Meanwhile, in a recent presentation, Indianapolis Star Editor and Vice President Dennis R. Ryerson said his newspaper has stopped counting on advertisers to carry their traditional share of operating costs. He said the paper will institute changes to induce readers to buy the print product. He described the new direction for the Star as a "daily newsmagazine." The professional reporting, writing and editing of the product, he said, had to be supported by circulation revenue.

Both of these moves come as a response to the failure of advertisers to value online publications, at least those that are produced by traditional print newspapers. Both companies also are responding to the unsolved problem of free, unregulated online duplication of news produced by their employees. 


The Evening Standard's Russian owner, Alexander Lebdenev, seems to believe flooding the market with a free quality product will make his product indispensable to advertisers. Since the change, one other free newspaper in London has shut down.


The Star's Gannett ownership seems to believe that advertisers, with many options, will never again foot the bill for news operations. A good, local news product, they are saying, should be a marketable item.


There are differences between the U.S. and British television systems, which alter the calculations, but it's hard to imagine that both of these moves can be right at the same time. If London is wrong, the Evening Standard will flame out. If Indianapolis is wrong, the Star will start spiraling into a smaller and smaller niche. Let's hope at least one of them has found the answer.

The morning after the Colts' exhilarating Monday Night Football victory over the Miami Dolphins, the drive-time ESPN radio team of Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic devoted much of their four-hour stint to the game. It's sports-talk formula that people want to hear about what they saw and Monday Night Football is what every fan sees.

For those in Indianapolis who wanted to hear about what they saw,  it would have been smart to skip Mike and Mike and tune in the next time slot on 1070TheFan: the Dan Dakich Show.

With a game that offered much to discuss: the "wildcat" offense, the Dolphins' clock management, the Colts' lack of run defense and Peyton Manning's magic audibles, Greenberg and Golic focused on one cockeyed point: is Manning a better Colts quarterback than the late Johnny Unitas? Despite the fact that Unitas played his last game in 1973, before many of the listeners were born, and that he never played in Indianapolis, the two Mikes went through "best quarterback" lists and belabored the question through live interviews. The simple answer is that the two football eras cannot easily be compared and they both will be remembered as among the best.

That simple answer did not suffice, because Mike and Mike regularly reduce every sporting accomplishment to a "best" list.  Quarterbacks, pitchers, tennis players, coaches, shortstops. The question of whether Derek Jeter is better than Cal Ripken can be counted on to produce email and fit neatly into a short morning drive segment.

Dan Dakich doesn't have to worry about short segments. On the air now for nearly a year, Dakich runs his three hours like the family patriarch at Thanksgiving dinner. He's patient with kids, prickly with blowhards and lets guests and callers expound a viewpoint without confrontation or condescension.

When Emmis Broadcasting gave the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekday slot to Dakich, some in the industry scratched their heads. Why move ESPN's national Colin Cowherd show out of its live slot to the afternoon for an old basketball coach who'd never done radio? The other sports radio stations in Indianapolis rely on their networks for mid-morning material.  While Dakich spent 16 years as a player and coach at Indiana University, he'd been in Ohio for most of the previous ten years as the coach at Bowling Green University. He came back to IU during the Kelvin Sampson years and served as the interim head coach after Sampson was fired.

How long could Coach Dakich endure knucklehead listeners? Would every show devolve into a debate about Bob Knight? What if he had to talk about something other than basketball?

What's happened is that listeners have helped Dakich shape his show into something approaching a sports-talk salon. The games and schtick are minimal. The show keeps a moderate pace and and an Indiana center. Like most coaches, Dakich seems to be interested in all sports. Almost every coach you meet seems to be a fan of baseball and a player of golf. Pro football is the national sport; Dakich has baskeball covered and is the kind of guy who scans his car radio for high school games.

The morning after the Colts defeated the Dolphins, those who had the good fortune to tune in Dan Dakitch learned about the problems with the Indianapolis run defense and running attack, the former critics of Dallas Clark, the wisdom of "wildcat" and much more.

It's not formula radio. It may not survive. But for those with the time to listen, it's better than you would expect.

One theory about how newspapers can survive in a paperless future is the notion that they can become the prime sources of local news. What the President says can be found everywhere. What the Mayor says must be found on a local news site. The theory holds that what used to be called a newspaper's newsroom and now is called an "information center" is well-equipped to become the dominant local news site.

That dominance would mean advertisers get exposure from everyone looking for local news. Being on the welcome page or the main sports page would collect lots of impressions.

What would happen to that dominance if the readers go somewhere else for a news digest and then directly to the story about what the Mayor said? This happens already in a limited way if you use, for example, an iGoogle home page that gives you the top stories of your local paper.

Now an entrepreneur named Yiyi Liu has begun a revolution in that thought. Based in Montreal, his operation, called "City and Press," has taken what Google does in a universal way and made it local. In 30 cities, including Indianapolis, Liu has started local news aggregation sites called "(city).cityandpress.com". In Indianapolis, of course, it's www.indianapolis.cityandpress.com.

How this works, apparently, is that they capture RSS feeds from every local news outlet and publish them on the city-specific site, with stories categorized as "news,", "sports," "business" and more. On each city site, they promise to stop using material generated by a news outlet, such as TV station, on request.

This creates a problem for a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station. Does management want to be left out of what could become the prime index of local news or cede that role to someone else and take the linked hits? The revenue for a "City and Press" site is likely to be small, a least at first, but its overhead is minimal.

As we know, things online are moving faster than we ever expect. How news outlets respond to this advance could be crucial.

“Get me somebody like Jim Morris!”

When the Indiana Pacers brought in Jim Morris as President of Pacers Sports and Entertainment, I thought they had settled for a 1990s solution to a current problem. Sure, Morris knew everybody in town and had proven his leadership skills, but how could he deal with the drugs and the guns and the increasing alienation of the Pacers players from the Indianapolis community?

Now I think the Colts need their own Jim Morris. Anybody know a good fixer?

Look at the news about the Capital Improvement Board’s financial crisis today. Here the Pacers are asking for relief from the city and the Colts are saying they’d like to continue to fulfill their contract. Yet it’s the Colts who are getting the penalty flags thrown at them by the city, the state and the fans.

The Pacers missed the playoffs again and there are were few walk-ups who asked for $125 seats this year. All over town, however, folks who got cheap tickets for promotional nights and the many freebies Morris and other club officials personally distributed are thinking about actually paying for tickets for the coming season.

Meanwhile, the Colts are just two years removed from their championship and are led by Peyton Manning, a Babe Ruth for the 21st century. Ask the person on the street today and he’s likely to talk about how the Colts squeezed a great deal out of the city and then turned their backs when the economy went sour. The Colts have to realize that with corporate America in decline, working men and women may once again become their prime customers.

Every time Bill Polian or Jim Irsay gets up to defend the team’s position in the team’s trademark jutting-jaw style, the talk on the street gets louder. The team needs a fixer, somebody who can work through the city’s power structure to make the team’s position marketable, serve on the committees and show a smiling face to the cameras.

Who? There are a number of people in Indianapolis who could qualify. Candidates would need some political experience, maybe with the Goldsmith or Hudnut administrations; some negotiation skills and considerable marketing savvy. In this case, they’d also have to have strong enough personalities to withstand the force of the Colts’ top management.