J-prof Philip Meyer, author of the 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper, offers this prescription for the future newspaper: "A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product."

From the October-November issue of American Journalism Review:

The endgame for newspapers is in sight. How their owners and managers choose to apply their dwindling resources will make all the difference in the nature of the ultimate product, its service to democracy and, of course, its survival.

In an article in the December 1995 issue of AJR called "Learning to Love Lower Profits" I predicted the financial turbulence that we are seeing today. The piece urged stakeholders in newspaper companies to accept the inevitability of lower returns and to apply their resources to maintaining their community influence.

A decade later, I marshaled the evidence for that strategy in a book titled "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age." The argument was quantitative and complex. Judging by the Google alerts the book's title has accumulated since then, readers took away the wrong message.

Many focused on the book's prediction the last American newspaper subscriber would die in April 2043.

I'll pick up Meyer again where he talks about the Internet (the effect of which he now feels he underestimated in The Vanishing Newspaper) and goes into the growing trend of specialization, which has actually been developing for a while.

Postwar newspapers met the specialization challenge fairly well for a while. A metropolitan newspaper became a mosaic of narrowly targeted content items. Few read the entire paper, but many read the parts that appealed to their specialized interests. I still remember a fellow Navy trainee in 1953, when the Korean War was on. He religiously bought the newspaper every day. Instead of looking for the war news, he worked the crossword puzzle and threw the rest of the paper away. "Crossword puzzles," he said. "That's all newspapers are good for." Newspaper marketing since then has stressed ways to optimize the selection of pieces for that mosaic of such highly specific interests.

Sending everything to everybody was a response to the Industrial Revolution, which rewarded economies of scale. The model became less and less efficient as printing technology improved and made more specialized publications feasible. At the same time, retailing became more specialized, with boutiques squeezing out the big department stores. Specialized advertisers discovered that they could get mailing lists to target their most likely customers with tailored appeals and high-quality printing. Newspapers matched their printing quality with slick-paper inserts, but that did not solve the targeting problem.

Robert Picard, a media economist who looks at newspapers from an international perspective, believes that they try to do too much. He expressed this view in June at the Carnegie-Knight Task Force conference on the Future of Journalism at Harvard University. Newspapers "keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner," he said. "This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."

If they should peel back to some core function, newspapers would still have to worry about the Internet and its unbeatable capacity for narrowcasting. The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.

Now, what can newspapers do better than anyone else?

I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.

By news, I don't mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts. The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don't need new information so much as help in processing what's already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.

The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating.

Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against "persuasive communication," the euphemism for advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload. Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses.

Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence. To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet.

The best publishers have always known that trust has economic value. In "The Vanishing Newspaper," I reported that advertising rates increased by $3.25 per Standard Advertising Unit (SAU) for each one percentage point increase in the persons who said they believed what they read in the paper. And papers with higher trust were more successful in resisting the long-term decline in household penetration. Both of these results were based on a limited sample, newspapers in communities tracked by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Since most of them were former Knight Ridder papers, the overall quality was pretty high. A more representative sample would have higher variance in quality and could show a stronger effect.

Won't democracy be endangered if the newspaper audience shrinks down to this hard core? Not at all. As far back as 1940, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that voters get their information from one another as much as from direct consumption of the media. He called this the "two-step flow" from opinion leaders to the general public. The Internet is enhancing that two-step flow, converting it to a many-step flow. The problem is not distributing the information. The problem is maintaining a strong and trusted agency to originate it. Newspapers have that position of trust in the minds of the public.