I work for a newspaper but sometimes wonder if it’s going the way of the telegram. This sense of impending doom was exacerbated today by Jeff Cole, who has been heading at team at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications, that has collected data about Internet usage for the past six years. Cole, who was speaking at a MSN/Sympatico digital advertising conference in Toronto today, said teenagers aren’t reading newspapers and likely never will. At the same time, newspaper publishers are still struggling with ways to generate revenue from offering content online because there are too many free ways to get the news. With fewer readers and less-than-encouraging online prospects, Cole believes many newspapers will disappear over the next 30 to 40 years (Yikes!). One of the only bright spots, he said, are Sunday newspapers such as the New York Times that could become more popular by morphing themselves into weekly magazines. It’s a provocative viewpoint because newspapers have been around for such a long time and are still an integral part of many peoples’ daily lives. But you can’t help but think that Cole is right and/or newspapers need to change their stripes to survive. If you look around newsrooms across North America, hundreds of reporters are being cut loose as publishers scramble for ways to deal with lower advertising (which is being taken away by online rivals such as Craigslist, eBay, Match.com, Yahoo, Google, etc.). As a journalist, I don’t think newspapers will disappear but I'm biased. That said, they will need to aggressively build out their online operations (blogs, podcasts, video blogs, Web sites, RSS, etc.) as extensions of their off-line businesses – even if the business models are far from clear yet. At the same time, they need to recognize their brands and content are valuable and can be leveraged with some creativity.

Earlier this week, Canada lost a true hero when urban activist/writer Jane Jacobs died at the age of 89. Since she moved to Canada in 1969, Jacobs had been a major force in shaping Toronto's development - providing city hall with a vision of what the city could be. Perhaps the highlight was her active role in killing the Spadina Expressway, which would have run a highway right through the downtown core. (Jacobs also led the charge to kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway).
   In addition to her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs was a prolific writer and constant presence on the local politican scene. It would have been fascinating if Jacobs had embraced the blogosphere. With an insatiable hunger for new ideas, news and lively discussion, Jacobs could have used a blog to deliver her views on a variety of topics to an audience with a growing interest in how large urban centres are developing and evolving.
   At the mesh conference, our politics/society stream is going to explore how blogs are playing a growing role in getting new ideas and fresh thinking into the mainstream. With Michael Geist kicking things off with a keynote and panelists that include Andrew Coyne, Paul Wells, Captain's Quarters, David Pollard and Tom Williams, it should be a highly engaging and informative day. For more thoughts about this stream from the mesh gang, check out Mathew Ingram, Stuart MacDonald and Rob Hyndman. You can register for mesh here.