Giving It Away for Free

It's counter-intuitive, but here's some more free insight. My hope is whoever takes it will someday recognize the source and perhaps pay it backward.

Local newspaper wants to survive? Get a TriCaster; in fact, get a bunch of them. Sign deals with every high school to produce their home football games. Hire your own sports guys to crew the games, which insures they are on the ground to write the stories. Run the stats like regular so they go into your paper's on-line and into the broadcast.

Next up, take that portable system into the local town meetings. You become the source of the raw coverage, and the later value-added interpretation and analysis.

The paper evolves from being a singular medium of news into a portal for local knowledge. Want to watch Timmy's game, LocalPaper.com. Want to read the sports column about Timmy? LocalPaper.com. Want the immediate stats and scores? LocalPaper.com.

This mash-up unites the old local radio station's coverage with the TV station's visual presentation into a real-time entity that can regain some of the local relevance.

Current staff can't make it -- go get yourself a bunch of predators -- producer-editors who can shoot the story, package it, appear on-camera and write the copy. Yeah, backpack journalists by any other name, but the predator mode is a mindset.

Oh, that big-old continuous sheet press in the back? Sell it off for scrap and replace it with a ton of servers and a big pipe T1 hose. You'll only need a short run press for the weekend feature edition of the content the staff vacuumed up.