Mapping out the future of newspapers is a familiar challenge confronting publishers and owners.

Are newspapers dinosaurs, waiting only for the rocks to cool before they’ve forever disappeared below the surface?

Or are they indispensable, still capable of overcoming the torrent of multimedia competitors that jostle for attention?

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. Publishers realize that newspapers will never again enjoy the dominant positions they once held before 24-hour cable and Internet news replaced “Extra, extra, read all about it.”

But they also know that hundreds of millions of people worldwide look for their newspaper the first thing after they wake up each morning. That’s loyalty that marketers and bankers alike can’t ignore.

That’s why it’s refreshing to talk about the investments major companies are making in ink-on-paper projects. We already know about the $1 billion News Corp. intends to spend to upgrade production facilities in the United Kingdom. And in this issue, you’ll read about the progress Detroit Newspapers has made in its $178 million print facility project (see page 1).

But these are far from the only games in town. Last month, Belo Corp. said it would spend upwards of $200 million for new production plants in Dallas and Riverside, Calif.

Tribune, meantime, is ready to recoup some of the $45 million it spent last year to increase the color capacity of the Los Angeles Times and will likely spend more than that as it boosts color in its flagship Chicago Tribune.

We had the good fortune to visit both Detroit and Los Angeles in the past few months to see for ourselves where these investments will lead. In Detroit, the new plant will enable The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press to compete aggressively for business the papers had to forego due to obsolete printing and postproduction systems.  

In Los Angeles, the Times will exploit its revitalized production and color muscle in a bid to create a quality product that mirrors its lauded journalistic heritage. (We’ll have much more on the Times project in an upcoming issue of Newspapers & Technology).

Do these projects mean business as usual? Absolutely not. Keith Pierce, the Detroit Newspapers executive spearheading the project, said systems going into place will reinvent how the agency produces The News and Free Press, from makeready to how newsprint rolls are stored.

And will future projects necessarily produce newspapers that we’ve come to know and love?

Again, absolutely not. We should expect not only “traditional” newspapers, but also digitally produced publications that can be edited and composed on the fly. We should also expect tomorrow’s newspapers to be priced according to the market they are targeting. High income and a desirable demographic? Charge a buck. Trying to woo younger readers? Give it away for free. That’s a model espoused by Miami Herald Publisher Alberto Ibarguen, according to a piece published in The Herald Dec. 12. That’s innovative thinking.

Yes, “Extra extra” may be gone. But newspapers, if they’re smart, don’t have to be.