Dick Tracy. 3 newspapers in every city. Headlines that made sense. Enough content for an entire family to read.

Today's newspapers are a shell of their former selves.

The biggest problem with newspapers is that they are no longer newspapers. Nearly all local papers have become local versions of USA Today. There are 500 places where I can find all the breaking news about Brad and Angelina and even Natalee Holloway. These include many national magazines and newspapers, a dozen cable channels, and, more recently, the web. What I can't find in 500 places is local in-depth news, local investigative reporting, and non-pandering thought leadership.

Newspapers have to be more of what they can be: investigators, protectors of the truth, and guardians of the little guy. Newspapers can claim to be these things, but the reality is it can no longer be part of the corporate mission statement, since the corporation also owns TV stations, radio stations, and shopper-type newspapers, all of which make pandering to their audience a top priority. It starts at the top folks; if the chairman and the board have guts, the publisher will have guts, the editors will have guts, and they will support the reporters who have guts.

But its hard to have guts when the only commonality between all your media properties is the fact that they depend on advertising. It was easier for papers to stand up to bullies when they had more influence and more readers, but now, the corporate owners audience is in broadcast, and broadcast by nature panders. When was the last time NBC ran as influential a documentary as "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The 1980's?

I love newspapers. Growing up in New York, there were nearly a dozen local flavors of tri-state area dailies, each with a very distinctive personality. The only personality today's newspapers seem to have is consensus. There is no good or bad, right or wrong, win or lose. Look at the headlines.. "Support for Gun Control Waning (second line) But Still needed, Some Say." I made this up, but it is fact a very popular style of headline writing. No one is right, no one is wrong, we don't want to offend anybody.

The classifieds remain a vital source of income for newspapers, but it's tough to compete with Craig's List, which runs free classifieds and allows lots of pictures (a much better way to survey apartments, as an example.)

Which means display advertising and inserts remain the paper's growth area. Only relevant, fly-off-the-newstand content will change the sinking of the Titanic.

Which is why to get our content, we have to subscribe to a dozen blogs or more. Which is a shame, because the newspaper has one thing blogs don't- experienced people, strong heritages and product portability.

Chairpeople of multi-media property owners I beseech you: Don't concede the death of newspapers by throwing all your weight behind your glossy. blow-dried, feature-laden 10 o'clock news. Release the hounds, and let papers do what they are supposed to do: dig and report.

About The Author:

Brien Lee is a writer, creative director, and speaker. He is President of Brien Lee VideoStory, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin based national provider of video, multimedia, and web content for business to business marketing. http://www.videostory.com