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The net is all abuzz today about this angry memo from Bill Gates to a list of Microsoft bigwigs back in 2003. It's a classic: Gates tries to buy some Microsoft software, has a terrible user experience, and lets people know exactly what he thinks.

Funny, but here's a challenge. Assign yourself any random task on your newspaper's website, like trying to sell a car or give away a dog or maybe just find the forums. Take notes. And then write a Gates memo. Bet you can do it, with feeling.

A post from Howard Owens reminds me that a lot of people probably don't know how easy it is to get circulation information about U.S. newspapers. For papers that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, basic numbers and some deeper data is available online in a searchable format.

I find the Reader Profile information useful in illustrating some of the demographic weaknesses facing print. Reader Profiles are the result of surveys commissioned voluntarily by the newspapers, conducted by third parties such as Scarborough Research, and audited by ABC. They attempt to measure readership, not circulation, and the information is broken down by a number of demographic measures.

Dig in.

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blogs) these days.

It was an upbeat conversation about exciting possibilities, all hope and energy and yes, optimism. Mizzou has all sorts of fascinating projects in the works.

In the background, though, I was thinking about the  Columbia Missourian, for 99 years the keystone of the hands-on Missouri Method of teaching journalism.

The Missourian isn't a school newspaper -- it's a serious, professional, commercial daily newspaper that's operated as a teaching laboratory.

As the Number Two newspaper in a small town, it's having big financial difficulties. To be honest, hardly anybody on the "town" side of the "town vs. gown" divide reads it, and I don't think it's doing all that well on the "gown" side, either. You can't sell advertising in a paper that doesn't reach an audience that advertisers need.

Losses at the Missourian are running well over a million dollars a year, leading to talk of cutting the Missourian back from its daily publication cycle and focusing more on the Web.

Last year it spent $1.67 million on print-related expenses (composition, printing, mailroom, circulation) and only $93,722 on Web expenses, so it's not exactly been starving the past to feed the future. The daily paper reaches 7,400; a weekend free sheet reaches 43,000 homes, and the Web product claims 100,000 unique users. Think about that.

Maybe the Missourian becomes a Web-focused operation with a weekly print product, or more likely, an array of multiple targeted products. It already has a weekly free entertainment tab and a Hispanic-targeted product.

Or perhaps it might  buddy up with the competition: Hank Waters' Columbia Tribune, the "town" paper.

I've known for awhile that these ideas were simmering in Mizzou's pot. The path forward might seem pretty straightforward and obvious. But it's not simple, because of a risk of a potential backlash from donors.

Make no mistake about it: Higher education lives or dies on the largesse of donors, mostly alumni. The ones with the most to give tend to be older, which right now puts them on the opposite side of the digital revolution. Many fondly remember their college years on the staff of the Missourian, which until recently even operated its own presses.

These ideas about radically changing the Missourian are now in the open, and some people don't like it one bit. Dalton Wright, publisher of a small daily in Lebanon, Mo., and a member of the Missourian's board, already has been quoted: "I think Walter Williams would be turning over in his grave."

But I wonder how Williams really would react. What would make him roll over in his grave?

Walter Williams, for those who don't know the story, was the guy who founded both the Missouri School of Journalism and the Missourian, so you might think he'd have a sentimental attachment to the past.

But Williams was a change agent. He was a guy with a high school education who talked the Missouri General Assembly into creating the world's first journalism school at a time when reporters served trade apprenticeships rather than getting formal educations. Williams was a guy who never attended college, yet got himself appointed dean of that radical new school, then rose to become president of the University of Missouri.

It's easy when you walk through an ivy-covered campus, looking at statues and portraits of great men and women who were founders and builders and creators of empires, to drift into nostalgic fantasies about tradition and past glories. We all do it.

But those people in the portraits were pioneers, risk-takers, change agents. We don't honor their memory by clinging to what they built, but rather by understanding why they did what they did and finding new ways to apply those principles in modern contexts. Embracing the future requires learning from the past, but also letting go of it.

We need our universities to not merely churn out qualified job applicants. We need universities to take a constructive role in research, analysis, ideation and experimentation. We need help to figure out the new forms of journalism -- and the business models to support it -- that will serve society in the digital future. I hope potential donors will see and honor the needs of the future and not get stuck on preservation of the past.

At lunch Saturday, Gary Kebbel told me about a new Knight Foundation project:  a five-year, $24 million challenge grant program targeted at local information needs.

It's not handing money to projects to save newspapers. It's looking to persuade local community foundations to adopt the cause of "creative uses of media and technology to help keep communities informed and their citizens engaged."

It's open-ended and forward-looking, and likely to lead to some projects that many might not recognize as "journalism." But isn't keeping "communities informed and citizens engaged" what drew people like Walter Williams into newspapering in the first place?

The official Old Media party line, among the few remaining true luddites not yet laid off by their newspaper employers, is that New Media is a cesspool of misinformation while print is a rock of traditional credibility.

But the progress of the crackpot story about China drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba -- repeated by no less than Vice President Dick Cheney -- should knock a few holes in that argument.

AP quotes Cheney, caught repeating the misinformation, as saying he picked it up from print newspaper columnist George Will.

