But while liberal arts colleges are known for their emphasis on broad general knowledge and developing critical thinking skills, many student newspaper positions, especially editorial ones, are unpaid.

Through my work as editor-in-chief at The Wesleyan Argus, and speaking with students at peer institutions, I’ve firsthand seen just how inaccessible journalism is for liberal arts school students. I spoke, via email, with over 30 editors-in-chief at the helm of liberal arts college newspapers, and about half said their papers didn’t pay students in editorial positions. The ones that do can’t necessarily pay everyone, setting varying degrees of payment based on a student’s role at the paper.

Low (or no) pay dictates who can be involved in student journalism. Not paying student journalists makes the newsroom inaccessible for low income students of color, which in turn affects the newsroom’s demographics and coverage. It also shrinks editorial bandwidth, and devalues the work they are doing. Even at schools that do have the funds to pay their workers, students are oftentimes paid less than other on-campus jobs or are capped at how many hours they can be paid for.

Every so often, Twitter reignites the debate on the problems with offering unpaid internships but a similar phenomenon plays out in the college newsrooms. Working for a student newspaper without pay (especially during a pandemic) is only realistic for students who come from more privileged backgrounds and don’t have to worry about spending their time juggling jobs or other commitments, especially if the newsroom pay is lower than other jobs or nonexistent.

Mikayla Patel, who is the outgoing editor-in-chief of The Sophian at Smith College, where students do not get paid, emphasized she was able to be involved with the newspaper because she didn’t have other major responsibilities or jobs. Patel has had other time commitments alongside the paper while at Smith, like participating in the campus radio station, holding a social media position with an environmental group, and driving for Doordash, but she said nothing else outside of class has been nearly as time-consuming as working for the newspaper.

“Participating in the newspaper, definitely, being in most leadership positions, but especially as editor-in-chief — I don’t know how you would be in school and do that and have a job at the same time,” Patel said.

As she explained, a position like Editor-in-Chief requires availability not only for board meetings and work nights to help with editing, but also for answering emails and Slack messages from staff members throughout the day, looking at articles, or fixing website issues.

“Being available in this capacity while also working a part time job along with school would be difficult,” she said.

Similar to Patel, I had very few other commitments beyond the Argus. Although I took on a few course assistant jobs throughout my time at Wesleyan, I did so more for the experience rather than the need for money, and could dial back hours if I needed to devote more time to the newspaper.

The lack of compensation for student journalists is a major barrier to access for students from less privileged backgrounds, whether that be students of color, those of lower socioeconomic status, or as is often the case, both. It’s also a major factor behind the overrepresentation of white reporters in student newsrooms.

At Colorado College, Cutler Publications, a student-run non-profit that funds campus publications, pays students per piece or with stipends. Lorea Zabaletea, vice president of Cutler, said both amount to less than what other on-campus jobs pay, and this difference is evident in the demographics of the various newsrooms.

“At such a predominantly white school like C[olorado] C[ollege], it’s very clear who it’s easier for to participate in journalism, and it’s the people who don’t have to worry about feeding themselves or paying rent,” She said. “That’s why we want to get more funding for Cutler, so that we can pay as close to a liveable wage for college students as possible, so that it’s a real job that can support students that are interested in journalism instead of something that takes time and doesn’t give them the money that they need.”

This disconnect between the demographics of student newsrooms and the communities they are reporting leaves gaps in the paper’s coverage. A newsroom cannot fully represent campus stories if the people staffing it aren’t representative of the community.

“Student journalism and newspapers are a really important part of building a culture at a school and connecting the community,” Patel, from Smith College, said.

“If you only have students that are in positions where they don’t need to be working, or students from [only] certain groups of your campus [are] able to participate, then you’re not representing everybody on campus and as a newspaper, we want to be able to do that.”

Some editors also say not being able to pay all staff inhibits their ability to help writers fully develop their journalism skills, which hurts student journalists even when they are able to commit to a paper. Sonia Lachter, the outgoing editor-in-chief of the Colby Echo, explained that while both editors and writers are paid, hours are capped and many end up working more than their allotted hours and this affects their ability to build community and journalism skills.

“As editors-in-chief, we’re uncomfortable asking people to do more than the bare minimum of their job requirement because we know we’re not paying them even for that,” she said. “We want to do staff development and give them feedback, but don’t want to ask them to come in for another hour every week when we’re not able to pay them for that.”

The paper’s other editor-in-chief, Conall Butchart, said that editorial staff have begun marking up at least one writer’s article a week to provide feedback and working with the copy team to point out things that may have gone under the radar that week.

With student newsrooms often serving as a pipeline to full-time newsrooms, the lack of payment for student journalists perpetuates the continued overrepresentation of upper-middle class, often white, reporters.

