People keep talking about newspapers

from a comment at Digital Nirvana

"Newspapers are no more immune to the vagaries of the Bush recession than any other business. As much as digital goobers would wish otherwise, newspapers will be putting ink on paper for as long as anyone reading this will continue breathing in and out. Nobody does local news better. When someone creates that model, then I’ll be concerned about the future of newspapers. Until then, I’ll continue reader multiple daily newspapers every day and the same 5 or 6 weeklies I’ve read for years."

Here's the thread at PrintCeo and some links to the discussion at Harvard.

My take is that this one is going to be Oce vs Screen and maybe Kodak when they get Stream out the door. The thing is that Kodak has such deep penetration with their Newspaper versioning workflow, maybe they should concentrate a little more on that and a little less on digital where they have a steep hill to climb. Is HP a player in this? I don't have a clue.

We can get in the game by getting our commercial customers' sales force to network with local newspaper sales force. They can first sell newspaper ads + web ads to local business. Then they could evolve to selling print collateral - brochures, etc. Then they could evolve to selling other marketing materials.

Newspapers are already used to designing ads for local customers. Designing a brochure is a simple add on. For the right customer, we can do the whole Purl thing and personalized marketing at ultra local levels for local businesses that really need it.