...Ian writes : " there must be a core of protected news producers who are vetted and proven trustworthy ". ..That's what newspapers claimed to have had, but the protection they got ( Sullivan v. NYT ) eroded their trustwothiness to trash status. Therein lies the seeds of their destruction, as a business founded on trust can't survive the manipulation of news for political purposes that has been revealed to be the stock in trade of the media, especially newspapers. ..Todays news consumers 'vet' every story they read by comparing it with the next story on the same subject. There is no " protection " for news producers. That they ever thought there was forms the core of their demise.

Dude, your basic premise may be on track, but way too much extraneous #@&^ to digest. I'm not an editor, but tighten it up. We get it. there's another point from the advertising side that relates to readership/usership. advertiser ROI. print long held the premier position of delivering results for advertisers. That has kept them coming back. In my opinion the internet has delivered tangible results in the classified arena and many newspaper companies are back in the game there. Retail and preprint advertising still works ok in print, but there are only two forms of "retail" that have delivered advertisers results; search advertising and email marketing. I just don't see display banner advertising or video as being as strong. People go online to find information. If you leave them to this on their own they will sit down at the keyboard and go to familiar sites or type in specific search words. I find very little sense of discovery or whimsy anymore in the web. It is our job as media professionals to distill this down to relevant information for people. From a classified advertising standpoint it is not enough to post an ad or a job into a database. It is our job to help draw these postings out of the database - help people have success in marketing their message through the clutter. Otherwise, when you search for a car, you are going to look for a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla (today a Prius) rather than consider less familiar brands like Kia Rio or Chevy Aveo or cobalt. That has been and remains our real business model, deliver results for advertisers. Help them market their wares and cut through the clutter and noise. you can talk about the value of an audience, but there is still a lot of VC being thrown at people with interesting ideas. Most have not monetized them into a successful business.

In the list of reasons why newspapers failed to offer what is actually in demand, you could probably add the newsroom structure. Thinking in terms of methodological individualism, you see that neither the journalists nor the editors have an incentive to publish what readers want, since most ventures build up a big wall between business and editorial. Then, what makes a journalist's work rewarding? Peer respect. And that's why you have so many stories calibrated for a Pulitzer when what we need is more focus on the local kids. This aside, Markus Prior wrote in his new book that about 10% of Americans are news junkies, who basically consume news for its own sake. That's still 30m people. Isn't there a market for the surviving traditional newspapers?

This is an excellent perspective. As an employee of a media company, I've been trying to understand why there is such a gap between what I hear management of newspapers saying, and where the culture is headed. We really do have no way to deliver unique content that each individual wants by printing truckloads of folded recycled newsprint. Wasn't it 60 years ago that businesses learned the rule of "creative destruction"? We need new blood to make that happen. The old guard is not going to let go of their legacy until they are ushered out the door, I'm afraid. That probably means that the term "newspaper" will disappear soon of course, replaced by something more descriptive of the new news. Perhaps the "long tail" theory will become the new strategy and allow us to produce many small things rather than one big news product for everyone. That said, I still believe we can only stay relevant and real by holding to essential ingredience for valid news production: - A newsroom (virtual?) of trained cynical reporters who peer review stories, along with fierce pursuit of truth over popularity, plus honesty and transparency in how the news is gathered. Those elements can exist without a physical space or printed material of course, but there must be a core of protected news producers who are vetted and proven trustworthy, or there will be no protection from state control over what we know or do not know. You only need to have watched how China controlled news of the Beijing olympics to see what our future could be. That's the legacy I'd like to see us leave for the next 400 years.

This change can be liberating for newspapers, who no longer have to print soccer stories, for example, but can go back to the days of concentrating sports coverage on men's professional and college basketball, baseball and football. Sports pages no longer have to cover women's sports or soccer that have less mass appeal. And while newspapers no longer have to bother with foreign or national news, no one has come along yet to replace them for local news. Yes, I know about blogs, but can they sustain interest over time to keep going, and is the economics there to make it worth their while? So I see this as returning newspapers to what they looked like 50 years ago -- local news, big sports, and women's pages.

So what you are saying is that the reason newspapers are failing is due to their inability to innovate and distribute personalized, relevant news to individual news consumers? If so, I agree.

Where's a good editor when ya need one...

"violated the Principle of Supply & Demand" - wow, how could have those media executives not realize this obvious fact?

I'm confused. Buzzwords aside ... is it the Internet or not?

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The Freemium Business Model, especially for web-based businesses, is excellent, I believe, and a real solution to the penny gap economics of the web in particular. Yes, everyone wants everything free, but for a company to survive as a business entity, there has to be cash flow to at least pay its business expenses. The freemium model, at this point of the game, is the way to keep customers happy and also to ensure the survival of businesses providing needed services.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.--Terry Pratchett (1948--), British SF and fantasy author

I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.--Clarence Darrow (1857--1938), U.S. attorney

It could be fun if they decide to re-use magazines. I ship them back the magazine in a prepaid brown envelope, and get the new (used) one in the mail. Reading "Better Homes and Gardens" in the bathroom has never been so great as it could be with a mysterious disease on every page.

