It’s a long piece, but take the time to peruse this article from Online Journalism Review. Titled “What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive,” it’s advice every old-school newspaper publisher should heed.

A nut graph:

The newspaper industry has spent billions on the Internet to create online editions that are read by fewer people, less frequently and less fully than print editions. These online editions haven’t helped newspapers attract younger readers, and most of them are a financial drain on the newspapers that support them.

Online editions, it finds, act as albatrosses for print operations. Average readers don’t respond to “shovelware” editions, where all the print content of the newspaper is shoveled to the Web like some hungry blast furnace. Readers go online for content that matches their interests.

Ergo, online operations, in their current forms, don’t justify the vast resources thrown at them.

Coveted young readers, it finds, don’t read newspapers’ online editions any more than they read the print versions.

Stan Soffin, my professor for Newswriting and Reporting 101 at Michigan State University, introduced me to the concept of the Daily Me: an on-demand aggregate of the news I want to read. The future of news, he would say.

That future is here.

Readers, especially the young Web-saavy set, turn in droves to their own Daily Me editions, through advances like RSS feeds, or simply scouring the Web for the latest news that interests them. The bad news is, most newspapers don’t seem to have the mindset to meet those readers on the other end.

[Editor's note: This post amended, with explanation in a later post.]

Recent violence, and a rash of kidnappings, in Iraq have the international rules of war spinning precariously.

I wrote briefly earlier about the March 31 tragedy in Fallujah. Find that post here. That offered a strange case, and perhaps strange precedent, for war-waging. As terrible as that event was, those men were part of the second largest armed foreign contingent in Iraq: soldiers for hire.

Point being, while those four men did brutally lose their lives to angry crowds on the streets of Fallujah, I suspect they knew what they were up against when they got to Iraq. Scott Helvenston, who I wrote of, had a Navy SEAL background; he, and the other three, all employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, had intensive training for combat operations. BSC’s Web site describes their consultant teams as being “comprised of former operators primarily from the ranks of the US special operations and intelligence communities.”

A highly-paid professional “security consultant” (i.e. a “soldier of fortune”) is still a soldier.

Over the weekend, gunmen snatched an American civilian. That is in addition to the three Japanese kidnapped late last week, and fresh reports of Chinese civilian kidnappings.

Our leadership understands the nature of our foes. What I’m unsure of is whether our leadership understands the full implications of that nature.

In younger, more foolish days I thought of the U.S. as the paladin of the international scene. Though a preemptive strike policy, as exercised in Iraq, effectively guts that notion, I wonder if we, as a country, can guard ourselves against the dishonorable depths to which fundamentalist radicals can plummet.