MarkWhittaker.com

A few weeks ago, folks representing some of the largest and most interesting media, advertising and marketing companies gathered at a couple of interactive media conferences in New York City.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau held it’s annual MIXX conference, and MediaPost Communications ran its OMMA Global event during the same two days in late September. Even though some the nation’s largest advertisers, advertising companies and Internet companies are represented at gatherings like these, newspaper folks seem to shy away.

While I was online director for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I was lucky enough to attend at OMMA conference, and I also made it to an ad:tech conference, another popular gathering for those who work and innovate in interactive media. Those two conferences were great, and opened my eyes in a few ways about what was happening in the wide world of interactive media — beyond newspapers.

At the time, and I’m afraid still to a large extent, newspapers companies saw themselves as a universe separate from online. Oh, sure, they dabbled in the online stuff, but they were newspaper companies, not interactive media companies.

Most newspapers now have Web sites, and most of the them have some form of advertising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau is the leading organization for online advertising standards and practices. No doubt it will play a key role in the coming debate over behavioral targeting. And yet, very few newspaper companies are members of the IAB. A look through its membership uncovered four — Cox Newspapers Inc., New York Times Digital, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and Washington Post Digital. The Newspaper Association of America is an associate member.

Only Hearst , the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were listed among attendees at OMMA Global last year.

Is it any wonder that the interactive world is leaving newspaper companies in the dust? To play and compete in the interactive world — which is the dominant medium for information — a business needs to know the players, know the innovators and the advertisers who love interactive.

The rules and tools of the interactive game are all being discussed at these conferences and in a magnitude the NAA can’t possibly provide at its annual gatherings.

The newspaper industry’s leaders can’t just “talk amongst themselves” to figure out how to compete in the interactive world. They need to dive into it, and drag their old world along for the swim.

I’ve been saying for years that the newspaper industry is declining because there’s nothing in newspapers that people want to read.

It turns out that in a way I was right, but I didn’t think it the whole way through. Vin Crosbie, one of the great media “thinkers,” postulates that really there just isn’t enough in modern newspapers that people want to read.

Crosbie has begun a series of essays in his Digital Deliverance blog describing the decline and fall of the American newspaper industry. That’s right — it doesn’t seem so far that Crosbie expects the industry to recover from its current crisis.

The main reason? Newspapers have ignored the essential economic law of supply and demand. His full essay on that topic is here, and I don’t see the need to restate the entire thing here.

His essential point is that the basic newspaper package of news selected by editors for a mass audience is obsolete in an age when information consumers have access to many different sources of information. Newspapers’ general news package — the same articles distributed to all of their subscribers — can no longer compete with hundreds of cable channels, niche magazines and Web sites.

I’m eager to read the rest of Crosbie’s commentary as he releases it over the next few days or weeks.