I am employed by a newspaper and that naturally biases me about the medium's durability.
I have worked in other media (see bio next door) and that naturally opens me to see things a little differently than either those who have only been inside a paper or those who have only been outside one. I don't think the arrival of one medium ever irreparably harms another; everything adapts and evolves.
Everyone understands newspapers are in the throes of their largest changes since photography or coloured ink arrived. The issue isn't whether, but how, they will change in the time to come.
Len Kubas is one of North America's leading newspaper consultants. His latest report, Navigating Newspapers to a Brighter Future, isn't especially rosy about what is ahead. It's tough sledding. But he's not predicting doom and gloom, providing companies pick up their games.
Kubas assesses several problems, principal among them a focus on "performance measures" (read: high markups for high profits) that are being overtaken by new market forces (Wal-Mart's approach of lower margins and higher sales volumes).
And his prescription is a tall order: free papers, compact papers, modular ads, more colour, "lite" papers and a raft of niche publications. Most important of all: a digital-first culture.
"The major challenge for companies or industries wanting to reinvent their business models in the face of disruptive change is that in order to move forward, most will have to abandon any hope of retreating to what worked so well before," he writes.
But overall, Kubas is every bit as optimistic as other key industry reports in recent times, such as the Newspaper Next project from the American Press Institute.
In the end, he doesn't see diminution as inevitable, but he sees diversification as inescapable.

We journalists often live in denial about advertising. In that denial, it is distressing to know upwards of 80 per cent of any organization's revenue (100 per cent if you're online, in many free-subscription instances) is derived from an advertiser's commitment to your story-telling's capacity to deliver a desired audience.
It stands to reason that if you're going to buy an ad, you want it seen. And while there is great enthusiasm now about the growth in ad revenue online --- a new form of fuel for journalism, presumably, to lead us to a new business model  --- there is also alarming concern about ad-averse behaviour by the audience.
This is particularly true on the booming social networks, MySpace and Facebook. Where once about one in 100 ads were clicked through (an indication people are interested in the product or service), there are indications the rate now is about one in 1,000. The latest Business Week examines this disquieting phenomenon, which involves a desensitized audience that is a bit overwhelmed by targeted advertising.
The beauty of technology is its ability to drive messages to a clearly intended target. The trouble is that the target isn't clearly targeted --- there's self-defeating clutter and multi-messaging, and the audience balks at the overload.
But the new model for journalism depends heavily on finding the right balance to create a good digital environment for direct marketers and advertisers. At the moment, even Google acknowledges it hasn't found the ideal model for the social networks.

  

The Pew Institute's new report on video-sharing hasn't many surprises for anyone attentive to our have-camera, will-shoot world. We're watching more video online than ever, we're sharing it more than ever, and the rate of increase (doubling in one year) indicates that enough time is being spent on the activity to erode conventional media, likely TV most of all. The only question is how soon video-sharing will become the new normal of viewership.

I was a guest the other night on The National's At Issue panel. You can watch the video at:  www.cbc.ca/national/blog/video/at_issue/the_obama_effect.html