I remember the first time I saw one of those Flash-based "page turning" interfaces. I was sitting in a conference room in Minneapolis and an excited sales guy was pitching his company's tool, which could take newspaper pages and put them online as a print replica, saving us from all that messy Web stuff. He was so earnest and proud.

I was horrified. The Web isn't print. The Internet is a new medium with unique strengths. The whole idea was just ... sacrilege.

I've changed my point of view somewhat over the years, for several reasons:

• There's more than one way to do it. Single-product thinking is an old habit from the last century that we really need to get over. There is no requirement that publishers choose between Web, e-edition, print-derived tablet versions, and something that looks like it should be hosted by Alex Trebek. When possible, let the users choose for themselves, individually.
• People like skeuomorphic design in general. It's why desktop computers have "desktops" of their own. And trash cans. And folders. It makes the product feel comforting and familiar, and can contribute to ease of use. Personally, I blew away my Kindle Fire's wood-grained "bookshelf" launch screen in favor of an Android launcher, but others have different preferences.
• Some people like print. Its limitations can feel like features. It's fixed in time. It's linear. You can flip through it and feel like you've had an overview. It has a beginning and an end. It's not like the Web, where you just keep going until you're exhausted. And there is value in the editorial judgment that is reflected in page design. We don't all live on first-in/first-out real-time queues, breathlessly following the latest news.
• I don't feel threatened by print. I understand that others do, but I'm fortunate to work at a company where that battle is over.

One thing that helped me change my mind is what happened when we built Bluffton Today in 2005 as a website focused entirely on community conversation. We didn't plan to put news online at all (the paper was daily and free at the time). When we ran into some delivery barriers in a couple of gated communities, we added a PDF-derived E-edition. I was quite surprised by the intensity of use and the positive community feedback. Users liked the E-edition and the website, and used them for different purposes.

So I haven't changed my point of view that the Web isn't print and the Internet is a new medium with unique strengths.

In fact, I think adaptive HTML5 Web layouts on the "everything just works" principle ultimately will eclipse smartphone and tablet apps. But eclipse doesn't mean replace. And so long as we're producing a print product and making a digital replica is cheap and easy, I think it makes perfect sense to offer it as a product and let the consumer choose.

We're not currently offering any Flipboard-like interfaces on our websites. It's not a matter of design, but of simple economics. While we have all the necessary data to drive an algorithmically defined interface, we have an awful lot of plates spinning already, and one more set of potentially incompatible advertising delivery challenges just isn't something we need to take on right now. Maybe later. For the moment, I'd rather focus on making HTML5 Web pages adaptive and finger-friendly for touch interfaces.

Today six of the largest Morris Publishing Group newspapers are posting new senior management positions: vice president of audience. Internal and external candidates are welcome to apply.

This is a major step forward in the "audience first" program that Derek May described last week.

And while it has a lot to do with the newsroom, it's not just about the newsroom. It's also about research and marketing, community and social, special publications and -- importantly -- "commercial audiences" across a wide set of products and media.

Jay Rosen has talked about "the people formerly known as the audience." That's a mouthful. We're using the simpler audience term -- but not in the passive sense of last-century mass media, rather in the active sense of audiences throughout human history. The 21st century "audience" is participatory -- like the audience before mass-circulation printing and broadcasting turned us into couch potatoes.

This audience lives somewhere. We call our places communities. That word also is worth a close look. Community has to do with sharing and social cohesion. American newspapers are local. We are responsible to, and for, that social cohesion. If your charge is audience development, you have a community mission.

All of this must sit on a business foundation. The last few years have been very tough ones for American newspapers. Business has been pretty rotten for our ad customers, and generally worse for us. But things are looking up. Some people think this means print will come back. It won't. The future is digital.

But digital is a different world. In the old, mass-circulation print world, where barriers to entry were high, the local newspaper with the expensive printing press was the big dog on the block. Online, we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned.

Forget all the newspaper industry puffery about how we're reaching more people than ever. Frequency and time spent are the important metrics.

And the reality is dismal.

In a pie chart of "where do people spend their time online," newspaper websites are nearly impossible to find.

People aren't going online to read newspapers -- or even news, from any source. They're going online to talk. To find. To discover. We're way behind Facebook, Google, Yahoo Mail, Youtube, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Bing, Gmail, Craigslist, AOL Mail, Ebay, Windows Live, MSN ... and that's before figuring in the effect of Pinterest, the latest love of crafty women everywhere.

We don't have to "beat" the big national brands. But if we're going to survive as a business, we have to carve out a much bigger slice of the pie than we've managed to date. And to do that, we need a relentless focus on discovering and meeting local information needs.

News is part of that, of course, but it's news in that reborn participatory audience context, news that is timely, news that is personal, news that is interesting, news that is shared and spread socially, news that we get in our pockets as well as on our tablets and computers, news that is in text and photos and videos and yes, still in print.

But news is not enough.

