A recent post by a local portal guru cites an employee memo from Gannett’s CEO Craig Dubow saying that “news and information will be delivered to the right media - be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented - at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.”

Dubow goes on to say “Asking the community for help, gets it - and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again,” he says. The bottom line is that more people, in a community context, will “attract the customers advertisers want…. Simply, appealing to more and different readers helps bring us more and different advertisers.”

How exactly does Gannett plan to turn the ship Mr. Dubow from a revenue model of charging for classified ads and subscription-based readership? As your revenues continue to decline, your readership gets older, and your editors are stretched even thinner in their territories to cover more local stuff–a recipe for disaster. The barrier to entry to compete against you is very low when you start diving into web, video, podcasting, or anything else you decide to throw at the wall. You are not a 20-person local paper full of entrepeneurial writers and programmers. You are a $7 billion public company headed for an iceberg. Good luck trying to “appear local” with community driven content. Your base readership, which skews 60+ in age, isn’t going to go online, download your podcasts to their iPod, and take part in an online discussion about a new garage band in the area. Good luck with that.