Little Dougie's newspaper

Newspapers in America have gone every whichaway since the Internet started to destroy the traditional newspaper business model 15-odd years ago.

I say to you, wherever you live, you will find no other result more interesting than the one we enjoy here in San Diego. Our newspaper, "U-T San Diego," is laid out on the living room floor by Little Dougie Manchester, with his "Jr. Newspaper Publisher and Future Ambassador Kit."

Doesn't sound possible? Subscribe to U-T San Diego for a month.

Little Dougie got his kit a couple of years ago but it's only been a year or so that he has really started learning how to use it. We in San Diego have had the privilege of watching his skills develop week by week.

Little Dougie must have received an earlier edition of the "Jr. Newspaper Publisher and Future Ambassador Kit." The newest edition would certainly call for a television studio to be built in one of the old newspaper's newsrooms, but it would also instruct that the project be purely digital, with TV content captured as computer files for consumers to come to, at a tiny fraction of the cost of transmitting this content using the traditional broadcast methodology.

Little Dougie's newspaper uses the old, traditional TV methodology. Thus it is costing him many more dollars to hear consumers tell him how bad it is.

But hey! What are instructional kits for? How many of your mother's china coffee cups, dear readers, did you ruin in your first year with your chemistry set?

We have witnessed Little Dougie's imagination shift into a higher gear in the last couple of months. Apparently it is tied to the 2012 presidential elections. He must have gone to his father and asked, "Father, as a publisher, what am I?" His father replied, "Son, you are a Mitt Romney Republican, and Barack Obama is the devil incarnate."

We saw red-crayon endorsements for Republican candidates start to show up on the front page. Then over the weekend we witnessed opinion-page layout that any veteran traditional newspaperman or editor will tell you has never been seen on an editorial page before. This very Sunday, an editorial appeared that could only have been written by a six-year-old with a couple of movie passes.

Little Dougie is really getting the hang of it. I will be keeping you posted. Late update: This week, Little Dougie is starting to show Republican candidates locally how to use the "Jr. Newspaper Publisher and Future Ambassador Kit," to write better press releases, get more favorable coverage, etc. You'll be reading more about this, I am sure.

If you are wondering about the kit's "Future Ambassador" feature, it takes a high level of ego to be a newspaper publisher. Ask them, and many will tell you frankly they would enjoy being an ambassador someday. If Mitt wins, with the kind of support received from Little Dougie, you can see an ambassadorship somewhere in the boy's future.