Looking forward, the crystal ball isn’t kind for print journalism. Layoffs and losses hover around the newspaper industry like vultures ready to pounce on the firat company willing to cry uncle. Bloggers are suddenly annointed as the saviors of an industry that while strutured and ethical newsrooms struggle to keep up with the times.

For someone employed within the industry and a lover of getting my fingers dirty with newspaper ink, it’s a very discouraging outlook to have. Especially when no one really knows what the magic bullet is that can make everyone happy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But doing nothing or waiting for someone to make the first move isn’t the answer. Patrick Smith on PaidContent writes digital advertising revenue has begun to stall (thank you very much, Google, something that can be directly attributed to the fact newspapers have really only done the bare minimum they could possibly do on the Web.

As my colleague Ron Nurwisah notes, newspaper newsrooms have to become more online-friendly as we move into 2009. I’d like to take this much further and suggest that the role of the newspaper staffer should be turned on its head and become their own online content manager.

Reporters and editors should start equipping themselves with as many online tools as they can to supplement their own print-based content to a far greater extent than what we have now. Look at it at sort of a news-content pyramid  of sorts (borrowing a journalism “inverted pyramid” concept).

Own a blog that adds further content that may have gotten cut from print stories for space or just to add secondary comments; converge that coverage into Twitter accounts while maintaining relevent conversations with followers; push content out onto aggregators like Digg or Reddit manually (don’t automate it anymore) while watching comments and adding to them; buy a webcam and post to Seesmic inside the newsroom; embrace social networking and maintain an active Facebook, Friendfeed or Myspace account (if you haven’t already, I’d be shocked if you haven’t yet) to merge all these extra content pieces in one place; talk and reply to as many other netizens as possible – the trick is to keep the conversation going.

Thankfully, all of these efforts are not as labour intensive as you might think, you just have to start the ball rolling and set aside a few minutes each day to tinker around with your new toys. Start slowly and but set firm goals to do as much as you can to make sure eyeballs eventually migrate to your stories.

I remember one former colleague dismissing moving forward into the digital age saying, “I don’t have time for these. I’m happy to be a dinosaur.” And I don’t want to insinuate that my employers, the National Post is resting on its laurels (we’re not; expect big things next year) but reality has forced upon us a harsh truth.  We cannot afford to remain in a prehistoric journalism age any longer – embrace your inner geek pronto.

Photo: Reporters & editors busy working in the newsroom at the Kansas City Star newspaper. (From Google’s Life archive)