Prediction #5: The Top Dozen Business & Technology Stories in 2010 Will Include...

Of course, there will be stories that we have not identified that could generate significant coverage in 2010. But based on what we know now, here's a list of some of the stories reporters are sure to be working on this year (though not necessarily in this order):

1. The economy, including the recovery, the housing market, auto industry and the "new normal."
   
2. The freelancing of the US workforce -- or how we'll all be contractors or "perma-temps" in the future (especially given the jobless nature of the recovery).
3. Apple's iPad and the future of mobile computing and Apple's iPads vs. cellphones vs. Kindle and other e-readers.
4. Cloud computing and virtualization -- and yes, we know: they're not the same thing.
5. Health care reform.
6. Regulations.
7. Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft and EMC vs. HP vs. Oracle.
8. 3-D TVs.
9. The state of the media, especially print media and advertising, online-only business models and online subscriptions.
10. Twitter's business model.
11. Location-based services and behavioral targeting by advertisers.
12. Online privacy as social media, behavioral targeting, location-based services and hackers combine to make it easy for others to access personal information.

Please note: This is not to exclude other topics we've included in our 2010 predictions.

Print Edition of Computerworld Now Hits Twice a Month

Computerworld is changing the frequency of its print edition -- acknowledging that news doesn't wait for weekly production schedules. Now Computerworld will print twice a month.

They're still covering news online.

And will keep a News Analysis section in the print edition.

As it is the print edition continues to shrink. Wonder it the next move is to become a monthly.

Google's Fast Flip Offers Micopayments to Content Publishers

Google has unveiled a new offering designed to make it faster for people to scan through news content and to enable content publishers collect payment for their content. Fast Flip takes some getting used to but seems like a concept that will help readers and publishers.

Micropayments for News Content Faces Significant Reluctance

Free may be a great price to pay, but for content on the Internet, it's an unsustainable business model. Especially for journalism.

I realize I'm giving away content on this blog for free, but this blog is not my main source of income. Offering opinion is easy. Researching and conducting real journalism takes time and money.

Last week, the New York Times wrote about a number of organizations that are trying to find a system to charge readers for news content. In the article, "Lots of Fee Ideas for Media Online," Richard Perez-Pena wrote that Steven Brill, News Corp., Google, Microsoft and I.B.M. have all offered up approaches.

Brill's Journalism Online says it will have a system in place within months, one that could be used by hundreds of sites.

The challenge, according to Alan D. Mutter, a media entrepreneur, consultant, and an investor in a failed startup that tried to develop a micropayment solution, “There is no unanimity among publishers about what to do — whether to charge for content, how to charge, whose solutions to use — and most people in the business still don’t believe they can put up a pay wall without repelling a large part of their audience.”

Actually, Mutter told the Times that there's another hurdle, too, “I doubt you’re going to see a lot of companies spend a lot of money building a system for the newspaper industry as long as there’s no resolve on the part of the industry about what they want to do.”

The Times article covered the lack of a technological solution to the problem.

What has yet to be fully addressed is that consumers love "free,"and have grown accustomed to not paying to get news content. What's ironic about the fact that Google provided some ideas on a payment structure, is that Google has helped fuel the decline in the demand for print newspapers because its Google News makes it easier and faster for some people to get just the news they want.

The declining demand for print is coupled with the disinclination to pay for news at all. I saw this article on the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club that makes the case that people don't want to pay for content.

In Print-only experiment upsets online crowd, the SFPPC reported that a San Francisco Chronicle column critical of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom by Phil Bronstein's column "appeared briefly on the SFGate.com site and then was pulled." Apparently, the Chronical had intended the column to appear only in the print edition, and not online, as a way to boost newsstand sales.

The reaction to the SFPPC's article itself is what's instructive: "Sorry, but I'm not paying a dollar for a daily, local newspaper. Too little news for too high a price." Another comment said, "print's dead. this experiment was doomed. hope the chron/hearst/sfgate has learned a lesson: back away from print and go entirely online."

Go entirely online means no payments.

Without finding ways to generate revenue, online news content is doomed.

I like free, too, but the news sites we like to visit will be in a death spiral unless they can generate revenue from online users.

Perhaps multimedia content like the Times' Gauging Your Distraction could help generate revenue, although I'm not sure how the Times would charge for that. (Per time playing the game?)

