BTW, when I listened to the podcast the quote seemed to be: “And the fact that not everybody apes (not reads) “The Washington
Post” and the “NY Times”is not necessarily all that bad.

The changes, to me, have seemed slow to come and one of the key limitations is that the available form factors, even those that claim to be designed for readers such as the Kindle, are products developed by and for geeks.

Someone who truly understands people who love to read and understands that we want the ability to scan content from cover to cover to pick and choose what we read, could make a small fortune and also boost revenues for the media industry.

There should always be a place for print media… In scanning the entire newspaper, I invariably come across something that intrigues me and gets me asking more questions. Thanks to the folks in print media like the Arizona Republic, the Associated Press and others. I hope they can continue to bring me valuable news every morning in “dead tree media” form.

There are enough of us tactically obsessed newspaper readers out there to create a nice niche for some time to come. And right now, the demographics of those readers (I would hazard a majority of which are affluent Baby Boomers with money to spend and educated Generation Xers) are still attractive to advertisers.

Even if the Republic shrinks its weekday editions, I would mount a pretty aggressive argument about the strength of the Saturday and Sunday papers for both their ad and news content.

The trick will be continuing to provide a worthy news product. What I hear from devoted newspaper readers in this market and beyond is concern over the content — some about the amount, more about the quality. It is a very difficult balancing act to offset print and production with the time and compensation needed to write a quality article. (Because of online the chiefs at the Republic need to constantly answer the question their readers will ask themselves, “Why should I pay for this?”)

I believe the Republic can still do a good job with a smaller news hole. They will have to, to become that Valley newsprint niche product for local newspaper readers.

That tombstone image made me wonder if those of us who indulge in digital media would really NOT miss print. I would. Call me old fashioned but despite my RSS reader, I want that newspaper on my driveway every morning to inform me about things I may not be smart enough to opt-in for. I want to be able to browse the newspaper and magazine racks at the bookstore.

I don’t believe the ‘newspapers are dead’ theories just because a few shrink and tweak their business model. They need to be messing –OK, experimenting– with the product (the news, not the paper) so let’s give them all the support they need.