What can newspapers do?

"What then can newspapers do? Like other businesses in trouble, they must focus on their core competency, which usually is local information. Second, they must actively plan for a paperless future. Such transitions are gradual; but they are also inexorable. Managing the transition will not be easy. Online and print newspapers depend on each other symbiotically. Print needs online for the future. Online needs print for the present, to subsidise it financially and intellectually. Third, they must customise. The traditional newspaper provides averaged-out content to a multiplicity of readers. What it needs to do is to serve the increasingly differentiated readers’ particular mix of interests..."

ELI NOAM, Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia University
(from The Financial Times)