What Brill, Murdoch and the rest of the news sector must do is start making the case why online news content is valuable, and that people who access online news content will either have to support it or get used to dwindling sources for news.

Good Article from The Deal about the Finances of Newspapers

"Black and white and red all over," which appeared in The Deal, offers an interesting look at the financial problems affecting the newspaper sector.

One of the points the article makes is that newspapers used to cost $0.05 in 1908, or about $2.67 today -- that's still more than most daily papers charge. (Sunday's editions are often more expensive.) The reason: publishers dropped the price to boost circulation to be able to increase the fees they charge advertisers.

(As faithful readers of this blog know, the U.S. has had an advertising-driven newspaper and magazine sector, meaning that print media (with exceptions like Consumer Reports) are generally advertising supported. Without the advertising, it doesn't matter how large the circulation.)

One suggestion in the article for improving the profitability of newspapers is to increase subscription costs. Another is to print only a Sunday edition while maintaining a 24/7 website. Doing so would reduce the costs by as much as 60%, the article claims.

Yet, the article says newspapers won't be able to make the transition to paying readership for their websites.

So we're still left with the question: how do you make online content pay. But The Deal's article is worth checking out.

Turning Distribution Into Revenue

The thing about journalism is this: reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

People continue to want news. They just don't necessarily want it in print form.

It's too slow. It's about what happened yesterday, after all.

It's not convenient. You can have it delivered to your home or office or pick it up from a newsstand -- but the printed newspaper isn't available on your smart phone, your iPod, etc.

It's too expensive.

What's interesting is that technology has transformed the first two complaints: you can now get real-time news updates and you can access it on your smart phone, on e-readers like Kindle, etc.

Technology has improved distribution of the news. But while it has brought some costs down significantly, technology still hasn't generated revenue streams to pay for the news.

Even providing an iPhone App hasn't solved the revenue question, as reported in the New York Times, "There’s an App for That. But a Revenue Stream?" Check out "For Murdoch, It’s Try, Try Again" by the Times' David Carr, which looks at ways Murdoch, the Times, Boston Globe and others are thinking about getting consumers to pay for news content.

As Murdoch told the Times, "Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news Web sites.”

By doing so, Murdoch and others will establish a wall that will prevent search engines from finding the content, and reduce the number of people able to access that content. Then it will become more important for PR functions to use social media to raise awareness of the coverage about their client or organization.

Still, the first challenge is to get people to pay for general news. Check out a New York Times article from today about the Financial Times, "Financial Times Feels Vindicated by Web Strategy," which looks at how the FT's strategy of putting its content behind a pay wall has been paying off. Up next for the FT is a system of micropayments.

Seattle Times Doing Well Since Seattle P-I Went Online

One of the important questions for the future of newspapers is whether the online-only model can generate enough revenue to sustain newspaper operations.

In the five months since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shifted to online-only mode, with a much smaller staff (now at 20, down from 165) and more than 200 unpaid bloggers, kept much of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. According to its owner, Hearst Corp., audience and revenue are "ahead of projection."

So a scaled-down version of local news can work.

What's also interesting, according to the New York Times' Richard Perez-Pena, "Seattle Paper Is Resurgent as a Solo Act," the Seattle Times is now profitable.

Which proves that demand for print journalism continues. For now.

A Voice or Two Grows in San Diego

Let's be clear: lots of newspapers are encountering significant problems due to the Great Recession. That's been a theme I've been covering in this blog. Major market papers have closed or shifted to online-only, laid off or offered buy-outs to employees, shifted publication schedules, etc.

Lots of publications have been put quietly or quite loudly on the market -- with no takers, and deadlines for bids extended again and again.

It's been ugly.

But one point I've tried to make is that the problem print newspapers have been encountering does not have anything to do with circulation or readership demand.

In fact, it's clear that the public still wants and craves news.

They just may not be as attached to the actual paper it's been printed on.

The industry's problems are more financial than readership.

As we shifted from 8-track tape to CDs, we're now at an inflection point with delivery mechanisms of news.

The current Forbes offers a story about two news startups in San Diego, "San Diego News Shoot-Out: As a newspaper monopoly crumbles, unorthodox upstarts storm the marketplace. Welcome to the future of journalism." What it shows is that people are still interested in covering and delivering news -- just as there continues to be demand to read the news.

