The principle of “economies of scale” says that, in certain cases, businesses can work more efficiently by getting bigger. For newspapers, big chains can spread of the cost of creating and obtaining out-of-market content across dozens of papers. It can run single, shared bureaus in state, national and international capitals. It can employ a single national sales force to sell ads across the entire chain. It can centralize IT, HR, and purchasing operations. It can standardize design and obtain better deals on syndicated content than individual papers could do on their own.

The chain also needs to employ additional layers of management, at the national and sometimes regional level, to oversee that centralized work. But the cost savings of eliminating all that duplicative work at the local level more than covers the cost of that additional management – and provides bigger profits for the chain’s investors.

At least, they used to.

When the Internet destroyed local newspapers’ control of the flow of out-of-market news information in their communities, it eliminated many of the economies of scale that justified local newspapers being bought up into large, national chains. What good is a deal on wire service content when your readers can get that same information for free elsewhere on the Web? (And you can just link to it from your website.) When journalists can use consumer-grade technology to produce their publications, what’s the advantage of maintaing a large, slow-moving, change-resistant, central IT department? What’s the sense in paying for a large national sales force when the unique, defining characteristic of your audiences is that they are local?

It didn’t have to be this way. Newspapers had a moment when they could have created (and thus, controlled) the social media and publishing tools that the public eventually used to destroy local newspapers’ information-access monopolies. What if Gannett had used its 1990s-era profit to create or buy something like Blogger, instead of leaving that to Google? Or Scripps had built YouTube? What if the late Knight-Ridder had used its Silicon Valley contacts to build something like Facebook?

What if the newspaper industry had used its smarts to build a better search engine before Google did?

If the newspaper industry had recognized in the 1990s that it was in the information access business – instead of the news reporting and ad sales business – it could have invested in new tools that would have allowed it to maintain its dominant market position in information access, instead of settling for the cheapest possible ways to shovel print stories onto static websites while not dipping into the industry’s double-digit profit margins.

Blame for this failure must fall on the leaders of the newspaper chains in the 1990s, because plenty of individuals within their companies were screaming at them then to make these types of moves. (Here’s a shout out to my over-40 readers who are glumly nodding their heads in solidarity right now.) Instead, when the threat of the Internet became obvious, news managers chose to throw money at creating classified vertical products that Craigslist already had rendered irrelevant – again demonstrating industry leaders’ belief that they were in the ad sales business instead of the far more lucrative information-access business.

Now, those opportunities are past. Google, Blogger, YouTube and Facebook exist – and the newspaper industry doesn’t own them, nor does it demonstrate the technical and social aptitude to displace them. So now news companies are left in the smaller, less lucrative information production business – the business that they mistakenly thought they were in all along. And in that business, local newspapers simply can’t afford to support their corporate parents any longer.

What’s the business case – today – for aggregating local news publications into national chains? The investors who keep shooting down pitches from content-driven Web start-ups are right: Local content doesn’t scale. It doesn’t scale for start-ups and it doesn’t for legacy chains, either.

Content production tools scale. Social media tools scale. Topical communities can scale (depending on the topic). Local news does not scale.

So the expense of paying for regional and national management is an expense that legacy newspapers carry that their local-owned and operated independent start-ups do not. That places those chain-owned newspaper companies are a permanent cost disadvantage to their start-ups – even if those newspapers could reinvent their operations to match the start-ups cost efficiencies in every other area. (And good luck with that, with all those national managers and corporate departments wanting to be “kept in the loop” on every decision.)

If local newspapers are going to have a chance to succeed in today’s information market, they’ve got to shed excess cost. And corporate overhead must be included on the list of those costs. Locally-focused news publications must become truly local, with local information, produced by local reporters with local ties, sold to local advertisers by a local sales staff who work for a local owner.

Break up the chains. It’s the news industry’s best hope. And I’m not writing this purely as an exercise in idealism. If newspaper chain investors are to retain any of their investment over the long-term, national managers ought to be devoting all of their time to recruiting and selling potential local buyers of each of their remaining publications. The value of local newspapers, saddled with corporate overhead costs, is only going to decline over the long term, given the continuing development of efficient online competition. The time to get out, for corporate stockholders, is now. So the best way to maximize the short-term value of those chain shares is to find and develop local buyers for individual publications who are willing to pay the highest obtainable price for them.

As any smart salesperson knows, you don’t get the highest price in a fire sale. You get it by developing relationships with potential buyers, qualifying those candidates and making a case for the high value (or at least potential value) of what you’re selling. If news chain managers really want to serve their investors, they’ll spend their remaining time pursing those buyers, before their chains lose whatever value they have left.

Take a look at Barry Ritholtz’ Yeah! The Housing Bottom Is Here! It catalogues six years of compliant reporters dutifully shoveling up quotes from real estate industry sources proclaiming a bottom to the housing market, implicitly urging readers to get out there and buy some real estate right now.

Each article follows the rules of good journalism. They include stories from many of the nation’s leading news organizations. Many articles offers multiple sources, in well-edited narrative. There’s no indication in any of the stories that their reporters misquoted anyone, or misrepresented what their sources were trying to say.