Not paying student journalists also devalues the work we do. We are already in a unique position, as we are responsible for reporting on peers and the institution we are a part of, without the same legal protection full-time journalists have.

Maxwell Mondress, the current editor-in-chief of The Clerk at Haverford College, is currently paid a stipend for his work on the Clerk. Mondress said paying student journalists is an acknowledgment of the labor they put into holding administrators accountable.

“Working with administrators whose stake is in their continued success and their positions, it can be very difficult to interface with them as journalists especially because they’re administrators and we’re students at their school,” he said. “If students are willing to put themselves out there, it’s nice that you’re able to be compensated for it.”

I don’t fully know what a solution would be. Some newsrooms, including The Argus, have made strides to try and make the newsroom more accessible. In the fall of 2020, we established a small fund to pay students of color from low-income backgrounds for their work on the paper, and a similar model has been adopted by The Amherst Student. The program has been successful with the few students we were able to fund, as they are able to be compensated for their time and devotion to the Argus. However, it is not enough to completely shift the industry. In an ideal world, everyone would get paid for their contributions.

Some editors-in-chief at liberal arts colleges I talked to have considered–– or are in the process of–– getting funding from their respective universities to pay their workers, but there’s always the question of editorial independence. That is, if newspaper staff are employed by their university, there is always the possibility they can be censored by their respective colleges.

And although pay is a huge issue that perpetuates inequity in the newsroom, it’s also about the resources required to break into the industry that liberal arts students lack. Those interested in journalism at liberal arts colleges are locked out of a number of privileges larger institutions with journalism programs have, whether that be classes, journalism professors with ample connections, or journalism awards (as many are only available to students in accredited journalism programs).

But liberal arts students who face those problems aren’t alone: students at public colleges without established journalism programs, whether state universities or community colleges, experience the same.

As it currently stands, the journalism industry values journalism experiences that are not accessible for students who don't come from well-known undergrad journalism schools or do not already have plans to go into journalism at the outset of their college career. If the journalism industry at large wants to remain true to its promise to diversify, it needs to be more inclusive of all kinds of recent graduates — not just those with Medill or Merill degrees — and those who aren’t graduates at all.

This is according to a qualitative report published Friday that was commissioned by the Reuters Institute and undertaken by the firm Kantar Media (with funding from Google’s Digital News Initiative). For the report, researchers interrogated news consumers’ openness to paying for (or not paying for) news online through discussion groups in four countries — Finland, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Participants in the study were asked, for instance, their feelings on various possible propositions from news organizations, such as “turn off your adblocker,” “please pay for an ad-free experience,” “pay for a membership with benefits,” “pay for unrestricted access.” (These in-person discussions were used to inform the 2017 Reuters Institute main report on digital news.)

People in the study expressed a begrudging familiarity with soft and hard publisher paywalls:

“I don’t think that’s bad to pay to continue reading. You get an idea of the news with the headlines. If you want to go deeper, you pay,” said one respondent from Spain who fell in the 35-54-year-old age group.

“It’s just quite straightforward and I think you know what you are getting,” said another in the UK (age 35-54).

Most of the people involved in the discussions, though, “were not aware of the funding challenge facing the news industry,” the report emphasized. Many were also unsympathetic to the general idea of a news company asking for money to support its business:

“It feels like it should be a charity for my cats or something like that. It doesn’t sit right with me — fundraising,” said one person interviewed in the UK (age 35-54).

“They are crying dollar signs but it doesn’t make sense to me. Have a big gala and invite your top investors or people who you know will donate big bucks. Don’t come to me,” said a U.S. participant (age 20-34).

“I don’t really have a bleeding heart for these kinds of websites. I am more of a home town girl trying to give my money towards people I know,” said another U.S. participant (age 20-34).

Participants were divided about paying for a potential service that would bundle different news sources and allow for micropayments for individual stories (à la services like Blendle or LaterPay, which the participants didn’t seem to be aware of).

“I like the range and per article. I think that is an amazing idea,” said one U.S. participant (20-34).

“Every time I am deciding to read an article, even though it is cents, I am going to think do I really want to read this article?” said another U.S. participant (35-54).

For the full report and other revealing quotes from people interviewed for the study, download here.

June 2017: Fifty years after the start of the 1967 riots, Timeline unveils its Long Hot Summer project, digging through archives and building a master timeline to share narratives, videos, and photos. Editor-in-chief Brian Thomas Gallagher and his team in San Francisco post the content on the same days that the events took place in 1967, over the course of two months.

“The intensity and frequency of the riots was hard to imagine…There’s a lot of context around last summer and Ferguson. This was so much more violent and widespread,” Gallagher told me. “I thought it would be interesting to kind of let that unfold to readers, to get a sense of that intensity with how the story is published.”

