The most noticeable design changes are on the iPad, where the new homepage has some of the modularity that the Times’ ongoing web redesign has. Here’s what the new (top) and previous (bottom) iPad apps looked like this afternoon:

Also noteworthy is what’s under the hood: This is the first version of the app that’s universal for iOS devices, meaning that the same code is at work across the iPad, iPhone, and even the Apple Watch. The Times released the first version of its iPad app in April 2010, just a few months after Apple announced the iPad and shortly before Apple introduced support for universal iPad-iPhone apps. Other news organizations, slower to develop for the iPad, created universal news apps from the beginning. A few months later, the Times started offering access to its iPhone and iPad apps in different subscription tiers, separating the products further.

Very proud to announce the release of an app I’ve spent the past year working on, a completely rewrite in Swift: https://t.co/OZ28wgmYro

— iYrke (@bpekroy) July 25, 2017

Both of these product choices complicated the Times’ efforts to bring its iPad and iPhone apps together, as Matthew Bischoff‏, a former Times iOS developer, noted in a thread here. Bischoff‏ said that app’s release was delayed in part by the Times’ decision to rebuild the app in Swift, Apple’s latest programming language.

6.0 is a rewrite of the app to be written in Swift. Additionally, it unifies the phone and tablet iOS apps into a universal binary.

— Grant Butler (@grantjbutler) July 25, 2017

Creating a universal app for iPhone and iPad should make life a lot easier for the mobile developers at the Times. When the Times experiments with a new feature, for example, developers will be able to code and test it once, rather than do so for multiple devices. This means both faster development and less testing, which should free up developers to push out features more frequently.

There are few features that aren’t enabled yet but underlying technology is almost done :) looking forward to seeing the app grow ;)

— Krzysztof Zabłocki (@merowing_) July 25, 2017

Today we dropped a brand new (universal) @nytimes for iOS, rewritten in Swift, setting the stage for lots to come: https://t.co/8p49TEhNMM

— Alex Rainert ‍ (@arainert) July 26, 2017

new @nytimes iOS app update (that I had nothing to do with) is legit. damn fine work, team.

— ashley riehlin (@asherly) July 26, 2017

Whoever finally fixed scrolling inertia in the new @nytimes iOS app deserves a raise

— Ryan Murphy (@rdmurphy) July 26, 2017

Postscript: they kept my favorite screen in the app: the emoji credits! pic.twitter.com/ic0MHZFuH0

— Matthew Bischoff (@mb) July 25, 2017

HomePod: Apple led its presentation (and picked the name) of the HomePod with music in mind — putting it in a historical line with iTunes and iPods rather than the Amazon Echo. (Its first stated requirement was to “rock the house.”) In the same way the Apple Watch sells fitness as the hook to get a computer strapped on your wrist, HomePod sells music to get a microphone in your home — and for many people, music will be all it gets used for. But it also features the same sort of voice interaction patterns we’ve become familiar with with the Echo and Google Home. That includes some news elements; check out this slide of things you can say to your HomePod — asking for sports results, tuning into NPR, playing podcasts, and “tell me the latest news” are all options:

There was no particular announcement in the keynote about Siri expanding to new classes of apps — though that could easily be something that is announced to developers later in the week or in developer docs just posted. So it’s unclear how open access to these queries will be. (“Hey Siri, ask The New York Times what’s going on in Syria.” “Hey Siri, ask Vox to explain healthcare reform in six minutes.”) But either now or at some point soon, publishers will likely have to decide whether Siri and the HomePod are worth developing for. (Update: The new SiriKit docs say only list-making and note-taking — “Hey Siri, add milk to my shopping list in Things” — are newly supported, so integration with news apps still seems to be theoretical.)

Before investing in building for a platform, publishers like to have an idea how large the addressable market will be. Amazon, the clear leader, doesn’t release sales numbers for its devices (just like the Bezos-owned Washington Post doesn’t tell anyone how many digital subscribers it has, grumble grumble). eMarketer estimates Amazon has 70 percent of the U.S. market, and Morgan Stanley estimated 11 million units sold back in December, pre-holiday rush, the vast majority of them in the United States. Google Home is at a fraction of that.

Amazon has made building Alexa skills quite easy, and its lower price point will likely keep it unthreatened as the market leader (the HomePod will go for $349 when it launches in December). But by putting the HomePod on the Siri platform, developing for it will likely also be able to take advantage of the huge installed base of iPhone and iPad customers. It’s worth watching what sort of access Apple allows developers; if it’s decent, it’s probably worth the time of an engineer or two at most or the largest publishers.

Safari: The new Safari features a couple features of interest to publishers. First, it blocks autoplay videos; Craig Federighi said that Apple will learn over time what sites “shouldn’t” have autoplay — presumably excluding video sites like YouTube. Perhaps more importantly (at least for the adtech world), Safari will do “intelligent tracking prevention,” which seems to be selective blockage of cross-site cookies, the “feature” that lets something you looked at in an online store follow you around the web for days. (Both of these announcements were explicitly made for Macs, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t move to iPhones and iPads at some point.)

Google is heading in a similar direction with Chrome, deciding what ads can and can’t be shown in-browser. Obviously, Google (which makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising) and Apple (which makes almost none of its) have different incentives influencing their actions — but in both cases, the tech giants who control the leading browsers are using their power to clean up an advertising experience that publishers, adtech, and advertisers haven’t been able to. That raises legitimate antitrust concerns — but it also appears to be a fait accompli at this point. Some news execs are going to see big drops in the monthly play counts, but that’s probably for the best.

iOS 11: In the long run, Apple’s interested in more information workers moving from MacBooks to iPads, but the phone-born iOS hasn’t always worked too well for more significant use. (Try researching a topic across multiple websites and then writing a link-heavy blog post about them on an iPad. Can you do it? Sure. Would you want to? Probably not.)

So iOS 11, announced today and coming out this fall, includes a few updates that’ll be welcomed by, say, reporters in the field. A new multitasking view, based on a rebuilt Dock, looks much more flexible. A better on-screen keyboard should make typing numbers and punctuation easier. A new Files app exposes the file system to users in a way Steve Jobs famously resisted, but which might save you a few hundred “Open In…” dialogues. (This may or may not be linked to Apple’s successful launch of a new file system, which reached macOS today. And the interface can include third-party apps like Dropbox.) Text, images, and other bits of content can now be drag-and-dropped between apps. There’s 3D Touch tab switching in Safari. It’s a package of updates that should make word-based, multi-app work significantly easier.

One other note: Apple is dropping support for 32-bit apps on iOS. It’s unlikely your publisher’s app is 32-bit unless it’s sat ignored for multiple years — actually maybe it’s not that unlikely? you probably have some weird print replica thing from 2012 still in there — but if it is, it’ll stop working this fall.

Apple News: The lil’ distributed-content platform that could, Apple News has been a surprise hit with publishers and audiences alike, with outlets reporting big audiences, especially from push notifications. No big updates made the keynote threshold, but there was an interesting mention in a section about iOS. Siri — which seems to be getting a rebranding from a voice interface to a Google Assistant-style pan-device intelligence system — can now detect what you’re looking at in Safari and suggest news articles about them. The example given was someone searching for travel information about Reykjavík in Safari and then being prompted with Iceland-related news in Apple News.

Some evil genius will figure out the right way to take advantage of this and unleash a new dark science of…Safari-engine optimization?

A couple brief mentions on a slide seem to indicate Apple News videos will now appear in the Today view (which I imagine also means a more prominent treatment for video in the Apple News app) and a new Spotlight tab in the app.

Update: According to promotional materials posted after the keynote ended:

News becomes even more personal, showing top stories that are more relevant to you. Siri learns what’s important to you and suggests stories you might like. And our editors choose a different topic every day for you to explore in a new tab called Spotlight. They also craft a daily selection of the best videos for you to see in Today View.

Plus this image of the Spotlight tab — this is part of what new editor-in-chief Lauren Kern will be working on, presumably:

Note that the current Apple News tab bar goes For You / Favorites / Explore / Search / Saved, so there’s a little bit of swapping going on here.

Miscellaneous: WWDC is about software first and foremost, but there were a few hardware updates. The 9.7″ iPad Pro grew to 10.5″, with smaller bezels; the larger size means keys on the on-screen and Smart Keyboards will be full-sized. MacBooks and iMacs were all updated with faster processors; the iMac also got boosted graphics capacity that should make it more useful for high-end video and VR production, an area where Apple has lagged. The company also announced an upcoming iMac Pro, due in December, which will be even more useful.

Over on the Apple Watch, Apple News is now a native watch app, meaning push notifications can be viewed in a more native and visual environment on the watch. They’ll show up in a new Siri-powered watch face. Still probably only useful to publishers as a prompt to pick up your phone, though.

The iPhone’s camera app now allows a sort of fake long-exposure filter, which at least a few tripod-free photographers will find tempting.

Apple announced new machine learning and augmented reality tools for developers, which sounded impressive and could be of longer-term use to a few publishers.

Finally, despite my hopes, there’s were no desktop Apple News or Podcasts apps announced — a space I’m a little surprised Apple hasn’t moved into yet. (Though the iOS Podcasts app has apparently gotten a redesign — potentially key given that’s by far the most popular places for podcasts to be consumed. And, though we don’t know much about it, a WWDC on Podcasts later this week promises that “iOS 11 upgrades the Apple Podcasts app to support new feed structures for serialized shows” — interesting!)

In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with the The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70/30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. “Now we’re going to open up to all categories,” Schiller says, “and that includes games, which is a huge category.”

The first part of that is the important one for news publishers. When Apple announced it would bring paid subscriptions to iOS in 2011, it was viewed with much excitement by some in the news business, who saw it as a way to transfer the regular circulation revenue they had in the print business to digital. Combined with the release of the iPad a year earlier, it prompted a flowering of efforts, from big media company bets (The Daily, R.I.P.) to one-person startups (The Magazine, R.I.P.). But over time — as those R.I.P.s might suggest — publishers mostly soured on the idea, for a variety of reasons. (Among them: Incomplete data on users; difficulty organically attracting new subscribers or reaching existing ones; being locked inside that awful Newsstand folder on your homescreen.)

Newsstand is gone, but until today, one other complaint was still true: Apple took a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue — too high a cut for some app publishers to swallow.

Schiller’s announcement means that that cut will only apply for the first year of a subscription; after that, it’ll drop to 15 percent. So if you’re charging $9.99 a month for an iOS subscription, your second-year revenue from a customer will jump 21 percent (from $83.92 to $101.90). And, John Gruber notes, this change is retroactive in one sense: Existing apps with subscribers who’ve been on board a year already will start getting the 85/15 split next week, rather than a year from now.

A couple other interesting details:

• Different price points in different countries are now possible. (So, for instance, The New York Times could charge readers in India less — or more! — than its U.S. readers.)
• You’ll be “able to keep active subscribers at their existing price while increasing the price for new users.”
• Renewal periods can now be every two, three, or six months, in addition to monthly or annually.
• It’s now easier to offer multi-tiered subscriptions within a single app. (Though it’s been possible before; the Times for instance offers both its basic $15/month digital subscription and its upsell Times Insider $25/month subscription in its current app.) Switching from one level to another will be seamless for customers.

One other cautionary point worth noting: You can choose to increase the price of a subscription for an existing customer…but that customer will get a notification of the change and the option to affirmatively accept the increase. If they don’t, their existing subscription ends. So you’ll want to use that option with caution.

Ironically, the part of the new rules least directly tied to publishers might end up as a net negative for them. Subscriptions were previously open only to certain kinds of apps (news, cloud services, dating apps, and audio/video streaming apps like Spotify or Netflix). Now they’ll be available to all apps. The intention is to enable app developers to build more sustainable revenue models for complex apps without having to charge a large price up front. (Think about how your Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office apps are probably paid for on an annual subscription basis today; five years ago, they would have probably been one-time retail-box purchases.)

But that new availability means that many, many more apps will likely start charging for subscriptions — including productivity apps for devices like the iPad Pro, for instance, and lots and lots of games. In that environment, I wonder if consumers will see a news app as “just one more monthly bill” and think of it as more directly in competition with Candy Crush PRO 3.11 for Workgroups or Two Dots Elite: Two More Dots or what have you.

I predict lots of $2.99+ apps will switch to $1/mo subscriptions and it will psychologically seem better to users and will boost sales.

— Mike Rundle (@flyosity) June 8, 2016

But that’s mostly just supposition on my part. Apple has itself tried to shift its revenue story from near-complete reliance on big one-time purchases (a new iPhone!) toward repeated regular payments (Apple Music! iCloud storage!), so it makes sense that it’s leading developers on the same path. News apps have always been a natural match for subscription models (since publishers have to keep making new news every day; a game developer can keep profiting off a mostly unchanging app for a long time). But the subscription party’s about to get a lot more crowded.

That strategy is paying off in terms of recognition — Apple calls the Reuters TV app one of its “essentials” — and uptake.

When Reuters TV was first launched as an iPhone app last February (don’t confuse this with the Reuters TV YouTube channel, by the way, which was launched in 2012 but no longer exists), it had a paywall: $1.99 a month, with limited ads. The app lets users choose how long they have to watch — anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes — and then creates a program of news clips tailored to time and interest. Reuters TV is sleek and well designed; its content changes based on your past viewing activity, and it is a genuinely good way to catch up on the news quickly. (You can even download episodes for offline viewing.)

But a paywall on an unknown video app hindered adoption. “We were best served by loosening that barrier, particularly at an early stage,” Reuters TV managing director Isaac Showman told Digiday last year. Last August, Reuters dropped the paywall on Reuters TV (users can still choose to pay $1.99 a month for an ad-free version). It’s launched the app on iPad, Apple TV, and web — with web app users now accounting for 25 percent of all the app’s active users, even though the web app only launched last month.

In November, Reuters launched Reuters TV for Publishers. “It allows any publisher to come to our website and, free of charge, download a widget that integrates onto their site” and provides a five-minute, curated news program,” Showman told me. “They’re able to put their ads in front of it and they keep 100 percent of the revenue.” The signup process is designed to be quick; publishers customize their fonts and insert ad tags, then get the code for the embeddable widget.

The payoff for Reuters, Showman said, is that more people become familiar with Reuters TV’s brand. The Reuters TV for Publishers app includes links back to Reuters’ website and social sharing buttons, as well as an option for users to enter their phone number to get a download link for the mobile app.

“Sometimes we’re going to reach consumers on our own platforms, and sometimes we’re quite happy for that to be on other people’s platforms,” Showman explained. “If we can contribute to other publishers’ success as a part of that, it’s a win-win for both of us, and something we’re really happy to do.”

Since the offering rolled out in November, “dozens” of publishers have integrated it onto their sites, “with more signing up each day,” Showman said. Reuters wouldn’t give me a full list of participants, but pointed me to an Entrepreneur.com article and to Canada’s Globe and Mail. (If you have an adblocker turned on, you have to turn it off to see Reuters TV’s widget.)

The Globe and Mail added the widget to its main news page on December 9, and plans to roll it out on mobile later this week. “We’re testing reader appetite for five-minute news verticals,” Cynthia Young, The Globe and Mail’s head of audience, told me. “We wanted to see whether our readers like that kind of packaging for news.”

Of the users who view Reuters TV on The Globe and Mail’s site, 20 to 25 percent of them watch the entire five-minute program, according to Young. “We expect to see higher than that on mobile,” she said. (The Globe and Mail audience’s use of adblockers is not particularly high, she noted.) The Globe and Mail — and other Reuters TV for Publishers users — have to go back to Reuters to ask for analytics, though “their turnaround is quick.”

In general, experimenting with products like this is a great way for a publication to “test out content theories,” Young said. “We could produce a similar thing, but Reuters has done the format very well.” Down the line, if The Globe and Mail were to decide to produce its own short news segments — say, with a Canadian emphasis — “we would work with Reuters to look at the product they’re producing and, maybe, figure out some ways that we could license it.”

Reuters has put a lot of work into the technology behind Reuters TV. Each time that Reuters decides to do a news story as a video, it produces three lengths of that story — “small, medium, and large.” The app’s algorithms choose the right video length to deliver to each user based on the amount of time the user wants to watch for and that user’s past preferences. The algorithm also accounts for users’ locations and interests and the judgment of editors. An internal tool lets Reuters analyze each video’s performance to see how it resonates with a small sample group of users before it’s pushed out to a larger group.

The 15-minute program has been the most popular option on Reuters TV’s various apps so far, Showman said, because that’s the default. World news is the most popular coverage category.

So far, Reuters’ new strategy appears to be paying off. Active users tripled between the third and fourth quarters of 2015, though Reuters wouldn’t give me an actual user number.

“The technology that goes into this is state-of-the-art stuff,” Showman said. “We believe other news organizations shouldn’t just leave other platform builders to build, but should be at the forefront of this.”

My guest today is Jason Kint. Jason is CEO of Digital Content Next, which I confess I liked better under its old name, the Online Publishers Association. It’s the trade organization representing most of the country’s largest online publishers.

I wanted to talk to Jason because this week marks the release of iOS 9 and with it the debut of ad blocking on the iPhone. Ad blockers have existed on desktop for years, of course, but they’ve mostly been a niche interest. On your phone, though, the appeal is obvious — faster loads, lower data use, fewer annoyances. And as I record this, iOS 9 has been out for about 24 hours, and the No. 1, No. 4, and No. 6 paid apps on the App Store are ad blockers.

So publishers are about to see some percentage of their mobile ads…disappear. Will it be a rounding error, or is this the beginning of the end for a certain kind of online advertising, the way popup ads were killed by technology in the early 2000s?

Jason’s been talking to a lot of publishers and he’s convinced it’s a big deal — an 8 or a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, he says. We talked about how publishers should respond, whether it’s worth trying to block the blockers, and how to keep a focus on your audience’s needs. Here’s our conversation.

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Show notes

Jason Kint on Twitter
Digital Content Next, formerly the Online Publishers Association
“CEO Explains Why the Online Publishers Association Changed Its Name” (Nov. 3, 2014)
“Back in DC. 48hrs. 7,300 flight miles. 30+ premium publishers, 10 meetings all related to adblocking. Working hard on this issue.”
“Dear ad blocking community, we need to talk” (Sept. 10, 2015)
“Rise of ad blocking threatens German publishers” (May 28, 2015)
“The Rise of Adblocking” (2013)
“A blow for mobile advertising: The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads” (June 10, 2015)
“How big a deal will adblocking on iPhones and iPads be for publishers?” (June 12, 2015)
“Ad Blockers Shoot to the Top of iPhone App Store Chart After Debut Day” (September 17, 2015)
Auto Image Loading in Netscape
WTF Ad Tech series at Digiday
Napster
Recording Industry Association of America
Pop-up blocking
“Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play” (February 3, 2015)
Direct marketing
“‘Tracking’ is immaterial to most publishers’ revenue streams. industry myth that it’s necessary.’
What is online behavioral advertising?
Podcasting on Nieman Lab
Native advertising on Nieman Lab
“Publishers arm for war with ad blockers” (February 19, 2015)
Timeline of file sharing
Crystal
“A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim?” (March 24, 2015)
“Facebook’s Instant Articles are live: Either a shrewd mobile move by publishers — or feeding the Borg” (May 13, 2015)
“Content blocking in iOS 9 is going to screw up way more than just ads” (August 28, 2015)
“Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff” (August 12, 2015)

First, of course, there’s the new News app, which takes the place of Newsstand (your news apps are set free, floating free on your home screen). Apple News, installed by default with iOS 9, is a Flipboard-like news reader that lets participating publishers distribute their content directly on Apple devices. Any publisher can sign up to add content, and dozens — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, Vox, Quartz, The Atlantic, and more — are already available.

Beyond News, one of the biggest changes in iOS 9 is revamped search: It now extends inside apps. Swipe right to pull up the Spotlight screen, then search for a term like “Syria” and find related news stories from apps that have enabled the feature. The Spotlight screen will also surface other customized content, including location-based news, and suggests apps based on the time of day that you normally use them — so it might pull up the New York Times app during your commute, for instance.

Related is deep linking, which lets users open search results within an app instead of in a web browser. Here’s how Apple explains that one: “If users have your app installed, the link takes them directly into your app; if they don’t have your app installed, the link opens your website in Safari.”

There are also iPad-specific updates: The iPad running iOS 9 supports split-screen mode and picture-in-picture mode, allowing you to run apps side by side or briefly open one app and then slide it away. These features should work especially well with the new, big iPad Pro that Apple announced last week.

A number of news publishers and news apps have been updated for iOS 9, or are taking the opportunity to explain what their News app strategy will look like. Here are a few changes to look for, and we’ll continue to update this list:

— The Guardian: Search and deep linking are enabled, so you can find Guardian content from the iOS 9 Spotlight screen and access content within the app straight from Safari. Multitasking is enabled, too, allowing The Guardian to be used with another app. (The Guardian also updated its Apple Watch app, but, again, watchOS 2 has been delayed.)

— BuzzFeed: Works with Spotlight search.

— Pocket: Works with Spotlight search, as well as the new “Picture in Picture” feature on iPad, so you can watch a video in Pocket while using other iPad apps.

— Flipboard: Works with Spotlight search.

— Timeline: Results from the app appear in Spotlight. And “annotated text within Timeline will bring up cards with context and detailed information on relevant topics.” The Apple Watch app gets an update too.

— New York magazine is making almost all its stories available on Apple News, and its launch advertiser is Gucci, with ads starting to appear Friday.

A new Apple TV, with an open app platform

“We believe the future of television is apps,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, and you can understand why the app company would think that. Netflix, HBO Go and Now, Hulu, and others (like on-demand services before them) have trained TV watchers to think of apps as a content source. (Over 60 percent of pay-TV streaming video is consumed on an Apple device, he said.) So the new Apple TV includes a full app store — which means publishers will be able to publish video directly to it.

Apps will be built with the new tvOS, which like watchOS builds on what developers are used to in iOS. (I should note that Apple’s playing catchup to some other platforms here. Basic games like Crossy Road and custom app UIs are already available on devices like the Amazon Fire TV. But the processor power and sophistication and variety of apps are substantially higher here.)

Apple is also pushing Siri’s voice recognition as a search tool, but at launch, it will only search a few content providers (Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and its own iTunes). Eddy Cue promised more sources will be added over time, but the phrasing makes me think that’ll be done through business deals rather than opening it up to all apps. That’s a shame, since it’ll likely keep most news publishers out.

Siri was also shown answering basic news and information questions while you watch a show — sports scores and weather. (“How did the Giants do yesterday? What’s the weather in Juneau?”) There was no indication that developers would have access to that sort of in-show interaction, but you can imagine uses for breaking news and other journalistic purposes. But that’s still a ways off.

I’m strange — I actually watch a decent amount of TV news through my Apple TV. Far more than I watch through any other method. I watch Wall Street Journal video through WSJ Live, old news clips through the ABC News app, 60 Minutes segments on CBS News, New York Times and Onion videos through Yahoo Screen, Wired videos through The Stream, highlights and games through WatchESPN and At Bat, and Frontline through PBS. With a 1-year-old at home, I’m up at odd hours, and flipping through news videos helps fill some dead time.

With that context, the new Apple TV — and the platform it will enable — is legit exciting. It will get me to watch a lot more news videos. Given the trouble many publishers have had getting eyeballs to their videos, that’s good news. My question is how unusual my habits are — whether making a very good Netflix/HBO Now/Hulu box and a pretty darned good gaming platform will direct any appreciable attention toward news. (And the related question: whether those positive qualities will be enough to get people buying a $149/$199 box when there are Chromecasts and Rokus and Fire TV Sticks at a third of that price.) Still, if I ran a major media company, this is an area I’d be directing developer resources.

The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, opening new interface possibilities

How strange is it to have the iPhone — generator of two-thirds of Apple’s revenue — relegated to the final half-hour of a two-hour keynote? Sure, it’s the “S” year, when the outward appearance is left unchanged and many of the upgrades are internal and hard to see. But still!

3D Touch — Apple’s new force-detecting sensors, debuted in the Watch earlier this year — is going to be a UX playground for developers. I can imagine news apps where tapping a headline pulls up the full story, but a quick press-and-hold pulls up a brief news summary, or an options-and-sharing panel, or background or contextual information. The twin pillars of headline-and-story have defined most mobile interactions with news; 3D Touch will push new forms and shapes. People will do great stuff with it, assuming it works well. (I worry a bit about how good a job it’ll do distinguishing between different kinds of presses; my Apple Watch and MacBook Pro are a little less than perfect on that.)

Beyond that, the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are mostly just more powerful than their predecessors. The camera’s better; the processor is faster. That’ll help lead to even more time we all spend looking at our phones, but that’s more an amplification of existing trends than the start of a new one.

The iPad Pro, soon to be spotted in newsrooms

The iPad — once the driver of publisher dreams — has been in a slow drift downward for a few years: still selling decent numbers, but shrinking a bit each quarter. Plenty of people use their tablets for little more than streaming videos, and for that purpose, there’s no reason to pay Apple’s price premium.

The new iPad Pro, unveiled today, aims to justify that by making the iPad more of a laptop replacement. A larger screen and faster processor allows for easier multitasking and more powerful tools; the new Smart Keyboard aims to make modern information work less of a chore; the Apple Pencil looks like it could be useful for casual note taking. As a result, I suspect the iPad Pro will be appealing to journalists — a higher-polish version of Microsoft’s Surface. (The first piece of content showed off in Phil Schiller’s iPad Pro presentation was an Apple News story from Wired.)

