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After 50 newspaper company CEOs met behind closed doors at the American Press Institute on Thursday for their “Crisis Summit,” I was tempted to comment, but wanted to wait to see what would come out of the meeting. Would some participants write what transpired that day? The API staff did publish this summary, but it’s pretty thin on detail. There was this at the end, under the heading “Next”:

“Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration. Some spoke of joint investment in research and development of both technologies and products, others of more formal means of sharing information.”

Well, I wasn’t the only person taken aback by that statement. On his News After Newspapers blog, Martin Langeveld, who recently retired after a long career in newspaper publishing, wrote what I too was thinking in “Busted Flat In Reston“:

“Six months? What are they thinking? They’ve laid off more than 10,000 people in the last six months — what will be left six months from now? They need to launch a Manhattan project to blow up their industry and start over. Now, not six months from now.”

Langeveld is right. The industry’s leaders keep putting off drastic change and hoping that incremental change will do the job. It won’t reset the trajectory to upward and it hasn’t so far.

The API staff reports that turnaround specialist James Shein, who addressed the 50 CEOs and who had researched the basic financials of the public companies represented at the summit, “concluded that as a whole the industry is at or approaching full-blown crisis stage, though individual companies are in various phases on the continuum. And he is pessimistic about their ability to halt their fall without outside help.”

I’m still eager to hear from some of the API summit’s participants (full list was published by E&P); perhaps there’s more to come out of Thursday’s meeting that’s not so discouraging. But from what we know so far, this still looks like an industry in denial about how much it must change, with many leaders whose heads are still high on Shein’s crisis curve (below) while their enterprises are much further down.

So, 50 newspaper CEOs, is there more to the story of what went on behind those closed doors? Because from outside, it’s not looking promising that you’re going to lead a reversal to the slide down that nasty-looking graph. If all that was accomplished at the Crisis Summit was to get everyone to accept that the problem really is big and agree to tackle the how in 6 months, that’s clearly not enough.

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I liked media consultant Alan Mutter’s latest blog item, “It’s time to rip the lid off,” in which he urges newspapers to get serious about doing hard-hitting journalism in order to save themselves.

His advice complements my thoughts as expressed in my most recent Editor & Publisher Online column.

Publishers, now operating with severely lessened resources, need to stop focusing on the less important stuff and put everything they’ve (still) got into producing quality journalism, Mutter says.

“All but the most aggressively down-sized paper can generate excitement on a day-to-day basis by practicing the sort of muscular, crusading journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted by kicking over rocks, exposing social injustice and holding public officials and corporate leaders to account.”

It’s becoming pretty clear: Newspapers cannot continue to cut staff and cut back while continuing to try to serve everyone and try to attract new younger readers. Focus the print effort on print loyalists who are older and want serious journalism. Bring younger people to the newspaper brand by developing and improving digital offerings (web, mobile).

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A reader of my latest Editor & Publisher Online column (about intelligently redesigning print editions to please older print loyalists and not go after younger people) asked:

“As newspaper companies redefine their strategies, will home delivery be a thing of the past? Will it be a premium service or only available through online downloads? Can newspapers make up ‘insert’ revenues without home delivery?”

Given enough time, I do think that home delivery of the printed daily newspaper will become more of a luxury item than it’s been historically, with a higher fee charged than for alternative digital forms of the newspaper (full digital replica editions for reading on a PC or other large-screen device, and appropriately formatted digital editions for smaller devices like Amazon’s Kindle).

That is, as the number of print subscribers to daily newspapers dwindles over the coming years, it will cost more per subscriber to cover delivery expenses. Such price increases will convince even more of remaining print subscribers to cancel and switch to paid digital versions, or simply stop paying and rely on free newspaper websites, e-mail delivery, RSS feeds, and/or mobile delivery. (The latter may be free, as is generally the case now, of perhaps in the future a charged service if combined with personalization features.)

For national papers, I expect to see more of them go the way of the Christian Science Monitor, which next year will cease its print edition except for a single weekend edition — becoming foremost a digital news publisher with a secondary and limited print product. Don’t expect to see USA Today disappear from airport newsstands or no longer appear outside your hotel room in the morning anytime soon, though.

As for ad inserts, that’s still a huge business for local newspapers which will be around for a while longer. (Though I do think that if you look out far enough, those advertisers will begin to shift more of their inserts money to digital.) So we’ll likely see publishers continue to distribute inserts to non-subscribers of the printed newspaper along with a teaser edition delivered to homes once a week.

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Sticking to the topic of “micro-personal news” (see previous blog item), John Paul Titlow wrote me the following note which responds to my September Editor & Publisher Online column, “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” He makes some good points worth sharing, so with his permission here it is:

“I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. I am a 25 year-old news junkie and Web content delivery manager for a weekly newspaper company in Philadelphia. Personally, I am able to consume most of my ‘news’ from the home screen of my iPhone.

“That includes the NYTimes and NPR apps for iPhone, a Digg app to see what the Digg community is pushing, CNN to tune into what’s considered ‘news’ by one of the big cable players, and Google Reader (any number of Web design & tech blogs, newspaper industry sites, Reuters, about 2 dozen other sites I read).

“But what I find myself tapping just as often as Google Reader or NYTimes are Twitter and Facebook. You’re right; it’s addictive. In a few seconds, I can see what friends are tweeting or posting as their ’status’ on Facebook. It’s even called a ‘News Feed’ on Facebook.

“Before reading your column, however, I hadn’t thought of it that way — these status posts and tweets are just as much news to me as headlines about the Iraq war or tech news.

“Newspaper companies will have to find a way to leverage this. You correctly point out that the ‘open’ nature of (most) social networks and their API’s should help enable this. I would also add that recent moves towards a universal log-in (OpenID, etc.) should also make this vision of ‘news’ closer to a reality.

“Hopefully publishers will catch on before it’s too late.”

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