This is certainly not light reading for a Monday morning, but if you have about 20 minutes to kill, the New Yorker’s Eric Alterman has written an epic-length piece on the demise of the American (to be fair, this is hardly just an “American” story) newspaper. To see where the industry is going wrong, Alterman turns to what seems to be working these days: The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post, in case you’re not familiar, bills itself as “breaking news and opinion” though, because its populated by a team of (mostly unpaid) bloggers, is almost entirely opinion dressed up in breaking news headlines. What makes The Huffington Post so successful (it’s about to break even with revs between $6-10 million) is it constantly channels reader feedback. The reader comment section of stories is often lengthier than the original reportage/opinion. And, the news cycle is determined by which stories are likely to generate further comment. In some ways, it more resembles a town hall meeting than the hierarchical newspaper we grew up with.

Of course, newspapers have begun to employ this formula. The UK papers have been in the forefront of this movement, even better than American papers, I’d say.

Ground-up is the winning formula for news sites going forward. It’s also the winning formula for any customer-facing blog strategy. If your newly minted brand blog is not attracting the audience you thought, that’s probably your problem. You’re trying to be like a newspaper. And, as everyone knows, the newspaper business is not a great place to be these days.

– Bernhard