A new company called Journalism Online has formed to help revive the dying institution. Comprised of five media gurus,  JO’s mission is to help publications implement reader subscriptions and generate incremental revenue by keeping most content free and deeming certain things as ‘premium content.’ It just might work!

But I fear that it may be too late. This is hard for me to admit, coming from a newspaper background. I’ve spend almost my entire career in print media, but it seems that any plan to reclaim online revenue for newspapers is futile. How can you expect readers to start paying for something you’ve been giving them for free? You would have to something ludicrous … like convince every news media to lock down and refuse to publish anything on the web. And then you would probably just lose more readers, and some other fly-by-night news site would take your place.

I don’t think there’s solution that any publisher is going to like at this point in the game. In retrospect, newspapers should have charged subscription fees for all content from the begining. I think everyone knows that now. But with today’s tech savy audience and in this economic climate, newspaper companies need to be proactive. They may need to fold and go all in online to create a newer, shinier web brand of their newspaper with more bells and whistles that will attract younger readers and advertisers. The money is not in subscribers … it’s in eyeballs and advertising.

Tomorrow morning I look forward to grinding my own beans (courtesy of some grocery store brand that I hope can at least beat community), right before giving the Mac Mini a memory upgrade (currently at 1GB, maxing it out at 2GB). Ever since I installed Leopard and CS4 (yes, I know we’re behind the times), there’s been a significant decrease in processing speed. So tomorrow, after a quick trip to Home Depot for a “Mac Mini memory upgrade kit” (aka two putty knives), I’ll be disassembling then hopefully reassembling my way to a faster, happier Mac.

And yes, there will be pictures.

Tomorrow, well, that’s a story yet to be told.

Oh, and a word to the wise; Be sure that you’re ready to permanently delete those files in your trash bin before you say okay, because getting those back is like getting gum off an ape.

Best Buy, we salute you, but don’t for a second think this means we forgive you for all the times you’ve screwed us. FYI.

Kerrville, we’ll be back next year and we miss you already!

Only downside is the random commercial before you play, but with the great graphics and easy controls, totally worth it.