Aggregators: The way to save newspapers?

This post is for all the J-types out there. If you have been keeping up with the industry for a while, or visited LostRemote once, you will know that newspapers are dying, and dying fast. People are now getting their content from online providers. And it may not just be from one source. It may be from multiple.

(Bear with me, this will take more set-up to get to the main point.) Over at CNN.com, they are now linking to and posting interesting local stories that may grab attention for a national audience. They use different outlets as content providers.

So why not - and this is my main point here - do the same thing for newspapers? I'm not just talking about using the Associated Press and Reuters and AFP. I'm talking about striking alliances and profit sharing from different news outlets. Get TV stations to provide you stories. Get local magazines to strike content partnerships.

Many egos get put aside for Hulu.com, an online video web site where FOX, NBC Universal and a few other companies put their content into one site, free for the user. We're talking about News Corporation and NBC Universal working together and sharing revenue from a single content provider. If it can work on a national scale, can't it work - on some level - in a local context?

The paper can also use freelancers, bloggers and the "citizen journalist" to provide content, assuming they opt-in. Independent editors, not associated with any content provider, would pick and choose which stories get selected, and where.

I have no idea how profits would work, that I really cannot say. I know that this magical newspaper's web site would be more likely to make the venture profitable, ironically. But the way newspapers are going now, they are just going to continue to lose circulation numbers. And it's going to take bold new ideas to shake them up and make the daily newspaper interesting - and worthwhile - to readers again. Does this idea do it? Maybe. Maybe not. You know, maybe making a localized "Hulu-type" newspaper would accelerate the death. But maybe the Localized Associated Press is the way to go! My point is, no matter how nicely you re-design your newspaper (shout out to the Sun Sentinel), it's the content that really matters. And if the same type of content brings your numbers down, you have to change the content to bring them back up.