We're not dead yet

A couple of weeks ago, my former company began running display ads in the middle of the front page, above the fold.

No, these weren't "banner" ads at the bottom of 1A that we lived with, reluctantly, for six years prior...even when house ads ran in those spots to basically yell out to the business community, "This space is for sale."

These were ads that affected the presentation of the top news of the day/week. How can you run a dominant photo, the lead story and a secondary story above the fold when you have you have about 24 column inches of space between the top of the ads and the bottom of the nameplate?

Good thing I was gone at the time. I'm sure my ex-bosses and friends in ad management were, too. They had extensive experience with my rants about advertising encroaching on editorial credibility, and those would have been tame in comparison to my lecture about the floating front page ads.

It's all about the money. The newspaper industry is in deep trouble...probably more trouble than the auto industry and AIG, and just less than the credit markets and small banks. Simply put, readers -- especially young readers -- get their news from the Internet, talk radio and CNN/Fox News/MSNBC. Not to mention The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (That's col-BEAR re-POR).

That means advertisers are leaving newspapers because of their own economic misery and because the falling readership. Shareholders or private investors call the shots, meaning journalistic integrity is the least if their priorities.

So, newspaper companies large and small are laying off hundreds. Some media companies such as Gatehouse Media, the Journal-Register Company and American Community Newspapers (my old stomping ground) have de-listed their stock. In my former company's case, the de-listing came about 16 months after we went public.

(By the way, they treated me very well during my tenure there, we had a very friendly parting, and I still cover high school sports for them. So I'm not trying to knock them.)

The Christian Science Monitor recently announced it would end its print edition and concentrate on the Web. Another paper in Madison, Wis. is now focusing its daily efforts online, while putting out a weekly publication.

The problem is, readers are turning to the Web, but newspapers do not know how to adapt to it or how to monetize it. Many journalists -- especially community, weekly journalists -- are so embedded in the weekly deadline/who cares if we're an hour late to press mentality, that the daily/get it up now paradigm is completely foreign.

Some of my ex-coworkers had to be told time and time again that we needed their council story right after the meeting Monday night so we could post it online. They were so set in their ways that they still didn't write it until Wednesday for the Thursday paper.

Still, no one has found the holy grail of transferring print ad revenue to Web as revenue. Many have tried, many have failed. Unless you simply put the print product up as a PDF, we still don't know the online equivalent of a full- or half-page ad -- without being annoying as a pop-up or pop-under ad (which in themselves are sabotaged by pop-up blockers).

If you're reading a story online, you have to actively click on a banner ad to get the full ad. In a newspaper, you're reading the Page One jumps, and you see the full-page ad right next to them. It's a passive view.

And the 2x2 ad on the side of the Web site costs less than the 2x2 inside a paper.

Newspapers must change their methods if they are to succeed in any form. For example:

*Make the investment in journalism. Small, community papers expect excellence for the cost of crap, and because of pride of craft, get mediocrity. They pay the same as seven years ago, but then it was paying for mediocrity and getting excellence. The investors don't like that investment because it will take a couple of years to really see the results.

*Realize the news is the product. We've seen sections and features taken away from top-notch papers -- The Dallas Morning News had excellent religion, science and health sections, but they've been minimized and absorbed into other sections. The size of the actual newsprint has shrunk (I won't bore you with technical terms, but today's page is roughly 2 inches narrower than it was a couple of years ago). Today's newspaper office more resembles a direct-sales call center than the creative tension of the "All the President's Men" Washington Post.

*Find the Web answer. Newsroom folks are being asked to do more and more to pump up the Web product. Editor & Publisher recently compiled a mobile news setup that included laptop, digital camera, digital video camera, iPhone and, oh yeah, notebooks and pens. I suggested at my company that all future photography hire be videographers. So now the executive office and the ad staff have to find the way to monetize the Web.

Nobody's found it yet. If I knew, I'd be a publisher right now.