These are more than just anniversary posts, though, and that’s true to Timeline’s mission.

“If you think about history through the lens of the present, you can create media of our history that we think is unusually compelling and powerful,” CEO Giles said. “We don’t think about what are the most important events of the 21st century. We’re not giving history lessons.”

Instead, Timeline has refocused to pay more attention to the parts of history that lacked attention from main media organizations at the time. Its website includes two distinct sections for women’s history and black history, and Timeline regularly highlights unsung moments in LGBT history as well.

It’s in line with what Timeline’s target audience of 25-to-45-year-old Americans wants, Giles believes, reflecting their growing interests in social justice and equality. The content is then distributed through written stories, photo essays, and social video shared through social media, an email newsletter, an app, and the website itself.

“The challenge…is to tell them so they each have a story that’s more than ‘then someone threw a bottle and then the National Guard came in,’ but to have them all be meaningful on their own,” Gallagher said. “There was a balance I wanted to strike with acknowledging some of the truths of why these things happened, some validity to the anger, and political disenfranchisement without starting off in a polemical way.”

Gallagher took out a whiteboard and plotted the timeline, working with the team to develop the themes and in-depth stories they wanted to investigate before putting out a call for pitches. Carvell Wallace, the special project editor, spearheaded the solicitation and navigation with the responding writers. But they hit a roadblock when it came to finding historical records of these stories, especially because some smaller news organizations that might have reported on the riots were either no longer around or didn’t maintain searchable records.

“If you can’t find a copy of the Tampa paper from June 1967, The New York Times will have a story on the Tampa event. It won’t be as rich or as textured, but it’s a start,” Gallagher said. Sometimes, it was the residents of the towns who provided the true launchpad: Gallagher found a “true crime aficionado” in Ohio who helped him learn more about a black man charged as the Cincinnati Strangler, a serial-killer case that heightened racial tensions in the community.

That community aspect has expanded beyond the Long Hot Summer project, too. One video tells the story of an African-American man who flew for the French air force in World War I after the U.S. wouldn’t accept him because of his race; Giles said that some of the man’s distant relatives met in the Facebook comments on that video. (Charlotte Buchen leads the video team.)

“We see really positive, enthusiastic engagement on Facebook,” Giles said. “It’s one of the things we’re proudest of.” He added that in the first quarter of 2017, Timeline’s videos on Facebook and stories on its website have been averaging “tens of millions” in views monthly, compared to “a very small base just a year prior.”

When Timeline was first gaining steam, in 2015, venture capitalist and cofounder Hassanein suggested various sources of revenue, such as sponsored content. Giles said the team is considering that, as well as developing a membership base and crowdfunding.

“We’re trying to do one thing, which is to put Timeline on a sustainable footing. We’re very fortunate to have a funder who is in this for the long run with us…but we are a for-profit company,” Giles said.

Translation: stay tuned. “The main thing is that the immediacy of the issues in the Long Hot Summer project and the relevancy of it today is really a microcosm of why the Timeline editorial mission is so important,” Gallagher said. “People really related to it when they started to realize that history is still super relevant.”

To answer that question, the industry also needs to get a better sense of what drives those who already do pay. A new, exhaustive survey from the Media Insight Project (a collaboration between the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research) offers plenty of insight into payers and nonpayers — and the differences between the two groups.

Here are a few standout findings:

— There are few surprises in why people pay for news. News organizations trying to convince people to pay must first start by creating something worth paying for — which is to say, something differentiated, focused, and high quality. More than 4 in 10 subscribers said that they paid for a publication because it “excels at covering certain topics about which they particularly care.” The Media Insight Project said that while current economic challenges may be encouraging news organizations to cut back, subscribers are increasingly rewarding publications that invest more resources into high quality content.

Other reasons people pay? More than 4 in 10 said it was because friends or family members subscribe to the publication. Oh, and don’t ignore the power of the discount: At 37 percent, spotting a discount or promotion was the third-largest motivation for people to pay up. That’s one area where digital publications can learn from their print counterparts. Another highlight: Young people in particular are more likely pay because they support a publication’s mission.

— A lot of people don’t pay for news because there’s plenty of free stuff online. This rationale, cited by half of nonpayers, shouldn’t shock anyone in the industry — it’s hard to compete with free, after all. Others (41 percent) said that they don’t pay for news because they don’t care enough about it, and a smaller number (24 percent) said that news is too expensive. Just 15 percent of nonpayers said they didn’t pay because they don’t trust what they read from news sources.

— Paywalls work, but only to a degree. Many publications have leaned on paywalls to help turn habitual readers into paying subscribers. But turns out that that there’s a limit to how effective the tactic is: Roughly 17 percent of payers cited paywalls as the the factor that pushed them to subscribe. The Media Insight Project said that paywalls are most effective when they’re combined “with other considerations of ‘value,’ including frequent engagement, quality content, and more.”

