Problem is too much young managerial talent has been lost to the industry for it to act on these ideas while the old buffers have hung on. And smart young entrepreneurial types began avoiding this dead end long, long ago. So, like the Dodo bird, extinction cometh.

Very well. we now see that part of the battle in the news business is over the means used to deliver news. Mr Kramer sees a place for newspapers who use the web to deliver news & have a news room with reporters(?) to collect news which will be processed in the news room & fed to the web. What about stories the reporters bring in but editors decide isn't news & get discarded? That story can & will be picked up by a new kind of reporter, for want of a better name: a citizen journalist, & will be fed to the web. Sometimes these stories are called scoops, if the news user chooses to use that bolus of news. A bolus of news which isn't used by a web user or a paper's editor's & publishers's is still dreck.
Since publishers are eviscerating news rooms because they are very costly, will traditional media start using stories from cj's? They may after a web site scoops the newspaper by posting the story 1st.
If you don't have access to the web, you might still buy a paper & read a story which 1st appeared on the web. But you might be so broke &/or apathetic that you won't buy a paper.
Newspapers still face death by starvation when people don't buy papers & advertisers abandon papers.
Access to the web is becoming easier & younger people know how to use the web. The papers still has a monopoly of people who don't know how to use the web. As those who don't know how to access the web die off, the papers lose potential customers. No customers=no money.
Some web site publishers now have virtual news rooms too; that kills another advantage of traditional papers. Projecting on how virtual news rooms will develop can't be done now. To be atavistic, if a virtual news room makes money for a web publisher, that publisher's model will be used by others.
The prognosis for newspapers continues to be guarded. How many newspapers will be left in 2010?

When the Gannett chain bought up the small-town newspapers in our area, then promptly stopped covering local news in the "old" way, I got mad. A friend and I started our own "newspaper," online only. Now, it's the go-to source for local news for our village and the immediate area. We cover the news that matters to our residents, the kinds of things the big chains don't care about and can't be bothered to cover. We are the future of the news business in the Internet Age.

It's ironic, don't you think, that we should be reading about / discussing the mortality of the newspaper industry on an internet news site?

Maybe Marshal Mcluhan was right. Maybe the "Age Of Print," ended in the middle of the twentieth century. Maybe we surviving newspaper readers are merely late-adopters stubbornly holding on to our aging and outmoded rituals.

On the other hand, maybe it's as Chou En-Lai famously suggested in reply to Henry Kissinger's question on the historical impact of the French Revolution, another profound transformation: "It's still too early to tell."

So, how will newspapers survive in the Internet Age?

A few simple clicks reveal a study undertaken a few years ago in the International Journal On Media Management. According to "Quantitative Media Measures: Newspaper Experiences," individual media products are "experience brands" and the newspaper reading experience can be highly individualized. The research confirms that "...reading newspapers is a rich, multi-dimensional experience" and that the key to long-term success is understanding and shaping this experience.

Well, rich, indeed.

One certainly could have experienced such brand distinctions growing up a baby boomer in the once-newspaper-rich town of Chicago;

Or, by sharing the news-from-home in Stars and Stripes with other GIs atop a sandbag bunker in Vietnam;

Or, by taking a turn at the Minneapolis Star Tribune or the Saint Paul Pioneer Press in a college dorm on a lazy Sunday afternoon;

Or, by sharing the news of Anwar Sadat's assassination in The International Herald Tribune while enjoying a glass of wine with fellow traveler at an outdoor caf� in the Tulleries Gardens in Paris;

Or, by rapaciously devouring every bit of daily Watergate news in The Washington Post while studying politics in the District of Columbia;

Or, by "de-compressing" from a day at work with The Wall Street Journal while sharing a train ride home with the countless familiar faces of other business folk;

Or, by confidently reaching just outside the hotel room door for a copy of USA Today while the two-cup coffee machine sputters on the dresser;

Or finally, by devilishly competing with spouse for a favorite section of the Fort Worth Star -Telegram or The New York Times - two distinctly different publications - on the backyard patio each sunny Sunday morning.

Each in its own way, these media brands have regularly demonstrated a capability to deliver a fact-based news experience through an unambiguous connection with its target community. When each succeeds, reader and publisher are joined by trust in a uniquely shared experience.

Yes, computers and the Internet are here to stay.Their enormous reach, impact and utility are undeniable.

Yet, who could doubt that amid the rising cacophony of shrill analysis, spin, talking points, dirty tricks, opinion disguised as fact and carefully crafted partisan messages, such core values as integrity, fairness, diligence and a laser-like focus on a clearly identified target market could be the basis for a successful industry renewal and an enduring mixed-media business model?

I don't. And, I'm confident that if you're reading The Daily Beast today while your own subscription is still current, I'm preaching to the choir.

What you are saying is the newspapers need to fold up and become syndicates, like AP, but with specialization. At present, even the syndicates are struggling and many have gone out of business. The entire news industry is going through a massive restructuring that will take ten years to shake out and will affect all the players including television. Almost none of the newspapers have the mindset or the desire to become a syndicate, even a 'new' syndicate. Most will fold, and the barons of the industry such as Murdoch, Bloomberg, Black and others will become the Sarnofs, Paleys etc of the new era of news -- similar to when CBS, NBC and ABC reigned supreme on both radio and tv airwaves, but these guys will be in the ethernet.

Newspapers are not in the news business, they are in the audience business.

Newspapers sell their audience to advertisers, who pay far more than subscribers pay for the news content. Each 50-cent newspaper probably has $5 worth of paid ads in it. Sell 100,000 daily copies of your newspaper and you receive maybe $50,000 in "cover price." But the publisher also receives $500,000 in ad revenue.

And it's that ad revenue that pays for photojournalists and reporters down at city hall, watchdogging your tax dollars. It's that ad revenue that pays for Woodward and Bernstein to meet Deep Throat in a parking garage.

Unfortunately, the Alpha Dogs of the newspaper industry have been unwilling to take responsibility for actually selling those ads. Getting turned down all day can take a real toll on your ego, it's much easier to sit in an office and cross employee names off a list. When the leaders of the newspaper industry put as much effort into "revenue generation" as they do into "cost cutting," we'll once again have a viable fourth estate.

Newspapers have had almost 15 years since the web became a medium to try to adapt, almost 40 years since cable TV etc etc. Why would anyone harbor the hope that they could suddenly, somehow, succeed now? What in the history of newspapers and their managements would give anyone such a hope?