This morning in the NYT David Carr shares his dream for how newspapers can save themselves.  It involves standing together and trying to stem the tide of the inevitable.  Instead, they should leap to a new model, one that fits with consumer and advertiser behavior and scales long term.

The news and media business is undergoing radical change and yet Carr dreams of turning back the clock to try and undo the bad decisions and missed opportunities made in the past.

Problem is that his wish list misses the point about what’s happening out there and by perpetuating fear, potentially slow down the change that needs to happen.

Here’s what is going on out there:

• The cost to create and distribute information has dropped to almost zero.

• Consumers don’t go find news, a recent study (I’ll find attribution) quoted someone saying “if the news is important enough, it will find me!”

• Audience and therefore ad impressions are diffused to thousands of sites, including, yes, blogs.

• Ad networks have more inventory in any given market than the big newspaper in town.

Unfortunately, Carr’s wishes for newspaper decisions don’t address any of those crucial needs:

• “no more free content” — this ship has sailed.  Consumers are not going to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.  Info and data wants to be free and embracing that will help them grow bigger.

Also, do you think for a second that if every newspaper in us started charging for its web site that there wouldn’t be a huge effort by faster, more nimble, more scalable start-ups to undercut them and take their audience.  Oh wait, that’s already happened.

• “no more free rides to aggregators”.  This one hits a bit close to home.  At Outside.in we aggregate local media, but we also add value to that media by organizing by location to make it easier for consumers and for newspapers themselves. (We then pass all that extra metadata onto anyone who wants to use it: newspaper or blogger.)  The problem with Carr’s idea here is that consumers have already decided that they expect an incredibly customized and personal news experience.  It’s “Me-centric” not “newspaper centric”.

Consumers are disaggregating the newspaper and folks like Outside.in, the Huffington Post and others are putting it back together in a format that works better.

Now, at Outside.in we’re trying to share this model with newspapers and we hope it helps.

• “no more commoditized ads”. Carr bemoans the rise of networks and ad exchanges but glosses over the fact that there are billions of impressions in every market that are not being sold by the best sales teams in those markets — the local media companies themselves!  They’ve ceded their leadership in the local market by trying to hang on for too long to high cpms and scarcity.  That’s not going to last.

Local sales needs to embrace the fact that ad networks are a good thing.  They roll up audience at scale that sales teams can bring to their advertisers.  Sure, the margins are different, but ad networks are profitable and growing.

I’m not informed enough about his last point about the Newspaper Preservation Act other than to say it too seems like an effort to save a model that needs to change.

Think less about paying for your existing newsroom and more about what your new newsroom should look like.

Scream less about the impact of ad networks on your revenue and scream more at your sales team to go sell like an ad network.

Newspapers need to make bold decisions and need to rethink their editorial and sales models and their cost structure.

I’m going to the NAA conference this week where, among other things, I’m going to be previewing a new product from Outside.in that attempts to address the needs of local newspapers and present a new model for how they can survive and thrive.

I’ll post the presentation here and look forward to your comments.