The consensus of the newspaper executives is that “A newspaper has to be more than a newspaper to survive“, according to Peter M. Zollman’s report on the Newspaper Association of America’s Readership Conference and the Future of Newspapers Conference.
The next ten years will be a time of crisis for the newspaper industry, and delivering news to PDA’s–or Web browsers for that matter– isn’t going to save them if they don’t fix the core product.
When I was in the newspaper business, a lot of energy was expended and money wasted trying to come up revenue from “database marketing”. It turns out that newspapers are good at one thing–putting ink on paper and putting the paper on your doorstep.
If newspapers are going to survive, they’re going to have to be better newspapers. They’re going to have to meet the challenge of new media not by by “convergence, but by divergence. They need to put as much daylight between themselves and new media as possible if they’re going to meet the changing needs of their readers.