No, there aren't a lot of people Twittering in the larger universe. But the influencers are, and it's getting traction. Whether it's Twitter and its many offshoots and addenda and integrators (anything from TwitPic to Friendfeed to Twirhl...) or another technology, the cloud is forming and we'll see a lot of use of handhelds in short bursts, posting and communicating in multiple direction. Maybe Twitter's already jumped the shark? http://www.theonion.com/content/statshot/what_are_we_twittering

I see people writing about twitter a lot. Its everywhere...twitter this and twitter that. The reality is that so few people use twitter I dont know why its even a story. Twitter has less then 200K UU according to Quantcast. This means there are roughly 11,000 sites that have more traffic. Its no where close to mainstream.

Fremium, is really a mixed model. Mixed models work well for niche media -- and most news sites are niche either geographically or by interest. The Times got it wrong, but perhaps with the type of content, not the concept. They put opinion behind the wall because they couldn't make money off it with high-cpm ads, not because of any user orientation. I keep thinking of the old Wisconsin paper that had a paid Green Bay Packers website that made a decent chunk of change for extra stats and so on. What stats, hyper local content, access can any paper sell? What leads can it generate and sell? Alternately, how many ways can it serve its content and get ads attached?

Someone should explain the concept to this person. hanfordsentinel.com/blogs/?p=80

Disney call this model the 'velvet rope', i.e. you pay to cross the velvet rope into the 'VIP' area with added benefits. I wrote more about this in my 21st century newsroom part 5: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/01/28/making-money-from-journalism-new-media-business-models-a-model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-pt5/

Yes, according to Wilson in the follow up post in the link provided by Anonymous (a very prolific writer who seems to comment at countless disparate blogs) Jared Lukin came up with the Freemium label. Governor's post was just before Lukin's and I read the wrong name for Lukin's post. Thanks.

Interesting article, but looks like you got the source wrong: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/the_freemium_bu.html

Your article on Freemium, really begs the question, if the economy moving towards in that direction, I have been following some few other companies like: http://showmypc.com http://skype.com http://google.com/goog411 and other google service http://thefreesite.com I am sure there are many more but they all have something common, that is a free modal, with business targeted options. The winner is the end is the consumer.

Good grief man, make your point. Whatever you decided "new media" meant by the end of your article (sorry...I had to decide--"have a life" or "read article"), can we also insert in the definition "remarkable for facilitating communication promoting clarity of thought, succinctness, useful information as opposed to just data, the ability to enlighten (key root='light') and not bludgeon"? If nothing else, all these new opportunities to communicate one-to-many or many-to-many should provoke an evolutionary bump up in writers' DNA that leads them to take a point, make it, leave something of value behind, and move on.

I don't think the problem is the article's length but instead its logic. First, Crosbie claims that going back to old meanings, prior to the existence of a technology, is Better than claiming that a term's meaning can be extended as new developments emerge (e.g., calling einsteinium an element or baseball a game). No reason is given, and I can't see why we should change from the extension of "intermediary" that was made in the 1850s and seems natural to us now. Second, the article gives no proof for its account of "previous meanings". Crosbie never quotes any source before the 1800s saying, e.g., "I used the medium of water to get to town." Even less is any example given of a pre-1800 author saying "I used the interpersonal medium" or "the one-to-one medium". I can't remember any early source, even Hegel, saying such things, but even if some sources did, without proof the author's claim to be "returning to the previous meanings" is unproven and unpersuasive. Third, Crosbie ignores other communicative arrangements, long in existence, such as 'one to a few' communication--group communication--where some specific tailoring and some joint power to add content is present. See Goffman's work for other communicative arrangements [my term for what Crosbie calls 'media'.] So there weren't just two "media" before. Fourth, it's silly to claim that most instances of New Media individualize messages. Wikipedia, podcasts, websites don't, and those are pretty prototypical of New Media "vehicles". [Of course, to argue about the definitions usefully, we need a list of prototypical new media/"vehicles" or some other grounding. Since Crosbie's case is historically ungrounded, his argument otherwise amounts to 'I like my definitions best.'] Indeed, it may be self-contradictory to say that new media are "many-to-MANY" (my emphasis) AND that content is individualized. Fifth, it is even more strikingly faulty to claim that new media have, as a "hallmark characteristic", the property that "Each of the people involved --whether publisher, broadcasters, or consumer -- shares equal and reciprocal control over that content." Except for wikis (and even there limits exist), I can't think of a single example. In many cases many people have the ability to ADD content, as I'm doing now, but that's very different from "equal and reciprocal control". In most cases even the ability to add content meaningfully is limited and under unequal control. Thus, I think Crosbie's argument for his definitions is flawed in enough ways to be fatally flawed overall.

I think the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD format battle will become largely moot during the next 18 to 36 months as BitTorrent-based broadband downloading will become the default method for consumers to view cinematic and television productions. Netflix and Blockbuster are already beginning to switch to that method. A few of the Hollywood studios have begun to rollout services based on that method. And Apple this week announced a service (albeit not BitTorrent-based) that will rent downloadable videos via iTunes. To paraphrase Negroponte, the change from delivering programming on atoms (i.e., 7 mm DVD discs) to delivering that programming via bits has begun. Yes, there still will be DVDs. People who want to own a classic edition might buy and collect those. And perhaps Blu-Ray or HD-DVD might replace the old format for those discs. But those discs will become about as important as lithography is in today's ink jet world.