Yet, every article on that page is spectacularly, dangerously, and offensively wrong.

And that illustrates the gravest problem facing journalism today. It’s not competition from the Internet, or even the loss of local advertising monopolies. If journalism as an industry were producing consistently accurate, forward-looking, and unique reports that helped people live better lives, without ending up underwater on a crappy mortgage, competition from inferior news sources – even cheaper or free sources – wouldn’t threaten the industry’s survival.

The gravest problem facing journalism today is its continued adherence to a stenographic model of reporting, one that accepts accurate recitation of quotes and data as truthful reporting, overlooking the very inconvenient fact that people very often lie to reporters.

J-school cliche says “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But far too often in news reporting, “checking it out” means simply calling up another source, and presenting their confirmation or denial of mommy’s alleged love in the next grafs of the story.

Ideally, a reporter would check claims by sources not just with other sources but his or her own investigation of relevant, accurate data and other eyewitnesses. Of course, to do that, a reporter needs time (often in short supply in understaffed newsrooms) and expertise. A reporter needs training and experience in the beat he or she is covering so that he or she can select and perform the appropriate analysis for the issue at hand. Not only that, the reporter must be able and willing to perform an accurate analysis that checks regular sources’ accuracy over time, to determine whether a source is trustworthy.

To that end, in 2012, it should be obvious to anyone working in financial journalism that the National Association of Realtors is the “Baghdad Bob” of the business beat. (Heck, that should have been obvious years ago.) If you’re quoting an NAR spokesperson, or NAR-affiliated analyst, in a real estate story, you might as well just label your piece “advertising” and ask the NAR to cut you a check for it. Because it’s likely of no service to your readers, given how often NAR sources have been wrong over the past six years.

Unfortunately, too few reporters do any sophisticated, data-driven source analysis – as evidenced in part by the long list of stories linked above. I suspect that, while lack of time and expertise contribute to that failure, fear of being labeled as biased or partisan drives much of our industry’s reticence in challenging certain financially or politically powerful sources.

As I’ve written before, partisanship and ideology only creates a problem for reporters if it influences their reporting, driving them to ignore or suppress information that contradicts their political beliefs. If accurate reporting leads a journalist to a partisan conclusion, the only problem for journalism is to ignore that conclusion or soften that reporting because you don’t want to look partisan.

Yet we live in an era when just about every issue’s been politicized – from housing prices to birth control to student test scores. Even the weather. Heck, it’s hard to find a beat outside sports and movie reviews where reporters aren’t afraid to take a stand.

We’ve got to change. If traditional news organizations are to survive in the Internet era, they’ve got to make changes that keep them from consistently barfing out stories that mislead their audience and fail to stand the test of time. The ultimate test for journalism doesn’t lie in how a story was reported or presented. It lies in whether the information the story presents is true.

Let’s stop being naive. Accusations of partisanship and bias are being used by people on the wrong side of the facts to bully us into not pointing that out. Let’s quit accommodating them by dumbing down journalism to stenography.

We need to do better. If we’re to win over more readers (which makes our publications more attractive to advertisers) or even to convince some of those readers to pay us for our reporting, we have to be find a away to be right more often. And that means calling out the liars and fools among our sources.

Start by reading a post Dave Winer put up last month called Paywalls are backward-looking. In the piece, Winer focuses on the heart of the news business model over the past century, and shows why traditional thinking about the news business won’t help it survive in the Internet era.

“Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, and the gasoline it took to get it to where you are. In fact, everything that determined the structure of the news activity, that made it a business, was organized around the distribution system.

“But that’s been over now for quite some time. And paywalls express a desperate wish to go back to a time when there was a reason to pay. Now news, if it wants to continue, must find a new reason.”

Let me back up a moment before advancing Winer’s point. Many beginning news publishers cripple their business by failing to recognize who their customers are. A customer is whoever writes you a check (or gives you a credit card number). Too many publishers naively believe that their customers are their readers, when the customers actually are the advertisers or foundations that are paying the bills to keep the publication running.

In a similar way, many news publishers – rookie and veteran – mistake the benefits that they provide these customers in exchange for that financial support. This is the brilliance of Winer’s post. It illustrates the real value, the real benefit, that news publishers once provided to the market: the ability for information to flow more easily. Customers paid for access to that information distribution system – readers paid for home delivery or newsstand access to the information included in the day’s paper, and advertisers paid for access to those readers.

The Internet, of course, allows information to flow even more efficiently than even newspapers ever could. Which is why the Internet – once widely adopted – meant the inevitable doom for the newspaper business model. Newspapers, with printing presses to pay off and circulations departments to pay, never could hope to deliver information as inexpensively as could publishers on the Internet.

Have you ever heard newspaper publishers lament their failure to install paywalls in the early days of the World Wide Web? “If only we’d started charging upfront,” they say, “our information wouldn’t have been devalued and we wouldn’t be in this financial mess.”

It’s like listening to a four-year-old talk about the Easter Bunny. It’s so naive I actually find it kind of cute, in a completely nihilistic way.

