From an opinion piece by Andy Kessler, one-time Wall Street hedge-fund manager and all-around smart guy:
In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I’d be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national.
Don’t just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little “link love” so they don’t stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone.
The value is there: Newspapers aren’t in the printing business, they’re in the ad business.
