So I think we can all agree by now, right, that the newspaper and magazine industries are in a completely free-floating downward spiral right now, with no end apparently in sight? I mean, both industries have been on a slow decline anyway, arguably since the 1960s, when the public first started developing a fascination with live television and video-oriented news; but that was always about a change in medium, not how people got printed news actually delivered to them, which is why there's always still been a place for newspapers and magazines in our modern society. But with the rise of first emails, then the web, then blogs and now RSS feeds, new technology has been encroaching on how we even interact with printed text itself, which is why things seem to be so much worse for these industries right now.

I mean, just look at all the traditional parts of newspapers that are getting sliced out these days: many papers no longer carry stock quotes, most shrink their comics so that they'll all fit on one page, and of course more and more classified advertising is getting shifted to the web with each passing month. And this is bad news for the paper news industry indeed, because just like blogs, the way companies sell papers is by convincing people to make it a daily part of their routine. Most of us, I think, don't get too overly excited about picking up the paper in the morning, but there might be a couple of daily things in there that you still look forward to each morning - reading your horoscope, checking the weather forecast, catching up with your favorite columnist. Each time one of these things gets shifted to the web, then, so that it's suddenly easier and more powerful to look it up online in real time, that's one less reason these daily newspaper readers have to pick up a paper. And if they end up falling out of the daily habit, of course, you have an upward battle ahead of you to get them back into a daily habit.

So, okay, we now live in an age where people don't automatically go to their daily paper to learn every bit of information they need in a day; and unlike the last 40 years, the web is now taking money away from the paper news industry, which means that they finally have to address this. But the question remains - what becomes the nature of this paper document in such an age, that it can still capture a daily audience without overlapping what they're doing on the web already? Because let's face it, there's still a big need for paper-based news publications - mostly because of something I've mentioned here many times, that we still lack that fabled "iPod for books." I mean, sure, we've got lots and lots of text media readers now on the market, some of them quite good; but they're still all fundamentally based on an electronic computer screen, which means you'll never be able to read one for more than 30 or 40 minutes without your eyes going all bug-shit. There's a lot of interesting work going on in Asia right now, in fact, in combating this problem, including half a dozen working prototypes now of "electronic ink" systems (where millions of tiny little two-colored particles in a sheet of plastic are manipulated by computer to flip black or white, forming text and images just like pixels on a computer screen); but until those mature and there are cheap commercial products on the market, there simply still will be a big market left for a paper-based publication that in one form or another delivers us daily information.

The two major newspapers here in Chicago, for example, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, think they have the answer - for several years now both have been printing a tiny 24-page daily tabloid, one still trying to be sold for a nominal fee, the other one now given out for free each day, with the only revenue coming from advertising. There are lots of other cities, too, that have such small tabloid experiments going on; the two here in Chicago, however, both have the word "red" in their titles (The Trib's "Red Eye" and the Sun-Times' "Red Streak"), so for the rest of today I'll simply refer to the entire concept as "red tabloids."

Both of the red tabloids here have made a similar decision as to what they thought needed cut from the main edition of their papers; gone is most of the national, international and local hard news, all of the reprinted Associated Press stories, all of the op-ed and most of the business section. Instead there is an expanded effort to cover sports, entertainment, health and beauty, and of course a certain amount of the daily "comfort" items brought over as well, like the crossword and sodoku puzzles, horoscope and the like.

And this is...eh, well, I suppose the theory itself is okay enough, to chop this former daily paper behemoth into a trim little 24-page tabloid. Because yeah, if you take me for example, I don't need my local paper anymore to reprint all those AP stories, because I subscribe to the AP web feed directly myself and just read them straight from the source. And I don't need weather, and I don't need a giant classified section each day, and I don't need a giant automobile section each day either. Where I highly disagree with current red tabloids, though, is this assumption they all have, that the way to woo young readers is to give them all the crap they're clamoring for on television - endless articles about who Jennifer Lopez is fucking, the latest ways drunk sorority girls are painting their faces before going out, ad fuckin' nauseum. I hate to break it to these editorial staffs, but the people primarily wanting that stuff are avoiding your red tabloids altogether, and sticking to their endless hours of cable television instead.

All of us who pick up red tabloids, as ashamedly as we might, are still primarily lovers of text and stories, or we wouldn't be picking up a print publication in the first place. So how about filling that tabloid with stuff that's best as a long-form text narrative - interviews with interesting artists, political commentary, a literature section and the like. It'd be the print equivalent of NPR reports, which the Tribune actually already does a great job at; every day the "Tempo" section of their main paper is just filled with stories exactly like what I'm describing, so how about reprinting six pages of that in Red Eye instead of six pages of the latest gangster rapper to take a bullet in his ass?

The red tabloids are on the right track generally, I think, in that we've existed in an age for awhile now where such a small tabloid just makes more sense; and like I said, the papers themselves would've made this move themselves a long time ago, except that they didn't have to, not until the web came along and actually started threatening their financial livelihood. But instead of trying to make them as dumb as they possibly can, and having as low an opinion of their audience as possible, how about making them as smart as they can, and giving their audience at least a little credit? Those tabloids would be a lot more popular as a result, I guarantee, instead of people snickering and rolling their eyes whenever they pick one up, like everyone does currently.