Go @wired! Our story displayed on stage on ipad pro! #AppleEvent http://t.co/FLG2ASfKue @kathleencodes @whyisjake pic.twitter.com/X2ZEDTfBV4

— Hayley Nelson (@hayley_nelson) September 9, 2015

Still, at $799 to $1,079 (plus another $268 for the keyboard and stylus!), I doubt it’ll move units at a significant enough scale to increase tablets’ share of the news audience. It seems like a smart strategy for the iPad to target enterprise customers, but one that probably won’t move publishers’ needles — or stem the shift to smartphones.

The Apple Watch, with faster, more powerful apps

Cook gave a brief update on its newest major product line (though without revealing any sales numbers), while also talking more about watchOS 2, first unveiled a few months ago. The big news with the new OS is allowing native watch apps, which run on the device rather than on the attached iPhone. That should speed up launch times for news apps, which have been rather abysmal. (No one wants to hold their wrist up in Dick Tracy position for 15 seconds while a few headlines load.)

Apple’s Jeff Williams also showed off the new availability third-party “complications” — little info nuggets that appear on the watch face — and highlighted the potential for news companies. (The example given: a CNN headline.) That’ll be good for the few national and global brands that will be able to reach a scale among Apple Watch users worth the bother. For most news organizations, though, active Watch development is still a reasonable skip.

With that event in mind, let’s step back and look at the furies of the year so far, as the pace of 2015 media changes whets our appetite for 2016. Here are 10 could-be headlines for the season ahead.

Restoring the old order

Verizon buys AOL. NBCUniversal (and Comcast) expand their media holdings, with big stakes in both BuzzFeed and Vox Media. AT&T swallows DirecTV. On Wednesday, Charter and Time Warner Cable got to set the 180-day clock toward their own merger. Think about it: Four big pipes companies, dominating broadband and “TV”/video, and each working toward escaping their plumbing roots. They all intend to be media companies when they grow up.

Certainly, other large media companies (“What are they thinking? NBC-U and the ‘digital dozen’ seek perpetual youth”) — including 21st Century Fox, Disney, Hearst and the biggest news players — have much sway in the world, but it’s the pipes companies who are ascendant. They’ve got direct pipelines to tens of millions of customers, and the kind of cash flow of which content-producing companies can only dream. Amazingly, at the same time, unionization of media quite unexpectedly woke from the dead this year. As the News Guild enjoys a $500,000 kitty (“News Guild starts $500,000 campaign to organize digital newsrooms”) to aid its NYC media organizing, with successes already at Gawker, Vice, The Guardian U.S., Salon, and Al Jazeera America, we’re seeing a restoration: Big capital and big labor. Maybe the Internet changed nothing.

Apple News changes everything

Apple will give the news industry a lot to think about next week, as it rolls out iOS 9, better and bigger iPads (the “awesome enterprise tablet unicorn,” The Verge’s Lauren Goode calls it), thinner iPads and, maybe, just maybe, a Siri whose functionality would befit the Apple name. More than 50 publishers are now signed up for Apple News, waiting to exploit Apple’s massive reach. While so much attention has been focused on the industry-shaking Age of Distribution (Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, and now Apple News), the stealth game changer may be built into iOS 9: its ad blocker.

For the pro-consumer- and pro-privacy-positioned Apple, which relies on advertising for just 0.3% of its total revenue, ad blocking is a twofer. First, it can set back direct competitor Google, which may depend on iOS customers for 75 percent of its mobile revenue. Second, it can reward and channel revenue to its new buddies, its publisher partners. Participating Apple News publishers enjoy, for now, 100 percent of the revenue on ads they themselves and 70 percent on any ads that Apple sells. Secondly, those with their own iOS apps manage to skate through the ad blocking walls, encouraging a pro-iPhone/iPad publisher orientation; only the mobile browser will gain the ad-blocking tool, not apps.

It’s a delightfully devious war of tech being played out, with publishers as bit players. The result: We should see more emphasis on publisher apps — a good idea anyhow, given the five-to-one loyalty app users show compared to the browser-centric (“Newsonomics: Why native apps still matter in the Age of Distribution”). Yes, Apple News will have an impact on 2016 publisher fortunes, but it’s only part of the puzzle. All this new distribution is still generally additive (and, publishers hope, won’t become too subtractive). It will take time to get into the market and to assess. For publishers, it’s a game of keeping up, requiring a much greater level of audience knowledge (and analytics) and sophistication as they manage their way through the new landscape. But remember, these changes often occur more slowly than the headlines would have us believe. Facebook Instant Articles, for instance, is still in the testing phases, with few actual articles actually circulating.

Now, on second thought

Who’s got a case of economic jitters? No one wants to talk publicly about the incipient malady, but anyone in the media business should take note of the China economy meltdown effect. Consider that every media decision we’ve seen this year — in big new-media investments by media companies, consolidation in the newspaper business, even Nikkei’s acquisition of the FT at an oh-so-premium price — assumes a healthy and growing economy. At this writing, we don’t know how much impact a global economic slowing may have on the U.S. (and European) economies. We can all hope that impact is transitory, but if it isn’t, the optimistic investments in advertising-dependent media businesses may be ill-timed. Do you really want to buy more newspaper companies — already squeezed much to make more minimal profits — if the ad landscape gets tougher? As red ink threatens black, the proposition of Gannett and New Media Investment Group (GateHouse) that “we’ll make it up on scale” weakens. Will investments in Vox and BuzzFeed pencil out if a more tepid economy (and ad blockers) take their toll? Perish the thought (almost), but what if a recession were to happen sooner than later?

In the Alphabet, Facebook comes before Google

In the doldrums of August, Facebook crossed over. According to web watcher Parse.ly, it surpassed Google as a referrer of traffic to news sites. This is no surprise to publishers. They’ve steadily seen Google’s share of referrals decrease. For many, it’s a drop from the neighborhood of a third to about a quarter of overall traffic. So Google — the king of intent, as divined by search-box typing — is still important. With the Alphabet shuffle, the company is both more obviously vulnerable to market change — and potentially revitalized. But the continuing ascendance of Facebook remains the biggest story of the year, as the company shows no sign of peaking. Word of mouth beats intention, it seems. Already, the smarter publishers have put more resources into social optimization — with audience teams populated by living, tweeting, posting sharers — and fewer into the older arts of search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Most importantly, though, is the double dominance of these two companies, a search/social duopoly of this era. They are twin suns around which much revolves.

Top this

This has been the year that over-the-top video fulfilled its long-promised destiny. After years of pooh-poohing the impact of cord cutters, even the cable and satellite companies, led by Verizon, are now testing video bundles; Comcast soft-launched Watchable Wednesday. With the second quarter seeing the single largest subscriber loss for pay-TV services, it’s clear we are seeing the end of one era and the awkward beginning of another. Netflix has birthed the new era, and opened the doors for Amazon, Google, Apple, and former pay-TV loyalists HBO and Showtime. The whole question of how we watch our favorite stuff — video — is blown wide open, with profound implications for anyone in the moving pictures business.

Collateral damage, the sequel

If the deep-pocketed pipes companies figure out how to find new customers and revenues in audience shift, the owners of broadcast and cable stations are beginning to feel related heat. Even before the stock market tanked, lowered financials prompted multiple downgrades of giants like Disney, 21st Century Fox, and CBS. Suddenly, the world seems less stable — more than $40 billion in market value has disappeared from that sector — while companies play catchup to find paying digital-only customers.

Over the moon for millennials

Who’s causing all this TV/video drama? Blame those pesky millennials. Named as a generation long ago, they now dominate the marketing conversation and investment interest. It’s the replay of that old record: What do those young people want? The contemporary twist on that, of course, is: What will those young people pay for? Anyone associated with video now sees the familiar dollars-to-dimes phenomenon print publishers long ago experienced in digital disruption. Into 2016, expect both a movement to “get younger” — and for some legacy media to emphasize how well they still do with an older, more monied audience (“The newsonomics of the millennial moment“).

Yahoo to world: If you figure out where we fit, please let us know

Through all the digital publishing change, Yahoo’s never-ending identity crisis never seems to end. At the ripe age of 20, it should be beyond adolescence. In the latest of CEO Marissa Mayer’s many moves, it completed on Wednesday its acquisition of the Polyvore shopping-centric fashion site, but that doesn’t inspire anyone to believe Yahoo will be a native ad leader. Instead, it seems to be casting about in lots of newer playgrounds — but after others have staked leads, established branded awareness and gotten traction. It’s happened in original video, in digital magazines, in branded news (Katie Couric), in social (Tumblr acquisition), and the list goes on and on. As Mayer has reached the three-year mark, the Google search results combining Mayer and failure grow. We have to wonder what might be the statute of limitations on still more meandering Yahoo leadership.

Parlez espanol?

The world stage has truly been set this year. Out of the blue, Nikkei snatched the Financial Times prize away from Axel Springer, showing the diversity of digital-seeking world capital — and bolstering the FT’s chances of faster growth (“What are they thinking? FT’s ’emerging markets'”). In newer media, The Huffington Post planted a bunch of new flags, as did BuzzFeed, and Quartz claimed an Africa franchise. The Wall Street Journal is spiffing up its international products, print and digital, and look for The New York Times to make international business expansion a 2016 business priority. Against all the vicissitudes of U.S. digital audience and revenue competition, the 6.5 billion-plus people outside the U.S. now find their way into more and more business plans.

Itching the new niches

As publisher Austin Beutner reshapes the Los Angeles Times with a profound community empowerment strategy, he also discovers new niches. Beutner called Gov. Jerry Brown and invited him to a one-hour televised (and streamed) interview on the California drought. Good PR, good brand building, and maybe a little piquing of audience interest that the Times may be something more than another dying newspaper. But wait — the Times unexpectedly picked up water-related ads from drilling and irrigation companies, bringing new advertisers out of the parched ground. Beutner now thinks there may be a newsletter — sponsored, and maybe paid — in this niche interest. Overall, he sees a restyling of the Times from simply a major general interest paper to one also serving a fleet of niches. Think Politico Pro, now a popular model, brought to regional journalism. (Disclosure: I also write for Politico Media.) The Times is far from alone. The Boston Globe now launches Stat, an ambitious health news site, being tested along with its all-things-Catholic Crux site. Last month, Cox Media launched the first of its planned half-dozen niche sites, one on University of Georgia football. All strategies share a passion for serving passionate audiences — and deriving revenue from readers, sponsors and commerce. If some of these get traction, regional publishers may beat a path from former mass (as they increasingly serve only pockets of their communities) into new niche. It’s one road forward.

The Washington Post announces a new news business model

Well, maybe. The Post’s below-the-radar network building and overall strengthening of its products and content could portend something. Post watchers wonder when the Bezosian contrarian strategy will become apparent.

Does Bezos yet have a different way of making the news business of 2018 sustainable, profitable, and growing?

With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter.

We’ve read so many obits for news media over the past 10 years that you’d think we’d be inured to yet another. But the onslaught of off-site distribution initiatives — from Facebook’s soon-to-expand Instant Articles to Apple News to Snapchat Discover, and most recently Twitter Lightning and whatever may next emerge as an offspring of Google News — now offers yet another existential moment. Will anyone go directly to a news or media site or app in 2020? Or are the platforms, now becoming quasi-publishers, all that will matter? (And will anyone come up with something better than “platisher”? And don’t try to make “pubform” happen.)

It’s all got me thinking about end games and end times. We’re in the midst of a new volcanic digital movement and we have little idea what an end looks like. I’ve called this greater movement to off-news site reading the “age of distribution,” but in reality, it’s just a further flowering of distribution, as newer pipes companies — like Facebook and Snapchat — join the restyled ones like Verizon and Comcast in bringing more stuff to their customers. Several publishers have a few years’ experience partnering with Flipboard, and they have some small gains but no tectonic business movement to show for it. The sheer size of the new generation of platforms interested in news gives publishers (and those who like to tell them what to do) both chills and thrills.

Some veteran observers of the distribution game make the point that, though it’s easy to lump all these announcements together, they’re not all created equal.

“They are so different from each other,” says Vivian Schiller, who has headed media units at The New York Times, NPR, NBC, and Twitter, and who now does consulting. “It’s Apple News, though, that could disrupt new organizations’ native apps. You can’t delete the [Apple News] app, and in the demo, it’s a gorgeous experience. We may ask the question, ‘Why do I need a New York Times app?'”

She’s right. Both the potential of the deals and the kind of moneymaking each offers vary, sometimes significantly. Some will offer a curated news mix, while others (like Snapchat) offer it up brand by brand.

Most notable about what most of the new deals offer is the chance for publishers to sell ads contextual to their content off their sites. That’s a potential game-changer, as Frédéric Filloux notes in his Monday Note, “The Redistribution of News.”. While publishers have been able to sell ads off sites, those deals with Flipboard and MSN, among others, haven’t produced big revenue; Apple and Facebook distribution might. For legacy publishers, off-site content deals have been largely focused more on selling digital subscriptions than on advertising — with mixed results.

Hearst’s Troy Young finds this common thread across the deal spectrum: “They feel very similar to us. All of these partners bring our brands closer to readers in mobile environments. All give us tools to tell rich stories. In all cases, monetization follows our content.”

Of course, the big question is what the money will look like when the dust settles. Will this round of changes stop or deepen the struggles of print-based companies? In an age when Taylor Swift acting like Ari Gold can cause a giant like Apple to modify its plans, might all of this distribution form a new business model?

Let’s consider what the new landscape tells us about both end games and end times.

End games

Few has embraced this new news ubiquity (“Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”) more than Atlantic Media, and few are as bullish as Atlantic’s Michael Finnegan, whose views I recently wrote about in depth (“What are they thinking? Why Atlantic Media floods the zone”). Atlantic Media is in on the ground floor on Facebook’s Instant Articles, one of its initial nine partners, and will be in Apple News as well:

Let’s say we reach 35-40 million people through owned and operated sites today. Five years from now, our brands could be reaching 300-500 million worldwide, but not if we insist that all of them have to interact with us on our terms on our site. Five years from now, if you told me we were reaching a half a billion people with our brands, and you told me only 50 or 100 million were coming directly, that wouldn’t worry me. I’d be confident we’d be able to figure out an amazing business model to pay our journalists.

That’s one possible end game, and fascinating to think about. In that one, the platforms’ rediscovery of news — it drives 20 to 40 percent of a lot of “platform” traffic, given its continuous refreshing; you know, news — creates such a golden age of reading that publishers figure out enough ways to monetize, cut those old tiresome print expenses, and pay lots of journalists.

I put that question — of end games, and of the actual state of off-site metrics and monetization — to a half-dozen of the smartest publishing execs I know. For most, this is the hope: keep their most loyal, paying readers reading through own sites and apps, and expose their news brands to many, many more (younger) readers.

That purely additive result would be ideal, but publishers know it will be far more complex. Few wanted to say anything for attribution, given ongoing negotiations with the distributors.

To the question of how off-site monetization can compare to on-site, the answer was universal. It’s as much art as science at this point. Figure 50/50. Yes, they can do a fair amount of tracking, and of comparison, but the data — and its partialness — limits how much.

How well can they really track a Flipboard deal (now the older fogey of these platform distribution plays) compared to what Facebook, Apple, and Snapchat may offer? How do they look at what Twitter is cooking up, or Google may? As one veteran of numerous deals puts it: “Not perfect, not real time, but enough to know which distributor is performing better in terms of monetization.”

Given that landscape, what’s a benchmark of success? Finnegan believes it is unfair to expect off-site distribution deals to perform at same level as ones on Atlantic Media’s own sites and apps:

I don’t think we hold distributed content revenue deals to the same standard as we do our owned and operated sites. We can offer our clients a much better value proposition on our site, where we can customize, integrate and tailor the experience. Holding distributed content deals to equivalent standard as our sites is an unreasonable expectation because we believe our sites offer advertisers better value propositions.

If a publisher can sell its audience on its own site at a $20 per thousand price, and only gets $12.50 for a thousand readers on another platform, is that a good deal or a bad one? It’s an impossible question, at this point, to answer. Are those $20 readers abandoning a publisher’s site and moving their time spent to Facebook or Apple News? Or do most of the habituated readers, and paying subscribers, stay with a news brand’s own sites and apps, with largely new readers coming in through the new doors? Only tracking of these deals will tell indeed how much cannibalization is actually happening.

Yes, that word — have no doubt, these deals will cannibalize publishers’ direct business. The big question is how much.

That risk gets measured against the potential gain. Go back to Michael Finnegan’s best-case scenario — that tenfold multiplying of audience. He makes the case that “if we could get 20× the audience and only 10 percent of the ability to monetize, that would be something we’d want to look at. “

It’s a math that doesn’t make intuitive sense, but it’s a way of playing that ubiquitous distribution landscape. Here’s where a rational older world approach to metrics throws us off kilter.

As Buzzfeed, Vox, and Vice have taught us, huge digital news audiences can be built on free marketing, a.k.a. free social distribution. This next development of distribution platforms is a logical outgrowth of all that Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest traffic. This distribution, as disturbing and possibly damaging as it may, is, after all, free. The siren call of free: Given free access to would-be readers who can be reached at close to zero incremental cost, how can you not play, in what seems to be an age of ubiquity? So, if Atlantic Media and others can make money from even a small percentage of a huge new audience, the math could work.

Another big question: How stable are these partnerships? Publishers like much of what they’ve heard so far; for instance, Facebook Instant Articles will allow publishers to sell ads alongside their full content on Facebook and keep all the revenue. Critics guffaw and say: “Sure, that’s what they say now. Later, they’ll want a revenue share.” Sure they will. That, though, doesn’t mean worthwhile longer-term terms of partnership won’t be worked out. Remember when Apple said it wanted 30 percent of subscription revenues from its Newsstand. Outrage ensued. Then publishers recalibrated sales costs into the equation of gaining new paying customers, much as they do in the analog world. The same principle might rationally apply here. Facebook — and other distributors — do provide a service to publishers, offering new audience. Build a reasonable, predictable commission into the sales equation, and we could see a new stability and mutual expectation of revenue that could become the cornerstone of new relationships.

Deal points are one thing. Just as big is something more intangible: publishers’ own direct connection with their readers. “At a minimum, we want to ensure we have a direct relationship with our readers/users,” says Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president for product and technology at The New York Times.

Publishers worry about becoming too dependent on these new platforms. In fact, they already are. Most news publishers get far less than half of their traffic coming directly to their sites already. Google drives a quarter to a third of it, and social is fast getting competitive with search. Then there are the thousands of other sites that provide traffic. In the end, publishers’ dependence on platforms might best be mitigated by working with a number of the big distributors. In search traffic, Google has essentially no competition, and publishers thus have had little leverage in negotiating advantageous partnerships. In the new platform wars, can publishers play Apple against Facebook against Snapchat against Twitter?

End times

If history is any guide, we’d have to answer that question “no, they can’t.” The famously splintered news industry has found itself largely incapable of effective collective action in dealing with large, singleminded, highly mobilized Internet companies. They move at the speed of light while publishers dither.

Fears of antitrust collusion charges slow collective action. Then there’s the question: What would we negotiate for? So publishers worldwide end up simply reacting to the offers of Facebook, Apple, and others; few are in on any early discussions on how to make the programs mutually beneficial. Facebook gets credit, from early participants, for its listening abilities, but still, Instant Articles is a Facebook-driven project. Could it be any different?

Down the road from Facebook’s Palo Alto campus, representatives from eight European publishers broke bread with Google managers in Mountain View last week. At that meeting, they moved forward a joint agenda for cooperation, which I detailed a couple of weeks ago (“Newsonomics: Could a small Google tech change mean tens of millions to news publishers?”). Yes, the meetings were jumpstarted by European legal action against Google, but still it’s an attempt to jointly define a news future. Whatever comes out of that Digital News Initiative, all publishers should consider this: Google is now playing catchup to its two most important competitors, Facebook and Apple in news distribution. Google needs to find a new post-Google News strategy; that product now seems so 2006.

“This seems to be a mobile land grab and it will be fascinating to see what Google will do with Android,” Gordon Crovitz suggests. Indeed, Android — with many more users worldwide than Apple’s iOS — will likely deploy a new Android News or Google News not too long after Apple News hits the market. (It currently offers Google Play Newsstand.)

Google isn’t yet talking to publishers about what could now do for news readers and publishers, or vice versa, and I’ve made the point of how absent North American publishers are from the Digital News Initiative talks.

Let’s also acknowledge that in all the talk of these platform distribution deals, it’s only national/global companies — companies like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC, The Atlantic, Bild, Spiegel, The Guardian, and the BBC — that are named. Where is the regional representation? Most Americans and Europeans get much of their news from regional and local newspapers, yet they’re nowhere in the conversation. Here, as in most things digital, the chasm between the national/global players and the regional players grows, with the latter much constrained in meeting the ever-changing demands of digital publishing. For the local daily press — which in the U.S. means all but three dailies — you can’t win in the new platform wars if you don’t play.

Finally, on this topic, let’s ask one more question: Why haven’t publishers become platforms?

One publisher has indeed made a big splash, going the platisher route. The Huffington Post, which claims 100,000 contributors (though some dispute the claim), just set a goal multiplying that number by 10 (“Arianna Huffington’s next million mark”). From its inception, The Huffington Post has served as a platform for others, from top Hollywood stars to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, as well as a source for news.

“We have seen ourselves as a hybrid — both a publisher and a platform — since day one when we were one part news site, one part group blog,” Arianna Huffington told me Wednesday. “Over the years, we’ve expanded both our editorial team and our platform offerings, including growing to 100,000 bloggers, crowdsourcing user-generated content and partnering with hundreds of non-profits, schools, etc. to cross-post their content.”

Few newspapers have built anything like HuffPost’s system, with the Deseret News one notable exception. Many tested ideas and early technologies (I recall our Knight Ridder Digital late 1990s experiment with community site Koz), but the timing was off and the idea has never been broadly revived. To that end, publishers — which could have become much bigger platforms themselves — left the field wide open for the latter-day pipes companies. Further, newspaper companies haven’t robustly supported real universal high-speed internet, as laid out by Barack Obama, like much of the rest of the civilized digital world enjoys. If we did, Facebook couldn’t easily complain — accurately — about the eight-second lag in reading linked news articles, a digital eternity that it says drove the idea for Instant Articles.

Which gets to the end times notion. It’s not about oblivion, but about people and paper. It really is end times for print. Readers continue to abandon newsprint, trading it in for digital. As importantly, publishers’ aggressive pricing policies have increased circulation revenue but keep pushing down print volumes — toward a inevitable and sooner-rather-than-later end. It’s in people though — the journalists who write the news for us — that we see the whole sense of local news reporting slipping away. Just in recent weeks, we’ve seen dozens more newsroom jobs lost, from Denver eastward to Chicago, Greensboro, and Tampa.

After the Apollo acquisition of Digital First Media fell through in May, DFM began a new round of job cutting affecting dozens, plus additional cost-cutting throughout the company. It won’t be alone. Bleak print ad revenues drive these cuts — and 2016 budgeting is coming. It is, in fact, end times for the now more than 21,000 journalists that have lost their jobs in the last decade. Their readers are being hurt too, drop by drop. As the big national/global publishers do their end game theorizing, much of the newspaper business is being left on sidelines, trying to figure out how to maintain profit for 2016, 2017, and maybe 2018, but with little role in the new platform plays.

Overall, this new age of distribution may be a significant historical marker, as long as publishers try to take the future in their own hands and don’t expect Facebook to come up with its own brainstorm to “save” the news industry. As Mark Zuckerberg took questions on Facebook Tuesday, he said all the right things — and showed himself to be as uncertain as publishers on where all this would or could lead. “There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces,” he wrote. “This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet.”

Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9.

Adblocking — running a piece of software in your web browser that prevents ads on most web pages from loading — has moved from a niche behavior for the nerdy few to something mainstream. A report from 2014 found that adblock usage was up 70 percent year-over-year, with over 140 million people blocking ads worldwide, including 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. You can understand why that would be troubling to the publishers who sell those ads. But until now, adblocking has been limited almost entirely to desktop — mobile browsers haven’t allowed it.

Here’s how the developer documentation puts the new change, coming in iOS 9:

The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.

Your app extension is responsible for supplying a JSON file to Safari. The JSON consists of an array of rules (triggers and actions) for blocking specified content. Safari converts the JSON to bytecode, which it applies efficiently to all resource loads without leaking information about the user’s browsing back to the app extension.

Xcode includes a Content Blocker App Extension template that contains code to send your JSON file to Safari. Just edit the JSON file in the template to provide your own triggers and actions. The sample JSON file below contains triggers and actions that block images on webkit.org.

What this means is, when iOS 9 launches in the fall, you’ll be able to go to the App Store and download an extension that will block ads on most news sites.

Is there any chance that won’t be incredibly popular? The desktop version of Safari currently allows a variety of custom extensions, and what’s the most popular? Hint: It’s called AdBlock.

For me, the arguments for using ad blockers range from the unconvincing (dude, information wants to be free) to the reasonable (I don’t need dozens of tracking beacons on every webpage) to the downright understandable (poorly built ads slow my browser to a crawl). I don’t use an ad blocker, but I do block all Flash by default for performance reasons, which accomplishes some of the same ends. The best arguments for adblocking are even stronger on mobile than they are on desktop — bandwidth and performance and battery life are all at a premium.

