An assignment in my interactive media class: solve the newspaper industry in one page. Here’s what I said:

Solving the newspaper industry in one page – here we go:

I’d like to start my solution by drawing a parallel to an often-discussed failure of great American industry: the American rail system. Not too long ago, the United States had the best, most advanced, and most prolific rail system in the world. But when the automobile came along, and later the plane, no one traveled over rail anymore. Now the US rail system lags far behind more advanced systems in other parts of the world. Although it may not have been avoidable, most historians attribute the railroad industry’s failure to the companies’ stubborn thinking that they were railroad companies. In actuality though, they were transportation companies. They were in the business of moving people and things.

The same confusion can be seen in the newspaper industry. They all think that they are simply newspaper companies, when in actuality they are simply communication and story-telling companies. Once they get over this imaginary barrier, then newspapers can start to embrace the changes around them and adapt their business model in order to continue communicating and selling stories.

However, these changes need to be in alignment with the new medium. Currently, newspapers are merely porting their content onto the web. In my mind, that’s akin to the first television news programs merely being people reading newspapers. The new interactive Internet requires new interactive solutions to deliver stories.

Here are some ideas:

Transition away from print. The reality is that there are still a lot of people online, but not enough to pay the bills. It’s time to transition completely away from the print medium – it will drastically reduce overhead and simplify the process of telling stories.

Invite collaboration. Gone are the days of telling people the news. With new technologies, news can be broken and reported by anyone. Embrace the feedback and credibility of independent stories and make partnerships with the best content generators.

Act like bloggers. Be the credible voice that other bloggers reference, but in this new age there are no print deadlines, and news still happens 24 hours a day. Make every reporter proficient at multimedia blogging. The most popular posts make it to the top and all content is portable to other areas to the net under creative commons licensing.

Stay local. You still own local news and local advertising. It’s time to revamp how you manage these valuable ad spaces. Look to Google for insight on how to build contextual advertisements that you can sell to anyone through a sleek interface. By partnering with other local beats, you increase your selling power and can better control ad revenue.

Become the portal for all information. Maybe you start by cultivating feeds from other sources, but there is no reason why newspapers can’t own a city’s story. Become the destination for user-generated reviews of restaurants, plays, etc. Own the city you cover and all the information available to it.