The bitter feud between Slate's Ron Rosenbaum and new media simpleton Jeff Jarvis aside, both do agree that newspapers are in deep shit. The Times' Catherine Rampell dismisses the clamor over copies of the NYT's election issue, and doesn't see the newspaper becoming "a luxury product." Newspapers are just another industry, and as currently constituted, papers are way behind the curve in ensuring their survival:

"If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you’ll see it’s virtually an impossible thing to do,” says David A. Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. "Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they’ve pretty much written their death warrant." Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted — including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?

Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They’re adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they’re trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.

Meanwhile, we’ve already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry.

We know an insane man (Lee Abrams, right) who works for the Los Angeles Times who totally agrees with you, Ms. Rampell. Hell, the LAT is promoting today's edition as a Twilight collectible! There is an optimistic note sounded at the end:

But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.

A quilt newspaper might be a keepsake we'd all like to enjoy. To our thimbles, journalists!

'How Industries Survive Change. If They Do' [NYT]

Rosenbaum just took him down in Slate, partly for his new book about Google that happens to be just made up of things Jeff Jarvis thinks about Google. Here is the important part of the rant:

But what makes him wined, dined, and comped by Dubai to fly to self-proclaimed summits all over the world? It's not just that corporations are dumb enough to waste what's left of stockholders' money to pay for someone to tell them to "listen to the market." No, it's Jarvis' pretensions to guru-hood, his gnomic "laws" and pronouncements. Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence.

He offers chestnuts like, "The link changes everything," "Stuff sucks" ("Nobody wants to be in the business of stuff anymore. … Google's economy is more appealing"), "Atoms are a drag," and—yes, his contribution to the "X is the new Y" genre—"Small is the new big."

Yeah, down with stuff! Let them eat fake. Sleep in buildings not made with atoms. Everyone should be a new-media consultant, and then we won't need any media at all.

Hah. Rosenbaum is frankly far too kind to Jarvis, but Jarvis responded with a snippy post about how Rosenbaum is stupid and he always confuses Salon with Slate, a joke that is about 10 years past making any sense, because Slate is now a Washington Post-owned established web magazine and Salon is just pure crazytown. Jarvis takes it all so personally! Is it his fault people keep calling him to discuss the future of media? No! It's the fault of the people who call Jeff Jarvis looking for insight into anything. LOOK AT HOW MUCH GOOD WORK HE DOES:

Just this morning I attended - busted! - another conference where I talked over coffee and croissant with chief executives of four newspaper companies as they brainstormed new models for news. I ran a conference at CUNY last week in new business models for news. I am starting an organization at CUNY to find, explore, and share best practices in new business models for news. I teach a course in entrepreneurial journalism in hopes supporting small sparks of innovation. Full disclosure: I also advise or invest in a number of related startups including Daylife, Publish2, 33Across, Black20, Brightcove, Outside.in (and haven’t made a penny on any et). I hope the profession - or someone - finds ways to save journalism.

We're sure one of those terribly named startups will save journalism forever!

Anyway Jarvis is pretty sure the way to "save journalism" is to turn it over to "the market," which is always right, and in practical terms obviously that means a world where positioning your content to make the front page of Digg is more or less the goal, so listicles and tits are seeming like probably the model we're going to be dealing with, in this wonderful future.

Of course there is no right answer to this question, and cranky old Ron Rosmbaum doesn't have a better idea, he just feels bad for people who write ten-part newspaper serieses on police torture and then their newspapers fold. We're sure there's room for your ten-part series on police torture at The Huffington Post, friend! Or, at least, they might have an intern link to it. Which is just as good.

In closing, we hate the internet.

Friedman hopes Rosenbaum will "help class up the Internet, which is home to so much nonsense. (For a prime example, check out some bloggers' shameful rumor-mongering about actor Heath Ledger's death this week.)" Ha! Take that, you Mary-Kate Olsen rumor-mongering Internet hooligans at the New York Times city desk!

We do like Rosenbaum's writing, but he's hardly our favorite Internet writer. Has he ever written a sentence as dryly, subtlely hilarious as this? "As Rosenbaum has shown by tackling such unpopular subjects as Hitler, a journalist doesn't have to yell or preen or act like Mike Wallace on steroids to appear courageous." Finally, a writer willing to take on that sorely underreported "Hitler" fellow!

Ron Rosenbaum is Slate's ace in the hole [MarketWatch]

There are serious issues raised, there are profound questions about The Way We Live Now to be discussed. The result is a meretricious prose whose pretense at arch sophistication has become a schlock art form, the written equivalent of a Leroy Neiman nude.

The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written? [Slate]

My own attitude almost reminds me of the epigraph to Nabokov's Pale Fire. The one from Boswell's Life of Johnson in which Dr. Johnson is ruminating about a crazed young man going around London shooting cats. And then reverting to thoughts of his own cat, Hodge, Johnson says (I'm doing this from memory: "But Hodge shan't be shot. No, no, Hodge shan't be shot."

It's some sad, beautiful fusion of wishfulness, wistfulness and dread. The possibility too horrible to contemplate. it sounds selfish, but it's more self-protective.

But then this morning when I'm halfway across the country, to learn to my horror that my Hodge may be being poisoned at that very moment by the callous morons who can't be bothered to care enough to figure this out til ten days or so after the first warnings were issued... You know who should be shot? Well I probably shouldn't dwell on what should be visited upon these dimwit subhumans.

Pet Food Rats: The Shame of an Industry [Ron Rosenbaum]
EVEN MORE ROSENBAUM CAT FUN: Saul Bellow and the Bad Fish [Slate]
And! Dingo Kitty Chicken Jerky Recalled!

[Image via]

Ron Rosenbaum to Join Slate Magazine [BusinessWire]