Of course, all this ignores a much bigger issue, which is that we're not nearly talking about an either-or situation here; it would be entirely possible, in fact, for a news company to build an entire umbrella of distribution outlets for their content, to create one uber-ad-rate package for their clients, and still hold onto the kinds of giant audiences newspapers enjoyed at their height. And in fact, a lot of news companies have been trying very hard for the last ten years to do just that, although in typical form almost all of them have failed so far at delivering on their full potential. And this just seems like a fairly easy solution to me, and I don't know why a news company hasn't put the following hybrid plan in place yet - so I'll just detail it here instead and see if you don't agree with me or not.

--Daily red-style paper tabloid, although done in the way I recommend instead of the way they're currently being done. Distributed for free.

--Powerful and simple web portal for national and international news - direct links to appropriate external sites, direct feed URLs, reprints at their site, chance to print articles, save them in my account or email them to others. Direct links as well to all the other daily information most of us now get online - weather, stocks, sports ticker, movie listings, etc.

--An expansive local section, broken down per page by neighborhood, each page managed by a paid employee but entirely staffed by citizen journalists. Instead of our usual definition of "local" news, this could almost be considered "hyperlocal" - a dozen reporters in each tiny neighborhood, reporting on what are usually small-town matters like broken stoplights, a recent public arrest, neighborhood school events, etc. To avoid past problems with such projects, formalize the citizen-journalist relationship: make reporters take basic training at your office, submit sample articles before approval, have articles checked by professional journalist for basic issues before running. Each page then effectively becomes a publication of its own just for that neighborhood, while tying it together with the larger daily tabloid and national portal.

--A classified-ad section at the same website, run the same simple and powerful way as a place like Craigslist. Run the code necessary to automatically tie ad listings to a real-time Google map, like what already exists. Free for all except car dealers and real-estate agents, like how Craigslist does it.

After that, then, you simply create a rate plan for your advertisers that reflects this hybrid construction - one simple fee, for example, for X amount of print ads, X amount of banner ads at the portal, X amount of contextually-based ads (like you see at Google) in the local section, plus X amount of classified advertising. And then of course tie all these media together in your audience's mind as much as possible - like print only half an interview in the paper edition, for example, then direct readers to the web for the other half, like how the Onion often does things. If a news company was to really do this, to legitimately execute such a plan in the way it needs to be done, with a new kind of executive structure that can handle all these media and keep all departments in communication, then that company would officially have one gazillion audience members, and advertisers just pissing all over themselves, trying to get space in that multimedia hybrid monster.

So will something like this actually happen soon? Hmm, that's the interesting question, isn't it? To be sure, there are small organizations out there right now, more than happy to peel off one of these services after another from the big news companies - take the aforementioned Craigslist, for example, and how their San Francisco edition has been the cause of some ridiculous drop in classified ads from Bay area newspapers, something like 60 percent in the last three years or so. Then add the Bayosphere, for example, who are building one of these 'hyperlocal' news sites for San Franciscans that I was talking about, right under the noses of the papers out there unwilling to do such a thing themselves. That's the problem with all these big dinosaurs in the first place - they've spent decades saying, "That's not how we want the world to work, so we're going to make sure that that's not how the world works." Anytime a new technology comes along, though, that lets start-ups come in and legitimately challenge the way the world works, these dinosaurs are forced to change with them whether they like it or not. And since these dinosaurs have spent decades in this siege mentality where nothing changes...and since they drove away all the people qualified to implement these changes in the first place (often right into the arms of the start-ups challenging them - take the founder of the Bayosphere, for example, who used to be an award-winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News)...it means these big companies are even more fucked than they were already. And they were pretty fucked already, let's admit it.

So we'll see, I guess, and I guess it goes without saying that I find it all just so fascinating to watch and follow along with these days. And in the meanwhile - seriously, red tabloid staffs, just in case this entry somehow makes it to your attention, could you please try to make your publications at least a tiny bit less moronic than they are now? I and the rest of the Youth of Chicago thank you kindly.

And as long as I have your attention, mainstream media - please, for God's sake, no more articles ever again along the lines of, "Can you believe a college is offering a class on 'The Simpsons?' That's CRAZY!" Well, no, I do believe it, and it isn't that crazy, because there are over a dozen colleges now that offer such a course, and every time another one does, you write another article about how crazy it is that they're doing so. Fuck, I get it, it's crazy! It's all so goddamn crazy!!! It reminds me of what Jessa Crispin has complained about before over at Bookslut.com - how she never wants to read another article again that starts, "Comic books - they're not just for kids anymore!" Hey, I got news for you - they haven't been just for kids since 1985. And I know that because you fucking told me yourselves way back in 1985 when it first happened, so I don't need you twenty years later still telling me! I get it! It's crazy, man, crazy!!!