The challenges include:

1. How to make the new news credible.
2. How to make delivering the news -- in whatever format -- profitable or at at least sustainable.

It's worth checking out both startups profiled in the Forbes article.

The challenge for us in PR is to find ways to work with the new news -- and to provide context to our clients and bosses that these new outlets are indeed worthwhile to pursue.

What The Selling of BusinessWeek Tells Us about the Economy -- That BusinessWeek Hasn't Told Us

The news that McGraw-Hill is trying to sell BusinessWeek, "McGraw-Hill Is Said to Be Seeking a Buyer for BusinessWeek," tells us something imporant about the media business -- something that you won't find inside the pages (hardcopy or otherwise) of BusinessWeek itself.

It's that the Great Recession has not started rebounding.

Circulation for BusinessWeek is holding steady at about 900,000, but advertising is declining.

BusinessWeek is a great publication, does a terrific job covering news and trends. And its website and BusinessWeek Exchange community are very popular.

Doesn't matter, though, because advertising pages has dropped 40% since 2004.

Here's what Peter F. Appert, an analyst at the Piper Jaffray Companies, said to the New York Tmes about the potential sale: “It certainly makes all the sense in the world for them to sell it, even though in my view there is likely to be minimal proceeds, if any. There could be buyers, if the definition of a buyer is someone who’s willing to take it off their hands.”

That last part of his statement is worth repeating: "There could be buyers, if the definition of a buyer is someone who’s willing to take it off their hands.”

What that tells us, unfortunately, is that BusinessWeek is in trouble. That a high profile, important business publication will be spun out, its future uncertain under new owners looking for a bargain.

It means, if McGraw-Hill feels it makes sense to ditch BusinessWeek now, that we're far from being out of the woods, that a recovery is not just around the corner.

Meanwhile the list of failed magazines continues. Former Mets (and Phillies) Lenny Dykstra had filed bankruptcy, and shut down his finance magazine, according to Forbes. "Dykstra Done In By Debts: Ex-ballplayer goes bust, owes millions after failed investment in glossy finance magazine for pro athletes."

In the short-term, we should expect further belt-tightening at the BusinessWeek and other major publications -- that layoffs and offers for buy-outs will continue, that print will continue to look for ways to shrink their publications to save money, continue to look at ways to increase revenues (the problem with a recent Washington Post pay-for-access salons), and that more publications will shift to an online-only business model.

What that also means for PR functions is that the competition for ink will continue to be tough since the number of organizations trying to get into a publicaiton seems to be holding steady while the number of actual pages is shrinking.

Is PR Evolving? Can it? What Will it Look Like?

The media landscape is clearing changing. Print newspapers, some in existence more than 150 years, are either closing or shedding their print operations and shifting to online-only.

There are significant implications for journalists and J-schools.

But also for PR agencies and communications functions. We still need to work with print outlets.

But is PR evolving to address the new media reality? I suspect many are not fully embracing the future, based anecdotal evidence (potential clients are all interested in social media, but view it as a nice-to-do, not a must-do).

The question we ask over here is: what does PR look like in three years, and what steps must we take to ensure we're moving ourselves and our clients in the right direction. (We got some validation recently when a client, who had rejected our recommendation two years ago to embrace social media, finally did so, and thanked us for pushing them in that direction.)

What happens to digital agencies that have claimed bloggers and social media but have not worked with traditional soon-to-be online-only media? What happens to traditional agencies that have not focused much on social media? And what happens to internal PR functions and how they allocate resources?

A colleague heard a client say that PR is a dead field. I disagree, though I do think there will be a lot of agencies who can't make the transition from silent flicks to the talkies, to use an analogy current about 80 years ago.

I don't believe that social media is only a customer service channel, and therefore you no longer need PR.

To succeed, functions and agencies alike will need to think about how they can facilitate communications and generate meaningful results and benchmarks.

For a look at how science journalism and PR is evolving, check out this article on the blog, Flack's Revenge.

New Media Trend: Laid-off Reporters Start Free Online News Site

It's tough out there for reporters. Especially reporters who worked at large local papers that have downsized dramatically. If you like the city -- Denver, Seattle, Newark (yes, Newark) -- you don't have much in the way of options for finding another local paper to work on. (Sure, there's the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, but Newark?)

There's a growing trend of former employees of defunct or downsized papers who gather together and start publishing their own free newspapers online. For example, former Rocky Mountain News reporters have established their own site. A friend in Hyde Park, NY, started a new online site after the paper for which he wrote a regular column ceased publication.

