With the implosion of the dot.com industry and what at first glance appears to be an overbuilding of bandwidth in the telecommunications sector, it seems like as good a time as any to kick the newspaper/Internet business. Kick it while it is down.

I have wanted to take a shot for awhile but was afraid to. Since America Online became big enough to acquire Time-Warner, and generally before, the Internet has been forecast as the eventual resting place of most newspaper endeavors and publishers have scrambled to put together a “presence.”

If you didn’t have a strong Internet offering to complement your ink on paper, you were considered a dinosaur, a fool or both. Many publishers saw their future role as content owners and developers. Companies that wanted to help newspapers build and host Web sites called daily to pitch their services. In many cases, sites were built out of fear of being passed by — rather than any particularly good business model. Resources that were badly needed elsewhere were diverted from the core products.

Now the pendulum swings back in the other direction. If the question is Internet-related, the answer is “no.”

Both approaches are wrong.

The first step for publishers looking at branching out into the Internet, is to realize that it is a completely different business. It should be treated as such. The business model is different (or it should be), the sales pitch is different (or it should be), the sales force is different (or it should be) — everything is different.

Some folks have been around small newspapers long enough to see some interesting business combinations with the local paper. Printing job shops, office supplies and copy services are the popular ones, but all of us have probably noticed the occasional anomaly.

But usually, upon close examination of the business and the owners of the business, those combinations made some kind of weird sense. The models worked and they were not forced. The owners of those odd combinations somehow knew when the two or more businesses needed to be separate, and when a little overlap was OK.

The newspaper/Internet content provider combination can work too, if it is not forced. But don’t try to slap the model from one business on to the other. In a tourist town, you may do pretty well selling advertisements for a countertopped tabloid but find there is real money to be made in taking a reservations commission from the local hotels and restaurants through your Web site. You may find you sell a tremendous amount of local sports or brewery hats, mugs, shirts and other products through your e-tail site, at a hefty profit, but most of your clients first saw your aggressive print campaign in the local paper, your paper.

But you might get killed trying to sell a Web banner advertisement with a two-column-by-2-inch display ad. Your sales rep may be excellent with print but not have a clue with electronic media or visa-versa.

But the reason for the combination of two or more businesses is because that combination makes sense. Just because everyone else has a Web site, it is not necessarily a good reason for you to have one.