The New News Channel

For a while, it seemed as if the battered newspaper industry might be cast in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. With readers and revenue fleeing the ink-on-paper business, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Denver-based Rocky Mountain News shutting down, and other papers slashing the size and frequency of their publications, newspapers have been chanting a desperate mantra: Somewhere over the horizon someone surely will come to our rescue... somehow... some day. ¶ That day may be at hand. But the potential savior comes from an unexpected direction. Internet technology-the same revenue-and-reader-sucking technology that newspapers have loudly blamed for their current predicament-may offer the solution to pulling the industry out of its financial hole. The prospective rescue vehicle is the electronic reader, the wireless device that allows users to download print material, from books to the New York Times, on a small but highly readable screen.

Newspapers seem captivated by the idea. The New York Times, along with the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and others, are already available on Amazon.com's Kindle reader for a relatively modest subscription fee. Plastic Logic Inc., a Silicon Valley company, has lined up a newsstand full of newspaper partners, including USA Today, for an e-reader that won't be available until January. And Hearst Corp., which kept its seattlepi.com website going in Seattle as a bare-bones placeholder in the e-reader sweepstakes, has been readying its own entry into the electronic device market, courtesy of a stealthy startup that Hearst has invested in: FirstPaper.           

It's no surprise that newspaper owners, a notoriously slow-to-adapt bunch, are eagerly embracing e-readers. The owners don't have much choice, with dwindling print operations eating up their shrinking operating budgets and the existing delivery options-websites, cell phones and other mobile devices-pulling in only about ten percent of the ad revenue and none of the circulation revenue that print papers used to produce. What makes e-readers especially attractive to publishers is the prospect they could return the industry to the good old (i.e., pre-web) days, when newspapers controlled their news and ad markets, and hence dictated their profits.

It could happen. Amazon.com and Sony may soon be positioned, much in the same way Plastic Logic and FirstPaper will be, as ideal partners for a content provider-a newspaper, for example-that would slap a pay wall around its website and prevent outside news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo! from linking

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