The latest example, courtesy of the New York Times: "Cast Out, but Still Reporting" about former Newark Star-Ledger reporters.

There are a couple of interesting elements about this trend:

• These are established, experienced reporters -- and they are working for free.
• They realize that the interest in local news did not go away -- even as business problems plagued their newspapers. In other words, there are structural problems with the old model -- perhaps too much debt taken on, as with the Tribune Co. or GateHouse Media.
• That said, there are structural problems with these new online sites. Namely no advertising revenue (yet), no subscription fees, and no payroll. Hardly sustainable.
• These new sites will put pressure on other papers in their markets (Denver Post, Seattle Times), making it less likely those newly single-paper markets will flourish as much as their publishers proclaimed.

The question is: how long can these new efforts last when no one's getting paid.

Meanwhile, as for PR functions, it it important to consider these new outlets, though I don't know how many are offering up business sections vs. local municipal news.

One Obstacle to Online-Only Media

Online-only news sites may be better positioned than than traditional print newspapers because at least they don't have heavy production costs of the latter. Of course, online-only outlets also shed revenue streams, too.

But one major challenge to online-only media is that a lot of sites have mediocre search engines. Currently, it can be very difficult to search the websites of these print outlets to find online versions of articles that appeared in the print edition.

Twice this morning, I looked online for articles I had cut out from the print edition of two different outlets. And twice, I could not find the articles using those sites' search engine. Instead, I had to leave the site -- which they can't really want -- go to Google, and then found the article I wanted.

One of the sites I checked is a subscription-only site, and yet their search engine for subscribers (and I am one) is truly lacking. Clearly that's a problem.

If the intent of online-only -- an eventuality for which all print newspapers and magazines should be preparing themselves -- is to enable users to find all content being produced by the outlet, then finding articles should be easy, not be complicated.

There's a lot of work to be done here, with a lot of sites not doing the work to make their archives and current content available to the public.

Cost Cutting Won't Save Newspapers, Analyst Says

Quote of the day from the Boston Globe:

Newspapers cannot cost cut themselves to prosperity and an online-only newspaper is not profitable, not even close. We do not have a solution on how to solve the difficulties newspapers face," Craig Huber, Barclays Capital.

What Newspapers Do, from the Boston Globe

The embattled Boston Globe ran a compelling justification of why we need newspapers, "What newspapers do."

Of course it's self-serving, but it's worth reading.

The fact is we need media outlets who seek to serve the greater good. From my perspective, that's no doubt about that.

I do think that online-only media outlets can provide the same service that newspapers have. I just don't know that we'll be able to get that when news outlets are all online. I think it will be more difficult to pull people together when we're all ready different news items online -- instead of reacting to newspaper headlines while commuting (via mass transit) to the office.

Even if you don't subscribe to newspapers, when you see them on newsstands, at a convenience store, or on a colleague's desk or on the subway, train or bus on the way to work, the headlines do have an impact, and help set an agenda. You can be pro or con to what's being reported, but there's an agenda.

I'm sure something will evolve, but that agenda-setting capability won't be replaced easily by online-only news media.

As more newspapers stopping fighting the inevitable and shift to online-only mode, another way to unite our experience goes by the wayside.

The Future of Newspapers When They No Longer Print on Paper

We've been recommending that companies (clients and nonclients) consider optimizing their news and information for search engines and Web 2.0. Not all are on board because of some very good reasons:

• Costs: Concern about needing additional investment in marketing given current conditions. Costs could include professional production of video and audio.
• Training: Identifying the skill sets required, and making sure staffers have that training.
• Metrics: Establishing benchmarks that are appropriate and meaningful and help quantify ROI.
  

Ok, but this post is entitled "The future of newspapers when they no longer print on paper," so what's PR got to do with that?

The answer is that PR has to re-imagine itself to be relevant to our clients and to the people we're trying to reach on behalf of clients. And if newspapers want to charge for their online content, they have to re-imagine themselves, too.

From an eyeballs' perspective, online newspapers are spectacularly successful. More people read newspapers online than read the hardcopy editions of newspapers.

From a financial perspective, of course, this has been the worst year/period ever for newspapers in terms of revenue.