This is worrisome. Publishers already make tiny dollars on mobile, even as their readers have shifted there in huge numbers. To take one example, The New York Times has more than 50 percent of its digital audience on mobile, but generates only 10 percent of its digital advertising revenue there. Most news outlets aren’t even at that low level.

If iOS users — the majority of mobile web users in the U.S., and disproportionately appealing demographically — can suddenly block all your ads with a simple free download, where is the growth going to come from? (By the way, a version of Adblock Plus for Android just came out a couple weeks ago, though it appears to be more limited than what Apple is allowing.)

The folks behind Adblock Plus — a different ad blocker from AdBlock; it’s a confusing space — aren’t sure they like the way Apple’s allowing it, saying it might make certain adblocking methods harder to implement on the desktop version of Safari. But desktop Safari is small potatoes compared to the web browser on every iPhone and every iPad, where it was impossible to write ad blockers before now.

The potential impact of “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” even goes beyond blocked ads. Apple is explicitly allowing the blocking of cookies on a site-by-site basis. For example, you could build an extension that blocked the cookies that allow a newspaper paywall to work. The Yourtown Times allows you 10 stories free a month? It’s probably using a cookie to keep track of that count. Block that cookie and the paywall comes tumbling down — you’re a fresh visitor every time. Imagine being able to download an extension that blocked paywall cookies on the top 50 paid news sites. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard to code; unless Apple chooses to prevent it, someone will do it. News sites would be able to build workarounds — changing cookie IDs regularly, requiring user login from article 1 — but winning that sort of cat-and-mouse game is something publishers are unlikely to be good at.

Why would Apple do this?

An Apple partisan might argue it just wants to give users control of their iPhone experience, and having debuted extensions in the last version of iOS, allowing them to alter web content is a natural next step.

An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival. (Google has been less friendly to adblockers than its “open” positioning would suggest.)

An Apple cynic might note that the company on Monday unveiled its new News app, which promises a beautiful reading experience — and a monetization model based on Apple’s iAds. iAds will, one can assume, never be blockable by third-party extensions available in the App Store. Ads that appear at the operating system level — as opposed to in HTML and JavaScript on a web page — have a rather invulnerable position so long as you keep using Apple products. (It’s good to be the platform.)

Maybe I’m exaggerating the potential impact here. (Talk me down!) Maybe people won’t download the free app at the top of the Most Downloaded list that promises to make their websites load more quickly, more beautifully, and using less data. But use of ad blockers has done nothing but rise, particularly among young users, and people are about to be given an easy way to do on the devices they use most. For the many news companies who are counting on mobile advertising for their future business model, I don’t see a way that this change won’t shave off a real slice of mobile advertising revenue.

In two hours, Apple killed off its previous home for news apps on iPhone and iPad; announced a brand new home for news orgs (though, importantly, not for news apps); integrated individual local news stories deep into iOS; and made Apple Watch news apps substantially more powerful and useful. Whew!

Here’s what journalists and publishers need to know.

A new app just called News

The big news — and pitched as one of the biggest new features in iOS 9 — is an app called News. It’s “beautiful content from the world’s greatest sources, personalized for you,” according to Apple vice president of product marketing Susan Prescott. (Also: Two actual women on stage today!) It’s an awful lot like Flipboard — though the awesome power of default Apple distribution puts it in an entirely other league. This app will be on hundreds of millions of devices within 24 hours of its debut.

On first launch of Apple News, you pick a set of both news sources and topics that you’re interested in. (Among the publishers listed: Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, CNN, The Atlantic, ESPN, BuzzFeed, Quartz, NPR, and Daring Fireball. Topics are things like baking, science, or travel.) Apple News then assembles an attractive package (“For You”) of stories based on those. Articles can be put into a generic wrapper or — if built using something new called Apple News Format — in a custom wrapper that reflects the news org’s branding. Here’s what Apple has to say about the format:

With the Apple News Format, you’ll be able to create beautifully crafted layouts with custom typography, rich photo galleries, videos, and animations — all optimized for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch…You can author once and News will optimize your content for all iOS devices, so your readers will have a great experience no matter which device they use. It’s easy to connect to existing content management systems, and you get access to a rich suite of tools to measure user engagement with your content.

The base level of publishing is RSS-driven, since interested publishers are being asked to “register to submit your RSS feeds to News,” through an interface called News Publisher. You’ll need to use Apple News Format if you want to graduate up to that brand-specific templating and presentation. (It also appears analytics are only available for Apple News Format publishers.) More information here.

There’s also monetization built in, via Apple’s ad platform iAd: “Earn 100% of the revenue from ads you sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for you. iAd provides campaign management, targeting and reporting capabilities that help drive your business.” This will likely serve as a nice upsell for premium publishers, though I suspect all but the biggest publishers will rely on Apple to do the selling. (And Apple is no Facebook when it comes to ad sales; your CPMs are unlikely to inspire.)

The presentation features all the same sort of bells and whistles we’ve seen in Facebook’s Instant Articles — animations, swipe-able photo galleries, fluid movement. (“We think this offers the best mobile reading experience ever.”) And it promises, like other aggregator apps, to get better with time, as it learns which sorts of articles you’re interested in from your activity. Apple News understands more than 1 million distinct topics, which are “created and assigned by Apple’s expert editors and sophisticated algorithms” — so hey, maybe there’ll be a few jobs in there for journalists too!

Here’s the list of participating publishers Apple showed at the keynote — though note they say it’ll be open to every publisher, big or small, personal or professional:

There was no word on integration with publisher paywalls, and I imagine there isn’t any. (Unlike, say, Flipboard, where some publications like The Wall Street Journal show more stories to digital subscribers than to the hoi polloi.) The New York Times will be offering about 30 free articles daily, Prescott said, almost certainly the same subset it’s offering free in NYT Now. Apple News will be available in the United States, the U.K., and Australia at launch, which should come with the debut of iOS 9 “this fall.”

How big a deal is this? On one hand, small Apple moves — like, say, including the Podcasts app by default in iOS 8 — can sometimes lead to significant shifts in user behavior. On the other hand, people interested in news on phones likely already have habits they may be slow to change — Facebook people, Twitter people, Flipboard people, and so on. Still, it’s easy to imagine a more casual sort of news consumer being excited by the lovely layouts, cross-brand sourcing, and ease of use.

It’s another sign that 2015 really is the Year of Distributed Content. It’s not just social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat that are interested in taking in your content — it’s also the device platforms they themselves squat on. There’s no guarantee Apple News will be a big hit; Google Currents, probably the closest analog up to now, was a flop. But the broader narrative is clear: Individual news apps and individual news brands aren’t the primary point of contact with news any more. They’re raw material, feeding into broader platforms. The loss of power for publishers in that exchange is obvious; the potential benefits remain mostly undiscovered.

Death to Newsstand

With the rise of Apple News comes the demise of Newsstand. It won’t be missed. Launched in 2011, it promised to create a special home on iPhones and iPads for news apps, a home with special privileges like better background updates and frequently updated icon images.

But that special home turned quickly into a ghetto, where news apps went to die. The tradeoff — a few extra features in exchange for no longer having an icon on your best users’ home screen — just wasn’t good enough, particularly as many of those features became available to all apps. And worst of all, Apple provided no way for a Newsstand app to be converted into a regular old app — which meant that a lot of news organizations were locked inside that little icon against their will. (It’s no coincidence that, while the main New York Times app is in Newsstand, NYT Now isn’t.)

As the folks at 29th Street Publishing put it:

…apps for publications like magazines and newspapers should never have been buried in a weird little corner of their own anyway. The publishers we work with are making amazing apps that people love to read, love to subscribe to (yeah, that matters!) and one of the biggest constraints on their growth and adoption has been the fact that they’re not just regular apps that can be promoted and discovered right in the app store like everything else.

It’s not 100 percent clear what will happen to existing Newsstand apps; presumably they’ll be converted to regular apps and dumped back onto home screens. But the details will be important.

News gets embedded into the iPhone’s “intelligence”

If there’s one area where Android clearly leads iOS in user experience, it’s Google Now. The fact that Google knows everything in your email and your calendar may be creepy, but it also gives it the raw data necessary to get quite good at prompting you with the right information at the right time. And while Apple is betting on the strength of a pro-privacy stance, that doesn’t make Google Now any less useful.

So one of the points of emphasis in the iOS portion of the keynote was adding intelligence to the operating system — better knowledge of what’s happening inside apps and out in the world. Apple’s Craig Federighi mentioned your phone offering up music when it thinks you’re about to go for a run, or an audiobook when you get in your connected car. It all looks convenient, if in many cases catchup to Android.

There are two key ways that news gets integrated into that intelligence. The first is through a new search API that apps will have access to. It’ll require work by app developers to take advantage of it, but if a user searches for “Syria,” it should be able to surface a recent Syria article from The New York Times, The Guardian, or whatever other news apps she has installed on her phone. Not many people search for Syria on their phone, of course — but one could imagine that sort of search habit growing with time, particularly for breaking news.

The second way is potentially powerful, but still unclear: News stories showing up automatically on the search screen, even with no search term entered. The demo led with a story from The Huffington Post:

This has obvious appeal as a source of traffic, but it wasn’t clear from the demo how Apple picks that story (and others underneath it). Is it personalized? Tied to breaking news? We’ll have to wait for the documentation; the primary clue on Apple’s website is that it surfaces “local news that’s trending where you are,” based on your location data. (The national HuffPost and CNN stories shown on the Apple site wouldn’t seem to qualify for that standard, though.)

Native apps for Apple Watch

As I wrote recently, news apps on the Apple Watch are mostly 1.0 disappointments, but the future is bright for this most personal device. (Indeed, the dream sequence I outline in that piece seems closer than ever with the sort of contextual intelligence outlined today.)

The new version of watchOS announced today will allow apps, including news apps, to make their own complications — small details on watch faces. The obvious idea is a headline, but those will be too long to fit on most watch faces. One could imagine other ideas — a dot that changes color depending on how important the news is? A reminder of stories you’ve saved? As with everything about the smartwatch, screen size will force presentation innovation.

But potentially much bigger is the announcement of native applications for the watch, rather than the current setup where the app actually lives on your iPhone. That arrangement has led to slow performance and glacial launch times as the two devices swap information back and forth. “Performance will be great, responsiveness will be great,” Apple’s Kevin Lynch promised.

Apple’s also opening up the watch to new kinds of input and output. It’s giving apps access to the watch’s microphone. (“What do you know about Jeb Bush, Washington Post?”) It’s also allowing apps to play audio directly from the watch (rather than just the phone or Bluetooth headphones) and video right on the screen (“short-form” video, however short that proves to be). This could be big — expect news orgs to put more resources toward 6-second videos. And Scott Simon can now talk to you straight from your wrist.

One more thing

Apple’s been trying to figure out how to charge up iPad sales, and the new package of enhancements today should help — particularly in the content-creation world that working journalists inhabit. Just two changes — multitasking and more usable cut/copy/paste — will make writing and editing on an iPad significantly easier. Personally, it’s the only decent reason I’ve heard yet to upgrade my old iPad 3 from 2012.

Now the important news is coming from up north.

The tablet, born as and symbolized by the iPad, is an instrument like no other for publishers. After the web had played havoc with the business models and reader habits of newspaper and magazine readers, it arrived, promising to be a vertical counterpoint to the horizontal desktop and laptop. It could display pictures wonderfully and text cleanly. It could be held in one hand, just like something printed on paper. Behind brown-paper-covered walls in secret offices, the Journal, the Times, The Guardian, and a few others scurried to be among the first to take advantage of the new platform. The products met with some nice reviews and made a small difference in top-line revenues, as news reading and ad buying increased marginally.

Today, tablets seem to have settled into early middle-age hood, valued, but a third-place player overall to web and smartphone use, bringing in about 12 to 15 percent of news publishers’ traffic. Except in Montreal.

There, La Presse, Quebec’s second largest daily, remains a true believer in the tablet dream. Its La Presse+ product, which drew a fair amount of attention when it launched in April 2013, is now getting a second wind. Its success, its leaders say, is such that daily print will disappear sooner than later.

Is this kind of tablet success, as many publishers have said, some weird French Canadian thing of no application to them? That assumption will soon get a big test. The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest local newspaper (the national Globe and Mail, whose innovations I recently profiled, just beats it in weekday print-plus-digital circulation), has adopted the La Presse tablet platform and plans to launch its own tablet product in early fall. The Star serves the fourth-largest city in North America and, of course, publishes in English.

This week, let’s look at La Presse+, what’s it’s done, and what it may do in Quebec. Next week, we’ll take a close look at The Star’s plans, how they align with La Presse’s, and where, importantly, they differ. Together, they form a fascinating north-of-the-border story. It’s impossible, though, to watch that story and not wonder what might happen south of the Canadian border, as U.S. daily newspaper publishers rely more on consolidation and cost-cutting than cutting-edge innovation.

Importantly, La Presse isn’t betting as much on a device as on a deep belief. The gating principle here isn’t the technology or the platform — it’s whatever works to engage readers of news. In that respect, in the digital age, there are only two things so far that produce engagement, or time spent reading: the tablet — and the newspaper.

“We want to be on any platform that allows us to provide engagement,” says Pierre-Elliott Levasseur, executive vice president of La Presse. So far, that involves at least a six-inch screen: “Less than that, it doesn’t work. We’re working on a phablet product now.”

La Presse+ is gorgeous, taking advantage of all the capability that Steve Jobs built into tablets, including photos, videos, and immersive advertising.

“This is what we told our staff, and it almost sounds like a pitch,” says Levasseur, and indeed it does. “You take video, with its emotion, magazines with their reproduction quality, great graphic design, and then the best of the newspaper depth and breadth, combined with the best of the web, which is instantaneity and interactivity [La Presse+ counts 26 kinds of interactivity within the product], and then you realize that even 25- and 30-year-olds will use this product, because it’s the best way to tell the story,” says the 44-year-old. “With this product, we have improved our demographic profile.” La Presse is washing out some of that baby boomer gray: “Fundamentally, the problem with newspapers is the aging demographic.”

While it may be a pitch, it’s one that delivers. Even for those unable to read French, the La Presse+ experience translates.

The math behind it, though, stymies some observers. From the beginning, La Presse+ has been free. No meter. No subscription. No circulation revenue. Its revenue comes all from advertising.

As Levasseur explains, “It enables publishers to move your low-digital-value, low-ARPU [average revenue per user] readers to a high-value, high-ARPU platform. Our CPMs are very high.”

The audience and ad metrics seem stunning:

• Engagement: La Presse+ claims engagement numbers, as measured by time on site, that rival or exceed what we saw in the halcyon days of print: 44 minutes on weekdays, 50 minutes on Sundays, and 73 minutes on Saturdays, the traditional big weekend day of newspaper reading in Canada. Overall, the company now says it has a weekly tablet readership of 453,957.
• Ad rates: Levasseur compares half-page print rates of $42 CPM (cost per thousand readers) to $68 for a half screen on La Presse+. He contrasts those numbers with far lower yields on desktop (about $13-14 CPMs) smartphones (at $2-3 CPMs). ARPU math that serves as the foundation for the strategy. Five months ago, La Presse+ launched a content marketing initiative, which now takes advantage of the product’s superior storytelling chops.

Those are the big head-turning numbers, but the lessons extend further.

• Staffing: La Presse staffed up in technology to 140-plus from a meager crew of 15 in 2009. That’s been its major investment, which it says came in at about $40 million Canadian. La Presse is privately owned by Quebec’s Gesca, a subsidiary of Power Corporation of Canada, a major diversified financial services company with a long history of influence in Canadian politics. Its news focus is now squarely on La Presse+; the company sold off six regional papers in March.

  Levasseur says other staffing remained fairly stable, with roughly the same number of journalists employed now as pre-La Presse+. Knowing that La Presse+ had to have a stronger features/lifestyle presence and a seven-day publishing schedule — it’s a morning edition product — the company staffed up by one or two dozen to enable those additions. (La Presse published a Sunday paper until 2009 and now prints six days a week.)

• iOS dominance: Heavy users of digital newspaper news skew heavily to Apple products, and, here, La Presse+ is no different. More than 80 percent of the product’s “opens” and of the time spent using it, come from the iPad. (Opening is the digital equivalent of circulation; meaning the day’s edition is both downloaded and opened.)
• Readership: Those tablet buyers form the sweet spot for La Presse+. The targeted age demographic: 25-54. Currently, 65 percent of La Presse+ readers range between 25-54. That compares to 46 percent of print readers in the same age range, with that readership of course skewing older. Levasseur says 14 percent of those using the product had never read La Presse in any form previously; 27 percent may have been on smartphone apps or website, but hadn’t read the paper. Again, this is the low engagement/low ARPU-to-high strategy in process.
• It’s a way to motivate your staff: “You really turn your staff into a real digital organization.”
• Content: Levasseur says it’s mainly the form factor of the tablet — which enables that storytelling — that brings in that younger audience, rather than a significant change in the content itself.

So where might this lead? Move over Advance Publications, whose own day-cutting could seem like mild historical prologue. As Levasseur describes it, it’s clear the company is planning its exit from print. The only question is when.

Some La Presse execs will tell you that the days of daily print newspapering may be measured in months, not years in Quebec. Certainly, the strong Saturday paper will remain as a reading and shopping mainstay for a longer time. Daily print, though, is another story. The company has reviewed lots of metrics, and thinks it will soon arrive at a point of important crossover (“The newsonomics of crossover”).

Consider: 60 percent of LaPresse ad revenue now derives from the tablet, a product that’s only been in the market for two years. Since web does still contribute some digital ad revenue, print now throws off only 30 percent of overall ad revenue. Yet the production people come in to work every day, and the presses and trucks still roll, all at great cost.

So the crossover calculus: Trade all those print and production costs — which now make up 65 percent of La Presse’s overall costs — for drops in both daily print advertising and daily print circulation, while maintaining Saturday for both revenue streams.

How many of La Presse’s daily 100,000-plus print readers will convert to the tablet edition when print starts to go away? One number that complicates such a transition: Today, there’s only 6 percent weekly overlap among those who read print and the tablet. Still, if print is removed from the market, some La Presse execs believe that as many as 30 percent of print readers will make the journey fairly immediately, even though there’s so little overlap now. How about the other 70 percent? It sounds like hubris at first hearing, but the company is willing to let them go to make the digital transition. At that point, it would become a digital news company that also publishes one strong weekly print product.

Yes, it’s the nightmare of the 70-year-old you know who pleads: “They won’t take the newspaper away from me before I die, will they?”

(Let’s note that The Star’s plan, in that respect, differs markedly; it plans to keep its print paper strong for now, believing it can profitably serve both audiences and markets.)

You’d think the great slowdown in tablet sales would give La Presse pause. After great year-on-year sales growth, tablet sales hit a wall in 2014, growing just 4.4 percent. That’s four percent, after 2013 growth of 55 percent and 2012 growth of 78 percent. One huge seller, Best Buy saw a 30 percent decline in tablet sales in the fourth quarter. And iPad sales have declined year-over-year for 8 consecutive quarters. Why? Those larger-than-phone phablets with 5.5-inch-plus screens eat into tablet sales. The big wild card: Tablets, expensive and unsubsidized, aren’t replaced near as often as smartphones. So they stay in use for a longer time.

We might think of the market as fairly saturated, but another way of looking at is to count the installed base that saturation has built: 147.1 million people in the U.S. will use a tablet of any kind at least monthly this year, says eMarketer.

In Canada, more than 50 percent of households own tablets — and those will tend to be the news-reading households.

As it proceeds into Year 3 of its grand experiment, La Presse is looking for ways to defray that large investment in tech development and staffing. That’s why it’s become a vendor, an often difficult path for a publisher. The Star serves as its first customer, but it plans to add more, though not immediately. Getting The Star off to a great start is essential to its vendor strategy.

There’s still skepticism, says Levasseur: “I think many of the publishers are just wrapping their brains around the short-term problems they have right now. Others are just printers, and they want to ensure the survival or print as long as they can. It isn’t a question of how many we can put the pipes. It is how many publishers are willing to adopt.”

One further advantage of the Star relationship: the two companies will jointly sell tablet advertising, covering the two largest ad markets in the nation, Toronto and Montreal.

Already, its digital transition has been remarkable. In 2013, the company’s digital ad revenue totaled 10 to 12 percent. In 2014, the first full year of La Presse+ operation, it came in at 70 percent, says Levasseur, the overwhelming share of that from La Presse+.

Has La Presse crossed over into the proud new age? No, not yet, and not surprisingly, given that La Presse+ is still a toddler. Gesca is a private company, releasing selective numbers, as private companies do. We don’t know what its P&L statement looks like, further complicating its message to the wider newspaper world.

Levasseur makes the longer-term crossover point. “The faster we move people and revenue over to the new platform, the more we are going to be profitable.” In the short term, the company has stopped marketing its print subscriptions, even encouraging cancelling subscribers to transition to the free tablet product. That means it’s taking a short-term hit on circulation revenue, while still bearing the costs of print production. That’s why the logic of day-cutting looks so attractive.

The company can hit that crossover button whenever it wants. It would just like to have as big a tablet business as possible in place first.

At the time, Quittner was director of digital editorial development for news, sports, and business at Time Inc., and he was placed in charge of leading the stable of magazines into this new digital frontier. “The first iPad magazines were Time magazines,” he told me recently. “I’m very much one of those people who believed that apps would give us another bite at the apple, that we could control the user experience to a far greater degree than we could on the web and that we could bring high quality advertising back.”

But even before the first issues arrived on the app store, he began to grow worried. Within Time Inc., there was a heated debate between the editorial product team and the business side over how to price the app. The business side, which ultimately won the argument, wanted to charge $4.99 per download, the newsstand price for the print issue. “What I believed was that we should totally charge for it, but we should charge the smallest amount possible,” he said. “Because this wasn’t even a beta technology — it was an alpha technology. We didn’t know which ways pages should turn, whether there should be a scroll or pagination. There were so many questions we didn’t know the answer to, and they were compounded by the fact that the download sizes were huge.”

Readers, Quittner believed, would treat these news apps as a novelty, and though Time could probably sell a fair number of $4.99 issues early on, that novelty would soon wear off and normal market forces would apply. It would then have to compete with every other available app, magazine or otherwise. “We were also competing against Angry Birds, which was popular at the time. Angry Birds was hours of entertainment, and a magazine, even a great magazine, offers maybe a half hour of entertainment. It just didn’t seem like the math worked out.”

The iPad wouldn’t just allow publishers to charge for content — it also offered an opportunity for more ambitious design, something that the web, where the focus was geared toward generating clicks on more content, had denigrated. At first, magazine designers were delighted that they could work on a print-like product. “Initially what happened was that the magazine would put in the extra hours to conform Time to the iPad,” Quittner recalled. “It was just another 15 percent effort — 15 percent more time to make an iPad version.” But then they decided to launch a version for the iPhone, and then device makers launched the first Android tablets, and soon they were having to adapt each issue to multiple screen sizes and operating systems. Eventually, Time needed to hire more designers to meet the demand, which then placed more pressure on the apps to generate revenue.

In 2011, Quittner took a job as editorial director for Flipboard, the news aggregation app that pulls in content from hundreds of media partners, and it was then that he came to the conclusion that Time’s attempts to build and maintain its own mobile app was futile. “It was like a lightbulb went off in my head,” he said. “Why are we in the publishing business spending so much time doing technology when what we should be doing is what we’re great at, which is finding and packaging truth.” A news company attempting to innovate within tech, he analogized, was akin to CNN deciding to build HD televisions just because it happened to be a television network. “This stuff is just moving too fast, and it’s really hard to do…My god, I work at a company with the smartest technology people in the world, and it takes every bit of intelligence and skills on their part to keep up” with the fast-moving mobile ecosystem.

It would seem that much of the news industry has evolved to agree with Quittner’s assessment. Though it’s not uncommon for a news company to produce and maintain a mobile app, there’s certainly been less emphasis on these individualized products in recent years. (I remember a few years ago attending the New Yorker Festival, which constantly broadcast a commercial starring Jason Schwartzman that promoted the magazine’s iPad app.) According to the Alliance for Audited Media, digital replicas of magazines made up just 3.8 percent of paid circulation in 2014, up only slightly from 3.3 percent in 2013 — not exactly exponential growth. And in December 2012, less than a year after the launch of The Daily, News Corp announced its shutdown, citing lackluster sales.

Meanwhile, news companies are consistently inking deals with aggregation apps like Flipboard, agreeing to allow their (expensively produced) news content to live within its app in exchange for a cut of ad revenue. Last year, Flipboard announced it surpassed 100 million users, and even The Wall Street Journal, which maintains one of the most successful newspaper paywalls, has inked a deal to appear on the app.

Traditional publishers have always leveled a skeptical eye at aggregation outlets, and many within the industry openly balked at the news that Facebook hopes to host news content on its mobile app for a share of advertising revenue. So why are they risking control of their content — and brand — by appearing on these outside apps?

“I think that publisher after publisher is seeing that the user does not want to go to one single source for all their information needs,” said Rich Jaroslovsky, the VP of content at SmartNews. “They want to take advantage of the greatest diversity of voices available.” Mobile apps, unlike the open web, do not allow for frictionless discovery, and therefore publishers are forced to place their content where the users already are. And in 2014, many of those news consumers are opening up aggregation apps, not individual mobile versions of magazines and newspapers.

