Leo Bogart’s assessment is on the money. But I believe that there is tremendous potential over here despite it all. Their distribution networks give them unbelievable direct access to readers that I would have killed for when I worked in the UK. They ought to be able to produce and distribute a number of different products for their readers in a way that would be impossible in most other countries. But they do absolutely nothing with it. Not yet, anyway.

You are right.

But the US newspaper industry is already paying the consequences.

Of course, there are exceptions.

I had the opportunity to speak a few months ago in a management retreat for editors of Landmark communications and I presented to them the amazing interactive experience of the “enlace” project in El Correo of Bilbao, Spain.

Well… as soon as they saw the idea, the editor in chief of The Virginian Pilot dispatched one of his editors to Bilbao.

And now, a few months later, the paper launches the Co-Pilot idea, inspired in the “enlace” one.

I am sure that is going to work very well.

Innovation starts many times “copying” and adapting ideas from other papers.

This is what foreign editors have done for many years visiting and learning from the best U.S. newspapers.

Perhaps now is the time to do the same but in the opposite direction.

Let’s not forget that one the most precious “Pulitzer Prizes” still is the fellowship to travel around the world and learn from other markets, newspapers and journalists.

Pulitzer was not cheap or parochial.

Pulitzer was smart, and successful.

We need more Pulitzers, and less bean counters.

I call it “cheap.” As a staffer or front-line manager in an American newsroom, good luck getting your editor or publisher to pay for a trip outside the mainland 48. And as an event coordinator, outside perhaps the Society for News Design with its long standing internationalization effort, good luck getting a trade association board to spring for travel for an overseas speaker.

You’ve seen this, I know. Most U.S. newspaper conferences try, as first resort, to get their speakers to pay their own expenses and even pay to register for the conference! It’s no wonder they tend to resort to people who “had to be there anyway” (yes, I often fall into that camp, and I’m sure I’d spend a lot less time on podiums if I refused to pay my own freight).