This is a bit off topic, because it’s of the dead trees variety, but this headline came across: Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs.

The timing isn’t as good as hopped, considering we’re in this thing called a recession, but this happened because a lot of newspapers treated their web properties like their print properties. Sure, the web have some very real expenses — those servers don’t come cheap, and there is that pesky thing called electricity — but it’s much less expensive than paying people to run the presses, a lot less expensive than cutting down a bunch of trees, and don’t get me started on the costs of dropping off one of those newspapers at everyone’s doorstep.

So by charging more, sites like Craigslist.org and Move.com ate them alive.

I like print!

I love print!

But print, as quick as it as happened, is dead as in George Carlin dead.

Companies keep on charging us the same for a digital product as they do for a product that has manufactured (software distributors like Adobe, publishers like the Wall Street Journal). At one point or another, we’re all going to wise up, yo.

They should take a page out of the ESPN’s book. ESPN is one of the most profitable entertainment entities on the planet, and they know how to play in multiple mediums better than anyone on the planet.

ESPN.com is an amazing (and the leading sports site), ESPN the network has about 20 or so properties it seems, and the print magazine has all but killed Sports Illustrated, because they are covering the whole media package.

I pay more for their Insider product than for their magazine, because I get the magazine for free as part of their Insider service. $4.95 a month, and more often than not, I read much more of their Insider content online. They have none of the legacy costs, and they’re able to leverage much more of their content (have you tried fitting a video clip on a newspaper page?), and get a higher CPM from their advertisers.

I imagine there isn’t a single newspaper executive that has thought of any of this, especially the management over at the Tribune, a company that owns many outlets of both video and print content, yet integrate none of that.

The biggest lost art in building websites is building content.

There have been quite a few times where I invested a lot of time coming up with a web design or an information architecture, and at the end of that, the response was, “you’re supposed to come up with the content, right?”

The last thing I am, other than coming up with a few catchy headlines and some grammatically incorrect copy, is a copy writer. There should be a dedicated person to this, and there seldom is. Additionally, good writers that can influence are not only hard to find, but paid well — much better than most people are willing to pay, but not as much as their true value.

My advice to clients: great sites have great content. Create great content, and you’ll get more traffic.

By the time most clients get to the point of writing the copy after struggling with the information architecture and the design they just want the site to be done; unfortunately, that’s usually when the real work begins. If they care about doing it right, they’ll care about putting content out there that isn’t marketing speak but that really speaks to the user. Users can figure out when they are being talked down to. Or, as this article points out, passion sells because it connects.

I think I mentioned this before, but I had a stint as an editor in chief at a local community newspaper (legals paper). I learned a lot there and as the same as a college paper. Writing blogs is much like writing smaller articles for newspaper — you have to make the short seem interesting, and writing less is much, much harder that writing more, especially if you want to make it relevant. Copyblogger has some pretty good tips on what we should be learning from newspapers, and applying to writing for blogs.

Even marketers get it: Dosh Dosh has a really good article on 50 Web Usability Tips that Help You Attract and Retain Visitors to Your Website that cover a lot of items even most Information Architects and User Interface Designers forget when designing a website i.e. who’s going to write the help text. It’s a good read.