You can say a lot of things about News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, but “stupid” isn’t one of them. In a talk at Australia’s Boyer Lecture, Murdoch said the future of newspapers is bright. His prediction is based on the movement of newspapers from print to the web: “I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone,” Murdoch said, “but our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgement.”

He’s right, of course, but this does not mean that print newspapers will vanish altogether. They will—like all old media faced with the benefits introduced by new media—evolve to focus on their strengths.

Still, it seems that every time a newspaper folds, somebody will assert that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the print newspaper business. Plenty of newspapers will go out of business before the industry figures out its new model. Nobody knows yet what that model will be (or the industry would already have adopted it), but I can make a few suggestions:

Collectible

Many of the daily newspapers produced the day after the U.S. presidential election sold out as people snatched them up as collector’s items. Many are now available on eBay, some at pretty respectable prices. The collectibility of newspapers is something to which the industry should pay more attention. You won’t get a front-page story of the magnititude of the election of the country’s first black president every day, nor does the sell-out of Obama victory editions is not a sign that the newspaper industry is healthy. But people do like to collect things, and I’ve never heard a single story of somebody printing out a page from a newspaper website in order to put it in a scrapbook or a collectibles box.

But that doesn’t mean the idea of collectibility doesn’t have merit. A story doesn’t need to be collectible for every reader every day, but if a story is collectible for as few as 15 or 20 different readers each day, a lot of people will pick up the newspaper to see if there’s anything worth saving.

I grew up in the west San Fernando Valley where a daily called the Green Sheet arrived on our doorstep every day, along with the metropolitan Herald Examiner. The Green Sheet was a thick paper, mainly because they’d print any civic-oriented content they received. The publicity chairman from a Boy Scout troop, for example, could send an article with a list of every award won by every Scout at a Court of Honor—along with a picture—and know it would get printed. And the families of every kid listed clipped those stories for inclusion in their scrapbooks. Newspapers would do well to return to this type of content.

No doubt there are plenty of other stories people might want to save. Ideas?

Local focus

The big news as of this moment is the announcement by U.S. Democrats that the Big Three automakers must submit a plan detailing how they’ll spend $25 billion in bailout money before the loans are approved. I searched this at Google News and found 728 news articles. Clicking through them, they were all more or less the same. In today’s news enviornment, do we really need a reporter from every daily newspaper writing the same story?

What would happen to the face of newspapers if all those journalistic resources were refocused on local coverage? This could include stories unique to the region covered by the newspaper’s distribution, but also the local angle on major national or international news?

People in Richmond, Virginia don’t need a local daily newspaper to fill them in on wildfires in California—they get that on channels from Twitter to CNN. But where else can they learn about the dry cleaner down the street that suddenly closed shop or the dispute over a zoning ordinance? While some of this may, indeed, appear somewhere on the web, nowhere is it packaged neatly and concisely for local consumption.

And here’s the business model: If more and more people grab the newspaper because of the unique local angle (and the other benefits covered below), local advertisers will be more inclined to spend some money. Henry’s Tavern isn’t well served buying a Google adword or a banner on websites, but knowing that local residents read the regional newspaper, the owners of the pub could find it very worthwhile to put a localized ad in a paper people read for its local coverage.

More columns

Most journalists—especially those who have degrees in journalism—make a sincere effort to be objective when reporting news. It’s a noble goal at which everyone falls short. One of the side effects of objective reporting is a flat, dull writing style. Fewer news reports and more personal columns in which professional writers can apply their own voices and opinions will draw more readers. Yes, you can get personal opinions on blogs (and a bazillion other online channels), but it’s still easier to read lengthy content in paper than it is on the screen, regardless of the generation into which you were born. Thoughtful, substantive columns still have a place in print, and newspapers would be well-served to produce more of them.

Local voices

My daily newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, increasingly publishes content from local residents who are not staff members or even trained journalists. They run the gamut from very personal reminiscences to observations on local issues.

Unfortunately, these only appear in the “Time Out” section. More local voices throughout the newspaper would improve the local appeal, so long as it’s easy to distinguish these voices from the professional reporting of the newspaper staff.

Free

The San Francisco Examiner, is free. It’s distributed from vending racks and in BART stations; riding BART in the afternoon, you see half the people on the train, earbuds jammed into their ears, leafing through the Examiner. The newspaper’s income is entirely based on advertising.

This isn’t a new model—it’s just new for the mainstream press. The alternative press has been giving its content away for free for decades, relying solely on ads to pay the bills. This model could work for metropolitan dailies, even for home delivery. One of my first jobs out of college was serving as assistant editor-photographer-sports editor-news reporter for a weekly community newspaper that was delivered free to everyone in the community. The more revenue accrues from advertising, the easier it would be for publishers to give the paper away.

Refrigerator journalism

The best-selling magazines—almost all of them women’s magazines—understand the concept of “refrigerator journalism,” a term coined by University of Missouri journalism professor Don Ranly. This is anything you want to cut out and stick on a refrigerator, and nearly always comes in the form of lists: Six ways to a better sex life, nine holiday decorating tips, eight five-minute recipes your family will love, five great getaways for under $100. There’s so much content in newspapers that could be reduced to style of reporting that it’s a wonder so few newspapers have adopted it—and there’s plenty of content that could be supplemented with the clip-and-stick sidebar. The more people find content they do want on their refrigerators (or office bulletin boards), the more likely they will be to take a daily look through the newspaper for useful items.

A total package

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of great content is available online. The problem is aggregating it. HP’s Tabbloid is a wonderful idea, but it will only produce content from feeds I’m already familiar with. The serendipitous discovery of an article about the opening of a new European bakery down the street is less likely on the Web than it is while paging through a concise, linear package that was put together with a sharp focus on the interests of the local community. I want to know, when I pick up that local newspaper, that spending 15 minutes with it will give me everything I really need to know. Of course it won’t, and I’ll need to go online to supplement what the print newspaper provided, but hell, even the Net doesn’t give me everything.

Smaller newspapers

By smaller, I don’t mean less content, although print newspapers inevitably will have fewer pages. I’m talking about the actual footprint of the newspaper, its dimensions. The San Francisco Examiner has it about right—a tabloid-sized newspaper that’s easy to read if you’re standing up on a packed BART train on your way home.

Quality

Newsprint is too think and nobody likes ink on their fingers (other than die-hard journalists and printers). If publishers upped the quality a notch or two, reading that tangible document would be a more pleasurable experience.

Online connection

These print newspapers will also have websites, and should think more about how the print and online properties integrate than what separates them. How can publishers turn readers into members of a community that involves both the tactile print and ethereal online experience? What’s more, newspapers can leap out ahead of other industries by developing a true mobile strategy that does more than just repurpose the website content, but rather takes real advantage of the mobile phone’s limitations and capabilities.

These are just my 10 ideas for print newspaper adaptation in the digital world. What else could the industry do to make some form of their print product viable and desirable? Thoughts?