Dan Conover lays out the next 11 years of the news industry

Dan Conover at Xark tells us that we may have to wait for some sort of new media business model until a large city (San Francisco, perhaps?) loses its only newspaper. It's the business model that succeeds "after the fire" that matters more than what succeeds while the building is still burning, Conover says.

Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

The rest of his post is here. He takes us through 2020 with some reasonable predictions about the next 11 years of the news industry. One of the key predictions that caught my eye:

while most cities will generate enough revenue to support a professional press, watch for a wave of cooperative agreements between competing media companies and the popularization of the term “our broadcast partners."

I won't lie. I don't have a lot of experience in major-market journalism. I have worked my entire career in the same 30,000-population city. But I will say this: it always did seem inefficient to me whenever the TV news stations would send reporters to the same stories I was covering, especially when two or three TV reporters would show up.

I know that the TV stations can't necessarily use the text that I write, but why did they all have to have their cameras trained on the same guy behind the podium, getting essentially three identical shots?

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4. iTunes for news: A quickly thought-up model
5. iTunes not a money maker and wouldn’t be for news