GW ePublishing

These cost advantages make it feasible to make a business out of highly specialized information, a trend that was under way well before the Internet.

specialized media had been enjoying more growth than general media.

A metropolitan newspaper became a mosaic of narrowly targeted content items. Few read the entire paper, but many read the parts that appealed to their specialized interests

Sending everything to everybody was a response to the Industrial Revolution, which rewarded economies of scale

Newspapers "keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner," he said. "This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."

The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.

But the time for launching this strategy is growing short if it has not already passed. The most powerful feature of the Internet is that it encourages low-cost innovation, and anyone can play

Clayton Christensen has noted, the very qualities that made companies succeed can be disabling when applied to disruptive innovation. Successful disruption requires risk taking and fresh thinking.

One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution.

What service supplied by newspapers is the least vulnerable?

I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence

The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating.

Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence. To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet.

But it won't be a worthwhile possibility unless the news-paper endgame concentrates on retaining newspapers' core of trust and responsibility

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.

Further, text-based Web sites aren't where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies.

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.

And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.