Another number worth pointing out: 17 percent of people said they don’t pay for news because of the ease at which they can get around paywalls from the likes of The Wall Street Journal.

— News organizations should target nonpaying “news seekers.” It turns out that, in terms of consumption, people who don’t pay for news look a lot like those that do. The Media Insight Project said that understanding these nonpaying news seekers should be a core part of publishers’ growth strategies going forward.

— There’s a lot of price sensitivity among nonpayers. Researchers asked people if they would be willing to pay for a current news source that cost 50¢, $1, $3, or $7 a week. While a quarter of nonpayers said they would be willing to pay 50¢ or $1, just 15 percent would do so if the publication cost $3 or more. That’s more evidence that, when it comes to crafting a pricing strategy, most news publications face an uphill battle if the value proposition isn’t there.

Medium是美国的一家基于话题的博客型媒体，允许单一用户或多人协作在平台上发布内容。它由 Twitter的联合创始人Evan Williams和Biz Stone于2012年8月创办，深耕优质内容，以设计简洁和高质量长文著称。到目前，Medium上已经有超过700万篇文章被发布，每月吸引着6000万读者。创办之初，Williams在公司官网写道，“Medium是一个全新的媒体，希望增强用户与媒体之间的联系。Medium旨在激发人们的创造力，发布更长的原创内容，构建一个交换思想的平台。”

旧有模式无法盈利，倒逼Medium探寻新的出路。3月22日，Medium正式推出付费订阅计划—用户可以通过每月支付5美元成为“创始会员”。这听起来有那么点像流音乐服务商Spotify，又有点像艺术创作众筹平台Patreon，还有点像缓存管理阅读器Pocket。Williams在他的博客里是这样描述的：

“每月支付5美元，你将会得到两项升级服务。

更好的阅读体验：我们将注重内容的质量而不是数量。推荐文章是由这个领域的专家精心筛选出来的。虽然部分功能尚在开发中，但付费会员将第一时间获知新鲜动态、体验独家功能。

更好的内容：来自创始会员（头几个月注册的用户）的收入，将会被100％回报给内容的独立作者或媒体出版商。正是他们的资深经历、深入研究和悉心写作才让我们更思辨、更了解这个世界。”

Medium在发给创作者的email中写道：

“在这个新的订阅平台上，您创作的内容由它能给读者带去的价值定价，而非单一的阅读数据。我们诚邀您作为首批入驻的创作者，您发布的内容将出现在会员专区和独家精选中。

当然，世界各地的创作者还是可以继续免费在Medium上发表作品，但我们也意识到，出于利益考量，很多好内容被搁置了。我们希望这些经由大量调研、深入思考，倚靠着创作者深厚积累又承载着他们独特想法的文章，或许成不了‘爆款’，却可以出现在Medium的平台上；我们也相信，这会是读者真正想要看到的。”

根据Medium的描述，他们正在寻找以下几个方向的作者：

美国政治，技术/科学/未来，个人发展/效率，商业/创业，以及文化。平台会根据供稿的篇幅、研究的原创程度和作者本身的影响力向特约作家支付一定的费用。

新界面由不同板块环绕组建而成，分成了以下六大类：

类似的分类方法，在包括英国《泰晤士报》在内的好几家媒体中已经有过尝试。现在，Medium在过去通过email向读者发送的每日简报的基础上，又做了改装，把相似主题的文章打包到一起。

说实话，这似乎跟整个内容市场上的任何一家媒体听起来没有任何两样，况且，说不定人家还是向读者全免费开放的。

Medium的发言人表示，会员计划目前“只对一小部分用户开放，会在未来几周内做更广泛的推广”。

对于这样的改变，Medium解释道:

“我们不想成为你每天像完成任务一样、必须去点开看的东西，或者让你因担心错过某个内容而不断地刷网页。因此我们设计了新主页，完整性和可读性更强。

由此可见，相比于无止境地刷新内容，新版的Medium是一个有限的故事摘要，每天按时间更新三次。

新的主页也会更好地反映读者的个人兴趣。Medium邀请专家参与策划，将各个领域内值得关注的头部内容按主题分组，打上关键词标签，推送到会员用户的主页；而那些用户已经关注的个人和媒体的动态，则会显示在主页的特定位置。”

另外，Medium还推出了离线阅读的新功能。读者能够在离线状态下查看一个自己定制的阅读列表，并能非常便捷地执行添加、删除等操作。

当然，类似于改进主页、离线阅读这些较小的服务升级，是否足以从本质上促成Medium的这场商业模式革命，还有待进一步观察。

今年1月，Medium突然辞退了50名员工，近乎是其员工数量的三分之一，并一举关闭了纽约和华盛顿的两家办事处。

Williams直言：“Medium的商业模式已经崩坏，我们需要修复它，减少对广告客户的依赖，也不能再让社交媒体上的所谓“热点”牵着鼻子走。”不过当时，这家创业公司还并没能摸出一条新路。

In 2015, veteran biotech reporter Luke Timmerman set out on his own to launch The Timmerman Report, a $149-a-year subscription product offering original news and analysis about the biotech industry. The product quickly found its audience: Within ten months, Timmerman had attracted 1,000 subscribers, which he says was evidence that the idea could work in the long term. (Timmerman hasn’t shared an updated subscriber number publicly since.)

