PressEthic

In an article for USA Today, Kevin Maney asks internet entrepreneurs and tech-heads the question, "If you owned a newspaper, what would you do with it?"

He received varied responses, but, for the most part, they weren't terribly revolutionary, with most techies predictably saying that they would break free of the print form as soon as possible to focus on digital content.

No one offered an idea that totally broke form, reinventing newspapers the way eBay reinvented garage sales. No one, for instance, proposed that newspaper websites, which generally look more crowded than a Mumbai flea market, pare down to a single, clean Google-esque local search box. No one suggested that local papers outfox Craigslist, the free classified site that the newspaper industry treats like kryptonite, by creating their own free local classified sites.

Maney and his respondents seemed to see the biggest potential for growth at local papers in small and mid-size cities where newspapers have the ability to create an entire online community for readers, encouraging them to frequent the site and building a rapport through a variety of offerings.

Local newspapers would want to assimilate and link to local bloggers and get readers to network with each other through topic areas — like fans of the local minor league baseball team or musicians involved in the local scene.

Scott Jones, the founder of search engine ChaCha, said that his newspaper would have a "local emphasis on restaurants, classes, events, things to do, including pictures and videos. Think YouTube, but with a local orientation, of every school soccer game, art festival, church picnic or black-tie affair."

Local papers should buy up local online entities, says Alan Warms, founder of the Buzztracker blog aggregation site. Maybe The Times-Picayune in New Orleans should buy the blog "Ernie the Attorney: Law and Technology Observations From a Lawyer Living and Practicing in Post-Katrina New Orleans." Or the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle in Cheyenne should buy "I Bet After Sex He Smokes a Ham," a blog by "a gay artist living in rural Wyoming."

The future for newspapers in larger cities and those aimed at national audiences is less clear, and Maney commented, "They could wind up as 'tweeners — not big enough, but not small enough. In media, that's always a bad position."