Few people actually pay for online news. So the question that publishers need to be asking themselves is:

• If we were inventing newspapers today, what would they look like?
• How would they charge their readers?
• How would they charge their advertisers?
  

To answer the first question, newspapers need to embrace Web 2.0 functionality. They need to tag articles. They need to make it easy to link to articles -- on their sites and from other sites. They need to allow us to choose the format of the content we want. Some like to read articles; some prefer to listen to podcasts at the gym and others prefer to watch video. Newspapers must be able to offer all three formats. Perhaps the audio and video could be raw footage from events, conferences, etc.

If invented today, newspapers' online navigation and searchability would be improved. We might have a page with headlines and a 140-character summary of the article -- not just the article's first line -- and if interested, a link to click on to read more.

That leads to an answer for the second question: you could charge readers a monthly package for a certain number of articles they clicked through to read or an unlimited package (borrowing on plans offered by cellphone companies).

I'm not going to address here how to charge advertisers.

But given the plethora of choices of free news services, newspapers trying to achieve profitability through an online-only business model have to do more than just repurpose and post their print mindset to the the Internet.

Unfortunately, too many are not doing the work to invent a news outlet today. And they're doing so for similar reasons some companies are not embracing Web 2.0 for their PR functions.

But the bottom-line is this: If all they do is repurpose the print version, newspapers won't survive online. They must redefine the experience so that readers will be willing to pay. If they don't redefine the reader's experience, newspapers will fail.

There are two interesting articles in today's New York Times:

• "‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers": Which looks at a few sites offering news based on your block. That seems like an okay alternative for cities, but probably does not provide a bigger picture of what's going on in the entire city.
• "Papers Try to Get Out of a Box": by David Carr, who sums up the situation like this: "The taking of one company’s content and selling ads against it for the benefit of another company is simply not fair, no matter what the lawyers stipulate. But even though this is not the world newspapers might have chosen, it is the one that they live in. Deprived of links — the oxygen of the Internet — many news providers would wither away."

Tough Times for Alternative Weeklies: What happens to them when the traditional papers cease publishing?

While most of the attention to the problems of print journalism have focused on daily newspapers, things have not been going so well for alternative weeklies.

Check out the Boston Globe's: "The weekly battle: Alternative papers, like big dailies, cut back as ad sales slip."

Here's the thing: what happens to alternative papers when the papers they serve as an alternative to cease publishing?

It means alternative papers need to find a new alternative. They're going to have to shift online, which raises a question: who are they serving as an alternative too? The vast majority of blogs could be classified as alternative, I'd think.

So once they're online-only, these outlets will need to redefine their approach, their goals, and their alternative-ness.

Newsroom Cuts Not Enough to Spare Boston Globe

Last week the Globe announced that it had completed its newsroom cuts, the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs.

This week, the New York Times Co. met with the local unions to request concessions. Check out Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in cuts from unions.

Turns out, instead of losing $1M per week, the Globe has been losing $1.6M per week or $85M annually.

As a current and longtime subscriber, I'm not sure I see where that money has been going. The paper is thin, with four standalone sections in the daily paper: Front/national section, Metro (which includes business), Sports and g (which includes comics, arts, health and whatever else doesn't fit in the front, metro or sports. The business section -- well, at first, I wrote "business page," though technically it usually has about 2 1/2 pages -- has a couple of reporters. Same for the health, which no longer has its own section.

The challenge for the Globe, the dominant paper in New England, by circulation, is that its web site is not great. To compete as an online-only site, it would have to improve the search engine capability on the site, improve navigation, add multimedia -- in other words, it will take some investment to make it successful online.

That's probably true, too, for the Seattle P-I and other papers making the shift.

They all have to reinvent themselves as an online outlet.

As for the print Globe itself, NY Times management is asking the union to make concessions. Given unemployment figures and lack of alternatives, I think they'll have to work with management to save the Globe and their jobs.

But I actually read a quote from a journalism professor that said, in part, "The newspaper is telling the unions that radical changes have to be made or the newspaper is no longer viable. The question is whether it's a negotiating ploy."

I'd say, given the current market, the steps the Times Co. has taken to raise money, that that person was not paying attention. (He added, "In this situation, the request on the part of the management is not unusual or out of the ordinary" but I think we're beyond "negotiating ploys.")

Good luck, Boston Globe.

