• by February 23, 2006

A guy I work with says he doesn't even read the newspaper anymore. Says he canceled his subscription to The New York Times. He's in his 30s, but says he hasn't actually read what he calls a "folding paper" for a long time. He used to love newspapers, but now he gets all his news from the Web. He says it's so much easier and faster. Wakes up and turns on the laptop. Bingo. News at your fingertips. Sounds like an ad, but it's true.

That's only one of the problems newspapers face today. No surprise. Everyone knows ad pages are falling -- where is the data I had on this? Can't find it. Damn. I'm on deadline for this thing, no time to look. But you know what I mean. All the money is going to online media. And the online stuff looks a lot different from newspapers, which are, you know, totally linear.

First section News, second section Metro, third section Business, fourth section Sports. Been that way for as long as I can remember. But it's getting old, don't you think? Everyone thinks so, even the folks who work at newspapers and love them. One guy I know, a top editor at a big newspaper, put it this way: "I'm working for the railroad." Pretty apt metaphor, I thought.

So newspapers have to change if they want to survive, right? How are they going to make it in the brave new world of nonlinear media, where readers choose what they want when they want it, and jump around from one form of media to another at the blink of a screen saver? Hard to answer, but some of them are trying hard and are doing some interesting things.

Fellow named Don Wittekind at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel says newspapers have to develop a whole different mindset. The Sun-Sentinel's graphics director, Wittekind says, "We can't be a newspaper anymore and we have to stop thinking like one. We're a news machine, and the material we collect needs to be valuable for all media." Wittekind's newspaper is doing some cool stuff with interactive graphics related to news stories. It even has its own section of the paper's Web site to showcase the efforts. It's called "The Edge." Check it out at www.sunsentinel.com/broadband/theedge.

Newspapers have to use the Internet better and smarter and be more time-sensitive. How? One way is to arm photographers with video cameras as well as regular ones. That way they can put real time news up on the site as soon as it happens. They can accompany it with sound and video -- basically TV news on a newspaper's Web site. That's the future. There are also a few papers where reporters are writing blogs, which gives them more relevance.

"We're trying to present graphics that readers can interact with, and we're trying to do it for serious journalism as well as fun stuff," says Jonathon Berlin, design and graphics director at San Jose Mercury News.

Wittekind says newspapers have to think more locally than ever. To paraphrase Tip O'Neill: All news is local. Wittekind says the most unique news his paper can offer readers is local stuff they can't find anywhere else. Who cares what a South Florida newspaper thinks about the Middle East? Tell us what's happening in Boca! He says, "That's what we have that CNN will never have."

Citizen journalism might also work. Berlin says the Denver newspapers set up a Web site that's divided into what they call "microzones," where local citizens can post stories about their neighborhoods, their lives, or even just an ad to sell their car. They can rant about practically anything and post photos. Can't get much more local than that.

One more idea, and this one appears to reflect the old cliché about the cart leading the horse. In Paris, there's a newspaper called 20 Minutes. It publishes short articles, and the whole paper is specifically designed and edited to be read in 20 minutes. But here's the nonlinear catch: If you want more information about any of the topics covered in the stories, you're supposed to go to the paper's Web site. If you can read French, check it out at www.20minutes.fr. And by the way, the printed version has the second largest circulation of any newspaper in France. Très cool.