By Andrew Edwards on March 09, 2010

Traditional media folks -- those at big print outfits, especially -- are hoping Steve Jobs will have saved their jobs by coming up with a device that will do for print what the iPod did for music. He came up with the iPad, but my prediction is that it won't patch the leak that continues to drain away the traditional print-media audience.

Sure, it looks like you'll be able to see an entire page of something magazine-like on the iPad. And providers will be able to stream so-called "compelling content" as if the whole world had fat fiber at the desktop (it doesn't). Who knows, maybe they will be able to move away from that unhappy ad-supported, no-fee paradigm they hoped would sustain them as the web turned from a toy into a gigantic, white-hot power plant that darn near rules the world of information these days. But most likely that won't happen either.

The pay-per-view model for word-based media isn't going to work, and it may be that it's simply too late -- news and media outlets have trained their audience that they can have something (a newspaper or a magazine) for free, where once they had to drop a coin or a few dollars into the cup. Their audience is not going to reach, ever again, into their pockets for this product. They will simply find other outlets that don't charge money.

Long Island's flagship paper, Newsday, is an unfortunate example. Go ahead and laugh -- "Long Island" and "flagship" may not seem like they quite go together. But having grown up on that hallowed isle, and recalling Newsday as a progressive, award-winning paper of considerable merit, it is sad to hear that they recently tried to make people pay for content and got (rub your eyes here) 35 subscribers. I've seen the Newsday website, and there is, or course, the argument that Newsday's site, which last time I looked was an ugly mash-up of car-wrecks and perp-walks, just doesn't have the gravitas to charge money to anyone.

But does that mean the great grey Times can charge money? Or the unique New Yorker? Probably not. And they are going to have to make it or break it just the way they have been: by embracing that empire-destroying edict where "information wants to be free." I like both of these publications rather much, so I really hope their embrace with this media Frankenstein doesn't get so tight it cuts off their air and leaves them for dead.

Sympathy and admiration aside, I believe the killer combination of technology and user preference indicates a bleak future for the typical, old-world media venture -- and twisting in this whirlwind we'll find newspapers, magazines, and all the once-interesting digital content providers (remember iVillage? -- did you know it still exists?) that got bought and buried by traditional media companies.

Who will take their place?

It's fairly obvious to me that the battle will come down to a matter of DNA. Which media was born on the web, and truly understands it in its bones? Which media does not use the web to "drive sales to its traditional outlets"? Which media fully embraces (rather than pays lip service to) the "measure before you manage" paradigm that makes web marketing uniquely powerful when properly understood?

Those who can answer "I do" to the above will be the winners. They may not yet be titans, but they will scamper and grow and evolve as the great print-based sauropods thunder to their final resting places on the shores of the Great Sea of Free Information.

Perhaps the best example of a thriving news-media mammal is the Huffington Post. Word is, the H Post has just passed the W(ashington) Post in online readership. How in the world did it pull that off (perhaps more importantly, how did the WP let it happen)?

The Huffington Post pulled it off, I submit, because it doesn't have a newspaper to support. It doesn't have a hidebound editorial staff nor paid stringers in major cities. And, true to the scrappier paradigm of the web, the people working there don't take themselves all that seriously.

They also understand that the entire value proposition of the web to a content owner is measurability. They understand that the way you react to what you've measured is as critical as the measurement itself. Speaking at a recent conference, The Huffington Post's CIO indicated they've built their own in-house analytics tools that measure exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it -- and that their editorial staff happens to be mainlining measurement data into their journalistic bloodstream at rather astonishingly brief intervals (say, every fifteen minutes). And they do something about what they find out.

Moreover, their business model is built blog-wise and via content partnerships (feeds) rather than print-wise and vectored towards exclusivity. Somehow their site seems more alive and current than those from ink-based newspapers that have gone over to the web.

I would also submit the Daily Beast as a relatively mainstream triumph. Though not much more than a year old, it is, by all accounts, thriving. Perhaps it's no surprise the former enfant terrible of print, Tina Brown, is behind this venture. Ms. Brown has proven again she knows how to make media do tricks -- just the way she did for a time in print.

The content model is not that different from HuffPo -- a certain swagger, a certain fearlessness about slamming different kinds of content up against one another without worrying too much about categorization or whom such content might offend, and a propensity for rapidly shifting content emphasis. I have not had the benefit of talking to the Daily Beast's technology team, but I'd wager they are heavy into measurement as well. There is little chance they could take the chance of moving content pieces around the page like it was a big chessboard without substantial metrics-based insight.

Finally, the Daily Beast also features numerous feeds from partners, and this no doubt allows it to add richness without excessive cost. Both HuffPo and DB leverage the relative cheapness of bloggers and independent journalists against the high actual value these new media contributors deliver. The world of bloggers, now a sort of minor leagues for Big Show venues like HuffPo and DB, supplies much that is intelligent, interesting, different, and decidedly un-great-and-un-grey -- for a whole lot less than the typical, even if somewhat straitened, newspaper staff.

I have no beef against people working at newspapers and have been for years nothing if not a bona fide news junkie -- but it's pointless to pretend the value-to-consumer is getting added at the employee pay and benefit level or the "must sell subscription to print" level. It's being provided by fast thinking, flexible, down-to-earth, web-born outlets that are so far enjoying the ride rather than trying to retrofit while weeping in a downpour of bad circulation news.

Besides taking my advice to buy popcorn and watch the print-news debacle unfold from a safe distance, is there any big takeaway for folks not trying to save a daily or monthly print vehicle? Yes -- and it's analytics.

Remember why the survivor-mammals in media are more nimble? It isn't simply because they're smaller and carry less baggage. It's because from the CEO on down to the newest content editor, their people don't look at measurement as a "great-to-have-for-the-meeting" and "somebody-send-me-a-report" semi-nuisance. They regard it as one of the major reasons they report to work in the morning. They collect, they devise schema, they ask ad hoc questions, they invest in technology, they plan based on results. They embrace web analytics. They prove why analytics, properly done, can be the one advantage that puts their company twirling batons in the front of the parade rather than in the back, sweeping up after the elephants have passed.

A rough prediction from me puts the final day of print for better than half the newspapers in the country inside a five year limit. And if my beloved New York Times keeps printing after the year 2020, I will be surprised.

Most existing newspapers and magazines will probably be forced to seriously rethink themselves (or close) in the next couple of years and for them, it won't be pretty. Meanwhile there will be new Huffingtons and Beasts and blogs and aggregators who've figured out how to put up a site, measure it, and then bite the public on the ear with what they've come up with. Expect to be accessing them on your iPad.