It’s naive because comments such as that betray a belief that what newspapers grew rich selling in the 20th Century was information itself instead of the access to information, as Winer describes. The information that the newspapers were providing (and continue to provide) access to is almost never unique to the news organization reporting it. It’s commodity information – available to anyone on the scene or with access to the source reporting it.

The market opportunity for news publishers was the fact that the average reader isn’t on the scene or doesn’t have access to those sources. So getting access to that information becomes valuable to that reader. That is what the reader was paying for when he or she bought a newspaper – the access to that information.

By making access to the world of information ubiquitous with direct connection to sources, eyewitness accounts, and publishers with cheaper overhead, the Internet has forced news publishers into the marketplace that so many publishers naively believed that they were in before. Now, news publishers really are selling just information, instead of the access to it. And they’re running into trouble because the market’s telling them just how worthless much of that commodity information is to them.

But there is a way out for newspapers – and that’s to embrace the change the Internet has forced and move into the segment of the information business that books – and to a lesser extent, magazines – long have occupied. Newspapers should reinvest in producing and selling information that is unique to their publication, and not readily available to anyone who was on the scene where news occurred.

So what unique information can a news publication provide? Investigations. Perspective. Analysis. And don’t overlook the uniqueness of a specific community of engaged readers, contributing to the publication’s information with their own unique perspectives, reports, and analysis. When well-cultivated by engaged leadership, that community itself can become a publication’s greatest unique asset.

But to produce that information at a low enough cost to compete with the uncounted number of competitors and potential competitors online, a news publication has to eliminate everything else it pays for that doesn’t advance the cause of creating unique information assets. That means ditching everything in the organization that obtains or reproduces commodity content – the stuff people can get elsewhere online. Drop the wire services, the syndicated features, and all the editors and designers who work on them. Eliminate the division between “news” and opinion, and demand reporters who have the expertise to draw informed conclusions from the evidence they report. (And the experience to know – and then report – when they can’t.)

Drop the division between newsroom and online production, and charge your reporters with the responsibility for cultivating a community of readers talking about that beat. Don’t leave investigations for a dedicated team of newsroom hotshots. Make investigation every reporter’s responsibility, and then reach out to other organizations – J-schools, nonprofits, readers and even competitors – who can help you uncover fresh, unique information that your readers will want.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but the best independent publishers out there are doing that work, under very low overhead, and if you can’t compete with them, you’ll soon be done in this business.

Then don’t forget that building an audience is only part of building and maintaing a business. You need those customers, too.

Let’s step back and remember why advertisers have been supporting news publishers in the past. Without in-media advertising, business owners had very limited media through which they could deliver information to potential customers. A storekeeper could put up signs around town or hire people to go up and down the street passing out flyers. But media advertising allowed business owners to reach people inside their homes, by interjecting the businesses’ messages into a newspaper, television show, or radio broadcast to which the consumer already had chosen to pay attention. And that’s what advertisers were paying for – access to that information flow.

Again, the Internet tore down barriers separating advertisers from consumers. With email lists, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, the Internet allows businesses more media through which to connect directly with their customers. Business owners don’t need advertising as much any more. Yet I believe that some demand for advertising will remain, as businesses look to connect with and acquire new potential customers. But news media hoping to attract that advertising income will have to be able to offer those advertisers sharply defined audiences who are well-qualified as potential customers for that business.

It’s the era of the niche – whether topical or geographic. And if your reporters aren’t producing that targeted, informed, uniquely valuable niche information, you’re not building an audience that any advertiser will pay to reach.

Think non-profit is your salvation? Think again. As we’ve written before, non-profit isn’t a business plan. It’s a tax status. And the foundations that support non-profit journalism are looking to reach desired audiences just as much as advertisers are. Again, if you’re working in the non-profit world, you still have to be delivering unique information to a targeted audience. Otherwise, you’re just not delivering the value your foundation customers demand.

If you’re going to be a success in business, you must at least be able to recognize just what business you’re in. Winer has told us the way toward building a viable news business online. The challenges for news publishers are to put aside their assumptions and to hear him.

What was this practice? It was conducting national job searches to fill local reporting positions.

When I began my journalism career, J-school advisers told us to expect to start out at a smaller paper in a national chain, then try to work our way up to larger newsrooms, bigger cities, and more desirable places to live. You had to “pay your dues” in some small town before you could move up to a major metro.

The model was that of an assembly line, where you started by proving yourself on low-risk tasks that weren’t particularly critical to the overall operation, before moving up to higher-speed, higher-pressure jobs with national visibility. (By broadening the candidate pool for every local reporting job, this helped chains keep labor costs down, too.)

But while the smallest papers in a chain might be next to invisible to the suits in corporate HR, they were real, and important, to the people living in the communities they served. Most of those readers weren’t trying to “move up” to some bigger city. They were home, and happy there.

The old newsroom hiring model saw the nation’s communities as interchangeable rungs on a corporate ladder. But, despite the billion-dollar efforts of companies such as Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, and Applebee’s, people in those cities and towns continue to resist their commoditization. Sure, they shop at Walmart and eat at Applebee’s, but only because they’re cheaper than alternatives. (Which often were run out of business by big-chain outlets operating at a loss until they killed off that competition.) Cookie-cutter newspapers could hold onto their local customers only so long as they offered the cheapest way to get information, too.

