On paper, it looks as if the written word still has a place

There has been enough said about the BBC this week, so perhaps it is time for something completely different. So say, for some megalomaniacal reason, it was time to launch a newspaper, right here in 2007. What would you do?

Well, who would start with a newspaper? Surely on any contemporary view, it would be best to bin the paper product Monday to Friday and offer news real time, Reuters-style, online as text. That would end the dilemma between holding the best news story back for tomorrow and releasing it right away - and with scope for exclusives lasting an hour or two, it is perfectly possible to generate news with impact online.

Product loyalty ought to go out of the window during the week too. Best instead to divide the readership into segments – as the importance of the website home page diminishes, it is best to give people the chance to find the stories they are interested in, backed up by a system of e-mail alerts.

Web readers probably won’t read so many individual stories, so it has to be about information and quirky stories and humour. Too much high-mindedness won’t win a large consumer audience.

A print product makes most sense on a Saturday and Sunday, when relatively few people are online, when daily sales are at their highest and it is possible to capture all that luxury advertising with glossy magazines. And rather than a news section, that might be better replaced by what is overtly a news magazine, an Economist or whatever, with a bit more personality. Better paper stock might encourage readers to hang on to it too.

Back at the daily website, a 6.30am to 8.30am radio show (with all bits available to listen to again) would be worth doing online to complement the news product. Surely, there is a sum of money that could be paid to a John Humphrys, with perhaps the right sponsor and a lot less promotion? If readers are going to listen to their newspaper it has to sound like their radio station, with a bit more political opinion – crucial to help to differentiate it from the politically correct BBC.

The radio show might need fewer guests but each one could be interviewed at greater length. The only other audio worth bothering with is pure entertainment – any celebrity chat, say for the weekend printed product, ought to have an audio complement. If a news website wants to compete in the evenings and the weekends, it is only entertainment that can compete with television and radio; facts and news are morning and afternoon pursuits.

As for video, it has to be all about watchability. Life is too short to watch a lot of video in the office, or on the small computer screen at home – so what is deployed has to be dramatic. As any broadcaster will tell you, anybody talking without a good visual background for more than seven seconds is boring: which is why reporters simply talking to the camera is so dull. The trick is to use enough video to keep viewers on the site, maximising the time spent online – but be realistic about how much can be consumed. Nobody is sitting down for 90 consecutive minutes here.

But the real multimedia trick might be to create the online, real-time equivalent of crosswords and su doku (for ideas, see Yahoo! puzzles, one of the most popular parts of the internet group’s website). Puzzles are extremely popular with women, particularly older women, which can help to broaden the demographic appeal, if nothing else.

Anyway, that is just one proposal for News 2007. But before getting too excited about the future, it is also worth considering the impact of print switch-off.

Henry Blodget, the US analyst formerly of dot-com fame, published a valuable antidote to overexcited thinking with the help of an analysis of The New York Times accounts. He estimated recently that revenues would halve, up to 50 per cent of the journalists would be fired and the company would still lose money.

That is the problem with postnewspaper thinking: the profit still lies on paper, where the yield per reader is far greater than online. So, a reverie about how you would reinvent newspapers is fun but, in the end, nobody can afford not to love the old newspaper to bits either.

History might not be fashionable but it has a value, however exciting the rest of the 21st century is going to be.

Dan Sabbagh: Media analysis
The Times