This weekend Slate offers a feature of Philip Anschutz, a conservative businessman (and big soccer fan) who has launched printed papers under the name the Examiner in Washington and San Francisco.

Jack Shafer syggests Anschutz needs to invest more in editorial and consider the Web in order to be taken seriously.

Correct and double correct.

I wrote about this several weeks ago, and what follows is that original copy. You can get it free
any time.

I have a love-hate relationship with newspapers. (This newsboy is advertising news of the Titanic's sinking.)

The business has been at the heart of my "profession" for a century. The whole idea of a journalist as a professional is also a product of this business. I took my graduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism. Joseph Medill was the old reprobate who built the Chicago Tribune empire.

But as I've said many times here this whole idea of a "journalism profession" is a fraud. Professionals can make it on their own. Journalists can't. If you don't have a job you are not part of the fraternity. Even if you build a journalism company based on your vision of what the profession should be, you are always nothing more than a businessman.

The New York Times recently quoted a newspaper consultant as saying "For some publishers, it really sticks in the craw that they are giving away their content for free."

Here in one sentence we have the utter cluelessness of the industry. Here is an opportunity waiting for someone to exploit it.

Newspapers have always given away their content. Always. The money you pay for your daily paper goes only toward its distribution costs. The ink, the paper, the printing, and the entire editorial budget (which is just 8% of the total, although publishers act like it's the whole thing) -- that comes from advertising.

Where does the money come from? Many sources:

• Display ads next to copy, which papers now know how to get online.
• Help wanted ads, lost to specialist sites.
• Real estate ads, lost to specialized sites.
• Automotive classifieds, lost to specialized sites.

Then there's a very, very important type of ad, the advertising insert. Newspapers haven't even tried to replicate this online, although they could.

When newspaper publishers say they want to end subscriber "freeloading," they are showing an enormous ignorance of their own business, not just the Web.

They have already hurt their circulation dramatically by requiring registration of all users. This also causes a lot of people to lie, to trade registrations, and lowers the value of the papers' registration database. It can cut online circulation as much as 60-80%.

Add a toll gate to your stories and you cut that circulation again, another 90%.

So what newspapers are in the process of doing is destroying their circulation base, using backwards logic, and providing a wide opening to any competitor who can maximize online ad revenue and keep the gates open.

Of course, they've been doing this for years, based on the assumption that they each hold a "monopoly" within their markets. (I just adore this 1911 Leslie-Judge cartoon attacking Democrat William Jennings Bryan as a hypocrite for attacking the wealthy while becoming wealthy himself. Don't you?)

Nothing could be further from the truth.

TV has taken away their market for breaking news. Most cities have business weeklies. Many also have legal weeklies, sports weeklies and entertainment weeklies. My own area also has an ethnic paper (African-American in this case) and two neighborhood papers (filled with real estate ads), which are tied to my mailbox or thrown on my lawn (depending), free and regularly.

That's just the print competition.

Now, thanks to their own Cluelessness, newspapers are offering you this once-in-a-lifetime chance to take their last niche through the online world.

How can you make money?

• Maximize circulation. Use cookies to define your audience for advertisers. Don't put anything in the way of someone's getting everything you've got.
  
• Create news that is vital not only on the Web, but on mobile phones, in our daily lives.
  
• Use the news as an "extra" and build your business model around the reader's need for advertising.
  
• Make it interactive. Encourage cell phone users to SMS you about traffic accidents and celebrity sightings. Give prizes for the best news tips about local issues.
  
• Advertise. Buy ads on buses with instructions for accessing your site, via PC or mobile.
  
• Build campaigns. Get the newspapers' best advertisers on your side with campaigns that build prospect lists.
  

The age of the local Web is here. Get on board, close off the papers' last hope of a niche, and you may just kill them for good. Then you take over the market by using your online effort as the heart of a print product.