When online competitors such as Craigslist and Yahoo! News gave readers a cheaper alternative for classified ads and national news headlines, they bailed. And understandably so. It’s hard to appeal to readers’ sense of loyalty to local voices when those voices are recent college grads who’ve only lived in the community for a couple years and who flee the state whenever they get three or more consecutive days off. Those new hires didn’t grow up in the community. They barely know anyone outside the newsroom and the official sources they encounter on their beats. And frankly, they don’t care, either. They’re looking to “move up,” and get out of town.

If you’re a local, you might as well get your local news from a discussion board. At least the people posting there actually know the town, send their kids to school there, and are planning to stick around a while.

My first full-time job in the news industry was in Omaha, Nebraska – a community I’d never stepped foot in before my job interview at the paper. To my surprise, the paper offered me a gig, and with my first student loan payment looming, I took it. I had no business writing for anyone in Omaha, or the states of Nebraska or Iowa. Hey, I tried my best, but I didn’t know the names, the places, the people or the unique issues that mattered to anyone who’d grown up in that state. So I took the hint when the paper tried to run me out of town and eventually rented a truck to move to a city my wife and I knew and loved – her hometown, Denver.

(I worked there for nearly four years until I got recruited to a job in my hometown, Los Angeles, where I continue to live today.)

So as we look for new companies to emerge and redefine the journalism industry online, let’s hope those new leaders won’t make this same mistake, too. Readers deserve writers who are as invested in the community as they are.

And if that expression of idealism does nothing for you as a cold-hearted capitalist, allow me to frame the issue another way: You can’t collect a premium price for a bargain-basement product.

If you’re producing product in the cheapest way possible, you’ll only hold your market share so long as you offer the lowest price available. (Walmart’s learning this the hard way as its bargain-hunting customer base begins to abandon it for dollar stores.) Trust me, even if you think that the cheapest way to run a newsroom is with fresh college grads desperate for a job, they’re still more expensive than outsourcing to writers in Bangalore watching Web cams. Or script kiddies in Eastern Europe writing scraper algorithms. If you want to publish using actual live, local journalists writing your publication, you’ll never be able to operate at lower costs than your online competition. To survive as a business, you’ll need the higher income that only a premium product can command.

So your local writers better really be local writers, people are from – and of – that community. This goes for niche topic sites, too, and not just for geographically focused publications. Writers for niche sites must be insiders of the community they cover, as well – individuals with passion for and personal experience in the topic they cover.

What does this mean? If you’re a manager at a national news chain, it’s time to zero out the relocation budget, if you haven’t already. Make local publications hire exclusively from candidates in their local markets. It’s time to reconnect with those communities. Promote from within at your titles, too. If “outsiders” really want to work at one of your publications, insist that they move to that community on their own, first.

For journalists, it’s time to make an investment in your future by relocating to the community where you want to live and work, if you’re not there already. Then start blogging as soon as you arrive. Build the audience that you will leverage into either your own publishing business or a job at an established local publication.

For journalism students, do the same. Start your career right by going to the best J-school you can get into in the city (or state) where you want to live and work. If your goal is to work in niche-topic publications, rather than covering a geographic community, go ahead and look at big national J-schools. But select the one that also has the best available program in the field you want to cover, too. Either way, immerse yourself in the community you’ll be covering. Only by being in and of the community you want to cover can you make yourself an attractive candidate to the smart publishers who recognize the need to remain connected to their communities.

The market is speaking to us. It wants the era of clueless, disconnected, outsider coverage in journalism to be over. And thank goodness for that. Let’s make it happen.

It’s like watching an actor psyche himself out before going on stage, or a golfer giving herself a harsh set of the yips when approaching the green. Journalists I’ve met and worked with too often talk themselves out of their natural state and familiar skills when they start thinking about online interactivity. And those fears of failure quickly become self-fulfilling.

Here’s a success story story for you to consider, instead. Not to get all hokey on you, but I do believe that if you’re thinking about success when you interact with your readers, you’re putting yourself in a better place than if you go into conversations with negative thoughts. The key take-away from this success story is that it happened by using good, old-fashioned, print-era, j-school techniques for doing interviews. No special “online” skills required.

Here we go: Last week, I decided to get more active on Twitter by hosting an afternoon “Twitter chat” each weekday. (Okay, I hear people freaking out now. “You said this didn’t require any special online skills, Robert!” Chill. Stay with me.)

I got the idea after stumbling into a couple fun back-and-forth chats with a few of my followers in recent weeks. One time I threw a question out there, and another I responded to someone else’s. In both cases, others joined in with their answers and we had a nice conversation for the better part of an hour.

While I love Twitter as an RSS replacement – a handy way to push headline feeds out to willing readers – the medium’s also a perfect one for this type of focused, real-time conversation. You don’t need a pay for some special chat tool, and the 140-character limit forces everyone to get to a point efficiently.

So I figured, why wait for these moments just to happen? Why not schedule some conversations, and let my readers know when to expect them? The trouble with these types of planned events, of course, is that they too often come across as too planned. It’s like going to a party where the host has overscripted every element of the event. Who wants to be told when the fun starts?

