By Chris Brennar

The signs of crisis in the newspaper industry are all around. Headlines about plummeting stock prices, bankruptcy filings, widespread lay-offs and newspaper closings have become common place in the past two years. It is also not hard to find the immediate causes of the crisis.

The explosion of the World Wide Web has dramatically changed the way most people get their news, undermining the newspaper business model in the process.While most newspapers have developed significant web-based readerships to offset declines in daily papercirculation, web-based sources of revenue have failed to make up for the dramatic decline in traditional retail and classified advertising revenue.

Compounding this longer term structural weakness, the current recession is crippling advertisers and increasing the pace of job cuts. The result is a crisis from which many newspapers may not survive.

But this crisis doesn’t just present dangers. It also presents opportunities - for a new, restructured and revitalized journalism in this country. Identifying and taking advantage of these opportunities, however, requires a deeper understanding of the reasons why newspapers have had such a difficult time adapting to the changed media environment, and using this understanding to guide new business models and new roles for newspaper industry stakeholders.In investigating these deeper causes and solutions, this report makes three central points.

First, the reasons most newspapers have had a difficult time adapting to the technological and economic changes in the media environment is rooted in "three Cs" associated with their organizational structures and  practices:

Ÿ a culture of hierarchy and assembly line production that has stifled innovation and experimentation.

Ÿ a deficiency of local community ties, rooted in a largely undifferentiated approach to consumers and the resulting minimal understanding of the information needs and desires of much of their consumer base.

Ÿ and sources of cash that are structurally disconnected from the quality of their primary product.

Second, an alternative future for the newspaper industry is possible, and this future is likely to includesome elements of the following three factors:

Ÿ a network enterprise model, with multiple revenue sources, interactive network relationships and value-added data and information, in which localized, tacit employee knowledge is a critical component of the competitive advantage newspapers have.

Ÿ entrepreneurial reporting and salesmanship, in which journalists leverage their community knowledge and relationships to take a greater role in identifying new revenue opportunities and business models, as part of their information gathering functions, and advertising salespeople help leverage clientrelationships and community connections to co-create new individualized business models with advertisers.

Ÿ hybrid ownership, in which the dual functions of newspapers, as both for-profit businesses and important public services, are more directly reflected in the ownership structure of the newspapers.

Third, the California Media Workers (CMW) union can and should play a significant role in contributing to this promising future in the newspaper industry, both in Northern California and nationwide. As the representative of the most valuable asset newspapers have—skilled workers—and with important ties to community stakeholders who care deeply about the quality of local news, the CMW brings a unique set of assets and perspectives that can be an important part of the future of journalism.

Successfully achieving this role would require some significant changes in organizational practices and roles of the union itself, involving the Guild playing a more active role as a business partner, as a liaison with community stakeholders (including former employees, freelancers, and potential future employees), and as a source of ongoing training and skills development.

The challenges the CMW faces in realizing these ambitious goals are essentially the same as any union whose members work in an industry undergoing a wrenching structural change: figuring out how to move beyond business as usual and reacting to crisis, towards directly addressing the industry changes and the impact on its members.

But the union is already making innovative strides in this direction, building on the ideas represented in Figure I. These efforts provide hope for a new and revitalized next generation union for the newspaper industry in the internet age, and could provide guidance for other unions addressing substantial industry changes.