While this is cold comfort for the people who work there, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's downsizing, particularly since, hopefully, this fellow will be documenting it, affords a unique opportunity to observe the reshaping of a mid-sized newspaper to meet 21st century demands. And if that doesn't work, its "Eardrum-Shattering Death Rattles", as Dean Barnett writes:

The print media has been endurably clueless regarding the advent of the new media. Business schools of the future will someday devote endless symposia to studying how an entire industry could be so hidebound, paralyzed, arrogant and clueless.

Don’t get me wrong – even if capitalistic geniuses led the old media, they’d still be up the creek. The advent of new technologies has whipped up a perfect storm that even good businessmen would have trouble handling. The biggest problem the newspapers face, and the least talked about, is the hit the internet has made on their classified revenues. Craig’s List works better and costs less than the classifieds. This stream of revenue, which was huge, is gone and won’t be coming back. Even if the newspapers revamped their classified departments to go virtual and battle Craig’s List on their home turf, they still couldn’t come out even.

And then there are the more widely noted problems. A couple of decades ago, you got your news from the morning paper. For a large and rapidly growing segment of society, that’s no longer the case. For reasons everyone reading this site knows, the best way to stay informed is not to cloister yourself in ignorance until tomorrow morning and then get ink all over your fingers while you read headlines that have already grown stale.

Lastly, we have clueless management. Newspapers are a dying industry. There’s a gold rush afoot to create the virtual enterprise that will take their place. Some entities like the Politico, Pajamas Media and Townhall have seized a head start in becoming the mainstream media of the future, but no one yet knows what the MSM of the future will look like. Some us think we know, but the precise formula remains unhatched.

The weird thing about the newspapers is they’ve decided not to play. Other than putting an exact replica of their dying product out there on the internet, they’ve shown nothing but intellectual paralysis. We all know the virtual edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is not the MSM portal of the future, but the people running papers like the Strib have apparently quit trying. Other than commissioning the occasional blog (which virtually no one reads), their efforts to boldly step into the future have been lackluster and decrepit.