This isn’t some network broadcast interview, where advance work has squeezed all potential for spontaneity from the conversation. Instead of coming to each Twitter chat with a list of canned questions to ask, I kicked it off with a single question, then let the conversation evolve from there.

Listen, then react. Probe. Direct. Test. Challenge.

Ask.

Eventually, something will click. C’mon – we’re all confident when doing an interview with a source. Don’t let a lack of comfort with Twitter or any other online medium rob you of that confidence. Interviewing is interviewing. If you can elicit insight, passion, and emotion from a source offline, you can do it online, too. And those reactions will help your conversation connect with a broader audience.

The interaction never starts right away. I’ve needed at least four tweets to get the conversation going. And more times than not, my original topic dies in just as many tweets after that. So what? Find what makes your interviewees come alive. Then go there. You’ve done this before.

By the third day of my Tweet chats, we trended nationwide in the United States.

Sure, it was silly. A conversation about travel planning mutated into a bunch of gags about theme park attraction names. But it was a perfect diversion for a late Friday afternoon, and the audience was looking for fun, so I helped a few leaders in the conversation steer it there. Yet it wouldn’t have happened if I’d stubbornly restricted the event to a pre-planned script. Or if I’d been too inexperienced with interviewing to pick up on the potential in what looked like a mistake from a reader with only a dozen or so followers. But it was there. And when we followed it, dozens of lurkers jumped in, brought their followers, and we were trending 20 minutes later. (Search for #disneybudgetcuts for the whole thing, if you must.)

Of course, the trend list shouldn’t be every publication’s goal. But better engagement should be. I’ve long said that journalists have the unique set of skills to succeed in social media. Engagement and communication are our business. So don’t let a change in medium psych you out. Try a regularly scheduled Twitter chat with your followers and let your interviewing skills shine. Talk about whatever. Just use it as an excuse to get together with your followers, and talk.

A publication makes its greatest progress not when it introduces new products and services but when it shows the discipline to leave tired or failing efforts behind. You must fight the inertia that’s holding you back.

This month I began shutting down what where once the most popular services on my family’s violin website. While these were the first services we offered on the site, and the ones that defined us to our early audience, they’d become a major time drain for me, and were failing to leverage any significant income for the site.

Making the decision to close these services not only created an opportunity for me to devote more time to the stuff that is working on the site, it also forced me to confront the reasons why these services weren’t thriving anymore. An innovator who’s also designing and launching, but never taking a look back at her work – axe in hand – never learns any valuable lessons from the audience and customers she’s trying to serve.

When my wife and I launched the violin website, neither of us had time to do much with it. So I coded up some automated directories, which any registered member of the site could join – one for teachers, another for shops, and later, one for camps and summer festivals. The directories provided content for the site that readers valued, and the chance to be in the directories gave people a compelling reason to register with the site.

Years later, after my wife began spending more time writing for, editing, and coaching contributors to the site, those old directories fell behind our discussion board and blogs in pageview and visitor traffic. Sponsors wanted to be part of those blogs, interviews, and original feature articles on the site. I couldn’t get anyone to sponsor the directory pages, and the click-through data from those channels were just atrocious.

And yet, the directories began eating more and more of my time. No longer were interested violinists joining the site to get access to the directories, now they were attracting sweatshop spammers from around the world. Spammers looking for free backlinks to their scams and affiliate storefronts were polluting our listings with thousands of submitted entries that had nothing to do with the violin.

At first, I manually deleted or blocked the submissions. Then I started writing scripts to block them, or mass purge them after the fact, if they’d gotten through. But the spammers kept getting more sophisticated in their attacks on the site, and frankly, I got tired trying to stay ahead of them.

For what? For directory pages that were hardly unique any longer? When we began, no teachers’ associations had membership directories online. Now hundreds did. Other listings of summer camps and music festivals abounded. Directories aren’t what we provide best anymore. That’d be our original interviews, features, blogs and discussion board – in short, our editorial content. So why not ditch the effort to prop up failing directories and spend our time and effort building more great original content instead?

The only directory we had that retained much unique value was our business directory. So I salvaged that by converting it to a paid directory. If violin shops want in now, they must pay us an annual fee. That effectively eliminated not only the spammers, but also small, undercapitalized shops that really couldn’t handle inquiries from our global audience.

By the way, I can’t recommend enough that local and niche Web publishers develop a business directory for their advertising customers. With so many spam-laden business directories polluting the Internet, readers appreciate a well-targeted, up-to-date directory that lists only real businesses serving a specific community. And business customers are willing to pay to be in a directory that’s spam-free and promoted to a real audience of engaged community members instead of drive-by Web searchers. A directory is an easy sell to a local business owner who can’t spell “CPM” and doesn’t want to hassle with a complicated banner ad campaign, too.

But I wouldn’t have been in position to create that new paid directory for our site (which has led to five-figure annual income for us), if I’d been satisfied to leave our old directories be. By picking up the axe and taking it to the directories, I chopped away a lot of waste that had been covering up a better opportunity for our site.

