Readers aren’t leaving newspapers en masse, but they aren’t constantly checking on newspapers’ websites either, says the Readership Institute.

The biggest problem for the newsprint industry has to do with advertisers returning to their burrows waiting for the recession to wither.

Lots of faithful readers, no advertisers. Why not make the readers pay?

If readers like the content they read, maybe they’ll be willing to pay for it, too. Two solutions:

1.       Online: Seeking a financial endorsement. There’s no way you can make a web-user pay for accessing content on a per-article basis. Selling membership to a project, though, might work. The success of “Arrêt sur images” has little to do with content. Instead, a show kicked out of TV asked its viewers for support so it could live on on the web.

2.       Offline: Selling a new kind of journalistic products. The web forces a new rhythm to offline news. In France, a book-publishing venture launched to provide deep journalistic content (ie, a book) while sticking to the news agenda (via Atelier des Médias).

More impressive, a quarterly magazine appeared with 120 pages and 0 ads. XXI magazine has run 3 issues sold for €15/£12/$24. They sold 40,000 copies of each. You do the math.

This new ecology of journalism was advocated by Doc Searls last year. He argued that display advertising is so inadequate that it would disappear no matter what economic conditions. Now is the time to get ready for that.