In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News gives subscribers the computer software necessary to receive--free of charge--a separate "A la Carte" edition of the daily paper, updated frequently and available 24 hours a day by computer-telephone hookup.
In Ft. Worth, the Star-Telegram offers stories from the daily paper and from national news services to residents for $9.95 a month on StarText--a computer service that enables users to get an early look at the next day's classified ads, as well as make travel reservations, exchange electronic messages and access a "reference room" that includes book and movie reviews and gardening tips.
In Atlanta, the Journal and Constitution have 250 special telephone lines for readers who want sports scores, news updates, restaurant reviews, movie schedules, soap opera updates and stock, weather and traffic reports.
Newspapers, threatened by increased competition and decreased profits and readership, are searching for new ways to attract and retain readers and advertisers as the print media move, however timorously, into the increasingly electronic decades of the Information Age.
Newspapers are trying to figure out how they can reuse information they gather every day at great expense and now use only once. They want to take advantage of new communications technologies. They want to cement a seven-day-a-week relationship with readers by becoming more useful and more interesting to a generation accustomed to the accessibility and excitement of television, computers and video games.
Above all, newspapers want to reverse--or at least stem--a decline that finds only 52.6% of the American public reading a newspaper every day.
Many experts in communications technology envision a personalized electronic newspaper, available by some combination of computer and television set, early in the next century; in the meantime, some newspapers are experimenting with a variety of intermediate technologies.
"I cannot imagine a time in the future when there will not be newspapers in the home," says John B. Evans, executive vice president at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. "A newspaper is a data base. It happens to be on crushed trees right now. I don't think a newspaper proprietor . . . should care how it is delivered as long as it's his information."
More than a dozen newspapers have tried sending small editions to selected subscribers by fax, and others are experimenting with various versions of videotex--newspapers by computer.
If newspapers insist on remaining exclusively in the traditional "newspaper business," as opposed to the "information business" or the "communications business," experts say they will suffer the same fate as the coal and railroad industries, which considered themselves in the coal and railroad businesses, rather than the energy and transportation businesses.
Some in the newspaper industry have lulled themselves into complacency with the bromide that new technologies don't supplant old technologies, they just supplement them.
No, television didn't kill radio, but it clearly diminished its impact. Airplanes put many steamship and railroad companies out of business. Print newspapers may remain alive in an era of electronic communication, but they, too, could become quaint relics of another time.
"There is increasing awareness in the industry that we'll need to do new things if we are to prosper in the future as we have in the past," says Jay Harris, vice president for operations at Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
But while one of the newspaper's primary functions has always been to chronicle change, newspapers themselves have been largely resistant to it. High profit margins and monopolies or near-monopolies have enabled the industry to neglect experimentation, research and development.
Newspapers traditionally have been willing to spend money "only if there is an immediate rate of return," says Joseph Ungaro, an executive with the Gannett newspaper chain.
Thus, newspapers were slow to computerize, slow to shift from drab black and white to spritely redesigns incorporating color and slow to recognize both the opportunity and the threat of new communications technologies.
Newspapers must undergo a "paradigm shift," says John Altson, speaking as someone who has long worked on new newspaper technologies, rather than as an executive for his current employer, IBM. Altson says that instead of insisting that everything will be fine if only they can raise advertising rates a little, cut costs a little and redesign the paper a little, newspapers must begin "looking at the customers and . . . understanding their needs."
Editors worry that such suggestions are really code words for "dumbing down" their papers, for providing color photos, flashy graphics and short stories, rather than comprehensive news and insightful commentary. But technology experts say there will be a market for the traditional content in the future, regardless of how it is assembled and delivered and even if its audience shrinks.
