They're operating on the wrong premise.<p>The idea here is that their business got disrupted by the internet and therefore they need some sort of internet-wizard who can tell them all the things they need to do to reclaim their business. That world-view only works if you think that the internet is nothing more than magic.<p>The reason that newspapers are failing is that they had local monopolies, got soft and fat, and then got disintermediated in a hurry by the internet. Now, newspapers don't even have a good or correct idea of their own identity any longer. I'll give you a hint, a newspaper ain't about reprinting marmaduke, or the weather, or crossword puzzles, or classified ads, or even obituaries.<p>Someone recently brought up that great quote of George Orwell's "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."<p>I think there's a sound truth to that. But I think that's only half of journalism, the other half is research. Not just revealing what has been known by some and kept secret to others, but revealing what has been unknown to everyone. Investigative reporting need not necessarily have a "bad guy", as in Orwell's view.<p>But this is almost orthogonal to the current mission of most newspapers and the current educational foundation of most journalism graduates. "Journalism" the discipline today focuses on the form, the mechanism, and access, precisely those things which have become the most ubiquitous and fungible in the modern age. Journalism puts the cart before the horse, imagining that reporting is done by journalists with specializations. The way of the future, I believe, is the opposite, experts in a particular field with journalist specializations.<p>In the past there was much value around merely printing or re-printing a thing. It was like manufacturing. If you manufacture a widget it doesn't matter that a thousand other people are simultaneously manufacturing nearly identical widgets, in the end it's still a widget, and has some value. Today there is only a little value in making newspaper "widgets" (writing stories) because copying is so close to free as to make little difference. The world doesn't need a million stories all regurgitating the same wire reports to their local readership, everyone has access to the wire reports directly now.<p>The value is in original reporting and investigation. That's not something that an executive skilled in SEO and traffic monetization could necessarily help with. If anything they'd be more likely to drive your newspaper into being a tabloid than into becoming a robust source of original reporting.<p>But that is what I would do if I ran a newspaper. Fire all the regurgitators, keep all the people who will write the sort of stories that nobody else is writing and hire people who are experts in some field first and writers second.