So innovation involves not just creation, but destruction as well. What are the old pages, services, products and habits that you or your organization is investing significant time and money to maintain for your publication, only for insignificant revenue or other value in return?

Swing your axe thoughtfully, though. I gave our directories over 10 years before cutting them down. They had their run. Killing a new service before giving it a decent chance to find a customer base can cost you far more than leaving a dying service to linger. But once you’ve given it your best shot or a service has run its course, don’t let fear or apathy keep you from killing a project that’s sucking money or time, or polluting your pages with inferior content.

And once you’ve given something a shot, don’t kick yourself if someone else makes it work. Remember, ideas are worthless. If someone else executed an idea in a way you couldn’t, well, good for them. Go find an idea you can execute with success. Focus on what you and your organization do best, and let your axe keep your way forward clear.

Of course, on the flip side, trolls and know-it-alls can make reading the comments on a website a visit to virtual hell. So when some of your readers begin to tick you off – either for what they do, or what they don’t – here are 10 things to remember… after you’ve taken a deep breath.

You can’t force readers to care

No matter how much work you put into a piece, no matter how much news you thought you broke in it, no matter well you think told the story, you simply cannot force readers to care. The best you can do is to think about your readers’ needs and interests and then craft an engaging narrative or presentation that rewards whomever pays attention. But even then, some readers are just going to say “meh” and click over to the dancing cat videos. Even if you produce a dancing cat video, somebody’s still going to say “meh” and click to someone else’s dancing cat video. Don’t let it upset you.

See what’s keeping people from participating

While you shouldn’t get upset by a lack of engagement, don’t dismiss it, either. Always be curious about your site, and how people are – or are not – interacting with it. Create a new dummy account every few weeks, just to make sure your registration process is working the way you want. Ask friends to create accounts and jump in now and then, to get fresh perspectives on how newcomers react to your online community. Is there a tech problem that’s keeping people from registering, commenting, blogging, or submitting or embedding photos or video? Are new users getting private message spam from lurkers on the site? Are new users having a hard time tracking the conversations they want to follow? Find the barriers that your site’s putting up, and work to take them down.

Engage on social media – don’t promote

Twitter and Facebook are great media for pushing new stories to your followers. But if that’s all you are using those services for, you’re likely leaving your readers cold. So don’t get upset when your story links fail to elicit a slew of RTs and Shares. Try some new ways to engage your followers, instead. Post “wild art” photos. Ask questions about favorite places to eat, visit, etc. RT and Share the competition, too. Show your readers that you’re not some uptight, Fortune 500 media conglomerate, but an accessible neighbor they can talk with.

Remember that readers – together – know more than you do, even if you know a lot

So even if one or two readers really make you mad, remember than you need the rest of them. Therefore…

Don’t blow up at your readers

Stand up and move away from your desk, go offline for a few moments – always have a plan for what you will do when someone really enrages you, a distraction that gives you the time you need to calm down before you reply in way you’ll almost certainly come to regret.

Always be kind

No matter what tone a reader takes with you personally, if someone emails or messages you directly, try to always respond, and with kindness. Sometimes a person’s heat in a message just shows that they have passion for what you’re covering, and they can’t yet direct it. So it spews out at you. A calm, thoughtful response sometimes can redirect a hostile critic into a passionate advocate for your work, and for your community.

Keep your readers interested in the topic, not in you

Sorry to make this sound so rough, but, ultimately, nobody cares about you. Or your “brand.” They care about what you cover, and maybe even about what you experience in covering it. But any time or words you spend trying to get people to care about you is better spent keeping people interested and even excited about the topic (or community) you’re covering. Remember, a professional writes and reports to address your readers’ needs, not your own.

And I’m not trying to be snobbish about “professionalism” here. I mean this literally. The people who make money doing this stuff (by definition, the professionals) are the one who write for their readers’ needs, not for their own.

If they do get interested in you, don’t let go to your head

That said, if you do your job well, it’s likely that some readers will conflate you with what you’re covering and become fans. Just as you shouldn’t get too upset by trolls, don’t allow your head to get too big when people compliment you, either. Thank them graciously, then move on.

Know when to stay out, versus when to jump in

Sometimes you have to act like a parent, which means that there comes a point when you need to let your kids tie their own shoes. In this case, there will come a point when you ought to let the community take up its own causes and extinguish its own flame wars. You don’t always have to have the last word. Sure, there’ll be times when you will need to answer direct questions, and model the type of behavior you want from readers. But don’t forget to back off when your community is ready to walk on its own. Don’t get upset if they fall down a time or two before they get the hang of it. Every parent’s been there.

Ask yourself if the audience you get is really the audience you want

If your bad feelings about the audience you’ve cultivated ever become too much, even after taking time outs and trying to lead responsibly, you might need to face the tough question: Is the audience you’ve attracted really the one you want? If it isn’t, it’s okay to shut things down and start over. On the flip side, maybe you anticipated attracting a certain type of reader, but found instead that your work resonated with others. If you’re okay with that, embrace the change. Go where your work is needed, and appreciated.

Whichever path you choose, an effective online community leader needs to feel some peace with his or her audience. You can’t do this job if you’re always angry, frustrated or disconnected with the people you’re supposed to serve.