SmartNews, which only recently launched in the U.S., originated in Japan and has built up a base of 5 million active users. As detailed in a recent Fast Company article, its cofounder Ken Suzuki noticed while riding the subway that his fellow passengers were glued to the mobile games on their phones. Because Internet access is near impossible underground, these passengers didn’t bother trying to access the news. SmartNews tried to tackle this problem.

Jaroslovsky, a longtime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal’s website, was hired to forge agreements and partnerships with U.S. publishers. The draw for users and publishers, he argued, is SmartNews’s selection algorithm, which sorts through 10 million URLs a day and chooses about a thousand stories, based on a number of social and other algorithmic cues, to be displayed. Smart personalization and the ability to tailor what’s seen to the user’s interests is a prized feature on many of these aggregation apps.

Roman Karachinsky, the CEO of News360, told me that his company conducted research a few years ago, prior to launching its app, on user news consumption. “They spend half the time filtering and half the time reading and consuming,” he said. “And we thought that was completely lopsided. People don’t want to spend half their time looking at headlines and deciding, ‘Do I want to read this or not?’ They want to see headlines that are all interesting. The research showed that only about 20 percent of the headlines in your feed during the day are something you’re interested in, while 80 percent was stuff that you needed to filter out.”

Allowing the user to pick what topics she’s interested in is only half the battle, he said, because users are notoriously bad at articulating their preferences. With News360, every action you take — whether it’s more passive signals like opening and scrolling through a story, or more active indications like giving an article a thumbs up or thumbs down — affects what content you see. And it’s the ability to serve up the most relevant content to an individual user, Karachinsky believes, that will differentiate one aggregation app from the other: “Once you get past the initial hurdles of having a great UI, having enough content partners — those are not super difficult to achieve — the thing that’s going to set each of us apart is the algorithm.”

Karachinsky may have been underestimating the role of which content these apps have access to and how that content is displayed in determining how valuable the app truly is. Because most of these companies are only a few years old, there’s still no standard approach to how a news aggregation app handles content and how it pays for it. Some host nearly all their content within the app itself, while others just produce headlines and summaries and link directly to the news website. Others straddle the line between copyright infringement and fair use by allowing the user to choose a stripped-down version of an article within the app.

Nearly all the apps I researched for this article offer some kind of revenue share to their partners, rather than paying a set fee to license it. SmartNews, for instance, turns over 100 percent of ad revenue that appears on article pages to the publisher and plans to make money for itself by placing ads on the channel sections (where the headlines are displayed) of the app. News Republic, a France-based company, offers a 50 percent cut of ad revenue to publishers.

Sasha Pave, vice president of marketing at News Republic, told me that, because the user experience is better in these mobile aggregation apps, they can offer higher engagement numbers than a publisher can achieve in its own standalone app. News Republic has about 3 million monthly users — a relatively small number compared to the desktop audiences of many major news outlets, but these users consume over 300 million pages a month and flip through an average of 15 to 30 pages per session. Most publishers consider themselves lucky if they can get their website bounce rate below 80 percent.

Pave explained how working within the app stores — where every change, no matter how minor, must be approved — makes it difficult to iterate and test out new ideas. The Huffington Post, in its early days, was famous for rolling out new features the same week they were thought up. A site built on WordPress is extremely easy to modify and test out new features on the fly. Not so for mobile apps. “The app market is really unique,” he said. “There are a million apps on iTunes and many more on Google Play. It’s a tough, tough environment. You can have a huge outlet like TechCrunch develop a mobile app, and it just gets buried. They can be the top of the world on the web, but on Google Play and iTunes, it’s hard to get visibility, and it’s hard to retain users. It involves a lot of coming back to very iterative development where you have to publish and deploy QA” — quality assurance testing — “whereas on the web you can do things much more quickly.”

But for those that have managed to develop that audience, it doesn’t take much arm twisting to make publishers understand the value of it. “Let’s put it this way,” said Quittner. “I don’t have to do very much convincing in my job. I can’t remember the last time I had to actually convince someone to come on to Flipboard.”

To be sure, publishers haven’t completely given up on developing their own apps, as evidenced by The Washington Post’s big announcement that, under the encouragement of owner Jeff Bezos, it had developed an app that will appear preinstalled on new Kindle Fires. But even in cases where outlets are developing new apps, they’re doing so with aggregation in mind. In an interview with Nieman Lab, Stacy-Marie Ishmael confirmed that BuzzFeed’s future app will link to outside sources. But even BuzzFeed, which has mastered the art of viral news, is a content partner on Flipboard. It seems the king of listicles can’t resist Flipboard’s massive audience. As Jaroslovsky put it to me, “You can’t sit back and say ‘The world will beat a path to my site.’ I think those days are gone and I don’t think they’re coming back.”

What if we could know what we’ve read — and tune it — over time? What if we could count and categorize our news consumption, as we try to do with our meals, to become better versions of ourselves?

The Daily Beast, the hard-to-classify six-year-old love child of Barry Diller and Tina Brown, believes it’s time for the measured news diet. Check out the Beast’s mobile products and you know you’re not in website Kansas anymore. Both offer profoundly mobile-first, slimmed-down versions of the Daily Beast website (20 million unique visitors, 75 million pageviews). Pick “article feed” or “full view” on the tablet or just move through the article feed on the phone: You won’t find any of the website navigation — topical pulldowns, columnists, “what we like” — on those smaller screens, just the in-your-face Titling Gothic headline font that’s marked the Beast’s unique, in-your-eyes design. Why the sparer design? “Thoughtful reduction” is a driving point of its mobile redevelopment.

What you will find, in addition to the story roll are some unusual numbers at the top of the mobile screens, as in 51 STORIES, 7 READ, 3 SKIPPED. Touch any of those numbers, and a new screen draws down, with the site’s trademark blood red background. It’s entitled “The Daily Breakdown” and it’s an individual analytics console. The Daily Beast calls it a dashboard. You could also call it the dawn of the quantified news reader.

As a species, we’re going quantified at an astounding rate, able to record our life’s data in ways never before possible. We do it with footsteps, calories, online dates, check-ins, Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Why not news reading? Can we really learn what we’re reading and skipping? Do we want to?

Mike Dyer, co-managing director and chief product officer of the Beast, believes the answer is yes. Beast readers like The Daily Breakdown; since it launched in August on the smartphone (and a month ago on the tablet), the Breakdown now ranks among third or better in customer visits, among the site’s pages. More importantly, Dyer believes he’s found a vital engagement driver, with page consumption per session up 2× to 3× since August, he says. Fully 80 percent of mobile users swipe at least once per session. It’s reflexive and habit-forming.

That affinity shows to be particularly strong with the largest population segment birthed since the Baby Boom shook the planet, those now-well-sought-after millennials (“The newsonomics of the millennials moment”). Fully 54 percent of the Beast’s mobile users are millennials; the group makes up about 39 percent of the overall Internet audience, according to comScore. One secret to serving them that the Beast has jumped on: They expect and like interactivity.

Consequently, the mobile Beasts offer the seemingly Pandora-like innovation of SKIP (yes, in huge letters) on each and every story. Swipe to the left, the word, SKIP appears and then in one fell swoosh is gone, consigned to the SKIP count. Algorithmically, the SKIP is a minus-1, the opposite of a story read. Skip a story, and count the kinds of stories (by topic) you are skipping, and compare your own skips and reads to the crowd within the Beast app within the last hour. You get dynamically generated percentages of the kinds of stories you’re skipping and reading. A read story gets a big red checkmark imposed on it, to remind you what you’ve read and haven’t.

Dyer calls his skipping mechanism the Nudge Engine — nudge as in softly signaling interest.

Is it customization or personalization? Dyer prefers to call it “individuation,” intended to be a lighter touch on personalizing. Skipping stories provides data to the Beast’s content-serving apparatus, but doesn’t currently alter the feed of stories you now get. That’s where the nudge comes in: Red and blue nudge boxes pop up increasingly as readers more actively use the site, offering suggestions to readers. “We may say: ‘You’ve read a lot of politics stories, maybe it’s time for an entertainment story?’ Or, “You’ve read a lot of stories by this writer, do you want to follow him?'” says Dyer. It’s the data readers generate (+1 for reading more than half of a story, -1 for “skipping”) that fuel the kind of individuated nudges readers get. At this point, if readers use both an iPhone and an iPad, the Beast recognizes them as two separate readers, with no cross-platform intelligence gained; it could offer (or require) registration and authentication to provide a smarter cross-platform view, but that would serve as a speed bump in user adoption.

Is the Nudge Engine a new or good idea? It seems to be.

Other big publishers have whiteboarded the words “Pandora for news” and decided against it. They believe it’s just too blunt an instrument. If a reader skips a Bill Cosby story on the Beast, is that because she’s appalled by his behavior, or because she knows a lot about the story but can’t stomach anymore on it at that moment? Does she not want to read about rape, or race, or think too much attention is paid to famous people? There can be a lot of nuance in that simple “skip,” and it’s nuance that won’t be captured on any individual swipe.

That’s why what the Beast has done seems like Pandora’s iconic thumbs up or down but isn’t. “Pandora overplays the value of a thumbs down,” says Dyer. One translation: Journalism isn’t music. Understanding consumer desire in a flow of stories is far more complex than in picking tunes.

Bigger publishers may well consider the nuanced thinking The Daily Beast is bringing to the couple-of-decades-old debate on personalization.

“We have seen a huge uptick in the numbers of people who either want some form of personalisation or are taking steps to personalise their experience,” says Tanya Cordrey, The Guardian’s chief digital officer. “It is now around 20 percent of users on our Guardian apps.” Cordrey is rightly tired of the man vs. machine debate:

It is a topic that already feels slightly jaded as the past few years has seen a constant debate centering around whether algorithms can or will replace journalists. The debate is discussed at the extreme ends of the spectrum with not much in between. The debate, however, will move on in 2015. Clearly there are times when algorithms can work more quickly and more efficiently than humans. But humans are better at handling tone, serendipity, and context. Focusing solely on the tension between human editors and algorithms can also be a dangerous rabbit hole. I believe passionately that success will come with giving much more control to our users. They know best what they want.

The quantified reader idea makes sense to Cordrey: “News organisations will see more users wanting to understand their engagement and interactions with our products. Many of the most passionate users will also want to see more clearly how they contribute to our business models and our social ecosystems. We are currently discussing several experiments in this area.”

At The New York Times, chief information officer Marc Frons continues to test lighter alternatives as well:

I think passive personalization such as recommendation engines and minimally active personalization (reordered navigation, some subject filtering) can be useful to deepen engagement, and perhaps more closely match readers with advertisers and thus command higher CPMs. I also think people are getting “personalized” news from Facebook and to a lesser extent from Twitter, and that social filters will become increasingly important as they are better refined, as they are in apps like Nuzzel.

The trick here is in inferring reader likes and dislikes, as in the Cosby story example. Says Frons: “Subject-based personalization limits serendipity — one of the main pleasures of social feeds in particular and the Internet in general…For content creators, I am not sure that slicing the report up into micro-individuated bundles is ever going to make business or product sense. But a little bit of personalization within a product can go a long way.”

Then there’s the balance of customization and high-end curation, he says:

The challenge for The Times and other large, serious news organizations is to sharpen our focus on what people want to read/watch/interact without giving an inch on what is journalistically important…At The Times, our most loyal readers come to us (as opposed to reaching us through the usual social or search channels) for our news judgment as much as the individual articles. Personalizing the home page, for example, would fracture that shared experience of what is important and newsworthy. But a great recommendation engine that surfaces content you might otherwise have missed can be a powerful asset for publishers hoping to hold their readers’ attention for more than the scant minutes most people spend on any given site.

The Economist works with a similar balance in mind, and a different value proposition: finiteness. Here’s Tom Standage, The Economist’s digital editor:

Our deal with the reader is that they rely on us to be a trusted filter on world events: so we tell them what’s important. That’s rather difficult to square with a system that lets readers decide what they do and don’t want: our readers are in effect saying “I don’t have much time, so tell me what I need to know, even if I don’t think I’m interested in it or don’t realise it’s important.”

So we’re not doing any personalisation at the moment…That said, I think there is some scope for personalisation. Things we are thinking about: a “read this first” feature that looks at past reader behaviour to present what they’re most likely to want to read first, in app or on the web. (Some readers always start with the obituary, or the business pages.) Another area this might be useful is for audio, and in particular in-car audio: a smart playlisting feature, if you like, that plays the stories you probably most want to hear first.

The Daily Breakdown is a good 1.0 product. It’s simple and intuitive. Expect refinements to roll out next year, providing more quantification alternatives (the possibilities are staggering, given the complexity of news flow), undo functionality, and more. The Breakdown is just one of several Beast innovations in mobile. In January, the website’s Read This feature — highlighting five algorithmically picked stories — will debut on mobile as well. In allowing readers to “follow” individual writers, a feature The Guardian added this year as well, the Beast is getting closer to understanding what readers want.

Why offer quantification? The early engagement numbers tell one part of the story. Publishers can quantify for same reason Weight Watchers does: Keep the customers coming back. In the hypercompetition of digital news, what distinguishes one site from another? Certainly, unique stories and above-the-crowd voices, but tools also encourage habit. If you’re sold (or semi-sold) on the Beast, or Slate, or The Washington Post, or WBUR, or Time, might you visit more often to check your running totals? Loyalty and direct traffic become greater issues in the mobile news age, with both more potential and more peril. (Digital veteran Cory Bergman’s recent Mobile Media Memo piece urging publishers to make their mobile front doors more appealing is right on the mark.)

We could get greedy and want such quantifying across news websites, tracking our whole news diet. The Daily Beast’s trick is site-specific, suiting the tech of the moment and, of course, its own business needs. If indeed we want to become quantified readers — do we? — we’d need better collection, aggregation, and sorting. How might that work, and who would do it? Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, and a host of curating/aggregating businesses would love that role. But that’s a question for another day. We’ve long talked about the nature of quality in the digital news landscape. Now we can add new measures of quantity, personal and collective, to that discussion.

Two of those features prominently in many of the updates: increased functionality in Notification Center, which allows for widgets (a long-time feature on Android) and more interactive push notifications, and Handoff, part of Apple’s new Continuity feature that lets users start an action on one Apple device and finish it on another. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, today released a revamped iPad app that emphasizes those functionalities.

Here’s a partial list of outlets that have already made their apps iOS 8-enhanced and the features that they’ve included.

The Guardian

The Guardian’s newly released iOS 8-compatible app includes Handoff integration to let stories move from device to device. The app’s layout has been tweaked and images are now viewable in fullscreen.

The Guardian also utilizes the new widgets in Notification Center. The default setting in the widget is to show a short list of The Guardian’s top stories, but users are also able to personalize the widget to show the top stories from any of the Guardian’s other verticals — from opinion to tech to soccer. If you choose to personalize the widget, it’ll also include a button that takes you to the top stories in the app. (If you stay with top stories, that button just takes you to more headlines.)

The New York Times

In addition to updating its main Times and NYT Now apps with Handoff, widgets, and interactive notifications, the Times also released a new cooking iPad app that includes more than 16,000 recipes from the Times’ archive. The Times launched its cooking site in beta in May, but it’s being fully rolled out this week with the release of the app and a responsive web version for desktop and other mobile devices that’s also open to all users.

“With the introduction of this product and the anticipated rebrand of our Dining section front to Food later this fall, readers will see even more cooking, restaurant, food and wine & spirits content from The New York Times, delivered in a convenient package across platforms,” Times food editor Sam Sifton said in a press release.

Hey, iPadders, the #NYTCooking app is live for you: http://t.co/gnvt4BQNcM.

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) September 17, 2014

The app includes a thorough search feature that lets users search by ingredient as well as by keywords like “easy” or “vegetarian.” It’s multimedia-heavy and includes videos that can teach cooking basics. Users can also curate their own recipe box to save favorite dishes or recipes they’d like to try out.

The app also takes advantage of the widget feature in iOS 8 and will send users a daily Recipe of the Day.

Breaking News

In addition to interactive notifications and a widget in Notification Center, the Breaking News app has added a “nearby” section to the app to show users news that’s happening near wherever their phone is located. The distance is customizable — you can go from a 1 mile radius to a 100-mile radius.

The function builds on a feature that Breaking News released in June that sent users push alerts, called proximity alerts, for news that’s breaking near them. With that feature, users passively received news alerts on events near their location, but in the new version of the app users can actively seek out local news.

ABC News

ABC is taking advantage of the new interactive notifications. A new feature in its iPhone app lets users swipe a push notification from the lock screen to share the alert. The app also added a follow button to notifications to let users get continuing alerts on a certain news topic.

These additions are iterative updates to a larger overhaul ABC News introduced last month. The new app better integrates live video and lets users personalize news alerts to be delivered to an inbox in the app.

The Associated Press

Most of the changes to the iOS 8-version of the AP’s iPhone app are “backend changes that should make the app perform better than ever,” Michael Boord, the AP’s director of mobile products said in a company Q&A. But there are a few minor additions to the app that users will notice, like a Big Stories section on the app’s homepage that has collections of stories on major news events. Buttons to share to social media are also more prominent in the new app.

Today, the Journal is releasing a revamped version of its app, with expanded notifications and continuous reading, a feature that allows users to finish stories in Safari or on their iPhone that they started on the app. It’s a simplified and streamlined experience designed to take advantage of new features in Apple’s iOS 8, which is also being released today.

“We wanted to really explore iOS 8 to understand how that software could lead to a better reading experience,” said Edward Roussel, Dow Jones’ head of products. According to Roussel, about 85 percent of the Journal’s total app usage is on iOS devices. Roussel told me the Journal waited to update its app until the release of iOS 8 specifically to take advantage of the new features.

The new mobile operating system was first announced in June, but the Journal’s app gives a glimpse of how news organizations might adapt to the new features of iOS 8 — and how companies are fighting for precious real estate on users’ screens.

In iOS 8, users can add third-party widgets to the “Today” section of their notification center, and the new app includes a Journal widget that puts stories alongside daily appointments and the weather. (Similar widgets are old hat for Android users.) Swiping down in the notification center will now pull up the latest headlines from the Journal, letting users click on a headline to bring them directly to the app to read the full story.

Push notifications are also getting a refresh. Articles attached to push notifications will now include a read-it-later button that will save stories for reading in their iPad or iPhone app. (Stories can also be saved from within the app.)

“Part of our thinking is that increasingly the way in which people are reading things is in bite-sized chunks, so it isn’t one continuous read,” Roussel said. “You’re jumping in and out of your apps. So with the save functionality, whether it comes from a push notification or from having seen a headline of a story, it becomes a very, very important part of the experience.”

Reading in bite-sized chunks also means jumping from device to device, and the Journal app incorporates a new feature Apple is including in iOS 8 called Continuity. When Apple first unveiled iOS 8 in June, it presented Continuity as a way to continue working on a document between your devices, or to answer a phone call from your MacBook Pro. But the Journal is utilizing a function of the feature called Handoff to let users start and finish stories between devices. Roussel said the Journal envisions most people using the feature between the iPhone and iPad apps, but it will also work in Safari on the desktop.

That’s why the Journal is also pushing out an update to its iPhone app today, allowing Handoff and other features to work on iOS 8-enabled iPhones. Roussel said the Journal is waiting to fully remake its iPhone app pending the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which both have larger screens than the current generation of iPhones.

“We all take it for granted that email, for example, works well in the cloud and that you can pick up on your email regardless of device, and whether it’s desktop or iPad or iPhone,” Roussel said. “But what we’re really saying here is that the same thing will apply very, very soon with reading news. That needs to feel like a very natural experience in that you just pick it up wherever you’ve left off on whatever device.”

While the Journal’s phone apps are primarily focused on the latest in breaking news, its current iPad app is heavily focused on replicating the print newspaper on the tablet. The average age of a Journal iPad user is 50, the paper says, and three-quarters of the app’s users use it to read a digital replica of the print newspaper. In redesigning the iPad app, the Journal is trying keep a connection to that audience by ensuring the digital version of the paper remains a central part of the app while also creating functionality for real-time news.

The new app is still stuck in Apple’s Newsstand, which many news organizations lament as the place apps go to to be forgotten, but it presents a less-cluttered homepage that takes visual cues from the Journal’s print front page, including the “What’s News” column and the regular “A-Hed” feature, complete with stipple drawing. It also features a ticker across the top of the page with the latest news and stock prices. If a user is reading an article about General Motors, for example, they’ll see GM’s stock fluctuate in real-time. The new app also has streamlined article pages, trimmed sections, and simplified the navigation bar.

In updating the app, the Journal wanted to draw a better distinction between the print-replica and the updating-app versions. The previous app made it difficult to switch between the versions; now users can jump between them with a single tap. The app now also update the latest news in the background.

Roussel stressed that the new iPad app is just one of the first steps in a redesign across all of the Journal’s digital properties. He said the Journal plans on releasing new Android apps by the end of the year. A new responsive article page was rolled out in some parts of WSJ.com just this week, and the Journal plans to continue to expand its use of the new article page while also introducing a new video page, simplified navigation, and new section pages — including a new homepage.

“What you’ll see, between now and the end of the year, are some significant changes on the website,” Roussel said.

CEO Mark Thompson — whose chief mandate is to get first revenue and then profit growing again — had a little momentum going: Two of the last three quarters had shown revenue growth. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a real outlier in an industry still struggling to grow revenues, as it has since 2007 (“The newsonomics of zero and The New York Times”).

To be sure, the 0.6 percent downturn in revenues is a minor, mostly psychological setback. It does, though, point to a big problem for all dailies — the great decline in print advertising continues to swamp much of the other progress news companies are making in reader revenue and, for some, new digital ad revenue streams.

Compare this Q2 report to Q1, by the numbers:

It’s that awful 6.6 percent print decline that’s the Times’ big issue. If the Times, and others, can moderate losses, then they have a fighting chance to transform the business to digital. Without getting closer to zero (or somehow turning positive, as with that surprise 4 percent in Q1), it’s been near-impossible to grow overall.

One other troubling spot for the Times: circulation revenue. It’s up, but a tepid 1.4 percent, a little less than Q1’s 2 percent. That’s doubly concerning. We expected that Q1 would be lower, given that the Times had saturated much of its full-price market, topping out at 799,000 digital-only subs then. The introduction of NYT Now in late March upped hope that a new substantial market of younger, more cost-conscious ($2/week), mobile-oriented buyers would develop. The introduction of Times Premier, at the same time, promised some upsell money for VIP-status-seeking buyers. (It also launched niche NYT Opinion in June, so we’d expect the financial impact from that product to be minor in this quarterly report.)

The Times didn’t release specific NYT Now, NYT Opinion, or Times Premiere numbers. We do know though that the new products accounted for a majority of the new 32,000 digital-only subs. So let’s say they accounted for 20,000 or so new subs. In and of itself, that’s disappointing, a small number — with lots of marketing and promotion — and small new revenue on what are already lower-priced niche products. It would also tell us that Times’ all-access full-price push has really slowed, to 12,000 or so — an expected plateauing.

If the fundamental growth engine for reader revenue is slowing to a crawl, and the new products aren’t pumping out new customers, that points to what will be a growing problem in the quarters ahead. And for the rest of the newspaper industry — trying to figure out what it might be able to learn from from the Times’ reader revenue pushes — the slow pickup on NYT Now will be a cautionary tale.

In the Times’ carefully chosen words, we can see that concern: “We’re encouraged by the reaction of users to the products, especially the high consumer satisfaction levels we’re seeing with the NYT Now app. But, while we expected the portfolio to take time to build, we want to accelerate the rate of growth in subscription sales, so over the coming months, we will refine some of the offers and the way we market the portfolio to accomplish this.”

The impact on profits is clear. The Times eked out $16.5 million for the quarter, down $5.5 million from a quarter earlier.

That said, just about any of those numbers would be welcome at the United States’ largest newspaper company, Gannett.

For the company moving profoundly away from its newspaper base — becoming a TV company — its own Q2 emphasized the same issues the Times is facing.

Gannett’s newspapers were down 3.7 percent year-over-year overall in revenue. Print ads were down 5.1 percent, while circulation revenue went negative, down 0.6 percent. Digital revenues were up 4.3 percent.

Most noteworthy is that same big print ad decline — and the red number in circulation revenue. The paywall revolution was supposed to put newspaper companies on a path to ramping reader revenue growth. But what we are seeing at Gannett (and at other companies) is that the first- and (sometimes) second-year impact of higher-priced all-access subscriptions is waning. Further pricing is constrained by too great a loss in print subscription volume. If that continues — and if regional newspaper companies either don’t produce niche paid products or believe those products won’t resonate with buyers — then the blush of reader revenue growth will have been a short one.

Finally, last week’s Gannett quarterly call prompted a brief brouhaha. That was based on what CEO Gracia Martore said. Or did she? The company’s own USA Today had to run a clarification that it had “mischaracterized” its own CEO words.