Then came the some of the more knotty issues, most of which came out of left field. While signing up individual subscribers was straightforward, interest from companies looking to sign up multiple employees complicated things. Timmerman, the site’s sole reporter and salesperson, also became the sole customer-service representative, handling, for example, the wide variety of login and billing problems that subscribers often have. All of these duties, dispersed across multiple people at larger media companies, were suddenly all on his shoulders.

“Setting out on your own is obviously an attractive idea, but then you realize there are all of these little administrative tasks you didn’t realize you would have to deal with,” he said. “If someone’s login isn’t working, or they can’t find their password — that’s really important. I gotta take care of that, and a certain amount of my day has to go towards some of those things. But at the end of the day, that’s customer service and you are a business, so it’s your job.”

And yet, despite those challenges, Timmerman says he’s as bullish as ever about the one-person media company model. I spoke to him about the evolution of that model, the importance of customer service, and why digital media companies should think more like brick-and-mortar businesses.

But a new report out Tuesday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism suggests that text may have a longer run, at least for news. Consumption of online news video is still a minority behavior around the world, the researchers found: Only about a quarter of respondents, across 26 countries, watched news video online in a given week.

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2016 surveyed more than 50,000 people in those 26 countries, which include the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and many European countries, about their digital news consumption. The research was conducted by YouGov with an online questionnaire in early 2016, and focuses on of-the-moment topics like adblockers and distributed content. Here are some of the most interesting findings from the report.

Digital news overtakes TV everywhere

For every group under the age of 45, in all the countries surveyed, online news is now more important than television news. Drilling down on types of online news a bit: 51 percent of those surveyed use social media as a source of news each week, while 12 percent of all surveyed say it’s their main source. And among 18- to 24-year-olds, social media alone edged out TV as the “main” news source (28 percent to 24 percent). Print came in at a lowly 6 percent for that group and at just 12 percent for those 55 and older.

More than half of all respondents (53 percent) use a smartphone to get news. Heavy smartphone users access news more frequently than people who mainly use desktop and laptops or tablets, the Reuters Institute found:

We also have evidence that the move to smartphone goes hand in hand with the move to distributed content. When we ask people about the MAIN way in which they come across news stories we see that people use social media more on the smartphone, whilst they are less likely to use a branded entry such as a website or app.

Paid content: Still tricky, and differs by country

The survey found that around 45 percent of respondents pay for a printed newspaper at least once a week. But paying for news online is a different story: A meager 9 percent of U.S. respondents, for instance, paid for any online news in the past year.

No English-speaking country has a payment rate of more than 10 percent — likely to be a consequence of intense global competition for digital eyeballs. By contrast some smaller countries protected by geography or language have been able to achieve rates of 20 percent or more, particularly where there is tradition of newspaper subscription via home delivery to build on.

Because the subscription model is dominant in the U.S., however, U.S. citizens do pay more for online news — the yearly median payment for online news in the U.S. was $87.48. (The U.S. was beat out in this area only by the U.K., where the yearly median payment was around $116, and Switzerland, where it was about $100.)

Video news isn’t as popular as you might think outside the U.S.

Across all 26 countries only a quarter (24 percent) of respondents say they access online news video in a given week…Video consumption is highest in the United States (33 percent), where there has been significant ramp up in production by many news organizations — attracted by higher advertising premiums and better distribution opportunities in social media. By contrast, our weighted European average shows that less than a quarter (22 percent) are using video news in a given week with some of the lowest levels in Denmark (15 percent) and the Netherlands (17 percent).

That overall 24 percent number was up only one percentage point from a year ago (23 percent). The U.S. share was up from 30 percent a year ago.

The survey did reveal that “heavy social media users in particular are around 50 percent more likely to access online news videos than the general population.”

Adblocking continues to rise

Across the report’s entire sample, 8 percent of respondents block ads on their smartphones, but a third of respondents in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. said they plan to install an adblocker on their phone in the next year.

Yahoo is still the most popular online news source in the U.S.

This one surprised me, but it’s been true for awhile.

