There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I’m excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity.

However, the tech is secondary, not nearly as important as repairing some current issues with trust and curation.

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The FTC is planning public hearings aimed at figuring out how to prop up dying newspapers. On the agenda: tax breaks for news organizations, changing copyright law, and “greater public funding of public affairs news.” This is very, very bad.

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Is Google a newspaper killer? Not by a long shot, says Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be.

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The decline of newspapers is a tragedy for democracy. How can it be stopped?

Imagine yourself the proprietor of a venerable and profitable business whose success is based on the quality of your distinctive product, the brand loyalty of your customers, and the fair price they are willing to pay for the value you provide.

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In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans. The New York Times (NYT) and the Guardian, to name two, reportedly have visions of tote bags, mugs, and events in their heads. And I think that’s a fine idea. No salvation. But a fine idea.

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Digital content has been available for years, but the right vehicle to consume the content has been lacking. We still cut down trees and hand deliver newspapers to people’s homes. That worked in 1900, but 2009? Are you kidding me? The iTouch Tablet is about to change society as we know it.

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How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?

Or to put the question another way: The New York Times (NYT) keeps talking about how expensive its Baghdad bureau is and what a fix we’d be in without it. Well, the essential truth in Iran is that no one has a Tehran bureau (or if they do, it has been rendered useless by government diktat).

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When newspaper executives met in Chicago last week to discuss new business models for the industry, they expected to hear from Steve Brill about his well-publicized venture to charge for online content. But the executives were surprised by a last-minute addition to their agenda: Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor and entrepreneur widely known as the Newsosaur.

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Is all this talk about getting consumers to pay for the news they read online really a front for something else?

Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery say their new company, Journalism Online, is first and foremost about giving newspapers an easy way to start charging for subscriptions or soliciting micropayments for individual pieces of content.

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The government’s stimulus plan won’t work as planned if we don’t get consumers spending again. But in the nearly $800 billion package, there is one thing missing that would surely help accomplish this: advertising. To get people spending again, and the economy moving, the government needs to provide help for businesses in America to advertise their products and services.

Let me disclose that I do have a horse in this race: I’m an investor in advertising-supported businesses. I’ve spent a large percentage of my working career in businesses that sell advertising–including broadcast and cable TV, radio, magazines, Internet, newspapers and direct marketing. I’ve also led businesses that have used these media to advertise products and services.

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There have been a series of ridiculous articles lately claiming that, with the collapse of some newspapers recently, somehow investigative reporting and local coverage won’t work, meaning an era of corruption and the collapse of democracy. Fortunately, some are demonstrating the fallacies underlying these proclamations of doom.

Jay Rosen has been running an interesting experiment trying to find out just how many truly local stories an average newspaper includes in its paper, between all the national wire service stories. A look through a recent Seattle Times issue showed a grand total of seven locally produced stories. And a look at an issue of the Chicago Tribune found a total of eight locally produced stories. We’re not talking about huge numbers here.

And, in fact, the finding of eight stories in the Trib comes from Geoff Dougherty, a guy who created quite a stir in newspaper circles when he claimed he could provide the equivalent (or better) local coverage of the Chicago Tribune for just $2 million a year, and provided the spreadsheet to back it up. And he’s not just talking in theory. He’s doing it. Today. For much less than the Tribune (which is bankrupt).

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Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14-year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the Internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open Internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: Sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

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Bear with me as we recap last week’s 100-yard dash of media industry financial woe before breasting the tape of eternal doom. First comes ITV with its 40 percent profit decline, 600 redundancies and regional closures, then Channel Five making one in four people redundant–saving almost as much money as Channel 4 will gain from Kevin Lygo halving his £1m pay package. In print, things are no less unappealing. The ABCs for national newspapers recorded almost universal sales decline, with no sector growing and the Daily Sport (yes, it is still going) withdrawing from the audit altogether. In magazines, Arena closed, and even on the internet Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, has folded his blogs together, proclaiming that “micropublishing is dead.” Wherever you look, it is clear that the media industry is in dire need of quantitative tightening.

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How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here’s the story I often tell when that question comes up.

The year was 2005, and I had recently joined the venerable Dow Jones from Yahoo (YHOO), where I had led the team that helped build the financial portal. My job at Dow Jones was head of all consumer online sites, including WSJ.com, Barrons.com and Marketwatch.com. One day I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm about, of all things, the width of the Wall Street Journal. After I made a suggestion that was somewhere between novel and off the wall, the then-publisher leaned on the table, looked at me and said: “How old are you, young man?” The suggestion was clear: If you’re under 40, you can’t possibly understand the newspaper business. I still wish my response, though impolitic, had been: “How old is your thinking?”

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The news that Google (GOOG) is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business!

Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven’t signaled their intentions.

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