The year 2009 will be one of reckoning for the newspaper industry, as it will have to come up with a new plan of action, Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, said in a speech on Wednesday. In the past, newspapers relied on newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertisers, he said, and as the new business model relies only on the latter, it "makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens, the stool is likely to fall."

Newspapers that are solely dependent on ad dollars, instead of on readers, will also begin to cater to the advertisers, instead of serving the readers, Isaacson pointed out in his speech. This will lead to newspapers creating a lot of sections about "gardening and home improvement," while cutting other sections, such as book reviews.

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. (Samuel) Johnson said, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Those fortnights are upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year that newspapers, followed by magazines and other content creators, realised that further rounds of cost-cutting will not stave off the hangman," Isaacson said in his speech, posted on the Aspen Institute Web site.

Although eliminating or cutting print editions is an option, and will definitely be part of newspapers' future, it still leaves them tied to ad dollars only, he said. And there's another option out there.

"It's a bold, old idea: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce. If this happens, the advertising implosion of 2008 will have the benefit of birthing a business strategy that permits publications to become more beholden to their readers."

Newspapers have been charging for content for about 400 years, and even did so when the Internet emerged in the early 1990s, Isaacson pointed out. Yet, as the Internet changed, and ad-supported content grew, content creators abandoned the paid model, and search engines, portals and aggregators, as well as Internet service providers profited on all the free content. "Thus we have a world in which phone companies make it easy and expected for kids to pay up to 20¢ when they send a text message, but it seems technologically and psychologically difficult to get people to pay 10¢ for a magazine, newspaper, or newscast," Isaacson said.

Options for newspapers and magazines to charge for online content can range from subscriptions to micropayments, but one thing is certain: they must be able to profit from their content. News sites can create their own easy-to-use micropayment systems, making them "so easy to use that you'd hardly think about making an impulse purchase."

To read Isaacson's full speech, visit the Aspen Institute's Web site.