Current Draft

Step-by-step plan to save the newspaper industry....

1. Forget about pay-walls unless your in a niche.
2. Implement Facebook Connect so your readers can login with a single click.
3. Cut a deal with Facebook so that, with the user’s permission, you can extract and store their basic information easily - age, sex, location, marital status and interests. (The current Facebook T&Cs don’t allow this). Yes, you could just ask your readers for this information, but it won’t be as effective.
4. Watch what stories people are interested in, and start customizing the news for them.
5. Recall all of your foreign correspondents. Instead pay AP for commoditized stories, or band together with other news organizations around the world and simply swap news.
6. Focus 100% of your efforts on local stories and opinions… i.e., stuff that people can’t get elsewhere.
7. Band together with other news media globally to form an ad network that utilizes all of your newly collected data.
8. Allow advertisers to target users with the data from step 2 - but also allow them to easily create campaigns that span multiple news outlets. Then everyone wins, and a sales team of 10 suddenly becomes a sales team of 1,000.
9. Reduce the number of ads cluttering your sites, but charge a higher rate based on this, and coupled with the demographic targeting.
10. Create a free classified system.
11. … anything else?