The 77-year-old distinguished professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill, who is being inducted into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame today, says newspapers need to move aggressively online, attract younger readers and create niche products to serve segments of the market.

"If you're looking for a way to do business as you've always done it, I'm sorry, there isn't any," Meyer says. "The world has moved on, and the newspaper industry has awakened to that fact too late."

What role does technology play in newspapers' survival?

Meyer: The Internet means you can distribute your product without having a fleet of trucks and without having to kill a lot of trees. So it seems like a no-brainer to move as much content as you can away from ink on paper to the Internet.

The downside is there will be a period -- nobody knows how long -- where the advertisers will resist. They will not want to come along to the Internet. Advertisers have always been very slow to learn new stuff.

Is there any print component after this transition to the Internet?

Meyer: Yes, I think there will be. But it might not be daily. It might be weekly.

How long is this transition period going to last?

Meyer: Nobody knows. All I know for sure is it's going to be painful, and the winners are going to be those that took the most risks. And the newspaper culture is risk averse because newspapers had it so good for so long.

A lot of people say if we could live with, say, 10 percent profit margins, there would be no problem.

Meyer: In the book, I say newspapers are like grocery stores. Food and news spoil quickly. Grocery stores make a lot of money on a 2 to 3 percent margin. Newspapers ought to be more like grocery store margins, and in theory it should be possible to do quite well. The reason they don't, of course, is that all their investment decisions have been based on a 20 to 40 percent margin.

What can The News & Observer learn from the success of niche publications?

Meyer: The way [Harvard professor] Clayton Christensen puts it is newspapers need to find jobs that consumers need done and then they need to invent a product that will get that job done. One example that sticks in my mind is two photographs. One shows a guy riding the subway and snoozing because he doesn't have anything to do. The other shows the same guy reading a free newspaper that he found at a transit stop. Well, filling that time usefully is a job that he needed to have done, and newspapers in some cities have created special products to do that job.

What's at stake for the reader if The News & Observer can't find a way to do its thing? Meyer: There will always be somebody to supply the reader the information that he or she needs. It might be something like the Raleigh Chronicle, which is growing right in front of your nose. You guys should have come up with a product like that before they did. And the key to the success of a product like that is going to be content. Content is still king. You need to stop worrying about the cost of newsprint and figure out a way to get that content up cheaply. People who use the Internet are the people who are going to rule the world and buy products, so you've got to reach them.

What keeps you passionate about this stuff? Why do you care?

Meyer: Because I have grandchildren, and we can't have democracy without newspapers. Thomas Jefferson was right. If newspapers fail, our sense of community is going to fail, and if our sense of community fails, our democracy will fail. And there are already signs that it's happening. So we've got to invent something to replace newspapers to achieve that sense of community. Worst case, we'll be ripe picking for anti-democratic movements. If we can't keep something like newspapers keeping the public informed, then we're in big trouble.

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