This newscast from KRON in San Francisco in 1981 has been making the rounds recently. It’s labeled “primitive Internet report,” but what it presents is actually one example of the many pre-Internet efforts that the newspaper industry made to try to plan for an online future — and stake out its own turf in that forthcoming world.

This particular example has a lot of personal resonance because the newspaper involved is the SF Examiner. The video’s now antediluvian-looking images have a Proustian quality for me: In 1981 I was just graduating from college, but five years later I’d be going to work in the newsroom you see in this video. Those green-on-black screens you can see the reporters working on (“Coyotes,” they were called) strained my eyes for a decade. Dave Cole, the guy who introduces the Examiner’s “experiment” in making its content available via modem to home computer users, was still there, working on the computerization of the paper’s operations; he went on to become a well known industry consultant.

In the video, you can hear Cole say, of the “Electronic Examiner” he was demonstrating, “We’re not in it to make money.” At the end, the announcer points out that an entire edition of the paper takes two hours to download, at a $5/hour cost — making this “telepaper” little competition for the paper edition. “For the moment at least,” the reporter declares, over the image of a sidewalk news vendor hawking the afternoon edition, “this fellow isn’t worried about being out of a job.”

Though the piece does say that “Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer,” its underlying message is — Don’t worry. This crazy computer stuff isn’t going to change anything much for now. And indeed it took 10 years for any sort of online service to become even remotely popular. Almost 30 years later, newspapers are still in business; some are even still sold by guys on sidewalks. It has taken this long for the technology to transform the newspaper biz in a big way.

What you can see at work in this clip is the “computers will replace trucks!” perspective that continued to hobble the news industry’s online efforts for many years. The “Electronic Examiner’s” use of the computer as an efficient transport mechanism for the same old product was understandable; it was a Herculean effort in 1981 just to get this stuff to work (and there were precious few customers/users).

But even as the downloads sped up and the connect-time costs dropped, the industry held onto that approach, instead of coming to grips with the fundamentally different dynamics of a new communications medium. What had made sense in the early days over time became a crippling set of blinders. The spirit of experimentation that the Examiner set out with in 1981 dried up, replaced by an industry-wide allergy to fundamental change.

“Let’s use the new technology,” editors and executives would say, “but let’s not let the technology change our profession or our industry.” They largely succeeded in resisting change. Now it’s catching up with them.

More on this stuff from Jeff Jarvis (who was there at the Examiner in the early ’80s, before me) and Susan Mernit.

Jack Shafer seems to be locked into the same mental cul-de-sac as David Carr when it comes to the future of news consumption. In his Slate column responding to what he calls Carr’s “excellent” challenge to invent the “iTunes for news,” Shafer argues that publishers should invent their own standard and bypass potential Apple-like aggregators (the role Amazon has taken for its Kindle reader):

Just as the iPhone and other smartphones obliterated the PDA category, mobile PCs and smartphones used as electronic readers could render the Kindle obsolete overnight if publishers joined forces to create technical standard for over-the-air delivery of books and publications.

That’s my bold in the quote, because that phrase encapsulates the error in Shafer’s thinking. It is the same error that electronic publishers made in the early ’90s when they thought they could “repurpose” existing media on shiny CD-ROMs. It’s the same error that the early experimenters in motion pictures made when they pointed their cameras at the stage to record plays.

The future of news does not lie in “over-the-air delivery of books” and existing publications (newspapers, magazines). Books, newspapers and magazines work quite beautifully on paper. But they cannot be transposed into digital form as is. That’s why all the kludge-y attempts to provide a newspaper look-and-feel on screen (including one by the New York Times that Shafer inexplicably adores) are such disastrous failures, and will never become widely used products.

It is hugely unlikely that news and information as presently delivered in newspapers and magazines will be consumed as newspapers (or magazines) simply repackaged for download onto some device. Why? Because there already is a “technical standard” for “over-the-air delivery” of such news and information: it’s called the Web. And if netbooks become popular devices for consuming such news and information, as Shafer credibly argues, users will use them freely to assemble their news and information from the Web. If newspapers try to sequester their content into pay-only downloads, people will simply ignore their products. (Books are a somewhat different can of worms, but I’ll leave that for another post.)

Yet that is what Shafer is urging them to do. In his dreamworld, the newspaper and magazine publishers will secede from the Web and start charging users to read their products on netbook PCs via some proprietary interface. I’m not making this up:

By eschewing the Web browser, the Times Reader also sent the same message the nonbrowser interface for the iTunes sends: This isn’t the Web, dude. This isn’t free. You’re going to have to pay.

In 2009, it’s simply ludicrous to imagine that any such scheme could prosper. (The iTunes comparison doesn’t hold because music is a fundamentally different product from news and information.) But if you are clinging to the pipe-dream that news publishers can maintain their old profit margins, you have to convince yourself that this sort of approach could work. It’s a shame to think that some news companies will squander their dwindling resources on such desperation moves, when what they ought to be doing is accepting reality.

In reality, the old business model is disintegrating, and the public and the journalism profession need the business to figure out how to fund in-depth reporting and investigative journalism in the new digital world. The more energy the news industry wastes trying to repackage the dead old form in new, ill-fitting digital clothes, the fewer resources it will have to tackle the real challenge.

David Carr is looking for a new business model for news, and says it needs an iTunes. Part of what he wants is to charge for the articles, and, you know, good luck with that. (Times Select, RIP.) But part of what he wants is simply the elusive new online revenue stream that will pay for the newsroom.

Well, it already exists. It’s called Google text ads. It’s ad revenue tailored specifically for the Web environment. It works, and it’s already bringing considerable sums in to many Web sites. It lets little guys and big guys play on the same field.

The problem is, it doesn’t bring in as much cash as newspapers want, or have traditionally expected. And of course, from the music companies’ perspective, neither does iTunes.

The news industry knows how to make money online, just like everybody else. It just doesn’t know how to make as much money as it used to offline. Carr’s piece is strangely silent on this obvious observation. For someone who is trying to think out loud about this situation, he is displaying a peculiar blind spot.

Unfortunately, as a result, his musing simply prolongs the day of reckoning for the industry. He continues to hold out hope for some elusive profit-generating magic formula, instead of helping the business face the reality of a new world in which there’s simply far less money to be made.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s comment: “The real fallacy in Carr’s delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can’t get it somewhere else and so you have to buy the original.”