Newspaper innovation, U.K.-style

The American Journalism Review has a terrific essay on the greater willingness of British newspaper moguls to experiment in comparison to their American counterparts. I urge all of you to read it.

The writer, Frances Stead Sellers, takes a look at two papers, The Independent and The Guardian. By far the more interesting of her case studies is The Guardian, which has embraced a number of Web 2.0 innovations — blogging, user content and the like — in order to establish itself as a go-to site across the English-speaking world. The Independent, by contrast, has reinvented itself as a "viewspaper," a European-style journal of opinion.

One thing that struck me was how the Brits are focusing their experimentation efforts on customers who actually care about news. By contrast, a report put out last week by the Newspaper Next project comes across as timid.

The report, "Blueprint for Transformation" — which, as of this writing, is not yet online, although I've got a copy — devotes most of its time to looking at ways that newspaper companies might make money from non-readers and non-advertisers without necessarily removing the "non-."

According to the report, newspaper publishers should concentrate on developing a "portfolio" of products ranging from online resources for working mothers to specialized advertising programs for tiny neighborhood businesses. The ideas are not unworthy, but they're certainly not sexy.

You can request a copy of "Blueprint for Transformation" here. And here's a fairly brutal takedown of the report by media consultant Vin Crosbie.