I read with much interest a take on how to fix the newspaper industry by my colleague, Jen Gerson. I wanted to respond to it almost immediately but was ultimately dragged away by birthday parties, goodbye parties and what has now become a weekly excursion to Ikea.

Anyways, Jen’s post raises some an interesting idea in the newspaper world and that is to fix it, you must break it up apart and strategically sell sections during certain days to maximize readership and profits. An excerpt:

Why not divide the product up, sell it separately and publish according to readership? So, you maybe have a 10-page, quality news section in tabloid format that comes out daily for free. Your sports is the next big money maker, but your readership and game schedules means it makes sense to publish it only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, for example. Charge 25 cents for each of those. Sell the arts sections once or twice a week for $1 a pop. Then offer a high quality weekly newsmagazine on weekends that sums up the week’s news and contextualizes in long-form, combined with features. You could charge $1.50 to $5.00 on that alone. Then take your fashion and lifestyle sections, put them into a monthly glossy magazine format and sell them on magazine newsstands at standard magazine rates.

Interesting, no? Could it work? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Ultimately, I believe this method would mess up with the very psychological nature of a newspaper reader and  create confusion and thus lower sales. Sports, for example, is increasingly a 7-day/week activity and can’t be sustained on only a three-day outline. I agree with the notion that we have to examine each section on their on merits and how they fit into the entire news package, but I’d suspect that some people would get turned off this model. Dirty Games sort of agrees in their own way in their post here.

I’ve hunkered back from really commenting too much on my blog on the media industry and its woes, partly because of a former editor telling me I was beginning to sound “too preachy” and partly because, well, it’s not like I can confidently call myself a veteran of this industry – yet (give me until next year when I crack the 5-year mark) – so why should I presume I should be squawking about something I am still learning about.

But times are not getting any better for the newspaper industry. And if I want to have a long-term career in this business – and I most certainly do – it will be young journalists such as myself and Jen who will inherit the industry’s problems and that will have to be the one’s who will be poking, proding and shaping the future of what the newspaper will look like.

Jen also omits, in my opinion, the second-most important section of a newspaper – the business section. Whether this falls under the general “news” umbrella is unclear, but given that the biggest news of the year centres across this financial meltdown, business journalism has never been so important. Package that with detailed analysis, earnings outlooks, analyst reports, op-ed and you’ll begin to see why papers like the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal will never, ever go away.

So, with that said, instead of making this post an argument against a pretty well-thought out idea, let me attempt to make add another idea to this rolling brainstorm session:

Along with news, business and images (I’m lumping video and multimedia in here as well), I’ve always believed that the comment or opinion sections are one of the strongest pillars of the newspaper. This reason alone is why a newspaper like the National Post (my former employers) will continues to stay alive, no matter how many people forecast their demise – their comment section (both in NP and Financial Post) are top notch, regardless if you agree with them or not.

Even though blogs have begun to add noise to the vacuous arena of opinion, original, well written commentary pieces appear to have a stronger voice than ever. But the lines are beginning to blur, with sites like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post providing a unique mix of blog commentary and news.

If I ran a newspaper, I’d begin to open things up a little bit. Create your own blog network, leveraging the valuable brand you’ve already utilized to gain your 100,000+ subscriber base, and let anyone who wants to write a blog under your auspicious name do so. Then, along with your columnists, editorials, guest columns and letters page in your traditional Opinion section, take your top blog posts, either by “most comments”, “most read” or “top ranked”, and throw them up on an extra page in the paper. Maybe two, if you want to allow advertisers to be allowed on a hybrid, experimental opinion section of the paper.  Extend the idea to sports, arts, business, etc. Fiddle with the amount of real estate – one page, half page, quarter page, etc. And no matter what, keep people writing in your “blog network” and build your online community outwards. Make it big enough and then go tell your advertisers at the online activity buzzing within your brand. Sell some online ads. Rinse, cycle, repeat.

This way, you give someone the rare opportunity to have much more exposure and force a blog writer to actually, well, write something well if they want their name in bright lights, while newspapers continue to provide good commentary for your readers. And they get to bridge the gap between old and new media in a terribly fun and interesting way. Win for all!