• PBS/Media Shift, Friday, November 21, 2008 9:45 AM

Here's another out-of-the-box idea for struggling newspapers. They should act as local ad agencies, helping local businesses buy key words for Google AdWords and place Facebook ads. Stephen Gray, former managing publisher of The Christian Science Monitor and now a director of the American Press Institute, thinks it would work.

Gray says a key problem is that most newspapers cede all local search to Google or Yahoo, which tend to do it badly. Audiences have split in a million directions. By definition, regional newspapers are in a local market with the job of helping local businesses succeed.

If that means that "[newspapers] become the leading local Internet ad agency placing ads on Google and Facebook for local businesses, so what?" he asks. Providing such a service may be exactly what it takes for papers to succeed, "and ad agencies have been making a living off doing that for some time."

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