In recent weeks I’ve had a seriously hard time convincing paywall advocates of the larger implications of such a move. Why retreat into the old print model? Find new digital business models to replace the flagging print revenue.

To lock content behind paywalls or, worse, keep it offline altogether, merely casts a newspaper’s destiny into the hands of the remaining few who insist on getting their news delivered on dead trees at the end of their driveway. Unfortunately, they won’t be with us much longer. And I doubt any of them would be willing to pay the full cost of ink, paper, fuel and delivery needed to distribute their product of choice.

Now comes The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, at the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, to better articulate the critical point that has eluded me. You can read The Guardian’s piece about the speech here.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

And maybe my favorite quote:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

Well said.

I’m going to sum this up:

Newspapers enjoy a monopoly brought on by the high cost of entry in the form of printing presses and legions of delivery boys.

Internet emerges.

Newspapers shovel their content online without regard to ways to exploit the emerging medium. They view it as another channel/platform for publishing the same content that they’ve already paid to produce. Online advertising is gravy atop their meat and potatoes print revenue.

Internet explodes with ubiquitous broadband access. It’s no longer just a publishing platform. And it’s more than a broadcast channel. Internet upends business models and revolutionizes communication. Newspapers are slow to understand the new skill sets and innovative thinking required to harness it.

Economy tanks, accelerating an already apparent decline in print circulation and market penetration. Old-school advertisers who would otherwise stick with print go out of business. Others flee a medium that is hemorrhaging readers no longer interested in reading yesterday’s news left on their driveways.

Desperate for revenue, newspapers slap paywalls on their online content. The problem is the content they’re publishing is commoditized. You can’t convince readers to pay for something you thought so little of before that you gave it away. High-value content borne out of authoritative analysis, shoe-leather reporting and critical thinking was thrown overboard with cost-cutting moves.

What’s needed:

• Do what you do best and link to the rest, as Jeff Jarvis says.
• Don’t turn your back on the Internet. Go all in.
• Invest heavily in in-house innovation labs. Create new revenue channels and erect paywalls around ONLY those things you did not previously give away.
• Extend the technology by embracing open-source thinking.
• Fix your Web sites. They’re unusable. And while you’re at it, answer the phones and make it abundantly easy for the public to interact with you and to give you their money.
• Hire content producers and outsource or automate sales efforts. Ad buyers sometimes understand the technology better than advertising staff.
• Divert all remaining resources to producing truly unique content and watchdog reporting.
• Continue your best efforts to remain impartial and unbiased, but allow point of view by engaging your audience to participate in the coverage.
• Provide community leadership. Play a role in your readers’ lives. Rebuild any lost trust. Become transparent in everything you do.
• Quit trying to be the mainstream media that is all things to all people. Pick your audience slice and target them to the exclusion of all others.