Talking business last Sunday morning with a group of Poynter Ethics Fellows, the discussion turned inevitably to online possibilities and what, if any, life is left in the old business model.

 

What is there still to say on those topics?

 

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A participant from a big-city paper caught my attention with a comment that recent in-house research shows that a majority of subscribers do most of their reading of the print paper in the evening after they get home from work.  But since they probably at least glance at the headlines with a first cup of coffee, having the paper in the driveway early in the morning is part of their expectation.

 

This deferred-reading behavior doubtless relates to heavy consumption at work of the newspaper Web site (a well-documented phenomenon).  So what does the reader want at the end of the workday?  Not a traditional evening newspaper.  Not a daily magazine, exactly.  But a generous portion of in-depth and offbeat coverage that somehow has aged gracefully in the 24 hours since it was produced.

A second thought came from Lauren Rich Fine, who joined us by phone from snowed-in Cleveland.  Fine retired last year as a Merrill Lynch analyst and finished a term as a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board, but she continues to think hard about the news business as a resident practitioner at Kent State University.

If she were a newspaper executive, Fine said, she might do a planning exercise that assumed print classified advertising revenue would go to zero over five years.  It almost certainly won't fall that far. But that could be a way of thinking about a business model that relies on retail and national print advertising, subscription revenue (including online PDF versions), growing online and niche publication advertising and new ventures or new platforms.

By my calculation, print classified will still contribute about a quarter of industry revenue after the expected declines of 2008.  That is a lot to do without.  But those seven or eight streams mentioned above should be enough somehow to support a news gathering enterprise -- with some left over for profit.