The more I think about the death of metro newspapers, the more I try to figure out what entrepreneurs will come up with to replace them.

We’re seeing more than the death of metro dailies. We’re seeing the end of so called “mass communications.”

While consumers are spending less time reading newspapers and the national networks’ nightly news programs, they’re spending more time searching for more news about the iPhone, Apple, Dell, specific hi-tech games and toys and their professions, employers and industries.

And the internet allows Yahoo, MSN, Google, craigslist.com, eBay, Monster.com, careers.com and many other pay-per-click and auction sites to put readers in touch with advertisers who want to reach them.

So if you have a clean sheet of paper, $300 million in venture capital from investors who won’t put you deep in debt, what kind of business would you create to help advertisers reach their prospects and customers and consumers to find what they want to buy, keep informed about and discuss?

Would you follow CNN, which is considering taking on the Associated Press and Reuters, which are the primary national news providers?

Would you try to create a local news and advertising vehicle that focuses on community news and merchants rather than trying to cover a whole metro area?

Would you create an all news and commentary sight like a blog and count on readership that would make running Google’s Adsense profitable?

Or would you create an all advertising business that goes after local niches such as entertainment, foods, real estate, autos, sports and health care?

Maybe you’d try to do all of the above. If you could pull it off, you might have a local monopoly that would be close to legal. If you did parts of the service poorly, you could fail.

Who will be the first movers? Who will let others innovate and then come along with a better business plan? Who will be the Dairy Queen and who will be the McDonald’s, the Sears vs. the Walmart?

McDonald’s and Walmart are successful not because they invented fast food restaurants or retail discounting, but because they executed their plans so much better than their competitors.

In the communications world, the next big idea is still to emerge, much less a McDonald’s or a Walmart.

We still have the old fashioned, ancient, obsolete mass communications companies trying to re-invent themselves. We’ve yet to see a real innovator that will take us to the next generation beyond newspapers, network news, nightly news, weekly magazines, blogs and social networks.

I’m thinking the new communications entrepreneurs will begin to make their moves during the next 36 to 60 months. With the economy and credit markets in the dumps, the time is ripe.