Over at David Strom’s Web Informant, David Hakala writes an intriguing piece about newspapers, online and off.

Newspapers will never get IT right

That title is his conclusion. Newspapers don’t get IT—as in “Information Technology”— right and, they don’t get it, meaning the news delivery business right. They are shackled to old concepts like selling the news as it ages and advertising. Right: I want to pay money for old news in their archives. If anything I might pay for current news if they were the only outlet.

And no matter what Bill Gates says, advertising as we currently know it is going to die. I think it will be a pretty messy death and we will all have to suffer through some really irritating histrionics but throwing ads out mindlessly, even to something you’ve identified as your target group, won’t be sustained under the new Internet regime where I will manage my vendors the way I like.

David does a wonderful job of deconstructing the online newspaper presence and make sure to read the comments.

Bonus: Project VRM site.