The Front Page

Whenever I get a little sour on the newspaper industry, I watch one of my favorite films, "His Girl Friday," directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Not only is it the greatest newspaper movie ever made, it is absolutely one of the funniest films period, thanks to the screenplay by Charles Lederer which leans heavily on the original play, "The Front Page" by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. For anyone who has worked in a newsroom, a really competitive newsroom, it's a dream come true.

Which, in fact, is what I have been doing for more than three decades now. Working in a competitive newsroom. Both as a reporter and an editor, I've done my best to feed that competition, too. For many of those years, I've gotten up virtually every morning and looked at "my" front page to compare it with my competitor's. Early in my career the bad guy was the Northern Virginia Daily in Strasburg, Virginia; until a few months ago it was The Washington Post. How did "we" do versus "them"?

Every morning when I was a news editor at The Washington Times I looked at my paper and logged on the Internet to look at the front-page images of The Post and the New York Times just to see what each of us thought the most important stories of the day were and how much weight we gave them. Our best days were the ones when we didn't have any page one stories in common with our competitors.

Primarily the competition was over breaking news stories, but having a news feature or analysis topic first on page one was nearly as satisfying. For the number two paper in town it was also good business strategy.

These days, though, I find myself looking at -- and comparing -- websites. How does any website I'm associated with stack up against its competitors? And the competition isn't just newspapers anymore. How much weight does the Drudge Report give a story versus how The Huffington Post plays it, as opposed to the New York Times and Human Events? Now newspapers, aware they're no longer the only "news" source in town, are scrambling to keep as big a piece of that market as they can.

For me the habit of a lifetime has changed as well. I'm not sure the change has sunk in quite yet, especially since a daily print newspaper is still part of my reading diet. But these days the competitive side of me checks the Internet first.

Hope for newspapers at last

What better day than July 4 to celebrate the rich history of America's newspapers -- and the bright promise of the future. Say what? That's right: Let's talk about the exciting, positive days to come for U.S. newspapers.

While everywhere you turn it's doom and gloom in the nation's newsrooms, Peter Vandevanter and his colleagues at MediaNews Group in Denver are pursuing a fascinating possibility -- the so-called individuated newspaper, that is, a paper that is personalized to each and every user. From the Good Morning, Fran (or whatever your name is) on the front page to the story selection -- and the ads -- throughout. And it's a paper delivered to your doorstep or your computer or your printer or your cellphone or your Blackberry or whatever each morning -- and, at least as far as electronic delivery is concerned, updated throughout the day.

Sound impossible? Don't tell that to the attendees at the recent Second Annual Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper. Vandevanter, who has long championed the idea, was the force behind the gathering, but cutting-edge attendees like Eduardo Hauser of DailyMe.com, Dan Pacheco of PrintCasting.com, Jeff Kline of Accrisoft, Gregor Dorsch and Michael Stangl of German software innovators Syntops, Richard Miller of NewspaperDirect and media consultant Bill Ostendorf will tell you that the future is now.

Other supporters include academic revolutionaries like Vin Crosbie of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications and Randy Covington, director of Newsplex, a global newsroom of the future, and a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina.

The only real question in an industry hemorrhaging money is who will have the courage to do it first.

Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, sounded mighty interested. In his opening remarks to the conference, Singleton admitted that no one knows if the individuated newspaper is the absolute new model for newspapers, but he sure wasn't ruling it out. Just think, he said, "The publication will give readers exactly what they want combined with advertising about things they are interested in." Not bad, eh?

Okay, media types, let's get going. The future looks good, but we can't wait forever.

See the video.