Toronto Star business writer David Olive offers a prescription for what ails newspapers:

From his blog at TheStar.com: (posted Oct. 19)

I'll just excerpt his third point, which is what he sees as the competitive advantage of newspapers:

The CanWest big-city papers have been around, on average, for 122 years. CanWest's Montreal Gazette dates from 1778. In every city in N.A., the oldest medium, most deeply knowledgeable about the community, and with a reputation for that knowledge, is the local daily newspaper. The strongest media brand name in any city is that of its dominant newspaper.

A few years back, the folks at Procter & Gamble decided that the American consumer needed a new type of dust mop. Instead of dipping your mop repeatedly in a pail of soapy water, this new mop would have the cleaning agent embedded in the slab of foam at the business end of the mop. P&G had to come up with a cleaning agent that wouldn't drip or evaporate in transit to the stores. The compound had to be strong enough to clean your floor but not so strong that it left scratches on it. P&G had to come up with winsome name name for this thing. It had to test-market what seemed a quite unnecessary invention. And to decide how to price it. And design it, everything from the packaging to the fit of the handle in your hand. They then had to convince millions of North Americans that they must have this product. 

When I first heard of the Swiffer mop I thought it was idiotic, unable to imagine sensible people shelling out a premium price for a dust mop. But I also thought, this is Procter & Gamble, one of the greatest marketers in history. An enterprise that's been around since 1837, and has such long-established relationships with Wal-Mart, Loblaws and every other national retailer that, basically, P&G is able to force products onto the market on the strength of its reputation and marketing prowess. The local grocer is thinking, I've made a fortune over the years on sales of Tide, Pampers and Crest toothpaste, I'll certainly give this new P&G product a try. And you know the rest. Swiffer - I still think it's a ridiculous concept - generates sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars for Procter & Gamble.

In my business, we also have been around a long time, for at least a century in the case of most papers. Like P&G, we have immense resources, more than our non-newspaper media rivals. Unlike P&G and its Swiffer, we don't have to explain what news is, and why it's valuable to our existing and potential customers. All my colleagues and I have to do is be better journalists than our rivals, just as P&G has to stay a few steps ahead of Colgate and Unilever. We need simply to go back to what we once did so well - being the first to tell you about Marilyn Bell's extraordinary feat in swimming the width of Lake Ontario, and crusading for an end to child poverty and gang violence in our community. And expressing a strong point of view about the things we believe will make our readers healthier and more prosperous - whether it's a new industrial policy to revive our Southern Ontario economy, or championing more research dollars for breast cancer. We have to surprise and entertain. We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right.

It's really quite simple. We need to be essential.

It may be quite simple, but I would suggest he might find that to be astoundingly difficult in today's media climate.