Where I see some hopefulness in my loose metaphor is when we think about a good home-style restaurant in the same town as an Applebee’s. Even if the bill might come in a little higher, a lot of people will prefer the home-style place and continue eating there.

But it has to be a GOOD home-style place, or it will go out of business.

And here’s nerd trifectagasm:
Star Wars.
Olympic. (Ping pong is officially a nerd sport)
Legos.
http://bub.blicio.us/?p=111111154
(For DigiDave)

I think I see the results of monopoly in the savage or cynical attitudes many people have toward their hometown papers. In Chicago when I grew up, you might sneer at the Trib, but that meant you probably cheered the Sun-Times. If you thought Hearst’s American was too grubby, you were probably a fan of the respectable Daily News. Today, in most cities, your only choice in a major paper is take it or leave it.

I’ve said this before: Smart papers would stop trying to be all things to all people, online at least. They’d use a common CMS to feed alternative Web interfaces — a conservative version and a liberal one, one youth-oriented and one traditional, whatever makes sense for their market. A lot of the difference between one version and the other would simply come down to story selection and play, and that’s just a handful of people to call the shots.

My friends from Philadelphia would remind me that competition is no guarantee of profit. But online, there’s nowhere near the extra cost for paper and printing and distribution. The Tribune’s Red Eye has shown you can get an audience with skillful repackaging. Online, you can do that even more cheaply.

And with our shrinking newsrooms, the opportunities for journalists to run something major are dwindling. If we created some online sandboxes for our best and brightest — let them experiment with hard-news-only sites, or Red Eye clones, with sites that have far more political bite in their opinions than our tepid editorials dare now, or with sites that are all about apolitical news you can use — if we did that, we just might uncover the kind of creativity that can carry us forward.

If nothing else, we’d have more fun on the way down.

I would add that in addition to PROVIDING it, the news organizations have to make it convenient, and not annoying, not difficult.

Some of their Web sites fail at these in every way.

@Digidave – I like it that he links to Lego … just not my thing, y’know.