The usual curmudgeonly complaint about online interaction is that it's banal: a bunch of bloggers (or Twitterers, or whatever) in pajamas (or whatever) blathering on about what they had for dinner (or whatever). But mark me down as one of those who's not bothered by occasionally reading a Tweet about something good to eat.

Perhaps there is a time and place for everything. The era of newspapers operating wholly separate online divisions clearly has ended, and the era of integrated newsrooms has begun. From that union we're all learning some things.

With all the hyperbolic, ill-sourced and often self-serving End of Days coverage of the newspaper industry lately, we shouldn't be surprised to see any number of really bad ideas surfacing -- and I don't just mean paywalls.

I say: Let the bad ideas flow. Sometimes bad ideas spark good ones. Just don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Here's one that might smell good but bear poison: Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin's proposal to let newspapers dodge taxes by declaring themselves to be nonprofit charities.

There are still a few family-owned newspapers in America, but only a few. Most were gobbled up by corporate consolidators -- newspaper chains -- decades ago. The reason, I think, has to do as much with the dynamics of a family business as with corporate finance and the peculiarities of newspapering.

There are four cycles in the life of a family business. Often they align with generations:

As I observed Friday, newsrooms are categorically blind to the underlying business realities of their own employers. This leads to needless shock and amazement when an overleveraged newspaper chain falls on hard times, a lot of pointless hand-wringing about the future of journalism, and a parade of kooky ideas about how "we" are going to "make them pay" for all the really great content that Google, et al, are "stealing."

I twittered an offhand remark yesterday: "Please stop calling print the core product." It was retweeted quite a bit, and I received some "please explain" queries. Here's my explanation.

If you're still thinking your core product is a newspaper, you're misleading yourself and maybe even killing your business.

Your core business is not print.

And this may dismay the online news crowd, but your core product isn't news.

For an internal report, I'm interviewing various people at work in an attempt to identify what we've learned from our efforts to combine print and online staffs into unified content teams.

But I'm also interested in hearing tales from outside the company, so here are a few questions. You can reply anonymously if you want, or just send me a private email at steve(at)yelvington(dot)com.

* What are the 3 biggest mistakes made in your newsroom in the convergence process? How would you avoid them, if you could do it all over again?