In a recent blog post, Ben LaMothe discussed the need for newspapers to hire brand managers to help build their audiences. This is anathema to most journalists, editors and publishers, who view marketing and branding as the "evil empire" that they have been employed to guard against. But does it make sense?

There is little doubt that print newspapers have suffered greatly in the past decade. They have been slow to react and adapt to the digital age, and have only done so under duress. The public realizes this and has reacted by increasingly abandoning print newspapers for daily news and looking to the Internet, television and radio for immediacy.

What if the newspaper were to begin working harder to establish itself as the best local source for independent and credible news? What if it were to begin marketing itself as the brand to trust - relying on the education and dedication of journalists past?

There is no way the print edition of a newspaper alone is going to win the battle of immediacy in today's fast-paced digital world. Instead, it should be relying on online editions for breaking news and position the print edition as the vehicle for delving deeper into a news topic, pulling the many salient facts of professional journalism into a coherent and thoughtful combined news reporting platform. By establishing the credibility of solid reporting and fact-checking, it can become once again the go-to source for reliable information.

As discussed in the blog above, a brand manager for a newspaper could become the conduit between editors, journalists and the public. The days of assuming that a newspaper's content will be automatically and widely read because it's on the front page or up on the site have passed. By learning and implementing an ongoing editorial publicity program congruent with the newspaper's editorial standards and proactively positioning the newspaper to various communities, a brand manager could help salvage readership, share and profits.