To a question from financial analyst Ed Atorino about Gannett’s willingness to get into the market for newspapers (as its done in TV, as a buyer), Martore (transcript for the call is available from Seeking Alpha, here) replied:

Yes, there are newspapers for sale. Look, what this company is focused on, and laser focused on, as I said before is creating additional strong shareholder value. And we are open to any opportunities that will do that. And we’re the Board and I and the management team, continue to look at ways to increase shareholder value as we have successfully done with our superior returns over the last three years. We said last quarter that we were laser focused on Belo and now with the London Broadcasting stations. And as you can see from the results that was precisely the right focus for us to have, but we are an incredibly shareholder-oriented company and we are always evaluating the best ways to continue to meaningfully increase value for both the near and the long-term.

It was that “newspapers for sale” line that got her into trouble. Did it mean Gannett newspapers are for sale? Listening to the audio, I doubt it. I think she meant: Yes, there are sellers of newspapers out there. But it was awkward and confusing. One thing a CEO doesn’t want to do is introduce public uncertainty into the fates of thousands of its employees.

More interesting that what Martore said is what she didn’t. She didn’t take the opportunity to support Gannett’s newspaper investments and their importance to her or the company’s future. Instead, we heard the boilerplate of what any investor-pleasing CEO has to intone: Job one is maximizing shareholder return. That’s fair, of course, but it would be refreshing to hear a news company CEO who is also laser-focused on the readers.

Further translation of the whole episode: Gannett’s newspapers aren’t now on the market. That, though, is more rapidly becoming a “when” rather than an “if” question.

But those numbers hide the fact that traditional news outlets are being outcompeted for mobile users’ attention. Data from comScore shows that while consuming newspaper content takes up a mere 0.9 percent of total connected time on desktops and laptops, the total’s even worse on phones — just 0.2 percent.

Aren’t phones just web browsers with smaller screens? Not really. Smartphones are personal, social machines, optimized for communication and entertainment. Offered the choice, there are lots of people who’d rather spend time with Flappy Bird than The Fresno Bee. The tap-and-scroll interface works beautifully with social networks like Facebook and Twitter — less so with old-fashioned news presentation. And an interface built around apps and icons can make it a challenge for any single news source to earn a prominent spot on someone’s home screen.

The other big challenge is — surprise, surprise — money. Online advertising has long been dominated by a few big players, but their market power is even stronger on mobile. Just two companies — Google and Facebook — will earn 68.5 percent of all the mobile advertising revenue worldwide in 2014. They can do so because they have the best data about individual users: Google knows what you’re searching for, Facebook knows who and what you like. That advantage is almost impossible for a small news outlet to beat. The Newspaper Association of America estimates that mobile ads contributed less than 1 percent of all newspaper revenue in 2013.

So: News outlets are watching their audiences move rapidly to a new platform — one where they have a number of competitive disadvantages and where they have a hard time making money. Sound familiar? You can be excused for thinking 2014 sounds a lot like 2004.

Part of the problem is that many news organizations, seeing this new generation of devices, made a bad bet. They decided that tablets, not smartphones, were the place to invest. Magazines, in particular, spent many millions building interactive iPad apps that promised to transfer the magazine-reading experience to a flat piece of glass about the same size.

These apps were often lovely. They were also often slow to download, clunky to use, and papered over with only the thinnest layer of interactivity.

Publishers thought tablets would be a chance to retake control of the publishing channel. Anyone can publish on the web, they thought, but not everyone can create an experience like this; it’ll be a recreation of the old evening newspaper, a lean-back read that they’re uniquely able to provide.

That tablet boom never came. Most of those fancy magazine apps sunk into disuse, never attracting the kind of subscription numbers publishers hoped. Sales of the iPad, the most popular tablet and the one most publishers targeted, fell this spring, year-over-year. Cheaper Android tablets keep selling, but there’s little evidence people are paying for news on them en masse. Research from Ball State University found that, among college students, the percentage owning a tablet actually declined between 2012 and 2014.

Meanwhile, social networks took over the phone. Journalists spend a lot of time on Twitter, and everyone knows about Facebook. But other platforms — YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat — are also huge competitors for readers’ attention, and increasingly important for news discovery on mobile. The interconnection between mobile devices and social media has been a powerful one, fueling the rise of new outlets like BuzzFeed. New phone-first startups like Circa and Inside, products like Facebook Paper and Yahoo News Digest, and tablet emigrants like Flipboard are all presenting news in mobile-friendly ways. It’s hard for the old guard to compete.

But hard doesn’t mean impossible. Breaking News, the app-centric outfit run as an inhouse startup by NBC News, has done creative work to take advantage of push notifications and to increase customization. Atlantic Media, home to a 157-year-old magazine, has found early success with Quartz, a business site built around social content and designed with mobile devices in mind. (Quartz was originally targeted primarily at tablets, but it’s found smartphone users are three times as common.)

And The New York Times’s new iPhone app, NYT Now, rethinks the news app paradigm in interesting ways — including a scroll-friendly presentation, smart aggregation, and twice-a-day summaries of the day’s most interesting and important news. Even though it only includes a fraction of the Times’s stories, I’m not the only person to think NYT Now offers a far better news experience than the Times’ regular iPhone app or mobile site.

It’s not hopeless; the smartest news companies will adapt. Bright journalists will figure out how to shape their work for a mobile audience; smart developers will build new experiences to delight readers; entrepreneurial businesspeople will come up with new ways to make money on it all. But for traditional news companies, the rise of smartphones is as big a challenge as they’ve seen since the early days of the web. It’ll be up to them to see if the story plays out any differently this time.

As Steve Jobs prepared to take the stage, Times tech blogger Nick Bilton was preparing to scour the Internet for information on the yet-to-be-named tablet and feed information to the Times’ liveblog. The hype was huge, and readers were desperate for information on the tablet — not least its name. George Washington University professor (and frequent Nieman Lab contributor) Nikki Usher describes the scene in her new book, Making News at The New York Times:

Fast innovator Atlantic Media wrote the playbook for Quartz. That playbook almost seemed too fashionable:

✓ Designed for mobile and web-native
✓ A browser app only, not available as iOS or Android native apps
✓ No small-unit banner ads, with native ad “posts” the primary format
✓ Focused on visuals, with big photos and lots of sharable charts
✓ A global focus, in coverage and in audience, from the start

Even the name Quartz seemed a bit avant-garde, its qz.com url a little unorthodox. We knew what a Fortune, a BusinessWeek, a Wall Street Journal, an Economist, a Financial Times meant, both directly through their names and through their long histories. Quartz seemed to be going up not only against all of those, but Bloomberg, Forbes, and Thomson Reuters as well. All those business brands seemed formidable and more greatly staffed in journalists than Quartz.

And yet, before its second birthday, Quartz has found a niche. Let’s look at its newsonomics and how they provide a window into the hot “explainer” movement.

In short, its influence on today’s digital news world derives from three things: Its impressive audience and advertising strategy; its own “obsessive” model of mobile-friendly, explanatory journalism; and the wider sending of Atlantic/Quartz talent off into positions of influence in the next news, and its influence on a wide range of sites that have launched since Quartz’s birth.

Let’s take the talent point.

Justin B. Smith, Atlantic Media’s then-president, was a key shaper of Quartz. Smith is now CEO of Bloomberg Media, with a huge staff, deep pockets, and lots to figure out. His fellow co-conspirator at Atlantic Media and with Quartz, Scott Havens, just joined the soon-to-be-new Time Inc. as senior vice president for digital, after five years at Atlantic. Andrew Perlmutter, an Atlantic strategist at the time of Quartz’s launch, was named executive vice president of Boston Globe Media Partners by new owner and publisher John Henry. Just last week, well-followed Quartz writer Christopher Mims (from his bio: “He believes that the most interesting things about the universe have yet to be discovered, and that technology is the primary driver of cultural change. He is often surprised and delighted by what people will say on record”) took on the WSJ personal tech column job that Farhad Manjoo had vacated in January by leaving for The New York Times. That’s a confluence of influence that speaks to the thinking and execution at Quartz and elsewhere within Atlantic Media.

So, let’s look at the numbers Quartz reports:

• About 4.7 million monthly unique visitors.
• 40 percent of readers are from outside the U.S. The top five countries, in order: U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India. Given the India audience, Quartz is launching its first non-U.S.-centric site, Quartz India, in June, partnered with scroll.in.
• More than 60 percent of the audience is executive level (according to Bizo), with 90 percent of the U.K. audience at that level.
• 70 percent are male, and with an expected skew to tech, sometimes standalone tech and often tech within a variety of companies.
• 40 percent of its traffic is from mobile, with mobile heaviest on evenings and weekends, as at other news sites. Smartphone usage dominates the early morning, and out-distances tablet usage overall about 4-to-1.
• Fully 70 percent of traffic is driven by social links.
• 70,000 readers have signed up for The Daily Brief newsletter. The newsletter has been an important driver of habit and usage — and registration data.

If the audience is high-demo, its ad sell comes down to a single word that Atlantic Media brandishes well: influentials. From Quartz to The Atlantic to National Journal and Government Executive, its pitch is not based simply on wealth or spending ability, but that its readers as deciders, agenda setters, and idea connectors (“The newsonomics of influentials”).

Quartz is a high-end play, differentiating itself from the more mass-oriented Business Insider and Forbes.com.

The site has already booked 600 percent the revenue for the first half of 2014 as in the same period for 2013, says Jay Lauf, co-president and publisher of Quartz and a veteran of Wired magazine. The site’s native ad strategy fit its time of birth well. It has never run traditional banners — why jump aboard a slowing train? Advertisers include Boeing, Chevron, Cadillac, G.E., and Bank of America; more than 40 percent of advertisers are in financial services.

Lauf says the site is getting an 80 percent ad renewal rate, after first being tagged as the “hot new thing.” In total, Quartz has counted about 45 “blue chip” advertisers. That’s a big number, and shows how much Fortune 500 brands are embracing “share of voice” and native advertising. Quartz aids these content marketers in their creation, ranging from full creation to “light touch” help — a variation of content marketing digital services, a major growth area for all the national and regional publishers investing in capacity to do that work.

A Goldman Sachs look at top innovations of 2013 is the kind of advertising that plays to Quartz’ strength. It’s a major client, and its white paper-like offerings fit the thought-leader vibe of the site overall.

Only 30 percent of Quartz’s ad revenue comes from those native ad posts that caught so much attention when launched (and which The New York Times borrowed from for its new Paid Posts in NYT Now and elsewhere); 70 percent comes from larger-format “Engage” ad units that dominate web pages.

Advertisers pay rates in the range of $60 CPM or higher (cost per thousand impressions). That’s 2-4× what banners will bring in on national sites. Figure that Quartz is on a run rate to produce $8 million-plus in revenue this year.

In addition to native ads, events are becoming a bigger part of the revenue strategy. They’ve long been an Atlantic Media strength, and now that Quartz has developed sufficient audience, it will host seven or more in 2014. Key here are two revenue strategies, attendee registration and sponsorship. “The Next Billion,” its June 2 event in Seattle is priced at $599 (without an advance discount) and is sponsored by Intel. As the news events space heats up, the smartest plays here are extensions both of the journalism a company does and its connections to brands with good “influentials” budgets.

That journalism is framed around the idea of obsessions. “I’m a big reader of magazines, and the magazines I liked best had defining obsessions in what they covered and sometimes over-covered,” says Quartz editor-in-chief and co-president Kevin Delaney. The obsessions framing was at first internal; it now acts as the branding, and in some ways, the taxonomy of the site. On a practical level, it allows a smaller business news staff to cover a wider world, to think and act bigger. Quartz certainly picks its spots, covering some stories, while letting others go. (Even much larger business news organizations, though, do the same thing. Compare Tuesday’s widely-covered Twitter quarterly financials report — Quartz’ provocative angle was “Twitter is now in danger of being crushed by Facebook” — with the paucity of analysis of Time Warner’s.)

The big idea for newsies: Get outside the silo of beats and embed the macro context into anything the site writes. As an editor, Delaney knows that the 15 current (though changing with the news) obsessions — among them, “Indian Elections,” “Future of Finance,” “Ukraine Crisis,” and “New U.S. Economy” — push journalists “to think through what’s most important in the stories, not just process the news.” Not processing the news means avoiding the mushy middle of stories between 500 to 800 words; Quartz’ stories run short or longer.

Quartz’s visual journalism push now seems more commonplace. The site not only uses charts often to tell its stories, it has opensourced its Chartbuilder tool, with wide usage among other media.

Even though the majority of readers don’t use the obsessions taxonomy that much — guess what, they like to scroll — it’s both a guidepost for its staff and a high-profile branding that says prominently that Quartz is a thinking person’s business news site. That staff now numbers 25 full-time journalists, up from 17 at launch.

Delaney got to pick his staff. Stop there: As I talk with news-change people in both legacy and startup operations, that ability to pick a staff is huge. It connects with the overused word “culture”: In hiring, editors like Delaney not only get a chance to find the talents, digital sensibilities, and storytelling chops they want — they get to build their culture through hires. Any newsroom, new or old, has its issues, but a new, well chosen, well paid one can spend so much more time on the work and so much less time on the “change.” For legacy companies, a key question is how to emulate that kind of environment, ASAP. Take a tour of Quartz’ journalists and you can see a wide-range of skills, humor — and potential. Those qualities show, subtly, in Quartz’ stories.

The “obsessions,” of course, are just a foundation. It’s the voice of Quartz — serious, pointed, and yet casual — that gives it a personality. Delaney credits global news editor Gideon Lichfield, who came to Quartz after 16 years at The Economist, with establishing that style. “It’s hard to express,” says Delaney, “but it’s conversational, global, digital, and smart. Treat readers’ time well. Above all, don’t talk down to the readers. And don’t take yourself too seriously.” The effort, that serious casual, borrows much from what we’ve all learned in last 20 years on the news web. Often, it works quite well; less often, you can find yourself midway through a story and wondering why you’re still reading. Throughout, you get the sense that these are journalists grappling for answers on big issues and little, much as their readers are.

Quartz, at its best, zags when the competition zigs. Whether it’s the coverage of the next Netflix (“The track-changes version of Netflix’s vision for the future of TV”), contrarian advice (“Forget about learning to code — to get rich in tech, become an accountant”), or real estate comparisons (“How many houses can you buy elsewhere for the price of one in London?”) — chartified, of course — readers are unlikely to think they’ve seen Quartz’s take on current stories in other places.

We can see Quartz as part of that larger movement toward explainer journalism. What does Delaney think about the explainer wave? As The Wall Street Journal veteran he is (having left as WSJ.com managing editor to start Quartz), he takes a longer view than most: “News organizations — including Quartz — have been explaining what the news means for awhile.”

Yet the Quartz sensibility is now a cousin of everything from the new NYT Now to Circa to Inside.com to Yahoo News Digest, as everyone moves on to the coming majority-mobile opportunity. Explainer journalism, of course, isn’t only about mobile, but the its rediscovery coincides with this new mobile age.

My sense is that this great flowering (and great hype) around explainer journalism will soon be absorbed into the wider changes in how news is created and consumed. Though the names starting sites have drawn disproportionate attention, a kind of within-the-house celebrity journalism, we’re still talking about only dozens or hundreds of journalists hired. Almost all seem focused on an American intelligentsia, albeit an intelligentsia that’s highly attractive to advertisers and in its willingness — given the right proposition — to attend a conference or buy a subscription or become a member.

At this point among the contenders — Atlantic Media’s The Wire, Quartz, Slate, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and sites that may tumble out of First Look Media, to name just a few — we’re beginning to see a kind of Darwinian competition. Even the intelligentsia only has so much time and will make choices. I loved The Upshot’s spare story and great visualization of “Up Close on Baseball’s Borders”). But FiveThirtyEight’s 773 words and a scatterplot on “Do April Showers Bring May Flowers?” exceeded my wonk quotient; I’d rather see the answer to the latter in one of Larry Kramer’s restyled USA Today graphics.

While social referrals are an essential nutrient for all these newer sites, one important metric to watch over the next 24 months will be how much their direct traffic increases. What Quartz and its competitors are now fighting for is new habitual readers. They want to encourage daily check-in; they want to be on the first screen of our smartphones.

Where does Quartz go from here? It’s got new competition, but its business niche helps distinguish it from the newer explainer sites, as does its 19-month lead in gaining attention. Is it really a business site? Well, yes, but it travels well beyond the edges of business, and, interestingly, does it in ways different from what sites such as Business Insider and Forbes do. Clearly, “business” is a good category to claim, but how you then work its edges will make a lot of difference in how well you can really monetize your audience.

Quartz will need to find continued growth. The events strategy is a key to that. It will bring in about 10 percent of Quartz’ revenue in Quartz Events’ first full year of operation. Overall, Atlantic Media brings in 20 percent of all its revenue from events, so Quartz should have headroom there.

Then there’s that elusive question of reader revenue. Though Quartz’ native ad innovation is impressive, and related events revenue will help, all the new sites find a common question: how to balance their revenue streams over the longer term. Without a legacy print publication that people are used to paying for (like Quartz’s parent/cousin The Atlantic), how do you pry payment out of readers? Slate is the latest to try a new tack there, with its new membership program.

Will Quartz test similar waters? Not soon. “Right now, we embrace the open web, full stop,” says Lauf.

And then there’s the question of where Atlantic Media will next go. The company has hired well, in both executive and journalistic ranks. It ranks “culture” as one of its foundational values, putting it on the top navigation of its site. Owner David Bradley showed the industry how a company born in 1857 could be reshaped into a leading digital/print publisher. Now, he must decide on his next generation of leadership, and how much Atlantic Media will continue to be a serial product launcher (Defense One is the latest, launched a year ago) and how much it’ll become a buyer or a seller.

NYT Now’s timing seems right, and in my first testing of it, it offers reasons to believe it’ll get a lot of usage. But big questions loom as the final preparations for launch are made within the Times. The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay. There are also questions about how NYT Now fits with the Times’ other native apps and mobile web experiences.

The positioning of the app shows the resurgent Times’ confidence, bolstered by the “They like us, they really like us!” success of the Times’ three-year-old digital subscription strategy. In fact, NYT Now can be seen in part as an Empire Strikes Back play: It aims to take readership back from Twitter and Facebook. It is an offensive move from a company — and an industry — that has seemed to be playing defense for so long.

“It’s the best Twitter feed I’ve ever seen,” one NYT Now tester told the team building the product, says Cliff Levy, the editor of NYT Now and a well-decorated and well-respected Timesman. That’s part of the idea: Take minutes of news usage back from Twitter and Facebook by offering a somewhat open but still corralled experience. NYT Now aims to take back that usage at the critical early-morning check-in times and later in the day, when data shows even news readers tend to migrate to social and games. How much of the world really wants a lassoing of content, bringing some finiteness to the infinity of news and opinion out there?

We know that Twitter faces its own issues of relevance, of user experience, and of how to help its users make sense of the madding digital world; just recently, the company acknowledged loss of minutes and new signups because it’s too complicated for many users. How NYT Now will try to bring simplicity to the complexity is the question. Let’s consider NYT Now in four quick parts: the product, its journalism, its user experience, and its business strategy.

The product

The product is straightforward. It’s mobile-only and, at launch, iPhone-only. On Android, the Times says, “We’re looking at it.” There’s no tablet or web access. As mobile usage surges past 50 percent in some parts of the day and week for the Times and other news companies, NYT Now aims to exploit the compulsive, near-OCD check-in behavior of 2014 life.

The app will be a standard, standalone iPhone app, not part of Apple’s Newsstand, where the Times’ core iOS app lives. Download the app and you get 10 free articles a month — the same way metered access works on the other Times’ digital products. The price is $2 a week or $8 for four weeks.

The journalism

The journalism is NYT Now’s foundation. Importantly, that journalism is both self-referential (which is what we’d expect  of the proud, sometimes haughty, news standard of the Times) and breaking new ground —  encompassing a wider world beyond the Times. So readers of NYT Now will get 30 to 50 Times stories in a given day, with stories appearing and being replaced throughout the 24-hour cycle. That’s roughly 10 to 15 percent of its total number of articles and blog posts it writes daily.

It’s an editor’s product, put together around the clock by an editorial staff of 15 to 20 (in addition to another dozen or so on the business side). Levy is modeling it on the success of New York Today, the blogging-from-the-five-boroughs NYTimes.com section that he developed last spring and which has grown in reader (and publisher) appreciation over time. He and a growing staff have built NYT Now over nine months, starting with the idea of a “need-to-know” mobile product. Think of the content in three parts, each borrowed from New York Today:

• Briefings: Adapted from the breezier, bloggier world of New York Today, NYT Now’s core personality is in the briefing. Friendly good mornings and good evenings greet readers and then offer a two- to three-paragraph take on “some of the things that caught our attention today.” Last evening’s: “Obama vs. Putin,” “The brothers Murdoch bounce back,” “It’s hard to be that bad,” (about the 76ers), “Rumors of North Korean hair rule may have follicle of truth,” “Pass the butter,” “‘Psych’ ends its eight-year run on USA Network” and “An energy drink cuts the caffeine.” There are no Mr. Putins and Mr. Obamas in the briefings. It’s the Times taking off its tie, and sharing. Expect Morning and Evening Briefings and Lunchtime and Midnight Reads — four segments a day, and each will flow into the relevant U.S. time zone; those of us on the west coast will no longer have to translate from Timesian ET.
• Top News: A half-dozen or more top Times stories of the moment. Hard news, with “more news” and top opinion at the bottom of that page.
• Our Picks: Finally, curation. The Times is acknowledging that there are indeed other worthy news providers out there, and here it picks out the stories it considers the best. Among the top brands noted: Wired, Reuters, Recode, CNBC, USA Today, The Guardian, Forbes — and even Nate Silver’s new post-Times FiveThirtyEight. Levy notes that the Times has been doing a bit of curation here and there, in its Science and Bits sections. And the Times’ Election 2012 iPhone app also pulled in non-Times stories that editors thought were important. But this is nonetheless a major leap. Levy puts it in cosmic terms: “There’s a tremendous collective intelligence in our newsrooms, but it’s only been internally focused” — meaning that journalists read a lot of stuff each day that others write, making judgments about what’s well done.

What is great aggregation or curation anyhow but great editing applied to deep knowledge. In Round 1 of Internet news, even the smartest newsrooms bottled up that value. NYT Now intends to harvest and monetize it. The eventual success or failure of NYT Now aside, the Times’ move into curation is long overdue and welcome. It’s about time that native journalistic smarts escaped their own four-walled newsrooms. The big question for a paid curation app: Does it offer enoughi curation to justify paying?

The user experience

It’s mobile first. Think Quartz, a mobile-first news leader, with more pictures and white space. It’s a long scroll, and meant for mobile snacking. It’s intuitive. Its three parts are easy to move between.

Regular New York Times subscribers will like NYT Now too. With the briefings and curation, in addition to the top news found on the Times’ own regular smartphone app, it may offer a more pleasing morning (and later) experience for subscribers. On the business level, that’s not an issue: Times subscribers get NYT Now access included in their subscription.

What I wonder about: How Times subscribers who prefer NYT Now for a quick morning reader will be able to move over to and within the fuller Times smartphone experience. The two experiences are related, but not completely synced up, as I currently understand it. On the core app, I can’t get to the breezy briefings or curation, though I can go as deep in Times content as I want. On NYT Now, I can get those, but then I have only access direct access — and view — of the limited number of Times stories on NYT Now at that moment, coming on and dropping off. (NYT Now-only subscribers will be able to read any and all NYT Now stories any time on the web; a green diamond next to a headline will indicate stories to which they have access).

Maybe that won’t be an issue, but on first use, it seems like a disconnect. If I were the Times, I’d be concerned about current subscribers feeling lost in transition. That should be a big point to ponder. As Cliff Levy shared with me, it’s Times subscribers who have disproportionately shown the love for NYT Now’s inspiration, New York Today. That New York Today experience, though, is seamlessly integrated within all the Times’ digital products.

What has worked about Paywalls 1.0 at the Times is great simplicity. You pay your money, and you get an all-access pass. All-access is a simple concept sweeping the newspaper, magazine, TV, and movie trades. Moves into product niches need to be tried, but complexity and confusion are the enemies of commercial success.

The business strategy

The Times’ strategy here is simple: “What would products look like for those willing to pay?” says David Perpich, the general manager of the Times’ New Digital Product Group and business head for NYT Now. The first answer is in, with the success of the full-access product. Now, the niching — Paywalls 2.0 — begins for the Times, and the rest of the news industry, which has followed the Times strongly and quickly into the paywall era.

Think of the segmentation as these three E’s:

• Essential, which is NYT Now;
• Extensive, to this point the only digital-only plans the Times has offered, and which have signed up 760,000 digital-only subscribers; home delivery subscribers are also considered to be in this segment;
• Exclusive, the Times’ new “premier plan.”

Exclusive, which I first noted in November, has been priced. It’s the VIP level of Times subscription: $45 for every four weeks, which provides full-digital access to subscribers, in addition to the status benefits. That’s an additional $130 a year (or $10 for each four weeks) on top of the current all-access sub. Home delivery subscribers can also go premium, as of April 2, for the same $10 a week extra.

That’s a 28 percent increase on top of a Sunday print/digital sub or digital sub. That pricing parallels the Financial Times, which has pioneered the premium sub model. The FT charges 44 percent more for a “premium” sub than than a “standard” one. What self-respecting FT (or Times, or Wall Street Journal?) reader would be caught dead with a standard-issue subscription? We know that 33 percent of new FT.com subscribers preserve their self-respect by forking over the extra dollars, euros, or pounds for four added features.

