The discussion today about whether newspapers are dead or merely have a flesh wound, and if only wounded what they must do to survive, reminds me of the “bring out your dead” scene in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail…. I never touch a paper now except for Saturday mornings, or unless I need something to read while I’m eating alone at a restaurant, and of course there are lots of folks like me, and lots more with each passing day.My friend and mesh partner Mark Evans notes that the latest newspaper circulation numbers look OK, particularly in Canada. I personally don’t take a lot of guidance from the latest numbers because I suspect they are skewed by the growth of free papers that, if anything, give folks good reason to skip their paid cousins, and ultimately are really kind of a gimmicky sideshow to the bigger picture of what’s happening in media…. (And I personally don’t think the issue is really about what’s happening just in San Francisco – circulation at major papers has been hit hard across the US.)I also think that the “this is what newspapers must do to survive” line of discussion, while interesting, is largely a sideshow, and really only of interest over the next 12-36 months.

This is hardly an original thought, but reading a few of them really drove home the point for me that very often comments have absolutely nothing to do with a ‘conversation’ in any meaningful sense of the word – they really serve more of a miniblog / bulletin board function – a quick way for someone to scrawl “I was here” on the cave wall before returning to their daily life. This is more likely to be the case, surely, where a media property is heavily trafficked.I’m sure the NYT prefers that people scrawl on its walls and not on its competitors’, but this strikes me as a pretty thin form of ‘engagement’ to have with a customer…. And of course, if people are just scratching their name on the cave wall, they’re not spending much time in their visit reading what others have written, and they’re certainly not returning later to read new contributions. And, since you can’t really absorb advertising while you write (and particularly since many / most don’t eve run ads on the page after the first few comments, it seems to me that having comments in a heavily trafficked property – like a major newspaper – will prove to be more of a <em> defensive</em> tactic than a sound strategy for creating new revenue.Last point – why don’t the newspapers offer a feature that builds a survey in to every commentable post?