Andrew Tilghman -- a reporter for the Washington news blog TPMMuckracker -- tracks the false story to "an inexplicable spate of letters to the editor at small and regional daily newspapers." It would appear that print editors were duped by a bit of astroturfing that circulated a lie for political gain.

And he churned up a highly speculative newspaper lede that may have played a role in getting all this off to a roll.

This is the ugly truth about "freedom of speech, and of the press." It is full of trash. Misinformation abounds. Thomas Jefferson, often the victim of vicious lies printed by early newspapers, understood this when he said, "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." Because eventually the truth will out. And when lies are circulated by newspapers, perhaps a blog or two will be there to correct them.

David Kurtz, who writes for Josh Marshall's great political blog Talking Points Memo, is at the International Press Institute congress in Belgrade and observes that the angst being felt by American newspapers isn't being felt everywhere:

"In a provocatively titled panel -- 'Are Profits Killing the News?' -- William Green, the editor of Time Europe, was nearly at his wit's end, although diplomatically so, in trying to get two major European publishers to acknowledge and address the cutbacks in news and the effect of the industry's financial struggles on journalism itself."

But it's true. The future is unevenly distributed. In recent years I've attended publishing conferences and workshops and seminars in Istanbul (last year's IPI congress), Moscow, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Strassbourg, Paris and Stockholm. There is no universal publishing disaster. The publishing industry isn't dying; it's changing at variables rates and in some places (like India, where I'm headed in September) printed newspapers are actually booming. In some markets, like Norway, newspapers have become the dominant online service provider. In cities all over the world that have subways and rail transit, free commuter papers are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain (and occasionally disappearing as quickly). The world is a very diverse place.

At the moment, the United States just happens to be an ugly example of what happens when you combine disruptive technology, a business model heavily dependent on classified advertising, a disastrously mismanaged economy and a business infrastructure financed by the public markets. It's a perfect storm, which doesn't seem to be so perfect if you're one of the 1,400 people targeted for layoffs at McClatchy.

I just posted something on Alan Mutter's blog -- an item about planned redesigns at Tribune Company newspapers -- and realized afterward that hardly anybody currently employed at an American newspaper will have any idea why I referred to "funereal column rules" in Peter Palozzo's design for the old Chicago Daily News.

Friday I was chatting with a woman at work, much younger than myself, who has an unusual necklace, a gift from her newspaperman father. It's a Linotype matrix, a little brass mold for setting the letter F in type ("type" meaning molten lead, not pixels on a screen). She wore it on a visit to one of our newspapers. The executive editor asked her if it was some sort of Star Trek thing.

Here's the Palozzo explanation.

In the final days of the struggling Chicago Daily News, art director Peter Palozzo was brought in to try some visual shock therapy. He produced a design that had a jiggy new Bookman Swash logo and broke the pages into three vertical sections, each separated by a thick black line. You could fold the paper and read it on the El.

It was funereal, because in the days of hot type it was common for major stories of great sadness for a paper to "turn the rules" -- literally flip the lead column dividers upside down, so the fat base instead of the thin top presented itself. In other words, a thick black line.

Before this post there was not one single reference on the Internet to "turn the rules" and "hot type." Things change. We move on.

Yet more evidence of the deepening ownership crisis at American newspapers: the Philadelphia Inquirer's owners are technically in default of their loan terms.

This is one of those things that's likely to be oversimplified, so let's be clear: The Philadelphia Inquirer is not losing money in the simple sense that you and I might think of it. Neither is the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, another big paper sold to investors by McClatchy after it (foolishly, it seems) stepped in and grabbed the falling Knight-Ridder empire.

These newspapers are clearly declining, but they bring in more than they spend on business operations every month.

The problem isn't whether there's a positive operating margin, but rather the debt-burdened ownership. In addition to operating expenses, they have to pay crushing loan payments.

It's not terribly different from the real estate crisis. In effect, the new owners bought these newspapers by taking out huge mortgages based on assumptions about future income that turned out to be overly optimistic. The operating income is still a positive number, but it's dropping below a level the primary bankers consider healthy.

Unlike your mortgage company (which won't know you're in trouble until you're really in big trouble), the primary bankers are watching these newspapers closely. So they intervened.

This is the downside of the consolidation phase of the newspaper industry. In the last century, giant corporations sucked up the vast majority of American newspapers, and they did it with borrowed money that came from selling stock, selling bonds, and bank loans.

This drove the "market value" of newspapers to staggering heights. When I worked for the Star Tribune and McClatchy bought it for more than a billion dollars, it was a jaw-dropping figure. It was a bit like California real estate, where the median price of a home went from under $100,000 in 1980 to over $450,000 a couple of years ago. In the big picture, it was a bubble.

There's no question in my mind that the old product definition of a "newspaper" is obsolescent, that the future is much more about digital services than print, that the Internet is disconnecting news from advertising messages, and that these forces are dragging down newspaper companies.

But it's the debt load that's the immediate and most bitter problem. Newspapers can make the transitions that face them. But in order to do so, they need to starve the past and feed the future. You can't feed the future if you don't have and can't get capital.