In the keynote yesterday, Robert Picard made an amusing (and very apt) analogy between the life cycle of a dairy cow and the newspaper business. The title of his talk may sound dry and academic, but he gave one of those rare presentations that combine cogent and useful conclusions with entertaining delivery.

“When the cows get older, they produce less milk.” Newspapers are a mature industry; their markets are stagnant (and declining). Income from the print side will steadily decrease over time.

Less than 10 percent of Internet use today involves news, and most of that is reading headlines at the aggregators’ sites.

Five trends discussed:

1. 1- Erosion of audience base (and the audience is what you sell)
2. 2- Erosion of advertising base
3. 3- Online and broadband capabilities (and mobile devices)
4. 4- Employee morale has eroded and stress is rising: Content creation requires staff who want to work and who see a future in the business
5. 5- Owners of capital see greater opportunities for growth elsewhere

So the aging cow is now being squeezed hard. Shareholders and boards of directors don’t care if they ruin the cow’s ability to produce milk. As all dairy farmers know, no cow is able to produce milk forever. That’s just a fact of nature.

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I couldn’t watch any of the streaming coverage (I was at the Illinois Press Photographers Association convention in Chi-town… which I’ll rap about later) … so I’m stuck reading blog entries and checking the Austin site for video updates. It sounds like it was a cool event though. But everything in Austin has to be cool. It’s like… a city ordinance.

Anyway, Newspapers must have really pissed off a lot of people over the weekend. Business Week’s Jon Fine doesn’t pull any punches with this “Life Among The Dinosaurs” piece:

There are almost 1,500 daily papers in the U.S., so the gathering of publishers at this year’s Newspaper Association of America annual conference — held Apr. 2-4 in Chicago — looked a lot like America. An America of local monopolists, that is: overwhelmingly white, male, late-middle-aged, and predisposed to wear suits on Sunday, even when traveling. They gathered to hear, once again, that the whole problem is that they are no longer monopolists.

At every NAA convention, these men attend nightly parties in the host city’s grandest public spaces. This year’s opening event was at the magnificent Field Museum, on a large open floor bookended by two massive dinosaur skeletons. Many attendees joked about this. To the executive to whom I said such an obvious metaphor would never, ever, appear in this column: I lied.

I would totally pay one thousand pennies for a nicely-lit picture of this spectacle.

Later…

AT THE CONFERENCE, an Associated Press presentation and a speech by Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) hammered at problems posed by America’s outsize oil consumption. After the AP event, I encountered a delightful newspaper executive — ruddy-faced and white-haired — in the elevator. No conservation measures for this guy! “I’m just gonna gas up my SUV and go out in a blaze of glory,” he all but hooted as the doors shut.

In many ways, that is precisely the problem with newspapers.