Three points for Iowa.

You don’t hear “The [Cedar Rapids] Gazette of eastern Iowa” and “leads the way” in very many sentences, least of all from Mark Potts and Jay Rosen. But there it is–my hometown paper is leading the charge in reinventing their product:

[W]hat Buttry is suggesting, correctly, is that the newspaper should strive to be an active, aggressive participant in any sort of business transaction that it touches or causes to happen. Or, as he writes, “We need to connect the business with the customer and collect the money, taking a reasonable cut for ourselves.”

Editorial purists will shudder—it seems so…dirty. But it’s not, if the right protections are in place, and these are obvious revenue—and hell, reader-service—opportunities that papers have been foolishly ignoring for years, or paying little more than lip service. The Gazette is actually trying to do all these things. How radical.

Small newspapers are primarily middlemen–something happens somewhere, they tell us–and don’t have much investigative flex (I can’t remember the Gazette ever breaking a real story), so it makes sense for papers to take Google’s revenue-generation blueprint a step further, using their local connections and knowledge to target a specific niche.

If you’re interested in the fate of newspapers, read the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

HT: @Steve Buttry via @Jay Rosen

On a side note, this marks the second time in a month Iowa has been cited as a “leader.” Combined with swine flu, that has to be at least two horsemen, right?