I’m not asking to recite any market research or website usage metrics you’ve collected about your readers. Give me your gut, emotional reaction to that question, instead.

Let’s tweak the phrasing of my question. How do you feel about your readers?

Are you proud of them? Do they make you angry? Do they surprise and amuse you? Do they get on your nerves and annoy you? Do wonder if they’re even paying attention to anything you do?

I’m going to take an educated guess here and assume that many of you would respond, “a little of all the above.” I’ve certainly felt each of those reactions in dealing with the readers on my sites, not to mention on the newspaper websites where I’ve been entrusted to deal with reader-submitted comments and other content.

But I’d ask you to stick with the question and settle on just one reaction. What’s the primary thought, emotion, or reaction that you feel about your readers and their participation with your website?

Why am I asking you for this? Because, as a leader of your news publication’s online community, the attitude you bring to that community goes a long way in determining both the tone and the essential functionality of that community.

If you reflexively respect your audience, truly believe that they collectively know more than you do, and that they want the best for your community, too, then it’s going to be relatively easy for you to engage with those readers and inspire them to provide great information for your site.

But if the idea of reading comments and posts from your audience makes you react with disgust, and just avoid your comment sections and forums, well, I hope that facing this reaction helps you realize the Catch-22 that feeling can create for your publication. If you don’t want to engage with your readers, for whatever reason, that makes it real tough for you to elicit the change that you want from that community.

Trust me, I understand how reprehensible commenters on newspaper websites can be. But if you’re waiting for the readers submitting comments to your website to change their behavior on their own, well, you’re likely to be waiting for a very long time. And what kind of leader does that make you?

Try this approach instead. When you think about your audience, don’t think about just the people who are submitting comments to your site right now. Think instead about everyone out there who might be interested in the content and focus of your publication. Including the huge supermajority of readers and potential readers who’ve never submitted a comment, photo, blog, or tip to your website. Don’t forget that they’re out there, too.

If you can feel respect for and curiosity about that larger audience, you can build a civil community of those readers online. But you’ve got to retain that faith in your audience. The moment you lose that, you’ve burned out. Then it’s time to turn off the comments, disable the submission forms and disconnect for a while, until you can find a way to get that faith back. (I’d recommend setting aside extra time to reconnect with people offline. Volunteer in the community. Get engaged in community organizations, local schools, or service groups. Strengthen your offline community building to sharpen those skills before you try community building again online. You’ll also have a lot of fresh new friends and acquaintances you can invite to contribute online, to get your Online Community 2.0 off to a positive start.)

So if you’re not getting the quality of comments and reader participation on your site that you want, don’t blame your audience. Ask yourself, instead, what you can change to get more participation from those civil, informed, literate, and considerate readers who’ve been holding back. What could you change to inspire them to come forward? What could you do to reward them to come back? What could you change to discourage the blowhards and bigots from getting in their way?

The first step toward making that happen is to believe that it’s possible – that your audience has things to say that are informative, engaging, and constructive. Because if you don’t believe that they do, they will live down to your expectations.

Yes or no, don’t let this story discourage you from eBook publishing. If anything, this case should be encouraging independent news publishers to jump into the eBook market.

Why? As Talking Points Memo explained, this case boils down to an alleged attempt by big book publishers to collude to get an “agency” deal where they would get to set the price of the books they published and were sold on Amazon.

The TPM summary didn’t mention it, but that agency pricing model is the pricing deal that you get with Amazon as an independent eBook publisher. Why is that a price fixing offense for them and not for you? In short, because they allegedly colluded to get particular prices under that deal, according to the TPM summary.

Econ 101 lesson here: If you can enter a market where existing players are colluding to hold up prices, you have a huge business opportunity if you can undercut them on price. Typically, when big businesses try to collude on price, it’s because they have high barriers to entry in that business that keep potential competitors (i.e. disruptors) on the sidelines.

And that certainly was the case in the book publishing industry just 10 years ago. Today, however, the barriers to entry to book publishing are about the same as the barriers to entry to website publishing were 15 years ago – pretty much zilch. You need some tech know-how, but it’s nothing more than a sharp learner can teach herself or himself within a few weeks.

Remember, the big book publishers – like the big newspaper chains before them – have highly specialized, multi-level workforces that can drive their operating costs higher than Voyager 2. The traditional book publishing operation model includes

• authors
• agents
• book editors
• copy editors and proofreaders
• interior designers
• cover designers
• manufacturing
• publicists
• distribution
• retailers

Each book sold must pay a portion of the salary or wages of each person that chain. And don’t forget that each company involved needs to pay for all the managers overseeing these people, as well as a cut for profit as well. No wonder book publishers are trying to inflate the prices they charge.

Publishing an eBook independently through a retailer such as Amazon takes the manufacturing, distribution and retailing roles off your table. Independent publishing also removes the need for acquiring an agent and a book editor (though I recommend showing your work to a trusted colleague for feedback before moving into copy-editing).

As an online journalist, I have the ability to write my own book, to edit it, and to code up the HTML for the eBook design. As a website publisher, I have built an online community of tens of thousands of frequent readers to whom I can market my books, and the social media skills to help empower them to spread the word virally on my book’s behalf.