Media Predictions & the Speed of Change + One Prediction We Did Not Get Completely Right. Ok, More than Not Right

In my interview with Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business Success Radio, which airs -- ok, which runs -- on BlogTalkRadio, we talked a lot about media predictions and trends, based on my original blog post, Top 14+ Media Trends for 2009, posted Jan. 9, 2009. The predictions are an annual list that my agency, Birnbach Communications, compiles based on research, conversations with reporters, bloggers and Twitter members to find out what they're following. For nearly a decade, we've compiled the annual list of media trends to help clients more effectively work with the medi, both at traditional and online outlets, including blogs and other social media sites.

Anyway, since Jan. 9, we've been right about a number of the predictions. But what was startling was the pace of change regarding some of our predictions.

For example, we expected some second-tier newspapers would fold or shift to online-only mode. And we were right about that. But we really did not expect the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. And though we should have realized because the announcements were there, that primary papers in other top markets were in trouble, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is now online-only mode, and the San Francisco Chronicle, which will likely go online-only.

In fact, it's been difficult to keep pace and track with the number of first-tier and second-tier newspapers changes and layoffs. Since Jan., the pace of that change has accelerated beyond our expectations. We updated a media list yesterday that had last had its major update in Dec. 2008 -- and there were so many more changes than I've ever seen in three months, much less a year. Included were reporters who had been active journalists for decades.

So that's one prediction we did not get entirely right. We were hopeful more could survive, especially newspapers that were dominent in their markets. So we're revising our prediction to say that here will a lot of smaller and some larger markets without a major traditional paper.

One prediction we did not get right was the strength of hyperlocal reporting. While we still feel that hyperlocal coverage can be a solution, we now realize hyperlocal media is not immune to the cash flow and lack of advertising problems plaquing newspaper holding companies. Recently, the Journal Register sold two Connecticut dailies and closed several weeklies.

Please note: they closed them not because there wasn't local interest in hyperlocal news. There is. Just as there was readers support for the Rocky or the Seattle PI.

But that's not enough.

As I've noted before, circulation fees alone do not spare publications because advertising generates much more revenue. If advertising drops, even a circulation in the hundreds of thousands won't save the publicaiton. That's true for newspapers, like the Rocky or the Seattle PI, or consumer magazines, where glossies with 800,000 subscribers still closed.

However, to our credit, we did predict that local competition in the online space will heat up, and that still seems like it will be proven true.

Anyway, check out my interview on Blog Business Success Radio. And thanks for continuing to read this blog.

Could Twitter Help Newspapers' Decline

According to a recent post on Media Bullseye, Old Media's New Voice, newspapers that embrace Twitter are actually doing well -- as long as they don't see Twitter simply as an RSS feed.

A reporter at the Austin American-Statesman, Robert Quigley says, being on Twitter for a newspaper is "not just about driving page views to our site (which it does), it's also a marketing campaign."

Further, he provides some advice that's useful for any organization either thinking of or already using Twitter: "Put a real person behind that account. Twitter is too personal, in my opinion, for RSS feeds. That back-and-forth conversation can be very rewarding."

Among other reasons to be on Twitter, Quigley notes that it's a great platform to reach mobile devices.

Check out the article.

Ann Arbor News to Shift to Online-Only

Sounds a bit like that old song by Queen: Another One Bites the Dust.

174-year-old Ann Arbor News will shift to online-only model in July. I wonder why, now that decision has been made, the publisher, Advance Publications, is waiting that long to switch over.

The shift leaves the college town with no regular newspaper. I'm sure the college paper will step up as will the local alternative weekly.

Which leads to an important question: when mainstream media moves to online-only, where does that leave alternative weeklies? What are they alternatives to now in an online-only world? I guess as a produced-on-paper publication, alternative weeklies serve as the alternative to online-only. But it's not much.

Meanwhile, Advance owns other papers in Michigan, and they are apparently all shifting to online-only. That leaves a gap for any organization looking to reach suburban Michigan residents. Of course there will still be the online-only websites, but who knows if local readers will log onto www.annarbornews.com or will click to larger market papers, like the Detroit Free-Press and Detroit News, both of whom will shortly stop printing a full week's paper.

The shift to online-only is gathering steam (an outdated reference, of course). The problem is that no one has proven that online-only really works -- for publishers, who are giving up 90% of their revenue stream; for advertisers, and for readers.

As they used to say on radio drama, stay tuned tomorrow...