Digital Deliverance’s Crosbie says that newspapers have just begun to scratch the surface of the customization tools available to them. “I’m a Formula One and soccer fan, but I can’t get that stuff in the New York Times, which I subscribe to,” Crosbie says. “But I know they have the stories, because I used to be the Reuters executive who sold them the soccer and racing wire.”

Doom, Gloom Haunt Nation’s Newsrooms
The newspaper industry’s failures are by no means unique. They are simply a tangible example of an old industry that did not adapt to a disruptive technology. While it’s easy to blame newspaper executives for their paralysis during the late 1990s and the early part of this century, UNC’s Meyer says, that explanation unfairly absolves the many shareholders and investors who were placing short-term demands on them to perform and who didn’t encourage long-term investments in technology.

Others believe newspapers will die simply because they are too stuck-up to change their business models, fearing they’ll lose their journalistic souls in the process—a theory disputed by many in the industry. “There’s this notion that older print guys are dinosaurs just slowly slinking away,” says the Times’ Thurm. “It really hasn’t been that way at all.”

And he has a point. NYTimes.com attracts hundreds of millions of page views per month from all over the world—and that doesn’t happen without its employees (some of whom used to work only in print) stepping up and producing excellent work. No matter how much a business has been disrupted by a new technology, customers always respond to quality.

But that’s the Times.

Most analysts believe casualties among big city daily newspapers will become more numerous in the near future. But that doesn’t mean they will go down easily.

Sitting in his office at the Boston Herald, John Strahinich, the paper’s former Sunday editor (recently promoted to senior executive city editor/Enterprise), looks out a grimy window at Boston’s financial district in the distance, towering above the nearby expressway. A newspaper veteran, he’s in his second stint at the Herald. He was in Boston the first time the Herald almost died (when Murdoch bought it from Hearst). When asked if he’s worried about his paper’s future, he considers the question for a moment before replying, “We’re always living on the edge. That’s nothing new.”

And every Sunday, he continues to put out the best paper he can.

Associate Staff Writer C.G. Lynch can be reached at clynch@cio.com.