Outside Asia, most people don’t get news from messaging apps

Snapchat is popular, but…

With the exception of WhatsApp and Kakao Talk in Korea, one surprise is the low levels of news usage for messaging applications. Although Snapchat is one of the fastest growing new networks, only around 1 percent in most countries say they use it for news. For the first time we asked specifically about usage of Snapchat Discover, a poster child for distributed content which was launched at the beginning of 2015 in the U.K. and U.S. as a showcase for branded news content from publishers like Cosmopolitan, Mail Online, and National Geographic. In our data we find that it reaches 12 percent of 18–24s of our U.S. sample but so far only 1 percent in the United Kingdom.

Are we sick of push alerts?

The percentage of people using push alerts and notifications for news has stabilized in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France, the survey found.

You can view the full report, which includes more detailed information on individual countries, here.

Then, 20 years ago, many of us starting working on online news. In my early Knight Ridder New Media days, I remember vendors pitching me on the earliest e-editions — “digital replicas” of the print newspaper. To this day, many papers offer the easily produced replica (and replica-plus products), which maintain a surprising popularity with the older demographic. We knew, though, that the digital form had to be different than the print form. We figured we would figure out what that new form was fairly quickly. We didn’t.

We all now know that the digital revolution hasn’t been good for the newspaper-based business, with unending losses still defining the press. What we haven’t talked much about is how our failure to create a new, intuitive digital news reading metaphor has contributed to the chaos. Over 20 years, the desktop problem has persisted: Newspapers did not have a good way to let digital readers know the full breadth and depth of their daily production.

News, too often, dominated features and “lifestyle.” Our LIFO (last in, first out) headlining — each in the same typeface, at the same size — never conveyed the richness of the content, that stream of news that any good news organization offers its readers. Digital presentation oozed artlessness. Newspapers too often simply mimicked Google News, which had reproduced its snippetized “news” into a deadening list, letting its algorithms muddy meaning and value. Recency trumped relevance.

While the semi-beloved Page Ones, as limited as they were, offered an orderly, logical news report, Internet-delivered news has often reported in digitally drunk and disorderly.

Today, though, I want to celebrate a breakthrough. The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could.

For the first time, I see a newspaper-created product that seems utterly comfortable with the digital medium. It’s casual yet serious, with the hardest news of the day sidling up to winning features, commentary making an appearance where it makes sense and visuals of every variety — maps, graphics, photos, and illustrations — sized appropriately for a small screen. It’s information-dense, but not leaden. In a scan or a scroll of the moment’s news, readers can get a broad sense of what it indeed is happening. We also feel something we rarely have felt with digital newspaper products: playfulness.

“Obviously, it’s different,” said Steve Duenes, the Times associate managing editor for graphics. (See my separate interview with him this week.) “I mean [the print] Page One is [the important news of] the day, but this is…the Page One of the moment, in a way. For example, if you were following the coverage of the Paris attacks, you could see the scale of the story grow. You could see the different strands of the story that were getting covered and their presentations sort of settled into a logic for how we wanted to communicate that story.” Page One is a tough metaphor, but Duenes, 17-year Times veteran, made the association tangible. Speaking of the coverage of those attacks, he says, “We were able to introduce a hierarchy typographically, and then package parts of stories together with the team, for the phone. I think someone in the newsroom made a comparison to Page One.”

Now, dependably, topping the Times page is the Your Morning Briefing or Your Evening Briefing, doing in 10 or so points what Page One could never do. And tying it together is typography, too often the forgotten stepchild of our digital times. On the smartphone, the Times’ typography is elegant and used to signal differing kinds of content. For example, a bolder sans serif face tells you in an instant that a Sunday Magazine story is being released midweek.

The Times app is a harbinger of how the digital age can reward readers, journalists, and the business of journalism going forward. Over the past couple of years, we’ve also seen other newspaper-based design innovations. Two of the better ones have contributed to this next age. I find The Washington Post’s mobile display winning, but it’s a magazine scroll, lacking the proportion and editorial judgment that the Times has figured out how to introduce and maintain daily. The Guardian has figured out how to get a lot of its great work onto the page, but lacks the nuance and lightness of the Times. Buzzfeed, Vox and Slate, among others, all offer spirit and variety, but still look and feel boxy and/or listy.

The Times experience may be a good one, but does it drive the business forward? While the majority of news reading is now mobile — 55 percent or more — publishers have decried the lack of associated revenue. The Times, with its emphasis on reader revenue, believes it is cracking a code here: It is satisfying mobile audiences, and seeing subscription results. The company provided some key data points:

• “Based on our mid-spring [2015] iPhone homescreen redesign, we saw an increase in frequency of visits as well as higher article views and average time spent per user;
• Following the initial iPhone homescreen redesign, our new user retention improved with a lift of 20 percent at the first month; after six months, the new user retention has improved by 60 percent vs. the same period the prior year;
• In addition to mobile apps generating subscriptions, subscribers (print as well as digital exclusive subscribers) are accessing mobile at growing rates. In addition to viewing more content, subscribers who access mobile retain at a higher rate. On average, digital subscribers who use mobile have a 12 percent lift in one year retention vs subscribers who only use the desktop site (based on 2015 retention of 2014 starts).”

Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ executive vice president for product and technology, summed it up this way: “Part of the reason people subscribe is the breadth of our coverage, not just the depth and the authoritativeness of our reporting. Exposing that breadth is really important.” This is the moral of our little story: There’s a clear line we can draw between better products and growing revenue.

Most of the money comes from a few of the readers

Consider engagement and mobile innovation. While publishers may still talk unique visitors, they have finally come to realize that much of the money in the digital business is still to found from as little as 15 percent of the digital readership. The Times has found that about one out of eight digital readers drive its business. It’s no surprise that the only people who will pay are those who use the product.

So engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to increase prices over time. The Times now has that data, and the engaging nature of its smartphone products aligns nicely with its reader revenue strategy.

Can the Times hit CEO Mark Thompson’s goal of doubling its digital revenue to $800 million by 2020? Yes, according to the numbers I’ve crunched — but only if that engagement with the top 10 percent of the digital audience gets deeper and deeper over time.

This is an old-fashioned business philosophy: Give the customer more when you ask them to pay more. Amazingly, too few publishers today embrace that age-old tenet. The Times’ surpassingly high-quality content is worth the price of admission, but it’s in the product experience itself that the value of that content gets proven out.

In a very real sense, the digital display of news organizations has long masked their wealth of production. When Kinsey Wilson first arrived, and then quickly ascended, I asked him what he was making of the new experience. He said he hadn’t realized the breadth of what the Times produces every day. The Times produces 150 stories a day, 250 on Sunday. Yet most people will only read a minority of those stories.

If the Times can get readers to go deeper, and sideways, it will surprise them with all kinds of content they never knew was buried in the digital ether. In fact, another Times metric — one I haven’t heard cited by other publishers — is that a reader who reads two kinds of content regularly is more likely to become and stay a subscriber than a reader who reads only one, even if the number of pageviews is constant between the two. Variety may not only be the spice of life, but of subscription. As Mark Thompson has put it to me, “We are working the engagement curve.”

On the app, “we have gradually moved away from a more traditional top-story layout to one that is intended to make a statement about what the Times is all about and to give people a sense of the richness that’s there,” Wilson told me recently. “The implication is that the front screen is going to present the breadth and depth of The New York Times, as well as the most important stories of the day.”

In other words, it’s not a newspaper gone digital. It’s something else.

“We look at the way in which headlines and photos are handled so that an in-depth feature or a lighter piece gets a different treatment than a hard news story,” Wilson said. “You also need to build into your layout as much familiarity and predictability as you can, even though news is inherently unpredictable and changes all the time, so readers know what to expect when they go deeper.”

It’s all back to that engagement question, and how hard it is to gain — and keep — readers’ attention.

“There is so much that goes into getting somebody to click on a story,” said Wilson. “First, you need to telegraph as much as you can about what’s in the story that a reader won’t want to miss. One way to do that is to put the most essential element of the story, whether it’s a headline, a photo, or a pull quote, on that front card. We’re not all the way there, but that’s how we are approaching it.”

How the Times got here

It’s been a tortuous path, involving the reworking of content management system tools, newsroom workflow, and product capabilities across the company.

“Our 2015 redesign brought our codebase up to speed in many ways, but also helped us develop new technical and design approaches that we’re now spreading across the platform ecosystem,” Kate Harris, who has directed the Times’ mobile product development for four years, told me. Behind the scenes, it’s product development tools that make a difference. “Over time, we’ve been developing more and more tools to give editors the ability to express a story in a card format.” It’s not a discrete toolbox, ready to be plucked from for a breaking story. It’s more a shared way of doing things, a new newsroom/tech culture still developing.

Credit must go to the too-much-criticized NYT Now (“The newsonomics of NYT Now”). That product, launched in 2014 with a focus on millennials, failed to find a substantial new paying market, but its briefings-based, sharing-oriented way of presenting the news crunched new ground for the Times.

NYT Now founding editor Cliff Levy, who had iterated some of those innovations at a previous experiment (New York Today), deserves a nod here. Wilson credits NYT Now with several major innovations that are now being integrated into the main New York Times:

• Presenting a greater cross-section of what the Times publishes spanning culture, opinion, and sports;
• Using that fuller toolbox of typography, thumbnails and visuals to better express the range of stories offered;
• Presenting a finite list of stories so readers have a sense of completion
• Combining a select list of outside stories with Times content

That should be a four-point checklist for any news publisher. While the Times is the Times, the principles are sound.