The Times’ premium is for the influential and/or Times lover in the family: Times Insider for behind-the-scenes looks at the news sausage-making, videos of TimesTalks, Times ebooks, extra Times puzzles, and Times Store discounts. That’s the premium stuff. Premium is a nuanced upsell, as its benefits include two sharing features, which can essentially lower the price of shared subscriptions:

• Family access: The ability to share their Times Premier account with two additional family members. Here, if we do the math, the Times is offering three subs for the prices of one. In its pre-premium, all-access plan, it has offered one additional family sub, or two in total. With a little planning and organization, consumers get a much better deal — and the Times locks in more everyday readers.
• Gift subscriptions: The ability to give 12 weeks of Times digital access to up to three friends each year.

The pricing of the “essential” product, NYT Now, may be tricky. It’s only $2 a week, which gets you through-the-day reports plus a curated sense of what’s big news from elsewhere and the briefings. However, for $3.75 a week, you can get access to four or five times more New York Times content through its smartphone app — and full access to the NYTimes.com on the web. So a side-by-side comparison may give buyers second thoughts. It’s more likely that Times strategy will be to put NYT Now front-and-center as the shiny new must-have thing, believing that comparison shopping won’t be of major consequence.

That comparative pricing is one place this strategy could go awry. There are others, and expect the Times to move quickly on its immediate experience. Perpich says user testing was deep, but involved fewer than 100 live users of the finished product. So real market data on usage and payment inclination will be hugely valuable as Times decides whether its research has oriented it correctly.

If the three E’s have it, the word to avoid starts with a C: cannibalization, as in NYT Now eating away at the Times’ own full-price digital subscriber base. The Times has examined three years of data on customer usage and interaction to figure not just which products they might pay for, but also the kinds of partial-content Times products that wouldn’t incentivize existing subscribers to downgrade — which would put a dent in that $150 million in new subscription revenue the paywall is pumping out annually. So NYT Now, the first of the three new niche paid products (food and opinion products will roll out this summer), is intended to satisfy, but not satiate, segments of readers.

How large might the NYT Now segment be? There is undoubtedly a vast potential audience that could appreciate a Times fast-read view of the world, but it’s a group that may be tough to get to pay. Two bucks a week isn’t much. But at that price, NYT Now isn’t competing against other $2 products. It’s competing against the enormous freely available web.

This first niche product is aimed at Americans. While more than 10 percent of the Times’ digital-only subscriptions come from outside the U.S., Perpich says, NYT Now is targeted for Americans across those four continental time zones. My sense: If a low-price, fast-read, original-and-curated product works, it could readily be tailored for Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and Middle East markets.

Finally, NYT Now serves as the Times first home for mobile native ads, which it is calling Paid Posts. The Times may not be a leader here — in native ads, curation, mobile first, and the like — but it is becoming a faster follower.

“Make sure you lose money for at least three years,” VG CEO and editor Torry Pedersen told a London publishing crowd last week. There were some chuckles among the Digital Media Strategies audience, but behind the comment is a deep strategy: Invest. “You can’t have much revenue in infancy,” he told me later that day.

When European media powerhouse Schibsted set its digital business (relatively) free of its print legacy business in 1999, it expected to lose money on digital for two or three years. It did. When Schibsted separated out its mobile business from digital, it expected to plow more money in than it could take out for a few years. Both investments have paid off. Oslo-based Schibsted now can claim good shares of both digital and mobile audiences in its home Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden).

Now it’s adding pages to that same playbook as it tackles digital TV, and that’s what Pedersen had come to London to talk about. Schibsted’s VG or Verdens Gang (“The way of the world”) is Norway’s most-read tabloid daily, though it has suffered print declines along with the rest of the industry. It’s its website, VG.no, that has grown as print has shrunk — VG.no is now Norway’s largest digital news site by far.

VGTV is a product unlike any other I’ve seen come out of a news company. (Its sister tabloid in Sweden is running a parallel venture called AftonbladetTV.) HuffPost Live is the closest in comparison (“The newsonomics of leapfrog news video”), but VGTV has wider aims. It’ss news, sports, fashion, health, movies, music, and lots more. These are all topics covered by newspapers, but VGTV, a product of a legacy newspaper company, looks and feels (at least through Google Translate) like something new. Not broadcast TV, but the beginning of what we might begin to call native TV.

VGTV has been building for a year plus and now has a separate staff of 25 to 30, which is planned to rise to 50 by year’s end. It’s now separate from the mothership, just as digital and mobile once were. Just as both those businesses have been reintegrated into the news business, some day — after it is well established — VGTV is intended to be as well.

Schibsted is still mostly a secret outside Europe, where news media leaders know it well. Mention it to many North American publishers, and you have to spell it. That’s a shame.

The Schibsted model, which I first wrote about in detail in 2012, offers telling lessons for all publishers, large or small, global or local. We can see — in retrospect — how Schibsted protected its home Nordic markets against the inroads of Google, Yahoo, and others better than its peers in the western world. In letting its digital sites compete with its newspapers early on, it enabled online growth, while too many of its peers kept moving the deck chairs inside and out, between integrated (with the print business/newsroom) and separated digital operations. It re-envisioned digital classifieds and then played market leadership cutthroat, reducing Craigslist to an also-ran and becoming a leader in global digital classifieds and related businesses, now owning or partnering with efforts in 29 countries on four continents.

VGTV is a next-generation business investment. It’s aimed at an audience that news properties, offline and even online, often don’t do a good job of reaching: young people. VGTV is a serious and entertaining effort at growing substantial audience among video-centric, tablet-using, smartphone-punching youth.

Norway is one of the most advanced digital markets in the world. Consider its leading adoption curve: 85 percent of Norwegians use the Internet daily, 79 percent have a smartphone, and 52 percent have a tablet.

VGTV is still a tiny speck in the overall TV market: “We are a mosquito,” says Pedersen. “But we are an annoying mosquito.” That may be true in terms of traditional TV watching and TV ad spending, but as we look at the Norwegian streaming market, the competition gets more interesting. VGTV leads the country’s two largest broadcasters, NRK and TV2, in overall audience. Competitive daily Dagbladet, which has also gotten into the web TV business, is the No. 3 player overall.

Almost 12 percent of the population watches streaming TV daily, via one or more of those four players. VGTV can count an average of 183,000 daily watchers. (Norway’s population is a little over 5 million, or roughly the size of Colorado.) VGTV watchers spend an average of 10 minutes a day watching, less than watchers of traditional TV. So: More come in, but they consume smaller bits, as they choose among the numerous choices VGTV offers. Viewing time for VGTV, overall, increased 40 percent year over year, by far the greatest growth among streamers.

What do VGTV watchers watch? It’s a mix of live coverage and programming. Last year, VGTV produced 762 live sessions, and it’s currently running 21 programs a week. Much of the news is from around Norway; while VGTV operates as a separate entity, it’s tightly connected to the VG newsroom, with reporters contributing to the news report.

Recently, VG sent reporter Brynjar Skjærli to Kiev to produce video reports on the popular uprising. The reportage put Skjærli in the thick of Maidan, the square that has been the epicenter of civic revolt. It’s TV, but web-like TV, without the overproduction that can characterize legacy TV coverage. Featured on VGTV, the video also bolstered coverage on VG.no.

Most of its entertainment programs are produced in Norway, though Pedersen makes the point of how much high-quality documentary work is available in global markets at low five-figure costs. Dokumentar now features about two dozen longer-form global documentaries. (Many of them won’t work for viewers outside Norway because of licensing issues.) Also front and center each week: Saturday Night Live, which VGTV has licensed on an exclusive basis. (How well each SNL program does is highly dependent on the week’s special guest; Jonah Hill has been among the most popular.)

There’s a certain Northern wackiness built into the coverage. Take the 30-hour, 2-minute, 44-second “world’s longest interview” VGTV put up last year. (For more on Slow TV, Norwegian-style, check out The Guardian’s coverage of fireplace watching, sweater-knitting observing, and salmon-spawning spying. The ideas may not translate universally, but they may be testable in Minnesota and the Dakotas.)

The World Chess Championships also won huge viewership, with an average of viewing time of 39.4 minutes, as twenty-three-year-old Norwegian Marcus Carlsen was victorious. VGTV’s 10-part English-language documentary on Carlsen has been viewed by 780,000 people.

You get the feeling that much of web TV business can’t be planned. The best of it may be opportunistic. Isn’t that the way newspapers in print long prospered — seeing an opening and moving in?

Philosophically, VGTV doesn’t offer set-time news programming. As it covers news, it continues its coverage as long as it thinks it’s merited. That boundary breaking is significant. It’s a shapeshifting media world. TV from a newspaper company. Text digital news (and more) from a local broadcaster, as I recently wrote about as Scripps’ WCPO-TV added 20 digital news staff members, plunged into in-depth work, and is beginning to give Gannett’s Cincinnati Enquirer a run for the online money.

VGTV and WCPO are flip sides of the same coin. They show us that media is media — in smarter hands. Newspapers don’t need to be held back by the printing press. TV stations can move beyond the constraints of news-at-6 formulas.

Both forays attempt to get in early — before it’s clear how the money in digital news and video may work. It’s easy to lampoon such efforts, or trot out the cliches about the pioneers being the guys with the arrows in their backs.

At SXSW this last week, TV was big (good Zach Seward rundown at Quartz), and as Jimmy Kimmel opined, “The fact of the matter is, the amount of money we make from selling commercials on television, is 100 times as much from what we make from people watching our YouTube videos. And until those things even out somewhat, we’re going to be focused on television.”

Native TV may be a rounding error in Jimmy Kimmel’s financials, but it seems fresh, agile and about to be more impactful, as the toggle between small screen, medium screen, and living room screen becomes less stressful.

At SXSW, one couldn’t help but be reminded by how foundational technology is to the new news business, in all its forms. As the full five-day program underlined that fact, one statistic offered by Torry Pedersen kept returning to me. It amazed everyone I mentioned it to in Austin.

Schibsted, says Pedersen, decided it needed a lot more programmers to build out its products. What did it do? It recently opened its own tech facility in Krakow, Poland — with a staff of 150. That’s only about a two-hour flight away, allowing engineers to be brought into the Schibsted way with visits to Oslo. The common language, of course, is English. The wages: good, but much lower than in Norway.

One hundred fifty. The Washington Post’s Cory Haik (who wrote for the Lab recently about adaptive journalism) and I shared a panel at SXSW’s German Haus, and on it, she said that the Post has about 17 technologists working with her teams in the newsroom. Seventeen is an astounding high number; most newsrooms would only need a single hand to count their devoted-to-editorial tech staff.

Yet Schibsted, true to its all-in strategies, has invested substantially in its Schibsted Tech Polska central facility, in addition to housing numerous technologists at its various properties. Schibsted understands that the foundations of media are now based in engineering and analytics, having multiplied that analytics investment just within the last year (“The newsonomics of Little Data, data scientists and conversion specialists”).

Some of the staff of Schibsted Teck Polska in 2012. Courtesy Schibsted’s John Einar Sandvand.

It was security (Julian Assange and Edward Snowden) and news startups that caught much attention at SXSW this year. Nate Silver and Grantland’s Bill Simmons — both now working for ESPN — interviewed each other on stage. They displayed the swagger of confidence, of being part of something new, shiny, and growing. By contrast, legacy news media were unevenly represented. I didn’t hear of many news companies recruiting techies — the main crowd at SXSW Interactive — to work for them.

It is in this alchemy of confidence and technology that I see a model in Schibsted. It took years for it to build confidence in the “Schibsted way.” Each achievement along its path has bolstered that sense; VGTV’s next-generation reach is a logical extension of that. Here are three takeaways from the Schibsted model:

• Focus on growth, not survival. Survival is a fool’s game, as legacy newspapers playing defense just see themselves more and more depleted with each passing year. TWEET
• Be a pirate, not a guard. Go after other people’s markets, as VGTV aims in the long term for TV/video advertising.
• If you are going to do it, do it at scale. Hiring an analyst or an engineer here or there won’t build the future; hiring 150 in Poland might.

Photo of a Norway Day celebration (in Stockholm) by Andriy Baranskyy used under a Creative Commons license.

The Comcast/Netflix damn-the-buffering, full-speed-ahead agreement announced this weekend is all about timing. This is a time of major momentum for each company. The last thing either needs is a speed bump.

Netflix, with 44 million subscribers and oozing growth worldwide, has distanced itself from its rivals, both with those sheer numbers and the brand buzz of House of Cards and other value-enhancing original programming. In its rearview mirror, it can see Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO, among many others, trying to figure out how to play catchup.

With Internet buzz of slower streaming performance beginning to eat away at the seamlessness of its offering, Netflix knew it had to act sooner rather than later. Remember Qwikster, the company’s aborted initiative to split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. Many a business case history has been written on it, but one clear lesson applies here: Deal with issues as quickly as possible. Netflix and Comcast had been negotiating on performance issues for as long as a year, but you could hear the crescendo of easy-streaming-is-over conjecture quickly building over the last two months. In addition, Netflix needs to clear its decks for the introduction of higher, and tiered, pricing: Who wants to pay more if something’s not just working right — and may get worse?

Comcast needs to pick off as many impediments to regulatory approval of its acquisition of Time Warner Cable as it can, as hearings are scheduled and forces like Craig Aaron’s Free Press are making their case against it. (Excellent Tom Ashbrook On Point on the nuances of consumer impact of the acquisition here.) Netflix could have been a major impediment. It could have been a poster child of consumer concern that Comcast’s soon-to-be-even-more-outsized power was bad for the viewing public. Is Reed Hastings going to make a fuss now? (The agreement to not do so is in invisible contract ink.) Going into the year or so of regulatory hearings, Comcast has to put on its best face of problem-solving, partnering friendliness.

There’s also Comcast’s rearview mirror. Yes, it would become a broadband heavyweight — with something like 40 percent of the broadband market in the U.S. — but that’s today, with old-fashioned, slow-as-Slovakia (we’re No. 32, they’re No. 33) broadband. Take just two announcements over the past few days: On Thursday, Google announced it would be interviewing the city fathers and mothers in 34 new U.S. cities to determine where to install Google Fiber next. That’s the promised “100× faster than Comcast” service. Today, WhatsApp said it would move into free global phone calling. Neither foray makes a big difference to Comcast in 2015, assuming the (likely) approval of the TWC deal. By 2018, though, both could be taking significant chunks out of the Comcast bundle.

Fast data. Free Internet voice. Those two get right into two of three bases Comcast is covering with its Triple Play strategy. At first base, all-you-can-eat cable is in slow but steady decline. On second, Internet voice, a great throw-in replacement for landlines and — what was that thing we used to pay for? — “long-distance.” On third, broadband. That, of course, is the growth plan, and, as I and others have written the reason behind the Time Warner Cable deal. (“The newsonomics of Comcast and our digital wallets”) Yes, big is good and carries consumer concern. Yet the forces of digital disruption literally never sleep.

So chalk up the Comcast-Netflix deal as one of an attempt at road repair, as both companies try to scan the environment that’s ahead of and behind them.

Photo of alternate Netflix delivery protocol by Phil King used under a Creative Commons license.

Soon it’ll have one of another element of that experience: ads.

Watchup, the former Knight News Challenge winner with $1 million in fresh capital, is slated to release the latest iteration of its app next month, which for the first time will feature preroll advertisements via a new partnership with The Washington Post’s PostTV.

Launched just over a year ago, Watchup creates personalized newscasts for users, culled from video from dozens of global and local news organizations. The newest version of the app, slated to be released on March 13, will bring the third iteration of its interface.

When users sign up for the app the first time, they select their interests and a time of day when they want their personalized newscast to begin. So at, say, 7 a.m. you get a push notification that your newscast is ready, and over breakfast, you can watch a series of videos — CNN on the latest from the Ukraine protests, AP on what happened overnight in Sochi, or Bloomberg’s take on Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp.

Farano said Watchup was able to increase user engagement because they made the “experience totally effortless.” Videos now start automatically when the app is launched and playlists can be personalized from there; they’ll also evolve as the app learns what kinds of videos a user prefers to watch. Users can also get more context on any story from a series of articles in a sidebar on the right side of the app.

The new version of the app will advance its ability to personalize the newscast and also allow users to choose videos by topic in addition to channel, Farano said. It’ll also be the first version available for Android tablets. (It currently works on iPads and Google Glass.) Farano said they’ll be exploring specific deals with some OEMs.

Buyers expecting either some kind of strategic business model breakthrough or in buying badly needed publishing EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) may be disappointed by the numbers. Revenue is significantly lower than public estimates of this very private company. The numbers show that the boundary-breaking Forbes may be faring a little better than its rivals, but it’s found scaling up both revenues and earnings tough to do.

In fact, over the past year, overall revenue growth has been cut in half. That’s got to be a red flag for buyers considering the story Deutsche Bank’s memo tries to lay out.

Overall, the numbers should point to the difficulty of obtaining the $400 million price Forbes would like to reach. The magazine company’s earnings just don’t justify anywhere near that valuation. But there is one big asterisk: The three non-U.S. companies that have an interest in heading to the next round may well be prepared to pay a premium for the intangible value of the brand and its global value going forward.

We’d expect that the the offering statement would do a dance about Forbes’ identity. It can make the claim that Forbes.com “is the #1 business website,” but in its search to become a native creature of the web, it has softened much of its long-time serious business identity.

Not that long ago, in the old print business world, names like Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek went together like CBS, NBC, and ABC, or Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. The value proposition was clearer — both for readers and advertisers. It was good to be among the top three periodical chroniclers of American business — or as Forbes came to call itself, “The Capitalist Tool.”

In the digital world, Forbes redefined itself. Under Lewis D’Vorkin, its chief product officer, it borrowed as much from The Huffington Post as from Forbes the magazine. (Good D’Vorkin strategy view from The Guardian.) Now its listicles, headlining, wide use of lower-cost contributors, and prominent video evokes BuzzFeed or Business Insider more than Fortune or Bloomberg Businessweek. The content strategy broke through previous bounds, winning both accolades and page-spinning derision; its commercial strategy recognized the value of brand and product extension before other legacy publishers did.

The commercial buzz around Forbes.com — and much of the premium it is trying to get from a buyer — centers on three non-traditional businesses:

• BrandVoice: Forbes is an enthusiastic pioneer in native advertising. BrandVoice gives advertisers like SAP, UPS, and FedEx, who pay between $50,000 and $75,000 monthly, space to tell their stories.
• Extending the definition of “content”: For Forbes, content means more than traditional editorial. It extends to conferences, like its Philanthropy Summit and Health Care Summit. It reaches into custom research, fronted by its free white-paper Insights. Its paid investment newsletters add to the mix.
• Licensing: Long before listicles, the one list you wanted to be on was the Forbes 400, a ranking of the richest Americans. Forbes has extended the value of the Forbes name through publication licensing, allowing other publishers to use its name, currently in 33 local-language editions around the world. It also offers up its name in various partnership pursuits: It recently announced a new kind of brand licensing to Ashford University, which will use the Forbes brand as it markets online education.

Forbes, of course, isn’t alone in any of those pursuits. But it is its profound (and early) embrace of several of these strategies beyond traditional ads and circulation that have made a different kind of a name for itself.

So one key question in the Forbes sale is this: How much difference have those high-profile businesses made financially?

BrandVoice now accounts for some 20-25 percent of the company’s ad revenue, contributing $25 million in 2012. (Let’s use the 2012 final numbers because that’s how Deutsche Bank laid out its data in November, when it released its brief. As round two of bids start coming in, potential buyers should have access to full-year 2013 data. For our purposes, though, 2013 is still “projected.”)

That extended range of content brought in $15 million in 2012 over 2011, a growth rate of almost 50 percent.

Licensing brought in $10.8 million in 2012, up 24 percent year-over-year.

So far, so good. The buzzy initiatives are indeed bringing in new revenue.

Overall, Forbes earned an additional $11.9 million in new revenue. To get the extra in new revenue, Forbes had to spend $10.9 million, making a slim $1M in extra EBITDA, or earnings — to $15.3 million from $14.3 million year-over-year. Put simply, Forbes had to spend more to get more: a few million each in editorial, ad sales, and production.

As would-be buyers consider offers, they can tell themselves one of two stories about that performance:

• Forbes has already sunk much of the needed investment into the new enterprises, as CEO Mike Perlis has “uniquely transformed a powerful traditional brand into a multi-platform media company.” Forbes is ahead of the pack in the crossing over to the mainly digital age right in front of us. The new owner will reap the benefits of its investment in innovation, with revenue and earnings about to scale dramatically. Or:
• Forbes may have found non-traditional ways to make money, but the additional costs associated with that revenue may defeat a wider goal: maximizing profit. The brighter side of this scenario: It can still grow, even if it won’t produce high profit. The cloudier side: Forbes has peaked; that’s why its owners are maximizing the value of the buzz they’ve created and cashing out.

Of course, the Forbes pitch is the former. Look, below, first at its historical finances. Note, especially, the highlighted lines for Total Revenue and EBITDA. The overall revenue numbers are unremarkable: Up 4.8 percent, 1.4 percent, and 9.4 percent in the three years leading up to 2012. Earnings are better at 10.4 percent, 11.3 percent, and 11.1 percent. In fact, the 2012 total revenue of $137.9 million is about half of what the press had cited as Forbes’ annual ad revenues.

Maybe the hardest-to-explain number: Projected revenue growth of 4.9 percent for full-year 2013, half the growth rate of the previous year.

Let’s now look at the projected (2013-2018) numbers. Most striking is the earnings (or EBITDA line). Forbes says they will triple in five years, from $20.8 million to $62.3 million, even though they’ve grown only 25 percent in the last three.

But revenue is projected to increase just 45 percent, to $209.9 million from $144.6 million. In the offering memo, Forbes doesn’t clearly explain why its projected cost increases are so much lower than its revenue increases.

As important as the projections is the changing marketplace Forbes operated in.

Forbes.com’s ad revenue is projected to move from $42 million in 2012 to $86 million in 2018. “Display advertising impressions are expected to increase in 2013 with rising traffic worldwide, and doubling of site visits resulting from increasing smartphone use. Increase in available display impressions, number of BrandVoice partners and success of the programmatic sales effort is expected to drive this increase in advertising revenue. Revenue is projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.7% through 2018 via a combination of increased traffic, new engaging products, improved sell-through at relatively steady rates and increased performance in programmatic sales.”

That is, in one word, optimistic.

As Deutsche Bank warns in its introduction: “This Memorandum includes certain statements, estimates and projections provided by Client with respect to its management’s subjective views of its anticipated future performance…These projections have not been independently verified and cannot be regarded as forecasts.” It’s boilerplate, but for those of us who have plowed through docs like this over the years, it’s worth remembering.

It’s true that Forbes can claim an impressive 16 percent digital ad revenue increase year-over-year, one that largely tracks the broader digital ad expansion. That digital ad revenue now represents 43 percent of all ad revenue. (Weighed down by print ad declines, overall ad revenue is up 6.5 percent.)

But Forbes not only faces direct digital ad competition within the “business news” sector — Fortune, WSJ, Bloomberg, CNN, Quartz, and more — but also for affluent readers more generally. The top six ad players, led by Google, can now all target those audiences, and they claim to do it more efficiently and cheaply. That’s why digital ad growth has slowed for the great majority of publishers. ARPU — or average revenue per user — is also facing downward pressure (“The newsonomics of ARPU”). Yes, mobile usage is increasing audience and time spent with news sites — but more time isn’t tracking with more dollars (or euros or pounds) spent. The numbers prove it: Forbes says it is up 35 percent in unique visitors worldwide, but its revenue growth is no more than a quarter of that number.

Overall, this is still an ad-dependent business, and that could be problematic in the years ahead. Ads account for 71 percent of its income in 2012, down only two percentage points from 2011. That’s because circulation revenue keeps dropping, to $13.9 million in 2012 — down $2.6 million in three years, or 8 percent in the last two years.

Let’s remember that Forbes is free in the digital world; its strategy has long been about spinning more and more pageviews, one way or another. That means that unlike its competitors, which can charge for all-access or digital-only subs, Forbes has no easy route forward for substantial digital reader revenue. (Its paid niche investing newsletters are a good idea, but will throw off less money than an overall paid digital strategy.)

Inevitably, that tilts it toward ad dependence, just as many other news publishers are running the other way. Hearst Magazines’ David Carey (“The newsonomics of Hearst’s one million new customers”) has been clearest on that point in the consumer magazine world. Leading newspapers like The New York Times and the Financial Times have trumpeted their arrival in the majority-reader-revenue camp.

Other revenue projections demand superior execution against growing competition as well. What the memo terms “Content” (a.k.a. conferences, newsletters, and research) is slated to double. While Forbes pioneered native advertising and got into custom research and conferences earlier than most legacy publishers, the competition in each of those areas is intensifying. There is a limit, after all, to the number of conferences people can go to.

Which brings us back to profit. If the revenue growth assumptions might be a little rosy, especially in 2014 and 2015 (12.6 percent and 9.2 percent), the expense projections don’t seem to match up with the efforts needed to get the new revenue. They are all conservative, leading to a 29.7 percent EBITDA projection in 2018. (Its rental cost assumptions now can be newly defined; Forbes surprised its Greenwich Village-based staff yesterday by announcing a move to a Jersey City “media center.”)

So what do the numbers tell us about a likely buyer, or price?

