Papers May Be Using Web 2.0 Tools, but they Still Don't Get That everyone Else is Using them too, Building Their Own Mousetraps.

USA Today has a piece declaring that newspapers are finally waking up to the fact that the media world is changing around them and nostalgia for reading the morning paper over coffee will sustain them only so long.

Headlined, "Papers take a leap forward, opening up to new ideas," the piece contains this quote from a guy from the American Press Institute:

"Across the industry the message I pick up is, 'Oh my God. It's slipping away. What can I do?' " says Stephen Gray, managing director of the initiative, called Newspaper Next. The answer, he says, will require "a shift of thought from, 'How do we get people to read more newspapers?' to 'What problems are people trying to solve in their lives, and how can we help?'"

I disagree. Kudos to the papers for finally embracing the things that many of their readers have been well aware of for years. But these are just tools. What the people who run the newspaper business will never get their minds around is that, unlike those multi-million dollar presses whirling away in their printing plants, these tools are available to just about anyone. So, while newspapers may ultimately have a fighting chance at staying relevant and profitable enough to exist (I, for one, hope they do), they will never again command the kind of authority or dominate the market for (especially local) news as they did in the past.

That's a good thing for the public. It could even be a good thing for papers. If they were willing to accept it. But so far, they aren't.