The safe bet for a distribution model is to go all digital with some kind of print edition, probably a weekly with curated content from the website and some original magazine content. But once we've made the assumption that the vast majority of resources will be on the digital side, we still have a lot to figure out.

Distribution Power

Papers used to have an incredible amount of distribution power. Every single day, they could drive an ad or an idea — with Super Bowl-level penetration rates — into a city. In the post-Internet world, that distribution power went away. Papers became like ferry operators after a (super)highway bridge opens; all of a sudden, people can choose their own schedule and route through the world, and it becomes awfully hard to charge for the boatride.

The question then becomes: is that distribution power gone forever? Is there a way to get control back of the channel? Could your advertising sales people ever say, "Yes, Apple/Microsoft/Macy's, we can get your message to 60 percent of the city."

Here's one idea: what if the PostChron became a major provider of free WiFi in the very places where papers used to be distributed — BART, MUNI, bus stations, major areas. Convert those sad little booths into WiFi hotspots. The meraki model or early Net Zero model of inserting tiny ads into the top of the browser window or entry splash page might appeal to advertisers. Alternately, that space could be used to publish the daily headlines as a sort of "virtual newspaper box." Users see a well-designed front page before proceeding on to browse the web. Using that connection to distribute and promote the paper won't necessarily be easy. It's not that people couldn't just click away — they could and will — but the guaranteed access to device users that you have located in geographic space, increasing the value of advertisements that you can sell.

Here's another idea: get into the outdoor advertising market. It's not hard to imagine Post Chron headlines on the electronic billboard that's painfully visible to all commuters going to / from Oakland.

Design for Mobility

The land of early adopters. The SF Bay Area has the highest concentration of iPhone/smartphone users anywhere in the U.S. The PostChron needs to be accessible to those without smartphones, of course, but (I'd argue) it should be designed for those who do have them. The product might even be designed for the iPhone first and the web second.

Remember, the iPhone is a platform on which people have become accustomed to paying for things. That's an opportunity. Also, GPS phone + addictive news product + local ads = another opportunity. All of these (ads and stories) might be delivered hyper-locally to mobile through use of QR Codes.

Finally, the virtue of focusing on phones as a distribution platform is that it's easy to then press them into service as input devices, especially for cameraphone photojournalism. Obviously, this is an idea that's occurred to smart people at every news organization -- but the difference is that in the SF Bay Area, there's a critical mass of smartphones to actually make it work.

Content Model Benefits of iPhone App Development. As noted in the thread below, small blogs and community papers don't have easy access to the iPhone as a platform. Could there be a way to provide them to incorporate their content into the PostChron app, allowing them to get onto the device. It'd be a great way to bring hyperlocal content to people. The paper as producer and aggregator of content for the iPhone and Android phones. Why not?