As Forbes heads toward a sale, it’s telling that no U.S. publisher seems much interested. But it’s not surprising. On the basis of its operating results, its price tag is too high.

The enthusiasm is largely from outside the U.S., according to a good piece by William Launder in The Wall Street Journal. One is from a serious publisher, Axel Springer, Germany’s largest publicly owned news company. Springer is rapidly transforming its portfolio (“The newsonomics of the German press’ tipping year”) and already licenses the Forbes name for Russian and Polish editions, among others. The Journal cites two other Asian companies, Fosun (the “Berkshire Hathaway of China”) and Singapore-based Spice Global Pvt. Ltd. as the other likely finalists. Fosun, like Springer, already licenses the Forbes name for a Chinese edition. Of course, both licensees — Springer and Fosun — could presumably continue to license “Forbes,” rather than buy the company.

Why would they buy?

We could look at the potential non-U.S. buy of Forbes as a trophy acquisition. For non-U.S., non-publisher buyers, buying media can be just as much about power as it is money. Last month, Chinese recycling magnate Chen Guangbiao minced no words when he said his unsolicited offer for The New York Times was as much about influence as business. (“Every government and embassy, all around the world, pays attention to The New York Times.”)

Given this cast of potential characters, though, there’s more nuance in the buying motivations. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that a great brand — globally and differently purposed — could be of more potential value to a buyer than the current operating performance of a publication itself. Calling itself a “96-year-old revered brand” may be a tad too self-congratulatory, but there’s clearly European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American value to a print brand that may have seen its best days in the United States.

IBT bought a tired Newsweek for a virtual song, but sees value in that well-known title as it prepares to relaunch it early this year. Jeff Bezos “overpaid” for The Washington Post if you evaluate it purely on earnings, but he knew that a price tag of $250 million for the Post brand was a steal. (Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said last year he would have liked the opportunity to bid on the Post.)

The usual multiple for pricing magazines would be 5× or 6×. But Forbes wants a digital multiple — 10× or more — not a magazine one. Consequently, in November, we heard that ownership expected $400 million as a sales price. Now the FT has reported that the price could be between $350 million and $475 million, as the number of bidders trims from the 18 companies that took a look at the financials.

At $400 million, that would be about 26× of the $15 million 2012 earnings. Even at a more reasonable $200 million, that would be 13× earnings. If the $400 million price holds, it looks like the value of global brand potential will make up half of the price of this deal.

Photo of Forbes headquarters in New York by Rafael Chamorro used under a Creative Commons license.

Sometimes, a few words can sum up the futility of a competition. As Ukraine sadly fell back into the arms of the Russian bear this week, one commentator correctly noted that the “European Union had brought a baguette to a knife fight.” Now, as we celebrate 20 years since the first newspaper website, we see that the news industry early on armed itself in the digital wars with the First Amendment, the AP Stylebook, and a rate card — tools that have been little match for the power of databases, aggregation and digital scale.

2014 is Year One for some of the news novices — and Year 21 for those in the print/digital transition since the first news sites launched. Let’s take a look at the year ahead, looking at the big actors, major themes, and tests of the year ahead. Consider these nine big themes that will further separate the winners from the losers when we look back a year from now:

Braveheart meets newsies

The future is staring down the news industry, and the business doesn’t have an eternity of blinks left. Best practice strategies and their execution — the core of what I cover — are the only way forward, but this year has surfaced the intangible of what I’ve called “outrageous confidence.” Jeff Bezos’ buying of the Post (and the Grahams’ selling) startled people in the press worldwide and crystallized the sense that a new generation of owners may seem a real future in the news business. In 2013, all the new owners — Buffett and his growing BH Media, John Henry and his Globe, Bezos and his Post — have been consumed with getting-to-know-events and rearranging the furniture.

The test for 2014: Will these owners beat their chests, open their wallets, and most importantly fund and support new products, new kinds of customer engagement and new thinking not invented here in Newspaperland? Will they not settle for incremental small experiments but, while staying within journalistic values, make some big new bets?

The Last Man Standing theory of local media

Here’s our most Darwinian theme. The theory: As first newspaper print and then local broadcast advertising continue to winnow down, there just won’t be enough left to support the number of local media news outlets we have today. Digital advertising and even TV paywalls could help with funding. If you want to be running a local newsroom of significant size in 2020, be prepared to be one of only two or three that may then exist. It’s a only-the-paranoid way of looking at the Blade Runner news future, but it’s also, unfortunately, a logical extrapolation of the last half-decade.

That future could play out in a number of ways. We see one playbook being executed in real time in Southern California. There, new Freedom Communications CEO Aaron Kushner has deployed not one but four strategies in his first 17 months of ownership. His Last Man Standing theory has led him to (1) invest in doubling the size of the Orange County Register newsroom, albeit with about 75 interns as part of that mix; (2) march competitively into neighboring Long Beach with a cavalry of 20 editorial staffers; (3) announce — without additional staffing noted — the creation of the Los Angeles Register, moving into a county 3x bigger than his home one (“New Hollywood Sequel: Aaron Kushner’s L.A. Register”); (4) buy — and start cutting costs at — the next-county-over Riverside Press-Enterprise. Add up the costs and likely revenues of all those forays and it’s not yet easy to see a sustainable business strategy. But clearly Kushner fits the profile of the outrageously confident, one seemingly bent on surviving whatever new traumas are tossed the way of the news industry.

The Southland has been ripe for consolidation for quite a while, as its three biggest newspaper groups all endured bankruptcies. The question has been who would want to stay and who would want to go. I’ve written about roll-up — another route to Last Man Standing — and my friend Martin Langeveld has maybe more correctly labeled the merging of these low-financial-value companies as mop-up.

Consolidation is happening in every legacy industry. 2013 was the biggest year of TV station ownership consolidation, led by Sinclair, Gannett, and Tribune. As cord-cutting begins to age the cable industry a bit faster, Charter is actively pursuing Time Warner Cable, as Comcast considers its options. In Europe, too, we’ve seen the emergence of consolidation. Axel Springer sold two of its standard-bearing German dailies to consolidator Funke Media, while in the U.K., Local World — a roll-up of two big newspaper chain properties — has turned a first-year profit, even as its executive ranks are roiling.

Even when ownership isn’t consolidated, every operation that can be shared in a matured industry will be. As just one of many examples, old competitors in both the Twin Cities and the DFW Metroplex agreed to share presses this year.

As consolidation happens, newspapers should not have the sense they have a guaranteed position in the 2020 standings. Consistent with that local TV consolidation and the WCPO Cincinnati experiment, big broadcast companies want to be in the survivor group. Then there’s public radio, profoundly trying to be come public media. Monday’s announcement that NPR had put together six of the leading big local public radio players to produce a “seamless local-national listening platform” is indicative of that movement. Maybe as important will be the individual development of top station’s own local public media experiences, such as the just-launched KPCC tablet product in L.A. Consider the moves a five-year strategy to be one of those possibly few substantial local newsrooms when 2020 comes around.

The test for 2014: As we witness newspapers trying to do video, TV stations trying to write stories, and public radio aspiring to be text/audio/video producers, who will get it right first? Don’t expect the definitive “right” within a year, but 2014 is a pivotal year to get legs up on the competition.

The back pages

Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in.

The continued decline of print advertising is the very dark cloud hanging over the news industry and the darkening ones looming over the magazine industry. While digital advertising overtook print advertising in 2012 in the U.S. and globally, the accelerated pace of the print to digital movement is clear and fairly unwavering.

The test for 2014: How can publishers mitigate their print losses, pulling from an expanding toolbox of sponsored sections, events packages, custom publishing, and more to minimize as much as possible a near-universal negative number?

Digital advertising separates the pack

Last year, U.S. newspapers were up 4 percent in digital advertising, to a total of 11 percent of revenue. This year’s reports indicate that growth could well be less, closer to flattish, with many publishers struggling near the zero point. Yet some, which we’ll investigate in early 2014, are in double-digits. That’s a combination of executing on some of the ad buzzwords of the time — content marketing, native ads — but also on much less glamorous and written-about work like audience extension and yield optimization.

The test for 2014: With print ads spiraling downward, will the failure to execute on a strong and diversified digital ad strategy doom news organizations to even deeper cuts in staff and product?

The sweet smell of success

Paywalls perfumed an otherwise overripe business model over the last year. Astounding, more than 40 percent of U.S. newspapers will have one in place by mid 2014, with at least 650 titles globally by then. Consumer magazines have embraced them. Circulation revenue is up — probably another 5-6 percent in newspapers this year, following similar results last year — and that growth is one steady plus line in most newspaper company reports.

It’s important to acknowledge that success, and its valuable contribution to any kind of digital transition, as even long-time critic Digital First Media’s John Paton recently did. Getting long-time print readers to pay for all-access (including digital) is a big step in the mostly digital future. But too many publishers mistake this first step as a leap. They’ve made the long jump and are busy taking satisfaction of where they stand in the sandpit. Fine, they deserve to take a bow for a move that has smartly adopted across industries in record time — but they better not stand there for long.

Few publishers are selling many digital-only subscriptions to non-print subscribers; the highest metros reaching to 40,000-plus. While The New York Times has worked that digital-only niche well — moving into a go-to checkpoint role on smartphones and apps and racking up more than 700,000 digital-only subs — its success is not being replicated well enough in the regional press. The goal here is simple: sell more stuff to new and old customers. The now-decade-old problem is that too few people at news companies know how to create new products. And newsroom walls have only exacerbated the problem, as Raju Narisetti outlines so clearly in his year-end prediction.

One print product development area getting too little attention is Sunday. It’s the one print product with the longest shelf life and longevity and it’s the fulcrum for many long-time readers’ print/digital toggle.

Look at the trend lines and we can see that the bump publishers have gotten from reader revenue should hold, but they may well have trouble finding future growth.

The test for 2014: How will publishers prepare for the soon-to-come leveling off of reader revenue increase by producing what I’ve called Paywalls 2.0 products? The New York Times with its planned spring launches (“The coming of the New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0”) is one of the few to make such products a key next-wave reader revenue strategy. If other publishers don’t, they should expect to find the plateau of reader revenue at which the pioneering Times has already arrived.

Mobility, mobility, mobility

There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money.

The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years.

Sorry, your audience does not compute

We’ve seen a bigger divide between those companies (global, national, and regional) who harness analytics to drive their business and those who don’t. Just yesterday, I heard from a news-facing tech company about cookie licking and browser entropy fingerprinting.

We need to go no further than the Lab’s predictions this year to take in a new language of how technologists view the business of news-making. From The New York Times’ Allen Tan: “Ambient interfaces will begin to appear as data trickles into watches, televisions, clocks, cars — but with new affordances. While smartphones and tablets are deeply personal and interactive, these new devices sit in communal space, in the background: How do you design something that accepts minimal input but is aware of its environment? What does glanceable information look like?” Ready to take a holiday break before you begin tackling the tech-infused challenges of 2014?

Data science is at the core of the major global news brands’ agendas — and sketchy across the rest of the news landscape. Hiring one nerd to figure it out is so 1999. Not only is data science driving ad and reader pricing, much of the best storytelling of the year was accomplished by pairing journalists and technologists.

Then there is the data-as-assets opportunity/challenge, as companies move to allow publishers to “control” and perhaps market their own data in exchanges. Of course, the biggest story of the year — unveiling the massive government spy apparatus, post-Snowden — points further to how much technology remains the biggest underlying driver of many businesses, now including publishing.

The test for 2014: Can your company pass a basic tech literacy test? Your customers expect that you can.

The business press gets a makeover

The three iconic U.S business magazines are in the throes of change. Forbes is on the block. Fortune is going off with the new Time Inc. spinoff and casting for how to find new digital audience. Bloomberg Businessweek is showing some signs of vigor, in ads and brand campaign, but faces the same print trends as its peers. All confront what it means to be a print creature in a business world that is digital-dominant, one now being exploited by interlopers like digital-only Quartz. In the digital world, the magazines’ reader and ad competition is Bloomberg overall (with its own identity issues), the FT, and The Wall Street Journal. Then, of course, all the big digital companies can sell business-like audience profiles out of their deep data. Something’s gotta give, and much of it will in 2014.

The test for 2014: How soon will the business magazine space change as radically as the once-seemingly-permanent reign of newsweeklies Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report?

One is the loneliest number

In the year ahead, we’ll see the naked results of publishing assets set adrift from bigger, diversified companies.

2013 was the year of the big publishing quarantine. With print advertising in deep freeze and digital ads largely lukewarm, spinoff and separation was the name of the game. At mid-year, News Corp hived off its newspapers, reeling in a three-continent downturn, putting its growth-oriented TV, video, and movie operations into the forward-reaching 21st Century Fox. Tribune, avoiding the backlash of a Koch Brothers buy, spun its top-drawer newspaper brands (L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune) out of sales mode and into spin-off. Those newspapers, drained of real estate and digital classifieds assets, may go into a separate company, unless they are sold first (Joe Cahill picks apart the new “Tribune Publishing Company” financials). Time Warner Inc., finding new buyers for Time Inc., spins off its assets about the same time. In each of these deals, the questions of which assets and liabilities move to the new company is big (Allan Sloan dissects that part of the Time Inc. spinoff).

All the plays here are about maximizing the public value of the non-publishing assets. With the first new News Corp results, the continuing loss of major publishers only becomes more clear, as the previous filings of the media conglomerates purposely clouded poor publishing performance. Tribune and Time titles are being tossed into the public markets as they’ve cooled on publishing assets and the biggest movement has been from public to private hands; we’ll see how long both companies stay public.

The test for 2014: How fast can these new companies hit the ground running, paying more attention to their competitive marketplaces than to the internal reordering or organization and power?

Photo by Dan Moyle used under a Creative Commons license.

In southern California, KPCC’s new iPad app is a shape-shifting kind of product, heralding a new local promise — and offering an insight into what a greater shared local/national public radio experience may look like. All the metaphors in the product may not perfectly jell — it is a newly released V1 product — but its ambitions are great.

It is only the second local public radio iPad-specific news app in the market (Minnesota Public Radio’s launched earlier this year) and acts on the realization that more than half of public radio’s digital traffic will likely be mobile by 2015. Indeed, in a world where radio is still valued but a radio is becoming an anachronism, the new app acts on our near-compulsion to toggle.

What strikes me about the KPCC app is its largely successful attempt to bridge different elements that could otherwise be in tension with one another.

First and most importantly, it’s local news and it’s radio programs — a balance many public radio sites find hard to strike.

On the news side, it’s both locally curated twice daily and it’s a stream of news. It’s local news and it’s national news. It’s text news and video news and audio news.

On the radio/programming side, it’s radio and it’s audio. It’s livestreaming and it’s on-demand programming. It’s whole programs and it’s segments of programs.

It’s an exercise in toggling. We’re well beyond the old binary controls of balance, bass and treble. It’s a consumer movement across content types and brands: Media can no longer choreograph it — they can only provide a suitable stage.

The bridges here are important because of all that complexity. Just as important is the role of personality. It’s inarguable that we take in the human news voice differently than we do the written word. Public radio leverages this personality — resulting in a mass medium that has grown in usage and reach markedly over the last decade — and does it uniquely. There are lots of public radio apps, but almost all of them rely on words to stand for a program. The KPCC’s “All Programs” page is a set of photos of program hosts, from Fresh Air’s Terri Gross to Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to KPCC’s Larry Mantle. Touch the picture, and you get to current and most recent episodes. Want to use the app as a “radio”? Just edit your favorites and then new shows are automatically added to your queue.

The central idea of the design: Make it easy for readers to move back and forth between and among these various content types. That means a live listening bar available on the bottom of each page, and a number of ways to get back to news or a program with a single tap. KPCC’s Alex Schaffert is a digital veteran, having spent eight years at the station, and as director of digital media headed up the project. The effort is funded with a $1 million, two-year grant from the L.A.-based Keck Foundation, paying for some outside conceptual design help and five full-time positions. Schaffert emphasizes that given the fundamental shift in the business to mobile, developing internal expertise is now a given.

“The KPCC iPad app was entirely built in-house,” she says. “Many news organizations outsource app development, but I think we’ve reached a critical juncture where the user experience, the design, and presentation of news are just as important for a winning product as the content itself. App development shouldn’t be an afterthought, delegated to a vendor. The presentation of news in the mobile space is core to our business today, and in my opinion it’s vital that news organizations build that expertise among their ranks. You need programmers working side-by-side with product people and content producers in order to arrive at an innovative product.”

Like most big public radio stations, KPCC has seen explosive mobile growth, with mobile now at about 35 percent of digital traffic. Its smartphone app has been useful, but the station wanted to seize the platform of the day, the tablet, and use it as a base for KPCC’s large local news ambitions (“The newsonomics of the death and life of California news”). Those ambitions have grown, as former L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton and former Sacramento Bee editor Melanie Sill were hired as VP/content and executive editor, respectively. The news staff will number 100 by the middle of next year, as the print landscape in the Southland swirls with post-bankruptcy intrigue, consolidation, and more news capacity shrinkage than expansion.

In looking at data, KPCC found that its audience is even more iPad-centric than the population overall. It’s a strong two-year trend line; even with KPCC’s smartphone apps, iOS downloads outdistance Android nine-to-one. In addition, there isn’t much overlap between radio listenership and digital use at public radio stations nationwide. Fewer than 20 percent of listeners regularly use a local station’s website or mobile app; fewer than 20 percent of its app or website users listen much to its radio offerings.

That understanding opened up design as a green field to attract new audiences.

Behind the design are those five staffers. One manages the product, two are developers and the other two produce the app’s centerpiece, The Short List, a highly visual feature. “It’s a need-to-know product,” says Schaffert, interestingly using the same words New York Times CEO Mark Thompson uses to describe one of his planned new paid digital products. The idea: 10 stories, picked early in the morning for the peak 8-9 a.m. mobile reading hour and then again in time for the 4-5 p.m. surge. They are drawn from local (KPCC) and national (NPR and AP) reporting, from big global news (“India’s Supreme Court upholds anti-gay sex law”) to the occasional large reptile story (“Did the dinosaur asteroid send life-bearing rocks to Mars?”).

We toss around words like multi-platform, multi-device, multi-screen, and “news everywhere” to describe the countless choices consumers have. From a publishing point of view, though, these choices have created headaches, posing tech and cost challenges — even before we get to the over-thought existential ones.

As a radio station, KPCC is grappling with the same existential issues as other legacy media trying to break beyond their legacy platforms. With Rebecca Howard’s new charge at the New York Times, we see the same effort, as we do in Cincinnati (“The newsonomics of Scripps’ TV paywall and the Last Man Standing Theory of local media”) and many other markets, as local TV stations go digital and text. How do you show both who you are and who you aspire to be? The solution: Put aside vain attempts at self-identification (and self-esteem) and imagine yourself behind the customer’s eyes and ears. That’s what the BuzzFeeds, Circas, Der Correspondents, and all the other digital startups do. The world provides us with a simple truth: We consumers have proven to care little about Old World definitional differences. We simply like what works.

Where might this product go? If it’s static, readers may write it off as a good start, but one not satisfying enough for the deep-reading public news audience. If it develops, though, in breadth, depth, and navigation, it could offer up new ways to deepen relationships with members (who contribute 53 percent of the station’s revenues; full station report here) and introduce new customers to public media.

Further, KPCC’s new platform, along with other recent innovators — including New York’s WNYC, which recently produced a state-of-the-art audio-centric smartphone app — could well take advantage of a long-in-discussion wider public media network experience. Despite all the change at the top at NPR (seven “permanent” or temp CEOs in six years), NPR has continued its talk with top public radio stations in major markets around the idea of what once was called “Pandora for public radio,” as a number of top public radio execs have shared. That idea is as “simple” as KPCC trying to make consumer simplicity out of its welter of radio/audio/text offerings. In fact, the national complexity is far greater, given the multiplicity of news staffs, personalities, technologies and market strategies found around the public radio country. Those are just the organizational questions; how these products will generate substantial revenues is still to be determined. Though the national NPR is fundamentally different than the regional KQEDs, WBURs, OPBs and WBEZs, it’s a meaningful difference that isn’t meaningful to consumers. Add in public radio power centers like CPB, APM, PRI, PRX, and other funders, creators and producers of programming, and the ability to balance priorities, revenue streams and traffic flow can seem practically Rubik’s Cube-like.

Still, expect NPR to get to a harmonic convergence far sooner than later. Already, much smart work has been done at mastering the content management to allow greater sharing and use of content among public radio stations and NPR. Now it is the business issues that must be finally wrestled to the ground, as national/local relationships inevitably must twist and turn in the next mobile age. If all that messy sausage-making can be resolved, then public media could do on a national/local level what KPCC is starting out to do in L.A.: Make it finger-simple to move in and play among the bounty of public media content floating through the country on any given day in words, voices, music, pictures, video — and the personalities animating them.

For public media, it’s not just a question of upside, though there’s plenty of that which increased engagement can generate in dollars. In every news and entertainment medium, it is the aggregators — the Googles, Facebooks, Netflixes, iTunes, Hulus, Spotifys, Pandoras and Flipboards — that show the greatest growth. (And in each of those industries, we’ve seen fierce controversies about publisher/creator role in aggregation, controversies that usually last long enough for the incumbents to forever lose their standing.) Against that landscape, public media still possesses the ability to pull itself together. At the same time, there’s a deepening appreciation that if it doesn’t pull itself together soon (and even if it does) the TuneIns, iHeartRadios and Stitchers may well succeed in creating audio aggregations to beat all other audio aggregations.

For public radio, smart, teamed curation with the consumer utmost in mind is only the first step in meeting that emerging competition, and deciding where to compete and where to partner.

In an industry-shaking move, E.W. Scripps’ WCPO.TV — that’s the website of Cincinnati’s ABC affiliate — is putting up a paywall Jan. 1. While it may not quite be the first TV broadcaster in the U.S. with paid digital access, it is the first to announce the move. With another station, a Press+ client, preparing to go paywall before the end of the month, this mini-revolution in local TV news may be starting small, but its ramifications could be profound: Local TV news — itself facing a transitional struggle because of digital disruption — is re-orienting itself for a battle with local newspaper news — and therein will lie lots of drama over the next few years.

It was the news of a TV paywall — a hard paywall at that — that caught a few headlines two weeks ago when the news broke. But that isn’t even the most intriguing thing about the WCPO push. Scripps is investing in content and in engagement in Cincinnati. In total, 30 people are being hired, “the vast majority” of them in editorial, with multimedia producers, community-oriented staff, and digital sales people filling out that number.

How big an investment is that? WCPO, in the 34th largest U.S. market, started out with a newsroom of about 75. Adding more than 20 new people to focus on digital is a substantial increase.

“That incremental staff produces content for the digital platforms, but when a reporter breaks a story exclusively (which is happening almost every day) that information/coverage/story makes its way to on-air, though it might be written or wrapped in a different way, appropriate for that medium,” says Adam Symson, Scripps’ chief digital office. “Our digital reporters often end up interviewed on set as part of the tell. Bottom line, they aren’t producing TV stories because they aren’t broadcast journalists, but expansion of coverage as a result of the strategy is absolutely positively impacting the depth and breadth of our on-air product every day.”

What’s behind Scripps’ contrarian play, in an age of news cautiousness? “It’s about winning digital,” Symson says. “At the end of the day, there is room for one, two, or maybe three local dominant media brands. Winning the digital consumer will be the price of admission to being one of those winning brands.”

“Winning” is the optimistic spin on that strategy. The flip side to ponder: There just won’t be enough advertising and subscription revenue to sustain any more than one to three significantly sized news staffs in many metro areas. Call this the Last Man Standing Theory of local media. It’s painful to think about, but the last half-decade seems to have borne it out year after down year.

What’s the business strategy behind the investment? It’s not just about new subscription revenue. Thinking about the numbers, it can’t be.

As a free TV station — TV wants to be free, right? — WCPO, unlike newspapers, has no legacy base of subscribers who can be upsold to all-access, digital + print subscriptions. Aggressive all-access pricing is what is behind most of the new half billion dollars in circulation revenue we’ve seen in the U.S.; broadcast can only dream about that. While The New York Times has built up a business on 727,000 digital-only subscribers (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0”), the top regional dailies are topping out under 50,000 for digital-only subscriptions; most newspapers struggle mightily to see five figures.

So what might WCPO, without an existing paying audience, expect?

Let’s say it got 1 percent of its 400,000 monthly unique visitors to pay up. That would amount to about 4,000 paying customers. Let’s say they pay $100 a year, on average. That’s $400,000. Or, let’s say 3 percent, or 12,000 — a highly optimistic number, I’d have to say, given the habits here. That would be $1.2 million. Five percent, or 20,000, would bring in $2 million a year.

Compare that revenue to the $3 million or so in new costs of the WPCO expansion.

Paywall revenue may not be the main play here. Consider two other kinds of revenue the initiative hopes to goose:

• Digital advertising: Scripps hired 100 digital-only ad reps across the company in 2013, “the vast majority” of them in TV rather than newspapers, and plans to hire more in 2014. (As a a whole, the company now has 229 jobs open.) That’s a big part of the company’s stated $22 million annual investment in digital. At WCPO, the expansion is a lot about better monetizing new digital customers. (It may want to start with making it’s “Advertise with Us” page a tad friendlier.)
• TV audience: The expanded website and mobile products offer brand promotion for that legacy product on-air. Push up its ratings points some — WCPO is now in second place in the market to WKRC — and TV revenues will increase.

