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There’s a lot of talk in the “media blogosphere” about what business models newspapers will have to come up with to stay alive much longer into the 21st century, and while no doubt a sound business model is important (duh), something I’ve been mulling over in my head seems to me to be of equal or near-equal importance and that is relevance.

No, not the “write what people want to read” type of content relevance, although that’s obviously important too, what I’m referring to is along the lines of medium relevance, that is, “be where people are.”

So what if people move to a different medium (or a different angle on an existing medium) and we don’t move with them? What happens then?

Say there’s a newspaper, today, without a parallel web operation. Yes, everyone knows that 80-90% of a newspaper’s total revenue is made up of the revenue from the “print side of the house” and while this would seem like a great justification for not investing in that “fad” called teh intarweb, most sane publishers also know print revenues are dropping like a stone while the revenues from the web side of the house are increasing (albeit at a slower rate).

Now imagine some point in the future when the industry revenues are closer to 50/50 and the publisher of our fictitious newspaper decides suddenly to invest in an Internet strategy. “Now is the time,” he’d say smugly, “now that the tubes that bring us the Internet have shown some promise.”

Of course his competitors would already have 97% market penetration between them (70% Craigslist, 20% Google and every other area TV station and newspaper - not to mention up-and-coming local news startups - vying for the last 7%) so there’d be no room for him. But worse, in a world where virtually everyone would be getting their news online, would anyone even remember this particular newspaper? Folks would be saying things like, “I haven’t seen that paper since I was a kid,” and adding, “do they even still publish it?”

In a word, his paper would be irrelevant. And this is before even thinking about such silly little things like the howtos of web publishing, workflows or “changing cultures“. They’d be out before they even stepped up to the plate.

Ok, ok, the above is a pretty silly example (I hope), but it’s just a matter of degrees along a theme that I’ve heard a lot of over the years, the don’t waste time on that New Thing because it won’t get enough traffic meme. You see, we don’t have the resources to flit away an such trivialities as livecasting or in-depth local news or blogging or geocoding or RSS….

I worry that by the time the next New Thing reaches the point where it has “become viable” (or New Things, as I suspect it will be a combination of Things), newspapers that shy away from exploring new technologies will have ceased to be relevant.