The news on advertising revenue is very very grim. If you haven't already poured yourself a large one, please do so and have a look at the latest figures on US ad revenue in newspapers. We're looking at  15-20% annual declines in revenue in cars, homes, jobs and classified. Ad revenue for newspapers online up about $100m and slowing in growth. Ad revenue in print down about $1,000m and gathering pace.. Please don't tell me any more how online revenue is going to save the newspaper business ever. If you believe that you are about to kill your newspaper.

There are two courses of action. The first one is to give up and say that newspapers are dead. They may not be actually saying it, but if actions speak louder than words then that is pretty much what the major newspaper chains in the US are thinking. Point me to one imaginative print or distribution initiative going on right now? We need a hundred going on to have any chance of finding the one that works. McClatchy, Gannett, et al are sitting in their boardrooms watching the industry bleed and are apparently devoid of any ideas on how to save the industry. If they haven't given up on print, they have a funny way of showing it.

The other course of action is to imagine and execute dramatically better newspapers which, given the existence and growth of online advertising probably will also mean shifting more of the cost of production from advertisers to readers in some way. This will, obviously, be difficult and expensive: whereas fiddling whilst $1 billion of revenue drifts away is easy. The thing is that one road holds out the possibility of a future for newspapers and the other just doesn't.

Those of you who have followed this blog will know that I've tried to make this point several times over the past few months, here, here, and all over the place. I hope you'll indulge me again...  If newspapers want to survive you have to recognize that your biggest asset is your distribution network and that your journalism is actually on the whole rather low calibre and largely commoditised, probably as a result of arrogance or neglect.  Salvation will come from innovating in distribution and editorial, allowing the delivery of "flexible" newspapers that give people more of what they want (and tempting them to pay for it) and less of what they don't (allowing you to save a lot of money on paper).  It's entirely practical and simple.

But first we have to stop thinking that the internet is a great way to cut costs (paper) from our business and realize that once you remove that great big metal barrier to entry that newspapers own, online local information supply and the associated advertising is going to be a commodity business  and prices will decline to a point where we can't afford journalism any more. You can only stop this by raising barriers to entry again. The only way I can see to do this is high-quality high-volume editorial on issues that interest people distributed in a way that adds some value to it for readers and advertisers. Our business has always been attracting readers and selling their attention to advertisers. It's still a viable model: we just have to be more sophisticated at both parts of the equation.

There's $1 billion at stake. For the price of a plane fare I'll be with you in a week and getting your newspaper team thinking about newspaper innovation for a change. What can you possibly lose...? Email Me