Carla Savalli, who resigned in October as an assistant managing editor  at  the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., tells Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center that she sees newspapers in a whole new light: less compelling, less proprietary, less vital to her daily life.

“They are essentially outdated and irrelevant by the time they’re delivered. If given another chance, I’d never edit a paper the same way again,”  Savalli told McLellan.  The discovery, she said, is “startling. It’s not a comfortable revelation at first.”

But she says the experience has led her to a new vision of how newsrooms can and should transform.

Her ideas, as listed by McLellan:

- Move away from commodity news, the news that people can find all over the place
– Drop national and international news, which people can find online or on television.
– Redefine the newspaper niche product for local news. “Focus on what’s intensely local.”
– Reshape newsroom thinking about what people need to know. “Change the notion that we know what people should know.”
– Redefine the role of gatekeeper to one of a guide to information online.

Good ideas, and it’s great to see them coming from a “traditional” journalist. The interview is worth a read.

OK, I can hear you saying that online news types have been shouting these kinds of ideas for 14 years, into deaf ears. No matter. If print newsrooms decide they’ve invented a new model for local journalism and it looks like this, let’s all applaud.

Jonathan Knee, an investment banker who advised the buyers of the San Diego Union-Tribune, tells the Wall Street Journal that local newspapers — and he’s not including major metros or national newspapers — have a solid business model. Trouble is, their expense structure came out of the boom years.

There is widespread confusion and has always been regarding the source of the shocking historic profitability of many newspapers. The most profitable newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers. These are not sexy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have historically have significantly low margins.

And here’s his take on major metros going online-only:

Major market papers typically have suffered from the greatest anachronisms in their cost structure due to everything from oppressive union work rules to just bad management. The instant at which you have heard a paper is shutting down or going online-only have typically involved cases where the legacy liabilities, cost structures or regulatory burdens of operating were overwhelming.

A very eye-opening read.

Tech guru Guy Kawaski has a brief but wide-ranging interview with Media Post’s Kory Kredit, mostly about his  AllTop venture and Tweeting strategies. Kawasaki also has some thoughts about traditional publishing, for example:

My fear is that with all of this user-generated content/citizen journalism stuff, how do you do the deep background research, nine months of investigative reporting about the addictive qualities of cigarettes, or others stories like that?  Who does that if the newspapers go away? Because the odds of somebody tweeting that they just saw a memo from a tobacco company that says they are addicting people to cigarettes on purpose [is not very likely].

At the same time, Kawasaki’s advice to marketers could be part of the solution. He clearly has learned how to use Twitter as a powerful marketing and loyalty tool, which he details in his own blog.  Here’s just one idea:

Make it easy to “post to Twitter.” One day I met with Rashmi Sinha, the CEO of Slideshare. We got to talking about how she increased her traffic, and she told me that a “Post to Twitter” link was the most effective mechanism. When people are viewing a Slideshare page like this hilarious one about getting old, they can click on the “Post to Twitter” link under the frame and a window opens with a preconfigured tweet to send to followers…. Now there is a “Post to Twitter” button on every Alltop topic page. Approximately twenty people a day do this. On average they have 350 followers, so this provides us with another 7,000 or so impressions per day.

Traditional media are notoriously horrible at marketing themselves, but if they could take on just a few  techniques like this, it could make a huge difference.