Doug Frantz quits for a job at The Wall Street Journal just months after urging staffers to stay the course when the paper’s editor was fired for refusing to cut more jobs. That can’t be good for morale. The LA Times is still fighting back from its efforts to become The New York Times of the west coast in the 80s and 90s, a campaign that caused it to run ponderous stories that were irrelevant to the Latino audience that should have been its source of growth. This is a paper in serious trouble, while the Journal at least stands a chance of surviving the industry meltdown.

Alan Mutter gathers up the dismal earnings reports of the major newspaper companies and asks the tough question: how long can these businesses survive?

He writes:

“While everyone in the newspaper business acknowledges that the good old days are gone, few people viscerally understand how rapidly the industry is coming to the point that it cannot sustain itself without farther-reaching – and likely more wrenching – structural changes than such relatively modest efforts to date as scrapping stock tables, outsourcing telephone ad-takers or even down-sizing newsrooms by 50%.

“Absent plans to pare entrenched bureaucracy, eliminate archaic work rules and speedily implement bold strategic initiatives to build significant and sustainable new revenue streams, the industry could find itself on a hopelessly irreversible trajectory. If it isn’t there already.”

I asked much the same question in my essay, “How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism” earlier this year. The point is that the economics of newspapering – with its high fixed cost – doesn’t scale down very well. At some point, it becomes impossible to meet operating expenses, and when that happens, the whole model collapses very quickly. We will barely know what hit us.

The New York Times‘ David Carr writes of an experimental online publication called AssignmentZero.net that uses collaborative, iterative process to build a news story in real time and with contributors from all walks of life. A recent package on “crowdsourcing” is now live, which is appropriate, since crowdsourcing is essentially what AssignmentZero is doing.

The whole idea of having news reported by citizens and aggregated with work done by professional reporters gives a lot of journalists the willies, but I believe this is the future of journalism. Why would you want to ignore the observations, insight and feedback of knowledgeable sources just because they don’t know what an inverted pyramid is? Increasingly, the job of the editor will be to pull together information from many different sources and organize it into a coherent package that can be looked at from many different perspectives.

Most news stories online today are versions of print stories with a few hyperlinks. In the future, news packages will be constructed from the ground up with the links in mind. The reader should have many access and jumping-off points, and the narrative should permit the reader to dive down where he/she wants and resurface somewhere else. Check out the AssignmentZero package for an example of how this might look.