Ted, yes, I completely agree that newspapers should do as much as possible to drive traffic online, as the audience won’t just arrive there by itself. Some papers are excellent at this, others less so.

As for advertising… well, I’ve heard and spoken to several different people within the industry whose jobs are to figure out this kind of thing and they’ve all said they think advertising won’t quite cover it. In which case, you’ve got to find alternative revnue sources that aren’t charging for content.

I don’t know what other revnue streams will be (probably non-news related activity like the Guardian’s Soulmates, I suppose. But they’ve got to get creative, for sure.

Jambo, I think you’re right as well in a lot of respects. For all I say about newspapers needing to adapt to the web (which they still do. And fast) there will be a core audience that still buys the ink version, and if you can get a good balance you should be ok. But no matter how successful or profitable the paper, they need to get their online strategies sorted quickly.

Oddly, and this is based on educated guesswork rather than any real empirical evidence, I think once we’ve gone through the worst of it and several papers have shut (and, let’s face it, several papers won’t survive), you may get a few tentative smaller papers that start up to fill the gap. But that’s probably unlikely for several more years, if not longer.

I don’t think newspaper sales will increase as people become better educated though – the really smart ones will have RSS feeds and get all their info before the papers have even hit the presses.

I think the industry is thundering toward that core at the moment. There will always be a demand for reading news in paper form. I know I am not alone in finding reading online awkward and unsatisfying.

I think people are just scared that all the readers will one day vanish, but they won’t!

On a wider note perhaps one day newspaper sales will increase as people become better educated and more cerebral in general.

This isn’t an original suggestion – I read it elsewhere in the blogosphere – but I think it’s a good one: use print to drive traffic to your web site. Print a relatively cheap broadsheet with some good teaser content, and include in every issue detailed instructions on how to access additional content on the web. Each article should end with a URL that leads to more detail on the story. Get people into the *habit* of visiting your site.

As for advertising not being enough to pay the bills, don’t be too sure of that. Advertising is a valuable means for communicating with local customers. You probably aren’t going to make money on classifieds, but you can still sell commercial ads, both in your broadsheet and on your web site. You can also do the same thing with ads that you do with articles – put a URL in the ad that has further information about the advertiser – information the reader will want if they are interested in the services that advertiser offers.

I haven’t heard of anyone successfully charging people for online access to the news, so if you can’t make it on advertising I don’t know how else you’ll do it.

But as one commenter here mentioned, if you don’t have to have all the infrastructure of a complete newsroom, you can probably save a lot of money. Unfortunately you’re probably doing it at the expense of non-content-producing jobs, but if you succeed at least you still have a local news portal.

Along those lines – we think that there will be an influx of FORMER major media journalists taking up a spot in the neighborhoods. Since October my wife and I have been getting calls from people working at large media outlets who want to know what it’s like being the neighborhood news source. Some are looking for a soft landing in their own homes. They’ll transition from big office to home office.

BTW – my wife likes your term – ultralocal. Hyperlocal comes off a little too Hitchiker’s Guide.

It kind of comes back to our conversation a few months ago – you just need a laptop, a dongle, a phone and a notebook to be a newspaper reporter. Physical space isn’t necessarily relevant. Maybe that’d be better than having an office and doesn’t compromise the quality too much… It’s an idea, if nothing else.

Craigh, yep, I agree. The toughest part of moving a publication online would be to make money from it. Advertising alone won’t cover the costs, so if a paper wanted to do this, it’d need to get a bit mroe creative.

Many of these people spend a fortune on drawing people to their affiliate sites as they can’t create unique content.

Look to marry the two together, as well as locally driven advertising, and there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.