Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy (a regular contributor to CommonWealth) has a typically thoughtful post describing five ways to save the “shrinking” Boston Globe. For example, he suggests a better integration between the Boston.com site (aka The Tom and Gisele Show) and the print edition. Right now, Boston.com seems to treat the newspaper not as a resource but as a burden, shunted off to the site’s equivalent of a mother-in-law apartment (or “granny flat,” if you’re from Britain).

The most counter-intuitive of Dan’s suggestions is a steep increase in the price of the print edition, up to $2 on weekdays and $5 on Sunday. The idea is that “Customers willing to pay such a price would be an elite audience especially attractive to advertisers.” I see some merit in that, speaking as someone who now spends $5 on the Sunday New York Times. But if I’m going to pay for the Globe (rather than read it for free online, as I now do), I want to be sure that my “attractive” money is going to pay for some in-depth reporting and analysis, and not for more stale, suburban-oriented stories like this and this.

And I have to disagree with one of Dan’s ideas to make the print edition more attractive to serious readers:

How about a really well-edited, analytical daily briefing on world, national and local news that would take up all of an ad-free pages two and three? It would have to be sufficiently meaty that it would take 10 or 15 minutes to get through it, and leave readers feeling as though they didn’t absolutely have to read the rest of the paper. That would be a real service to time-starved folks who are serious about news.

I’ve never understood the need for a daily briefing like this. I’m not the president, and I don’t host a cable news program, so I have no use for one- or two-paragraph takes for whatever the mainstream media deems the most important stories of the day. If the people who matter are talking about something, I’ll find out about it quickly enough by glancing at the headlines on my Yahoo page or scanning my RSS feeds.

And if a news story is worth five seconds of my time, it’s worth five minutes of my time. I’ll skip over the capsule summary and go straight to a thoroughly reported piece, thank you. If I’m time-starved, I’ll just read about fewer things for now. There’s always going to be time to catch up on developments in the Middle East; I can skip days or weeks without suddenly becoming ill-informed on the topic.

I do agree with Dan that the Globe is still “the dominant regional media organization” and that its rivals (WBUR, New England Cable News, the local blogosphere) do not make up an adequate replacement for a daily newspaper. Anyone have any better ideas on how to save it?