It’s been a busy news week in the newspaper business.

The Rocky Mountain News — older than the state of Colorado itself — published its final edition yesterday.

Newsday is talking about charging for online content. The problem, of course, is that the New York Times tried this and failed. I can’t help wondering what Newsday thinks it can offer for a fee that infinite free Websites provide for a click.

Meanwhile, the American Society of Newspapers Editors is so bummed about what’s happening in their business they canceled their annual convention for the first time since World War II.

Want more? If you’re on Twitter, follow @themdiaisdying and you’ll know that the Boston Herald is looking to cut 20 more jobs, the Albany Times Union is cutting staff, the Frederick News-Post is suspending its Monday edition … and that’s just in the last 15 hours.

The reasons this is happening have become cliche: the rise of the Internet, the shift of classified ads to the Web, and the fleeing of advertising dollars in general. The current economy is speeding up the whole process.

What needs to happen — fast — is that a lot of smart people need to get in a room and completely re-imagine the news business.

They need to start with this assumption: “We’re selling news, not papers.”

Then they should assume newspapers don’t exist at all and ask themselves: How would you create a news organization from scratch in the 21st century?

One of those people ought to be Larry Kramer, whose Daily Beast article the other day about the second coming of newspapers shows he really gets it. “Forget the newspaper industry,” he says, “let’s launch the News Industry.” Bingo.

Meanwhile, Hearst seems to be doing some thinking in this area. In a time when the New York Times could send every subscriber a free Kindle at half the cost of printing the physical paper, Hearst is launching its own wireless e-reader. Hmmmmm.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Rants 'n' Such.