The Revenue's Just Not There

OK, the head of USA Today said it, now Gary Pruitt of McClatchy said it:

"McClatchy will likely end up with online revenue around a couple hundred million dollars this year. But it will not equal print revenue in the foreseeable future."

As an anonymous poster on Gannett Blog noted today:

"News gathering is too expensive to be sustained in the low-rent world of the Internet. We can't produce a page of news as cheaply as a competing site fills its screen with user-generated content -- or stolen digests of what the newspaper world produced at great expense."

Fine. Can we stop having to believe now that the online fairy is going to make everything OK again at some unknown point down the road? Can we start really talking about how to save ourselves and what we do and believe in, for those of us who believe in it, and stop saying it's all about the conversation and trying to match the economic model of bloggers? More niche products, fewer but smarter pages (whether just for now or forever), higher cost to consumers, pay walls like Little Rock's, whether beneath the bombast of Lee Abrams' notes are ideas that could save the sort of journalism we need to do while producing the sort of products readers may want more than we do? Every idea gores someone's ox. Can we do this without running for cover every time someone says, "You're just trying to save your stupid 19th-century buggy whip business"?

We've believed for a decade that at some point in the future, we'd strike online gold and clean up there like we cleaned up in print. It's not going to happen. That doesn't mean, forget online. It means we need a strategy based on what we are, and not based on a complete metamorphosis into something else that in any event hasn't happened in the last decade anyway. In the end, our core competency is that we publish newspapers. Let the people who want to be something else be something else.