Jarvis: Start the unbundling already

Newspapers should show some guts and stop producing one-size-fits-all products, Jeff Jarvis says. I'll try to paraphrase his recommendations:

• Kill printed stock listings and TV listings, offering them online if at all.
• Reduce national/global business coverage to digests.
• Rely on wires for personal finance information.
• Trim the team of local critics for movies, TV and music.
• Highlight entertainment/event listings in the paper as pointers to a comprehensive, searchable database online.
• Look hard at paying local sports columnists vs. running the best syndicated ones. Maybe all the staff scribes aren't a necessity.
• Stop sending local writers to nationally covered sports events.
• Age off syndicated features such as bridge and advice columns.
• Evaluate remote political coverage (e.g. Washington bureaus) vs. the value of covering local politics with local staff.
• Reconsider the value of the editorial board and op-ed page at a time when opinions are plentiful. Again, maybe all the staff scribes aren't a necessity.
• Devote the economies found in these recommendations to intensely local news and information, with participation from the community.

Coming from a long newspaper background, in recent years I've been nervous about the idea of tearing apart the newspaper convenience bundle. What if we strip newspapers down to the primary value proposition -- local news -- and all we prove is too few people really want that?

That notion does not scare me as much anymore, because it's clear now I was limiting my reasoning to "local news" told the way newspapers tell it: an overload of sterile, institutional, incremental, politically focused, supposedly bias-suppressed coverage that I believe most people find boring and irrelevant. It's the news we think they need told the way we know how vs. the information they want offered the way they want to engage with it.

Meanwhile, too many local bloggers and vertical sites to mention here show signs of success building communities around interests and passions that happen to have local threads sewn through them. Newspapers don't have to have "me-too" copies of every one of these vertical concepts, but we should learn from them how to grow small, tight-knit virtual communities.

The Internet should allow us to offer a bunch of different value propositions in our local community without forcing them into the one-size-fits-all bundle. And if we liberate ourselves from this idea that we're monolithic news sources for our local communities, then dropping some of the nonexclusive bundled features should allow more focus on the things we can do better locally.

Can we make money at that? Yes. Through advertising? Yes. But it won't be the same kind of adjacency model as print -- we don't have to have our own movie critics, for example, to create an adjacency for theater ads. For what it's worth, a new eyetracking study (PDF press release, sorry) commissioned by behavioral targeter Tacoda Systems indicates that contextual adjacency isn't as effective as targeting ads by -- guess what? -- behavior.

I still maintain that we don't even have to limit ourselves to one-size-fits-all in the printed newspaper, either. If the printed and delivered paper becomes a summary and guide to all that we offer online, why does it have to be the same collection of summaries and guides for every subscriber on my block?

Yes, I know press configurations, packaging and distribution equipment all have limitations, but I'm not talking about The Daily Me. I believe it's possible to offer some degree of customization in print, and The Daily Me online.

I'll add one more recommendation to Jarvis' list, one that will make my SND friends disown me for sure:

• Reconsider investments in "high design."

All but the most isolated, resistant newspapers have, at this point in our history, competent and readable designs. I'm all for that. Many have wonderfully talented artists, illustrators and designers to turn feature packages into "posters" and Page 1 skyboxes into attention-getting teasers. That's where I think we overinvest.

Take Alan Jacobson's advice, and start doing the kind of design that matters to readers. To me, a big part of that is using all the channels to best advantage. Point print readers to the Web for stuff that is better there. Meanwhile, recognize that in many situations the paper is still more portable, more convenient and less expensive than accessing news online.