Richard J. Tofel is the author of “Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism,” and was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

What Mark Twain once said of the weather now sometimes seems true of the state of print newspapers. Everyone complains about it, but precious little is being done to actually remake the papers—not reduce them by slicing the staff ever thinner, or cut a section here, a feature there, but actually remake them. Even if print is dying, it isn’t dead yet (at least in most places), and newspapers still present real economic potential. Herewith, with a nod to one of the greatest newspaper publishers there ever was, a proposal for rethinking the role of the print paper.

The publisher I have in mind was Barney Kilgore, the animating genius behind the explosive growth and staggering success of The Wall Street Journal in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Kilgore had many strong opinions about newspapers; one of them was that 32 pages, including advertising, was the optimal length for a paper. Readers, he believed (50 years ago!) just didn’t have time for more. And papers, he argued, should contain only essential material, stuff their readers couldn’t easily find elsewhere. The result was the fastest-growing, and ultimately the largest and most profitable newspaper in the nation.

Maybe, these decades later, Kilgore is right—again.

What would happen if Kilgore’s 32-page ideal became today’s norm? (To provide a baseline, The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) is averaging 78 pages these days on weekdays, The Wall Street Journal, 50, The Los Angeles Times, 94.)  If you had to cut back to 32 pages, what principles would guide you?

Here, after the jump, are a few.

You would focus relentlessly on what your readers still wanted to know by the time they got to their morning paper in a real-time, broadband, wireless email, unlimited texting, all-news radio, cable TV news, Twittering world.  For each news story, you would ask: Given the nature of this story, and the time of day at which it became known today, are there many readers who won’t have already learned about it by tomorrow morning, but who will still care about it?  If not, it simply doesn’t belong in the printed newspaper. What about the “paper of record” function?  That is a role which should be assumed by the paper’s website, where additional “newshole” is essentially free.

A substantial amount of what appears in today’s newspapers will not pass this test. Here are just a few examples from recent days: the fact of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and her basic biography; the White House announcement of a new Secretary of the Army; the substance of the Fed Chairman’s testimony on deficit reduction; the game story of baseball day games; almost all of the basic financial data still published in most papers.  Again, the point is this: these subjects are important to many readers. But those readers who care already know by the time their morning papers arrive, and those who don’t know by then almost certainly don’t care.

Does this mean that newspapers should ignore stories like the Sotomayor nomination, or even the GM bankruptcy?  Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that anything beyond one-paragraph summary items on those ubiquitous newsbreaks need to be analytical, interpretive, distinctive. At the very least, they need to be what editors have long referred to as “second-day” stories, but published on the “first” day.  Kilgore knew this early, because his Journal was a “second read” for most readers, as they were also reading the metropolitan paper in their hometown. Today, all print newspapers need to think of themselves as “second reads.”

Next, you would ask perhaps the hardest question to put in newsrooms: How essential to readers, how valuable—and valued—is each element of what we’re producing?  For instance, do each of our columnists and reviewers who have been in the paper for more than, say, a year have a demonstrably committed, interested following? (The year is intended to give them time to find one.) If not, we just don’t have room for them anymore. This doesn’t mean that all columnists and critics need to write for a mass audience, but it does mean they must each have an audience of some sort that considers them a key asset of the paper. Job tenure may work for teachers or judges; it doesn’t for columnists.

That’s some of what we don’t have space for anymore. What is it that we do?  Once again, Barney Kilgore may provide the key: Today’s newspaper should be about tomorrow’s events, not yesterday’s. Readers, Kilgore realized, turn to newspapers not because they are all fascinated by contemporary history, and want to puzzle out what another publisher later called journalism’s “first rough draft” of it. No, they want to know about what happened yesterday so that they can more intelligently cope with today, and tomorrow.
Beyond this, all of your remade newspaper’s content needs to be distinctive.  Some of it may achieve this by being new—“scoops” of fact, or of thought.  Some content may just be smarter—better analyzed, better sourced, deeper, better illustrated (both visually and as narrative), more comprehensible.  Some may be distinctive by being localized. Some may just be things newspapers still seem to deliver better than alternative media—crossword puzzles, cartoons and comics may be examples. Overall, again, the emphasis must be on content that is valuable (objectively) and valued (subjectively, by a particular newspaper’s readers)—and with this value tested not just overall but piece by piece. In a sense, you might consider it zero-based budgeting for content.

This thought experiment no doubt has its limits. Remaking the print product, no matter how creatively and successfully, won’t solve all—or even most—of the business problems of newspapers. The trickiest questions remain the transition from print to online, and the business model for online itself. But a new (or old) way to think about the print newspaper may be a necessary way-station on the way to the new world aborning.