All this means that I can handle pretty much all the work of publishing and marketing an eBook. Which also means that I can keep all the money my books earn for myself. Sure, retailers such as Amazon will take a cut, but in Amazon’s case they do bring something very valuable to the table – a recommendation engine and category best-seller lists that help drive sales of your books. That’s worth the cut they take, in my opinion. (Barnes and Noble? Not so much.)

All the rest is yours. You don’t have to set aside anything for managers or for shareholders. That should give you the ability to produce and market your work for a fraction of the cost of producing and marketing that same work through a traditional publisher, even if they were producing only the same eBooks. And you can do that while making more money than you would as an author if you had published through a traditional publishing house. So let the federal government, the New York publishing houses and Amazon fight it out. Ultimately, the future of book publishing belongs to the independents.

I’m nowhere near unique among journalists. If you’ve worked in online journalism, you probably have a similar skill set to me, and can handle the work of self-publishing your best reporting work into eBooks. With lower expenses, you can undercut “the big kids” on price. That leaves it up to you, and your skills as a storyteller, to compete to attract the attention – and purchases – of readers.

You want to stay in the news business? Here is your purest, most direct shot to do that. If you can tell stories that people want to read, eBooks are a marketplace in which people are paying authors – nearly directly – to read them. No employer or publisher can tell you ‘no’, or silence you. No big business can beat you on price.

So why not jump in?

“There’s oftentimes the impulse to suggest that, if the two parties are disagreeing, they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” Obama told the Associated Press.

The attack picked up momentum when an AP reporter did just that in his coverage of the speech, falsely accusing the president of moving to the left on health care as Republicans moved to the right. Talking Points Memo and The Atlantic both called the AP on it, though the AP story has now been changed – without acknowledgement – to remove the paragraph in question.

The reticence to take sides in reporting news runs strongly throughout journalism. But when that reticence mutates into a need to change the facts to fit a preferred, nonpartisan, view of the news (called by Jay Rosen “the view from nowhere“), reporters have, in fact, succumbed to bias.

I blame “the view from nowhere” as much as anything else for the collapse of the news business. People who want truth from their news are journalism’s strongest potential customers, but we drive them away when we favor a nonpartisan ideal over the reality of what’s happening in public policy. So let’s set aside this reticence to take sides in favor of some new principles of journalism ethics:

There is no mathematical formula for the truth

I despise the meme that journalists are no good at math. But on the political beat, too many journalists appear too eager to apply a math formula to the news: Take a quote from one party, a quote from the other party, then assign them equal value in the story. Let the reader assume that the truth lies somewhere in between.

For the math geeks among us: A = B, and the Truth = (A + B)/2

That’s not journalism. It’s stenography. And the world doesn’t us to do that anymore.

Journalism doesn’t offer a procedural formula for the truth, either

The journalism convention of reporting of reporting multiple viewpoints can just obscure the truth if you don’t find a way to show your readers which points of view are supported by evidence, and which are not. To find a better method at determining truth, student journalists would do well to get themselves into laboratory science classes, so they can learn what words such as “research” and “objectivity” really mean.

The world’s grown too complex for uninformed, uneducated general assignment reporters to parachute into an issue and be able to distinguish truth from spin, and facts from lies in their reporting. Yet an industry drive for cheap labor has encouraged newsrooms to import entry-level reporters from outside the community, while a misguided view of “objectivity” also has lead editors routinely to assign reporters to beats where they have no professional education, experience, or connections. Both practices are killing newsrooms’ ability to bring needed expertise to their reporting.

We need to find better ways to gather and analyze information.

Journalists’ obligation is to serve our readers, not our employers, our investors or even our profession

So how do we develop a formula for finding and reporting the truth? We’ll have to start by refocusing on whom we should have been serving all along – our readers. We get in trouble as an industry when we stiff our readers in favor of protecting newsroom organizational charts, short-term profit expectations, or even long-standing industry conventions that were created during a different era of communication. Whatever methods we settle on in the future will need to be focused on the readers’ needs for truth information that’s relevant to their lives, instead of the needs of other parties.

Which leads me to my final new standard for journalism ethics:

It’s okay to be partisan

There should be no sin in taking sides in a news story – so long as the facts support that side. The problem with partisanship in news reporting is not the partisanship itself, it’s when newsrooms (such as Fox News) allow partisanship to drive their selection of stories and viewpoints to include in those stories. But there should be no problem with reporting leading a journalist (or her or his readers) to a partisan conclusion.

If the facts point to a definitive, partisan conclusion, we actually cheat our readers when we stop short of taking them there. We should value our readers’ time and attention. Let’s not waste their time with half a story when we have the full thing.

No, the facts don’t always lead to a partisan conclusion in news stories. And even if they might, we don’t always have the all those facts nailed down when it’s time to report on a speech, a bill, or even an election.

But when we do have the facts, and they point a specific way, we shouldn’t be afraid to go there. When journalists twist their reporting to avoid the appearance of partisanship, as the AP did initially on the Obama speech, we’re as guilty of twisting the news as the hacks at Fox News are.

Our readers deserve better.