So, the revenue strategy here is three-fold: more digital ads, higher TV ratings, and paywall revenue. We’d have to think this is a long-term strategy; Scripps execs like to talk about the company’s innovative roots and point with pride to the WCPO push as the latest example of it. The WCPO test will likely not pay for itself within 18 to 24 months — but as a long-term investment, it could pay off, especially if the Last Man Standing Theory is true. If Scripps stays the course, and maybe continues to expand WCPO over time — and Gannett continues to chisel away at the city’s remaining daily, The Enquirer — how will the two compare in audience and in digital revenue in, say, 2017?

We can ask versions of that same question in many metro areas. What if broadcast builds digital slowly, and print continues to fade away? Or, to frame it a different way: If you’re a company that owns both newspapers and TV stations, which seems better suited to be a base for the mainly digital age to come? Scripps seems to believe it is TV.

Why? The legacy costs are smaller; while TV production has its own old-world cost structure, it doesn’t compare to the Big Iron costs of presses, plants, and trucks required for print. And while print ad losses have made newspaper revenue growth largely a pipe dream since 2006, broadcast keeps managing to sustain itself. Odd-numbered years (non-election, non-Olympics) are always lower than even-numbered ones, and 2013 is no exception. So even with massive consolidation in the broadcast industry this year (Sinclair buying Allbritton, Tribune buying Local TV, Gannett buying Belo, among others), TV’s prospects are arguably more manageable than print’s.

That realization can be seen in Scripps’ own share price. It’s up 95 percent year over year, largely on the basis of its broadcast fortunes — which now supply the great majority of the company’s profits, though just a little more than half its revenues. That increase is surpassed only by Lee among publicly owned “newspaper” companies.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, which pushed Scripps’ own Cincinnati Post into oblivion in 2007, is, like most Gannett papers, cutting back, not adding to its content creation. August layoffs further reduced its staff, as bureaus were reduced, critics packed up their notebooks, and reporters were laid off. Gannett, like most owners of dailies, is retrenching to maintain profitability, as print advertising loss can only be evened out by increased subscriber pricing and cost cutting.

Dailies, which had come to think of themselves as monopoly dailies, may be the only big print game left in Cincinnati and cities throughout the country. Those cities, though, often sport three to a half-dozen TV news outlets. What if one of those outlets decided to compete — digitally — with the local paper? That’s one of the big questions we’ll see answered as the battle moves forward in Cincinnati. Already, a top broadcaster may lead the local daily in a quarter to a third of the U.S.’ top 50 markets. If broadcasters invest while newspaper companies disinvest, how much and how quickly could those numbers flip?

Check out the latest (October) Nielsen numbers for a sense of the competitive urgency in the Cincinnati market. While Gannett’s Cincinnati.com (which barely whispers the word “Enquirer” on its homepage) pulls in the most unique visitors, at 582,000 to Fox19’s 531,000 and WCPO’s 391,000, the engagement numbers already tell a different story. WCPO averages 13 minutes per visitor per month, more than double Cincinnati.com’s 6 minutes and a little less than twice Fox19’s. In the important engagement metrics, from total minutes to sessions per person to web pages per person, WCPO is a clear leader.

Now, with a paywall and its attendant marketing only weeks away, how will those numbers change?

Since most of the new editorial staff has already been hired (10 jobs now open), the results of Scripps’ content investment have already borne fruit in traffic. Consequently, it’s hard to know how much more upside the company will gain. Conversely, the nature of WCPO’s hard paywall could drive down engagement. Sure, lots of content — the kind of relatively commoditized breaking news, weather, traffic, and sports that are staples of TV news — will still be free. And yes, WCPO’s Ron Burgundys should still be largely accessible for free. But readers will run into the hard paywall when they try to read the only-on-WCPO stories, the kinds of stories for which Adam Symson’s research shows a hunger. Stories on education, religion, or health — you know, the kinds of stories that newspapers have long been known for. The new staff hired will focus much on that non-traditional TV coverage.

Scripps may be grafting a newspaper model on a digital TV platform. If it is, is that old-fashioned or a brilliant streak of genius? It’s a mind-bending set of media metaphors in search of the digital future.

WCPO is going with a hard paywall rather than a meter. It’s closer to many European “plus” paywall models, especially those popular at tabloid newspapers. Those papers, like local TV news, believe that when offering much of the same news as their competitors, it’s better to keep that stuff free and segregate the proprietary stuff. While the meter is all the rage among U.S. newspapers, 2014 will tell us a lot about the success of these plus models in Europe and, maybe, newly in the U.S. In the meantime, WCPO will see how much the paywall limits the crucial sampling of digital content, key both to maintaining high digital traffic and improving subscription conversion. Scripps uses Digital Paymeter, developed by Syncronex and NewsCycle Solutions (formerly DTI) to power both its TV and newspaper sites; the newspaper sites use a meter, though one that is time-, rather than article-, based.

Think of the WCPO test in part as R&D for the rest of the company.

“Scripps is not a holding company,” says Symson. “It is a consumer products business. You’ve got to get the the product right first.” If it gets that product right — along with the paywall model and the pricing (which is still TBA, but likely below the $9.99/month threshold) — then Scripps can export the model to others of it 19 TV markets. Going into 2014, though, there’s no timetable for doing so.

Soon there will be other local TV experimentation to watch. As Press+ (which this week announced its 500th customer) launches its first local TV metered paywall, we’ll see how that experiment progresses as well. The nuances of metered TV sites will be worth watching for newspaper sites as well. In Press+’s TV model, the video meter is a clock — giving, for instance, 10 minutes of free viewing, before watchers hit warning and pay-up screens. The text-story meter is still article-based, so the TV model is a hybrid.

The WCPO expansion raises many more questions for the news business. Among them:

• How will the interplay between on-air and digital work with the new staff? Broadcast has struggled with the same issues newspapers have in integrating or separating digital from the traditional product. Similarly, how well will the segmentation of video — given stations’ traditional orientation to block-programmed TV — move forward? It’s been painfully slow at many broadcasters.
• Where does mobile fit into the picture? Some broadcasters tell me that as much as 60 percent of their traffic is now mobile; that’s well beyond the 35 percent commonly reported by newspaper sites. WCPO is in the newspaper range — 25 to 35 percent — and has readied a new set of apps as well as responsive design. Across the broadcast industry, work is being done at the company level and through industry consortia (“The newsonomics of breakthrough digital TV, from Aereo to Dyle and MundoFox to Google Fiber”), and TV too faces near-infinite opportunities and challenges in mobile.
• How much of the TV pay experience will be mass and how much niche? WRAL’s TechWire, built in association with paywall provider Cleeng, is approaching its first year of paid experience (“The newsonomics of influentials from D.C. to Singapore to Raleigh”). Constructed around a membership model, the site is growing and retaining its subscribers, and John Conway, general manager of WRAL.com, suggests that the station’s investment, too, is a long-term one. At this point, it’s all about finding ways to put more people into the top end of the audience funnel and improve the conversion rate; that’s the nuts-and-bolts of the pay trade. Raleigh’s WRAL is one of the strongest local broadcasters in the nation, but don’t expect it to put up a full-site paywall any time soon.
• Is membership an answer here? Adam Symson isn’t yet disclosing details of the WCPO subscription offer, but he uses the term “membership.” That’a a term in wide and diverse usage in the digital sub trade, from WRAL to the Chicago Tribune. What might be part of a local TV membership bundle that could make you buy?

Photo of WCPO van by Travis Estell used under a Creative Commons license.

“We have the theory. We’ve done the research. We’ve done the modeling,” the New York Times Co. CEO told me last week. “Then there’s reality.” TWEET

Thompson, as intense and self-assured as many Timespeople often describe, punches at the air to make that last point. The new reality he is outlining will roll into existence in the second quarter of 2014. The Times will furiously break new company (and industry) ground with at least three new Paywalls 2.0 paid digital products and, at some point, a new “premium” tier. TWEET Within the Times building, teams of editorial, business and tech staff are shaping those new products. If it succeeds, the Pied Piper of the paywall revolution — having led the march that more than 40 percent of the U.S. newspaper industry is now following — will be leading a merrier band toward more new revenue.

For the Times, the new products are biggest initiative since the January 2011 launch of the metered pay system itself. Their success will determine how much gas there may be in what we can call the revolution of rising reader revenue. The Times leads the industry with 56 percent of its revenue coming from readers — but it needs more. Its three-year-old initiative has been a success, running at a rate of $150 million in new digital reader revenue annually. It has signed up 727,000 digital-only subscribers. It has transitioned its print subscribers to an all-access model — and gotten an astounding number to link their print subscriptions to digital accounts. 

But it needs more. Both print and digital advertising revenue are still shrinking, and a turnaround in either over the next two years is more a hope than a certainty. That’s the driver behind Paywalls 2.0. Can it extend the lessons of the first revolution in reader revenue — proving out the theory, research, and modeling that say there really is a consumer appetite for new paid digital news and features products?

It’s important to contrast late 2013 with early 2011. Walk the corridors of the Times building and talk to staff today and you’ll sense a budding confidence — a quality I believe is fundamental to the industry’s rebuilding (“The newsonomics of outrageous confidence”). No one has any illusion that the Times’ future is assured, and the recent defections of Brian Stelter, Nate Silver, and David Pogue and others have sent a bit of a chill through the place. But Times staffers know that their finances are a lot less shaky since the tenuous days of the Carlos Slim loan — and that a lot of people value what they do every day. The all-access digital pay strategy has not just brought in cash: It’s served as a statement that millions of readers value the Times enough to pay a fair amount of money for it. It shows people care.

I asked Paul Smurl, who led the development of the paid digital business as general manager of core digital products, why the new paid products won’t be introduced until the middle of 2014 when it was clear the all-you-can-eat subscription model had begun to plateau by the middle of 2013. (For that 727,000 total at the end of September, the Times showed just a four-percent increase since the end of June.) Smurl answered in three words: It is complicated. The Times has both a big news business to protect and lots of data to test.

In fact, it’s been busy preparing for Paywalls 2.0 for a while now. Smurl says the company has tested “a hundred different products and price points.” Qualitative studies, quantitative studies — and, of course, financial modeling. That modeling is aimed at one goal: maximize Times EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In other words, don’t just increase revenues: Increase profits. That makes fundamental sense for a company that eked out a $12.9 million net operating gain in the last quarter. In part, that means creating products that generate lots of new customers but don’t significantly cannibalize that new hard-earned customer base.

So what’s come out of that process? Three new niche products, to start:

• Food & dining: Sam Sifton, a former Times restaurant reviewer and national editor, is heading up this project. Expect lots of video and how-tos. This product will grow out of the Times’ well-read Dining section. The big question won’t be interest; it will be what kind of product might the Times create that consumers will value enough to pay for separately. Food and dining is a big, free world, with television content hugely popular. Recipes won’t be enough — nor will thoughtful and entertaining commentary. What might help would be third-party content, a partnership with a food outlet that has affinity with the Times, or functionality that extends the experience. How about some kind of special deal with OpenTable that gives subscribers some kind of preference or deal, for instance?

  Michael Zimbalist‘s R&D staff demoed “Julia” for me last week. Julia (check out the demo here) is a magical Internet tablet, using gestural and voice interfaces to use tablet-like content and then see ingredients displayed on the countertop.

  The R&D Lab describes Julia as “an experiment to think about how usage data and sensor data could be tied into a feedback loop between a publisher and its users to improve future offerings.” Julia may not be ready for prime time — or kitchens may not be ready for it — by mid-2014, but it’s the kind of wow that could get people to buy, much as the new Mayday feature on the Kindle Fire HDX is doing. Sometimes you sell the steak, and sometimes you sell the sizzle. What will be the Times’ sizzle here and in the other products?

• Need to Know: Cliff Levy, a much decorated Times editor, is at work on this smartphone-first (tablet-second, web-third) product. It’s intended as a first briefing on the world: Put down that Facebook and smell the globe. Thompson talks about it setting a news agenda, with an “American voice” and a witty, engaging tone that Levy has surfaced in the Times’ NYC Metro coverage.

  One big key for this product: aggregation. Ah, aggregation. It sounds so easy, but legacy news companies — and you can’t get more legacy than The New York Times — have had such a hard time of it. BuzzFeed has been all the buzz among European newspaper companies, for instance. “What do you think of BuzzFeed?” is usually one of the first five questions I’m asked by those publishers. They’re fascinated by it. Then I ask: Are you doing any aggregation? “No” is the usual answer. Maybe the Times can crack the code here. After all, it has some of the best editors in the world, and aggregation is in a sense just great editing — with all the web as your raw copy.

• Opinion: Andy Rosenthal, the Times’ editorial page editor since 2007, heads up this one. We know less about this one, other than it will probably have a tough road to get people paying. Consider it a counterpoint to the Guardian’s Comment is Free. There is so much free opinion on the web, some of it actually good, that this product may have the toughest go of it. How will the Times’ voices rise to must-pay levels?

Mark Thompson emphasizes the common threads among these products: “They are all an expression of classic journalism. There’s no dumbing down. Each has its own voice.” And: “Each will express the mother brand.” TWEET That combination of characteristics is a tall order. My bet is that the Times will be fortunate if one of the three new products generates substantial profits. Two would be a big win, and three would tell us that the Times has arrived at a new level of data-mastering strategery.

Perhaps as interesting as the three new products will be the as-yet unnamed (and unscheduled) “premium” tier for subscribers. TWEET The Times is figuring out what fits in that tier. Events (TimesTalks and its separate growing conference roster) will be part of it. Its ebook singles business, partnered with Byliner, will likely be part of it. Then there’s the possibility of commercial discount and loyalty programs, plus the other kinds of perks the Chicago Tribune is testing out with Trib Nation “membership.” The idea: Give brand-loyal subscribers more and charge them more. In part, they pay more to get more; in part, they pay because they like the idea of being “premium” or VIP. The Financial Times, adding its well followed Lex column, e-paper access, and letter from the editor to its premium offer, has gotten a whopping 33 percent of new digital subscribers to take “premium.” They pay $2.49 a week more for the privilege. That’s a lot more for about zero in extra cost. Premium or VIP subs are one innovation any self-respecting quality publisher should be thinking about for 2014.

What you won’t see as part of “premium” is the word “membership.” The Times has looked at a membership program, and backed away: The relationship just doesn’t feel right to the paper. It may well may be right about that. The Times isn’t our kissing cousin; it’s more like our brainy, sometimes-know-it-all uncle, respected but not exactly cuddly. Membership implies some closeness, and the Times likes — for good reasons and other reasons — to maintain its distance. We may prefer to keep our distance — getting the news, but sometimes disagreeing with its news judgment and editorials — and the Times is more comfortable that way too.

As the Times moves toward its ambitious 2Q goals, it does so on a base of quite a bit of learning, an education that’s useful to everyone in the publishing industry now peddling digital content:

• Take down the fences. “Everyone wants unlimited content,” says Smurl, underlining one of the lessons of Paywalls 1.0. The Times learned that lesson painfully with Times Select, which limited access in confusing ways — but it learned it well. All-access means use on all your digital toys, and all the content. Perhaps that thinking is most useful to the many European publishers who continue to offer freemium products, offering access to some stories for free and charging for others.
• “Free” has a new partner. “People are settling into a consumer mindset,” Smurl adds. That mean seem like nothing novel now, but consider how much our thinking has changed in four years. It’s not just all-access newspaper subscriptions that affirm the point: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora, and more prove out the point across news and entertainment media.
• People say they will pay — and do. Early on, 40 to 50 percent of Times readers told the company they’d pay a dollar a month or more for good content. Now, Smurl estimates that number would be 60 percent or more. That’s a big confidence booster as the new products are readied.
• Expect $9.99 or less as a monthly price for the new products. Part of the appeal of the new product is passion or utility, but part of it is also price — less than the cheapest digital subscription of $15 per four weeks, which is what a majority of the Times digital subs take.
• The Times has digitally linked close to 90 percent of its print subscribers. That’s a hugely important number. It means the Times can have a largely singular view of its whole audience and what it reads and spends. The number stood at about 40 percent before the pay system went into place, and for most newspaper companies, it’s been a struggle to reach 50 percent or more. The lesson: Do everything you can do to build the database; it’s a starting point for the next business models.
• The rest of the globe may well be the Times’ long-term big opportunity. Ten percent of its digital subs come from outside the U.S., where 95 percent of the world’s population lives. Thirty-five percent of its unique visitors are driven from the wider world, though a smaller share of the pageviews. The Times has abandoned its Portuguese-language planned product in Brazil and its China site is in play with the Chinese government. It is the English-language offering that Mark Thompson says will drive the Times’ business forward.
• Youth, or maybe slightly lower middle age, will be served, digitally. The average age of the Times print reader: 52. The average of age of the digital reader: 47. TWEET

Let’s not yet bury newsprint. It’s been a good friend for centuries — and still enables more than 75 percent of revenue for almost all newspaper companies on the planet.

Let’s talk about paper: what’s happened to it and where it may fit in the hybrid print/digital business models of news companies going forward.

Here is why it’s newly important: It’s print subscribers — now being priced up and upsold into all-access digital plans — who are responsible for the only bright spot in newspaper revenue growth. Though 85-95 percent of these subscribers are staying through these rounds of price increases, only a minority of them actually use the newspapers’ digital products much. They like newsprint.

We’ll get back to that paradox in a bit, but first some stark numbers portraying the flip side of the digital march:

• North American newsprint (80 percent of which goes into newspapers) demand peaked at 13.1 million tonnes in 1999. It was down to 4.9 million tonnes last year — a drop of 62 percent in 13 years. (If you’d like to delve into the finer points of tons vs. tonnes, here you go. For the rest of us, tonnes are metric tons, and provide apples-to-apples comparisons over the years.) This year, tonnage is down another 10 percent.
• World consumption was pumped up by developing country usage increased for a while, but is now dropping too. Its peak: 38 million tonnes in 2000. It dropped 24 percent to 29 million in 2012 and continues to decrease, as we can see in the chart below.

The decline has been most profound in North America, which is using barely a third of the newsprint it used in 2000. Western Europe is now cutting back significantly, down 27 percent for the same period. Japan is moving downward.

Forget what you hear about this being a developed/developing world dichotomy: Newsprint use is going down globally. While it rose greatly in Asia over the past decade, it’s since moved into decline. Even in India, newsprint usage has flattened and is moving downward; 2010 seems to have been the turning point year there. It’s trending downward, though more mildly at this point, in Latin America.

The havoc we’ve seen in the U.S. — and now the European — newspaper industry is mirrored in the newsprint business. It’s seen massive job loss, bankruptcy, and consolidation — its market cut in half and its prices forced downward. So the industry has diversified beyond North America, into other paper sectors — and into market intelligence products (that’s right, Big Data, crunched to Little), says Martine Hamel, vice president of the Pulp and Paper Products Council, based in Montréal with offices in Brussels and Beijing.

The newsprint usage decline almost matches the print advertising decline. That 62 percent decline in 13 years matches up with a 60 percent decline in U.S. print advertising over a shorter period. Last year’s 10 percent drop matches the 9 percent decline in print ads.

Significantly, the cut in newsprint usage in North America has been greater than the loss of circulation volume. The loss in print readers has been less than the newsprint cutbacks by news publishers, by about 10 percentage points. Why? First, there’s that ad loss; fewer ads, less newsprint needed. Second, publishers continued to cut to eke out their mild profit, as they have since the Great Recession. In Europe, the play between print reader loss and newsprint cuts is more checkered.

But now, entering 2014, what might the revolution of reader revenue do to newsprint usage? That could turn out to be a fascinating shorter-term question.

Let’s revisit the paradox. Newspapers, especially in the U.S., have settled on all-access as their reader business model. Package it all together — print, web, smartphone, tablet, e-edition — and charge a new price, usually 10-25 percent higher than last year’s print price. Force consumers to opt out, and no more (usually less) than 15 percent of them will. All-access gives newspapers new data, and that data shows a surprising picture: Even though they are paying for all-access, many long-time print subscribers don’t use their paper’s digital products much or at all. In fact, only a minority (20-40 percent) show significant digital news usage.

That’s an intriguing phenomenon. Newspaper subscribers are affluent and strongly represented among baby boomers. Thirty-one percent of Americans aged 50-64 own tablets, according to recent Pew research. Among Gen Xers (30-49), 44 percent own them. It’s just that many them still prefer the print paper, even though they use tablets, smartphones, and the web to read lots of other stuff.

So they have a preference for print, and they’re becoming the primary contributors to newspaper revenue, as ads plummet in high single digits each year without end. The resulting question: Will publishers be somewhat more careful in further cutting newsprint usage?

Given that subscribers are now paying $300 to $500 a year — when two years ago they were paying $200 to $400 — might newspapers have to tread it more carefully in cutting back on the print product? After cutting eliminated stock tables, TV listings, sports results, and lots of pages in general, might they slow down the cuts? After all, having millions of people willing to pay that large annual sum is a good problem to have.

If some publishers are skimping on the paper-based product, we also have the ultra-contrarian play of Aaron Kushner’s Orange County Register. In his multiple print plays, the Register is using a whopping 18 percent more newsprint this year than last. While Kushner has been in the press with issues of litigation, the big question is around that 18 percent and what it represents about his wider strategy. Will it work? It may take several years — assuming the new Freedom can stay its financial course, especially if it closes its acquisition of the Riverside Press-Enterprise tomorrow.

I checked in with Mike Klingensmith, publisher of the Star Tribune, which has managed the digital transition better than many of its peers (“The newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls and investing in the newsroom”) to get his sense of using newsprint in this digital age. Under new editor Rene Sanchez, appointed last month, the paper will put some “Sunday print upgrades” into effect in early 2014, following the addition of a new Friday Outdoor Living section in the fall, he says.

With the number of print ads dropping, news pages now make up 74 percent of the Star Tribune’s pages, up from 72 percent a year ago. Running newsprint through a press, of course, is far less flexible than digital printing. On many weekdays, says Klingensmith, the paper is at “minimum book size”; it won’t, for example, drop below an eight-page business section on a given day. Consequently, as ad volume has dropped, editors add news content to replace it. Summing up the reader impact: “We believe very firmly that the heft of the delivered package is important, and we pay attention to that.”

I haven’t polled publishers to see how many follow that line of thinking, but it should be a quite current concern. Publishers are now deciding where to cut in 2014. In the meantime, we do see a number of print strategies emerging. Largely, they track the newspaper industry’s progression from mass to niche, as Google and Facebook have become that new mass, first in time spent and increasingly in digital advertising. Consider, briefly, six areas:

• The Sunday sell: Sunday is the big push, as newspapers expect they have just about all the seven-day print subscribers they’re ever likely to ever have. Many sites that have put a price on digital access push Sunday + digital as their “best offer.” Improving the Sunday paper — making it the strong fortress of the print/digital bundle for the next five years — plays to a smarter use of newsprint. Sunday may be a new big niche.
• Niche pubs: Combine digital and print smartly in some target areas. For Digital First Media’s Bay Area News Group, that’s been focusing on three topics: community discovery, education, and senior-related topics. The first is in place, and in 2014 education will expand and seniors will be added — and throughout the group’s more than dozen Bay Area titles. “Each are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars annualized,” says Michael Turpin, chief revenue officer at Bay Area News Group.
• Newsprint as arbitrage: Newsprint may be less valued than it used to be, but it still has value. In Chattanooga, publisher Jason Taylor has made the point that promotion in his paper gives him a 30 percent cost advantage in advertising his events business over events competitors (“The newsonomics of the new Chattanooga Choo-Choo”). In Dallas, publisher (and new Belo CEO) Jim Moroney is basing his events strategy on similar thinking. The Orange County Register’s much-noticed Golden Envelopes charity giveaway leverages low-cost newsprint to “give back” to its communities.

  In Delhi, The Times of India has taken arbitrage to an incredible level. In exchange for newspaper marketing, it takes shares in its advertisers’ business. Its portfolio reaches to more than a hundred businesses.

• New local pushes: The Register’s community sections are the model here. Should it work, more papers will test the strategy.
• Content marketing: It’s all the rage, of course, and mainly oriented toward digital. But the old-fashioned power of print — helping businesses find their voice across platforms — is spurring a bit of print demand. Take The Globe and Mail, which offers standalone 16-page sections for as much as $300,000; Nissan, Toyota, and Grey Goose are among the brands participating. As content marketing becomes a significant business for the smarter publishers, newsprint finds new value.
• E-editions: As Advance has moved to its three-or-four-day print strategy, e-editions are a big factor. The digital replica product retains a strange kind of affinity among paying subscribers — so Advance has added back seven-day e-editions and other publishers have added e-editions to the all-access bundle. To create an e-edition, you need to create a formatted paper, giving the print format one more reason to live on.

Key to any incremental print growth will be dawn of integrated marketing. Digital is often the headliner, but print — often as niche, sometimes as mass — retails a power as part of a larger marketing package. To that end, there’s a lot of work going on in digital printing and other newer technologies to bring efficiencies to the old processes. A recent three-day “Power of Print” conference in Berlin, sponsored by WAN-IFRA, provided lots of seminars and how-tos. Indeed, the booths of Big Iron newspaper industry vendors seemed like a throwback to another age.

Photo of printing press by Newspaper Club used under a Creative Commons license.