A Future for Newspapers? Enter Barney Kilgore

(MoneyWatch)  Sixty-eight years ago, when he became managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Barney Kilgore assumed custody of a broken business model. Since its founding over a half century earlier, in 1889, the Journal had thrived by supplying stock prices and market information to investors.

But by the early 1940s, it had lost what had once been a virtual monopoly over such information, and along with it, a large share of its readership. Radio had arrived on the scene, carrying real-time market reports, and numerous daily newspapers in every city were now also publishing stock market news.

Kilgore responded to this challenge with a remarkably simple formula. He switched the Journal's focus from what had happened yesterday to what could happen tomorrow. Thus, he introduced more analysis into the Journal's coverage. Over the next two decades, he helped build the Journal's circulation from 33,000 to over a million.

I learned all of this from a book review on WSJ.com the other night by L. Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Journal. Crovitz's fascinating column was devoted to a book by another former Journal exec, Richard Tofel, entitled Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism.

Tofel discovered memos by Kilgore that show he recognized early on that the large daily metropolitan newspapers (unlike the Journal) were expending too much effort chasing news that consumers could easily obtain elsewhere. (Sound familiar?) Kilgore's prescription: Shrink the paper to one section and focus on local coverage. Plus, stay future-oriented.

As we reported yesterday, at least 89 print newspapers have already ceased publication in the U.S. so far this year. That number will only be growing for the foreseeable future. But what if some publisher somewhere tried to test out Kilgore's hypothesis? What if it worked?

Trimming the paper down to one compact section with a highly focused, interpretive and future-oriented content strategy would save a lot of costs (printing, newsprint, distribution, staffing, overhead, etc.) that do not necessarily equate to stronger journalism. If you think of this option from the perspective of a publisher teetering on the brink of destruction, what exactly is there left to lose, anyway?