsroom relative to advertising sales? Or are we better off re-thinking the strategy and reaching for a foundation to build?

I am confident when the changes kick in October 1 that this will be a more interesting story than it looks like today. The publishing cycle of The Times-Picayune will be only about 25% of the bigger story of re-positioning the brand, multi-platform publishing, and enthusiastic support for great journalism.

Is a seven-day print newspaper the only model that can succeed? There are many models worldwide where newspapers publish only once a week, and that is their anchor for ancillary activities during the week.

Will a market be better served with the equivalent of three Sunday newspapers per week, or should we amortize that energy over seven smaller editions?

We should stop lamenting changing a system that, clearly, is broken.

Where was the outrage as circulations plummeted from the 1970s to the 1990s as we ramped up the sizes of newsrooms?

Where was the outrage as newsrooms were spared cutbacks in the past two decades as we killed the “oxygen” that would have connected audiences to journalism – sales, marketing and research. Newspapers spend only 1% of revenues marketing to consumers and only two-tenths of 1% on R&D, according to INMA data.

Someone somewhere has to break the cycle. Maybe it starts in New Orleans.

I worked at a small-town paper from 2001 to 2001–about 10.5 years. Two years before I started there, they had 10k subscribers. Not big, but nothing to sneeze at; that was equivalent to about 80% of the town’s population (though to be fair, that was spread out over the county.) The paper wasn’t making a huge amount of money, but it was in the black; one of the higher-ups made the decision that the paper, while profitable, would be much more profitable with a staff reduction of about a third. Quality almost immediately went down, and the subscription rate almost immediately dropped about as high a percentage as the staff reduction.

Then, because it was no longer profitable, the staff was reduced further.

By the time I got there, the circulation was around 5,000, or about half what it had been just five years earlier. If you believe starry-eyed technologists, this was due entirely to the Internet. Not really, though it was a significant factor; small-town local markets tend to be served poorly by Internet providers.

Newspapers are partly to blame for that, too, since websites were seen as necessary, but a bothersome afterthought. They tried to rely solely on web ads. Funny thing, people don’t want to pay print rates for a tiny banner ad. Just try putting a newspaper behind a paywall, though; you’ll get the same reaction that you would if HBO tried to implement commercial breaks. People will tell you they already pay $20-$80 a month for Internet and have no interest in paying for a newspaper subscription.

I enjoyed my experience for the most part–I worked on the production end with some IT presponsibilities, so I say at a desk, wearing jeans, on a flexible schedule, using QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. along with scripting hackery in MacVim. It was frustrating, though, watching attrition by illness, old age, people getting better jobs, etc. and replaced by no one.

It was equally frustrating to have people come in who were loyal subscribers, and would each be able to articulate exactly what they thought was wrong with the newspaper. It’s a common story across the country, too; newspapers are afraid of losing those few loyal customers, those loyal customers tend to be connected with everyone important in the area, so reporting real dirt tends to alienate the people paying to keep the lights on and the paychecks coming in…so you end up with newspapers full of human interest stories, news stories about poor, unimportant people engaged in minor criminal activity, Chamber of Commerce meetings, every sport the local schools are engaged in, and ribbon cuttings, nearly drowned out with wire copy, with papers being dummied so tight that they’ll take up half to three-quarters of a page with ads. SNOOZE. When I left, almost all the subscribers to that paper were people past retirement age. None of the local papers put full obituaries on their websites, because they know they won’t sell any papers if they make ‘em available.

I can think of ways they might be able to profit from their website–sell larger ads, sell subscriptions to a “value added” website, work with newer tech like Kindle and iPad to make daily editions available as epubs, stop giving away the RSS feeds, and so on. Will any of them do it before they die off? Probably not. They’ll probably keep consolidating operations until there are only a handful of production people in each state, almost no local content, and the websites will all be run out of New York, Chicago, LA, and Bangalore, with no local production or news staff other than community volunteers doing it out of a love of community. And they’ll live on far longer than they have a right to.

If it weren’t such a heavily-regulated market, I’d be tempted to build competing websites.

With all due respect to Carr, I’d say New Orleans has drawn the lion’s share of attention because there’s been significant local community pushback, the likes of which were not seen in Ann Arbor, Birmingham, etc.

New Orleans is a paradox — a city with high poverty and illiteracy rates that also has some of the highest newspaper print penetration in the country.

I think people in New Orleans will accept the reality that the future of what we now call newspapers will eventually move to the Internet. Newhouse seems to think that time is now. But what people here will not accept is management’s insistence that this is a GOOD thing, that the news product will get better, that this is a benefit to the community.

Maybe Newhouse can’t, in your words, “return to the glory days of old.” But what’s ticked off the populace is the affrontery to pass this off as a positive move for the city. Don’t pee on New Orleans’ leg and tell the city it’s raining; we’re all amateur meteorologists down here.

BUT …

1. Why are people raising holy hell about this when pretty much the same thing has been happening all around the country for quite a few years now? Newspapers everywhere have laid off significant chunks of their staff, cut printing days, and even closed. So this isn’t exactly coming out of nowhere. Ok, so there’s that “special relationship” in New Orleans, but it’s obviously not special enough to keep the paper from losing half its revenue in five years.

2. Question for those calling for the paper to be sold to a local group: What indications are there that even if there are new owners that they won’t be facing the exact same financial problems as the old owners, and, eventually, be forced to take similar actions, even if it may be delayed temporarily? To me, the problems that face newspapers all across the country are so immense that who owns a particular paper is a trifling detail.

I’ve gone through watching the newspaper I worked for — and my hometown paper — have massive layoffs and cutbacks that left it a mere shadow of what it once was, so I can relate to the anger and hurt, and I can understand the “if only they had better owners” thinking, because I thought that myself at one point. But my own experience also showed me, once the initial hurt subsided and I was further removed from the experience, that having different owners would’ve made little difference. The ugly truth is that even if the newspaper industry finds the right path RIGHT NOW, there’s still going to be a lot of blood on the tracks before its transformation is complete.