A few months ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine in the mainstream media, a fairly well known columnist. He was talking about how the bosses at his newspapers wanted him to blog, and this wish baffled him. Subscriptions were declining, and yet somehow the bosses at his paper thought the key to arresting this trend was to give more of their content away for free.

I told him that to a point, I thought he was right. The print media has been endurably clueless regarding the advent of the new media. Business schools of the future will someday devote endless symposia to studying how an entire industry could be so hidebound, paralyzed, arrogant and clueless.

Don’t get me wrong – even if capitalistic geniuses led the old media, they’d still be up the creek. The advent of new technologies has whipped up a perfect storm that even good businessmen would have trouble handling. The biggest problem the newspapers face, and the least talked about, is the hit the internet has made on their classified revenues. Craig’s List works better and costs less than the classifieds. This stream of revenue, which was huge, is gone and won’t be coming back. Even if the newspapers revamped their classified departments to go virtual and battle Craig’s List on their home turf, they still couldn’t come out even.

And then there are the more widely noted problems. A couple of decades ago, you got your news from the morning paper. For a large and rapidly growing segment of society, that’s no longer the case. For reasons everyone reading this site knows, the best way to stay informed is not to cloister yourself in ignorance until tomorrow morning and then get ink all over your fingers while you read headlines that have already grown stale.

Lastly, we have clueless management. Newspapers are a dying industry. There’s a gold rush afoot to create the virtual enterprise that will take their place. Some entities like the Politico, Pajamas Media and Townhall have seized a head start in becoming the mainstream media of the future, but no one yet knows what the MSM of the future will look like. Some of us think we know, but the precise formula remains unhatched.

The weird thing about the newspapers is they’ve decided not to play. Other than putting an exact replica of their dying product out there on the internet, they’ve shown nothing but intellectual paralysis. We all know the virtual edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is not the MSM portal of the future, but the people running papers like the Strib have apparently quit trying. Other than commissioning the occasional blog (which virtually no one reads), their efforts to boldly step into the future have been lackluster and decrepit.

SO WHAT DID I TELL MY MSM FRIEND WHO WAS reluctant to blog? I told him that the first thing he had to do was come to grips with the fact that he’s in an industry that’s either dying, or, if he wanted to be a cockeyed optimist, metamorphosing. Regardless of the semantics, the takeaway was that he couldn’t continue to rely on the industry that had put food on his family’s table for the past couple of decades to continue doing so indefinitely.

The next question was, What would he have left after the industry died or metamorphosed? I told him that at the end of the day, all he would have left would be his talent and the brand that he had created for himself. And that’s why he should blog. By blogging, he could expand his brand, introduce it to a lot of new people, and open up doors that he didn’t even know existed.

This is what the great Jules Crittenden has done. When he was just a writer for the Boston Herald, even I had never heard of him even though his newspaper was located in my hometown. Now I have. Because of his blog, Jules has established himself as a nationally known writer and content provider.

WHICH BRINGS US TO OUR FRIEND JAMES. Were it not for Lileks’ blog, I’m pretty sure I never would have heard of him. Even in our day of internet wonders, I could see myself punching up a given day’s edition of Pravda before I even thought of considering seeing what the Star Tribune had to offer. Even for local Minneapolis stories that might interest me like ones involving sports, the Star Tribune vomits out such a wretched product on a day in/day out basis that I wouldn’t think of checking it out.

My point isn’t to dump on the Strib, although that’s always fun. My point is that Lileks’ wider fame has nothing to do with the newspaper that he labored for. In his spare time Lileks built himself a brand, one of the best brands that any writer in the country has, and soon it will be time to capitalize on it.

I’ve never met or even spoken with James Lileks, but I feel for him. I’ve known a lot of people cut professionally adrift as he essentially has been (or will be since his employer is giving off eardrum-shattering death rattles), and none of them said it was much fun. But the more gifted of them found that when they took their brand and their talent to the open market, things worked out better than they would have dared dream.

And there are few people with more talent or better brands than James Lileks.

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