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If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website.

E&P reports that the Cincinnati Post will shut down at the end of the year, when its joint operating agreement with the Cincinnati Inquirer expires. The Post's circulation has declined from 188,000 some 30 years ago to 27,000 weekdays today. For whatever reasons, E.W. Scripps Co. won't attempt to keep the brand alive by continuing to operate the newspaper's website.

Journalists are chronically confused about why people read newspapers. As Clayton Christensen has pointed out, the best way to understand product-market relationships is this: People don't buy products; they hire products to get specific jobs done.

Editors Weblog cites a study from the Newspaper Audience Databank that shows baby boomers in Canada still consume print (56% weekdays, 78% weekly cume): "Their readership habits have changed little over the past 20 years."

Om Malik profiles a company he calls "the American Idol of digital photography." The idea: Get photographers to compete online to get their work printed in a magazine. The site: JPG magazine.

It's human nature to compete for scarce resources. Online space isn't scarce, but print always is scarce. I wonder what use newspapers could make of this principle. Hmm.

Peter Krasilovsky and Jay Small have some thoughts about local online revenue growth and the inflection point at which a web operation outsells the print operation.