(An interview with Roger Black)

This week, Edmonton’s SeeMagazine did a great interview of Roger Black, and the headline couldn’t be more provocative for publishers, editors or anyone involved in the newspaper industry: Can good design save newspapers?

 NY1 viewers too busy, or lazy, to peruse the local papers have been able to rely on Pat Kiernan's segment In the Papers to do the job for them: every morning, the affable anchor spends a few moments looking th

 In a column in Monday's New York Times,  David Carr became the latest media watcher to suggest that newspapers start charging for their content online. After citing some fallen papers (Rocky Mountain News) and some that are teetering on the edge (San Francisco Chronicle), Carr said some other ostriches could still save their necks by making people pay.
 

Quietly, while many in the news media where mourning the Rocky and speculating about which paper would be next, Hearst's newspaper division has been making some of its own news. First was their threat to close the San Francisco Chronicle, which has been disastrously losing money at least since Hearst paid some $50 million to "sell" their flagship, the Examiner.

Google has 81 million results for the search, "saving the newspaper industry," which may be part of the problem. (Favorite Google link: "Can French Teenagers Save the Newspaper Industry?")

Everyone has an idea of how to save the business, but the problem is that we are still thinking of it as an industry like automobiles or real estate development—all now whining for bailouts.

The Pareto Principle, sometimes also called “the law of the vital few,” is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist of the 19th Century. What, you may ask, does a man who died nearly a hundred years ago have to say to the newspaper business of today? Pareto discovered, studying the economy of Italy at the time, that 20% of the population produced 80% of the gross national product.