In recent weeks I’ve had a seriously hard time convincing paywall advocates of the larger implications of such a move. Why retreat into the old print model? Find new digital business models to replace the flagging print revenue.

To lock content behind paywalls or, worse, keep it offline altogether, merely casts a newspaper’s destiny into the hands of the remaining few who insist on getting their news delivered on dead trees at the end of their driveway. Unfortunately, they won’t be with us much longer. And I doubt any of them would be willing to pay the full cost of ink, paper, fuel and delivery needed to distribute their product of choice.

Now comes The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, at the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, to better articulate the critical point that has eluded me. You can read The Guardian’s piece about the speech here.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

And maybe my favorite quote:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

Well said.

I’m going to sum this up:

Newspapers enjoy a monopoly brought on by the high cost of entry in the form of printing presses and legions of delivery boys.

Internet emerges.

Newspapers shovel their content online without regard to ways to exploit the emerging medium. They view it as another channel/platform for publishing the same content that they’ve already paid to produce. Online advertising is gravy atop their meat and potatoes print revenue.

Internet explodes with ubiquitous broadband access. It’s no longer just a publishing platform. And it’s more than a broadcast channel. Internet upends business models and revolutionizes communication. Newspapers are slow to understand the new skill sets and innovative thinking required to harness it.

Economy tanks, accelerating an already apparent decline in print circulation and market penetration. Old-school advertisers who would otherwise stick with print go out of business. Others flee a medium that is hemorrhaging readers no longer interested in reading yesterday’s news left on their driveways.

Desperate for revenue, newspapers slap paywalls on their online content. The problem is the content they’re publishing is commoditized. You can’t convince readers to pay for something you thought so little of before that you gave it away. High-value content borne out of authoritative analysis, shoe-leather reporting and critical thinking was thrown overboard with cost-cutting moves.

What’s needed:

• Do what you do best and link to the rest, as Jeff Jarvis says.
• Don’t turn your back on the Internet. Go all in.
• Invest heavily in in-house innovation labs. Create new revenue channels and erect paywalls around ONLY those things you did not previously give away.
• Extend the technology by embracing open-source thinking.
• Fix your Web sites. They’re unusable. And while you’re at it, answer the phones and make it abundantly easy for the public to interact with you and to give you their money.
• Hire content producers and outsource or automate sales efforts. Ad buyers sometimes understand the technology better than advertising staff.
• Divert all remaining resources to producing truly unique content and watchdog reporting.
• Continue your best efforts to remain impartial and unbiased, but allow point of view by engaging your audience to participate in the coverage.
• Provide community leadership. Play a role in your readers’ lives. Rebuild any lost trust. Become transparent in everything you do.
• Quit trying to be the mainstream media that is all things to all people. Pick your audience slice and target them to the exclusion of all others.

One of my biggest problems with online news sites is the lack of innovation in distributing news and information.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some news organizations that are investing heavily in finding news ways users consume news and how best to meet those needs. Notably, the Washington Post does a nice job discussing their innovations in news.

And News Innovation is a great site for learning about cutting edge business models for news.

And yet, newspaper Web sites are all basically the same. They involve little more than a digital form of their print publications. The best ones sprinkle in some video and audio, or let readers leave comments and fight among themselves. These efforts boil down to using new tools to tell the same story.

And herein lies the problem.

As long as news organizations treat stories no differently than how they’re treated in print, albeit with a few more bells and whistles, then it’s easy for search engines to index their content and send the occasional drive-by reader to the news site to scan a few lines of text.

Jason Fry has written a good piece on solving the problem of drive-by traffic created by search engines.

Jason talks about the context of the reader. The reader sent to the site via a search engine has a very different set of expectations and needs than the reader sent there by way of a recommendation from a Facebook friend.

Just as news sites are ignoring the context of the reader, I believe they’re paying short shrift to the context of the story.

Every story printed in a newspaper or published digitally online is merely a point on a much longer timeline. What came before and what is to come next may be far more important than the single instance. If one adds related content, the two-dimensional timeline become three dimensional.

I had been thinking about this for months when Google announced a project with The New York Times and Washington Post called Living Stories.

It’s a step in the right direction. But Google is attempting to use technology to solve my problem with brute force. Throw enough processing horsepower at the challenge of finding related stories over time and organizing them chronologically. I’m not entirely convinced the problem can be solved by computers. As good as Google is, they’ve yet to start predicting future developments in a story.

So here is my seven-step program for how Google and the newspaper industry can help each other:

Newspapers:

1. Acknowledge that Google drives considerable online traffic to you and provides a valuable service helping readers find content on your Web sites that are by and large impossible to navigate.
2. Understand that you are implicitly agreeing to let Google index your content by way of your Web sites’ robots.txt file and that Google is not doing anything you haven’t given it permission to do. You can opt-out of the Google search engine by changing a couple lines of text in your robots.txt file.
3. Work with Google to enhance the search engine’s ability to index your stories and understand what those stories are about. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. Understand what they are trying to do.

Google:

1. Acknowledge that the newspaper headlines, thumbnails and snippets of information you display to Google users are often all a news consumer needs and that some if not most Google users never click through to full stories on news sites.
2. Recognize in ranking search results which news organization broke the story and which sources are investing feet on the ground in covering the story. Do not drive traffic to competing news sites that are merely republishing wire service versions of the local story.
3. Give newspapers a cut of any revenue associated with their content that you display on your search engine results. Yes, newspapers have given your robots permission to spider their sites. No, they have not given you permission to steal their content. This shouldn’t be hard. Google News has generated a list of “news” sites. You know who they are and where to send the check.
4. Prove your intentions by developing the Living Stories technology and then giving news organizations the api to incorporate that artificial intelligence exclusively into their Web sites and story presentations. Do not make Living Stories a feature of Google.com and do not open-source it to any Web site that wants to build a business on the backs of news organizations. Rather drive the traffic back to the originating news sites to see stories in their fuller context.

Let newspapers refine the presentation to suit their needs. But more importantly, let newspaper editors and reporters do what Google’s massive data centers cannot: apply years of journalistic experience and judgement to guide readers on which stories are most important and where those story lines are headed.