We should be offering a toolkit for effective local living in this century, and most information needs are not related to the news, at least not as traditionally defined. We need jobs. We need to spend our money wisely (for those of you who outsource this function to other family members, it's called shopping). We want to be entertained.

As practical tools and as entertainment, "online newspapers" are close to useless. That can not be allowed to continue.

We don't have to do any of this. We could just fade into being nothing more than a sales agency for geotargeted digital advertising delivered across national networks. But that would be a sad outcome, not just for us, but for the communities that we have declared are our responsibilities.

We have chosen the path: "To become and remain the dominant convener and server of community audiences."

So the charge for this new-age audience chief is a daunting one: marshal all of our resources effectively to best serve all the local information needs of this participatory audience. It's an exciting one. We live in interesting times.

As of this morning, SOPA and its evil twin, PIPA, are effectively dead. A tsunami of public outrage pushed a major realignment in Congress. Plans for votes were canceled.

But these bills are not truly dead. Like zombies, they'll be back, propelled by the rage of content owners.

I don't share the rage, but I understand it. In the nearly 18 years I've been working in digital media, I've had to deal with a number of cases of outright thievery -- stolen images and artwork, copied stories, hijacked data, trademark violations. Once I discovered that some geek working for Lexis-Nexis was reposting to Usenet every newspaper story that mentioned the Grateful Dead. It happens.

And I understand the resentment of Google, which has become insanely wealthy by fixing a problem (how to find things) that content creators weren't smart enough to understand, much less address. Google's rise contributed to a glut of ad inventory that has hammered down ad prices, exacerbating the troubles of old-line media companies struggling to figure out the disruptive forces of the Internet.

But I don't share it. Google created value, and is not responsible for the plight of (for example) newspapers. And let's keep in mind that jealousy is not a virtue.

"Intellectual property" is not a natural right. It's a limited artificial monopoly enforced by the government for practical purposes, such as described in the Constitution: "the Progress of Science and useful Arts." It's not absolute, and there is such a thing as "fair use" of copyrighted materials, which is why I'm illustrating this post with a screen shot from The Simpsons.

As someone who's worked in the content creation business all my adult life, I think we need copyright laws that are fair, enforceable, and in the public interest. They should not violate free-speech rights. Persons accused of violations should be able to defend their case in court before suffering penalties, not after. Penalties should be in reasonable proportion to substantiated claims of genuine damage. And only actors, not third parties, should be affected.

And such laws should be written by representatives of the people, not by lobbyists.

These things seem obvious. The very existence of SOPA-PIPA demonstrates how corporate money has corrupted Congress. We all deserve better.

So Kodak, the company that invented amateur photography in the 19th century and invented digital photography in the 20th, is on the ropes. There are obvious lessons for newspapers and newsrooms. Here are a few of them.

Your business isn't what you think it is. Kodak at its peak looked like a photography company, but it was really a giant chemical manufacturing company. Digital tech rendered the entire chemical photography business irrelevant. By comparison, newspapers looked like news and information companies, but they were really expensive commercial advertisement printing and delivery systems. If you have borrowed heavily to build and maintain capital-intensive processes that are suddenly rendered irrelevant, you're in deep trouble no matter how smart you are and no matter what you do. Printing isn't yet irrelevant, but it's trending that way. This is not to the time to invest in a new three-around compact press line.

Brands decay. When I started in photography, Kodak was the trusted source. (Sound familiar, newspaper people?) We might flirt with funky European Agfa and exotic Asian Fuji, but when it was time to get serious, it was Kodak Tri-X and Kodak paper and Kodak Dektol. In a digital world, Kodak's brand means little. And if you think your newspaper's brand is a huge asset, you probably need to get out and talk to some young people now and then.

Early to market doesn't mean you win. When some of you kids were still in diapers and I was still in Minneapolis, we set up an early Kodak digital camera (I think it might have been a DC40) on a tripod at the State Fair. People queued up around the building to get their pictures taken and published online. Kodak was an early mover. So were newspapers, which had online products before the Web existed. Look how that turned out.

Disruption doesn't happen just once. On the digital side, Kodak initially pivoted quite well, creating the "Easyshare" concept and reconquering digital photography from the Japanese tech companies. By the middle of the last decade, Kodak was the market leader. But suddenly smartphone cameras have autofocus lenses, 8-megapixel sensors and HDTV video capability. Result: the low-end market is toast, and Kodak isn't taken seriously in the high end, where Canon and Nikon reign. Newspapers have seen a similar thing happen with classified advertising, which in the late 1990s was an online cash cow. Real estate agents and car dealers now run their own publishing operations.

All of this may seem like a downer, but it doesn't need to be. If you clear out the assumptions, what's left may be easier to understand. Businesses still need convey offers to consumers, and if anything, digital technology has chopped the audience up in to little pieces and distributed it all over the universe. Pulling audiences back together creates value. Make that your goal, and don't let up for a second.