Steal My Ideas, Please

I know the news people at newspapers will find this amewsing, but I’m serious about making newspapers more unpredictable and fun. As usual, these thoughts may seem like rambling, but there is a vision to my madness, if only to open minds to more possibilities for making content varied and surprising. Why, for example, can’t that billboard quote be a who-said-it quiz? Or a caption be a multiple choice? Why not print cartoons on sequential pages to make a flip book? Or how about using faint background lines on a page that show how to make something different every day … paper airplanes, hats, origami, halloween masks, a dress pattern, a game, a scavenger hunt. Make the page do double-duty. Make newspapers as creative as the Internet. You’re not competing just with news, you’re competing with YouTube. Nightline’s trumped by two late-night comics. That’s the audience, America.