I was raised in San Francisco, have wanted to be a writer since I was 13, and involved in journalism since I was 15. This week, I read that the San Francisco Chronicle may be shutting down.  I’ve posted before on the disheartening wave of newspaper downsizing and closures, but this latest blow hits close to home.  I know there’s newspaper bailout talk. Yet, as we’ve seen with the auto industry in the past, throwing money at complex business problems does not suffice. Consider the music business and the increasing legal and illegal distribution of music online … (though there may never be talk of bailing out the entertainment industry; the fourth estate certainly garners more political sympathy)… the most basic models have to be rebuilt in light of digital distribution and the expectation of free content, despite the fact that making quality content costs money.

Certainly if I had the secret recipe, this revolutionary model, I would be one of the most employable editors in these dire times. Mind you, I am on the lookout. I sincerely believe that in this collapse of the media business, the information vacuum will need to be filled. There will be an opportunity to apply our skills to developing a content creation model that advertising can actually support. This advertising will likely be the web-based kind, which unfortunately doesn’t (yet, at least) pay the rates we get for print. The cold reality is that we have less money to work with, good economy or bad. Yet the digital advertising model can’t be sustained with less content than we’ve produced in print; it arguably requires more. So how do we make more with less?

I had a great talk with Dennis, a sales person from my sister publication, CRM Magazine. We were talking about a remarkable bit of news we read, that DogTime Media’s audience has grown to 8.5 million. Why is dogtime growing while many of the finest media companies are collapsing? Dennis suggested that it is because they don’t have as much to lose. They are flexibile, agile, have low overhead for content creation from the outset… all things stacked against existing media companies, which have built extensive infrastructure, employ vast staff to produce requisite content, and have an ad model based on print. How can they abandon all that has worked so well and for so long?

Today, I read an interesting Outsell story about DemandMedia, which “offers over 500,000 professional and member-contributed how to articles and 100,000 how to videos. The site has grown 171% in visits year over year according to Google Analytics and self-reports over 30 million visitors per month. With unemployment rising and the economy sinking, the number of searches and views of economy and personal finance related articles on eHow has increased 84% in just the last six months.” Outsell VP & lead analyst Chuck Richard explores how eHow is “adding editorial horsepower without adding salaried editorial staff, while adding content at a rapid pace.” Chuck will not be at BSeC, but Outsell founder Anthea Stratigos will be presenting a talk  on Trends, Strategies, and Tactics for coming out ahead. I’ll be listening. Join us and participate in the kind of discourse this event is known for; let’s work on developing the transformative strategies that will allow content companies new and old to thrive.