The Times’ current smartphone product isn’t an endpoint; there’s plenty of work ahead. While the Times has managed to maintain much of the spunk of the NYT app (iOS and Android) in its browser products, its Kindle app suffers in comparison.

For now, though, the Times not only gives us a new Page One. It offers the first accessible model for the next generation of smartphone-delivered news. Further, it not only repairs the loss we’ve suffered with the decline of print, it points the way — finally — for how digital delivery of news can be smarter, wider, deeper and, eventually, more lucrative than what came before.

Look at the signatures at the bottom of this new Times document and you can see the impact of a year’s changes. CEO Mark Thompson, now moving into his fourth year at the company, has built his own team, and the 10 signatories inked their futures in what we’ll call the 2020 memo. Editor Dean Baquet, chief revenue officer Meredith Levien, and executive vice president for digital products Kinsey Wilson were among those laying out “Our Path Forward,” first in writing, and now in a series of sessions in the Times building with hundreds of staffers.

“We’ve talked to a dozen groups already,” Thompson told me Wednesday. “And we’ve got another dozen to go.”

As media watcher Jay Rosen tweeted:

I just read the new New York Times strategy memo. (No link available yet.) The best thing about it: the tone of institutional confidence.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 7, 2015

The Times does show a confidence, though a budding one. After an often harrowing decade of challenge and change, the Times can move forward assertively, if perhaps not with a much business swagger — the future is still too uncertain a place for that.

As we get to the 2020 memo’s most important number, let’s recall a big one that has hung in media minds from midsummer on: 1 million. The Times officially hit the 1 million digital subscriber mark in August. On one hand, it’s a breathtaking number: What odds could you have gotten back in 2011, when the Times announced its new paywall to a skeptical world, that it would find a million people to pay only for digital access within four years? On the other, it’s just a start. But either way, it’s a number that demonstrates the Times’ new leadership in the news industry and gives it standing to figure out its next future.

The 2020 memo first generated one big headline: “Times sets goal of doubling digital revenue — to $800 million — by 2020.” Then one factoid circulated widely: 12 percent of Times readers deliver 90 percent of its digital revenue. Which led to Baquet’s point of clarity: “We need to focus on our loyal readers.”

The clear link between the two is in the report: “To get there [doubling of revenue], we must more than double the number of engaged digital readers who are the foundation of both our consumer and advertising revenue models.”

Thompson connects the two this way: “I think what’s happened over the last 12 months is a growing understanding — from data science and machine learning — that time spent is one important measure, and that frequency is a very important attribute and very significant predictor of subscription and retention.”

Let’s delve beneath those headlines to the numbers. Let’s do the math on the Times’ big new strategy and see how the Times’ modeling took them to this plan.

That $800 million is a big number, but it seems smaller in context. Currently, the Times generates something more than $400 million in digital-specific revenue a year. To achieve a doubling, the Times must achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% from now to 2020. Importantly, that’s what its digital revenue growth rate must be — not its overall revenue growth, which has been stuck in the neighborhood of zero (“The newsonomics of zero”) for quite a while.

How ambitious is 12.5 percent? Somewhat. The strategy would require the Times to maintain its recent growth rates in both digital advertising and digital subscriptions for the next five years. Consider these recent numbers:

• Digital ad growth rate: In the second quarter, the Times could announce a digital ad growth rate of 14.2 percent. In the first quarter, it came in at 10.7 percent. If 12.5 percent is a new benchmark, then, the first two quarters fall evenly on both sides of it. (We’ll see the 3Q results soon, on Oct. 29.) Look back at 2014 and we see the momentum. Solid digital ad revenue growth began in early 2014, and by the second half of the year, it could show gains of 17 percent in Q3 gain and 19 percent in Q4.
• Digital subscription growth rate: In the second quarter, its digital-only subscription revenue grew 13.8 percent. The first quarter was even better: 14.4 percent. Its 2014 results show similar growth numbers in the teens.

Given that context, we might say that a 12.5 percent benchmark for doubling seems doable. It’s in the ballpark of what now seems possible.

Before we assess what the Times will need to do to make those numbers, let’s look at that second and ultimately more important fact: 12 percent of Times readers deliver 90 percent of its digital revenue.

Stop and take that in.

I began looking at similar numbers last year, and at first I found them astounding. Ask any publisher how well they’re doing in digital, and two numbers immediately tumble out of their mouths: their monthly unique visitors and then monthly pageviews. It’s a business numerically inclined to mass, despite the fact that in the ultimate infinity of news reading on the web, mass matters less and less to most publishers. (Google and Facebook — the new mass media of our day — can successfully work that model.)

My own broad math for newspaper’s digital audience valuation tells a similar tale:

• Reader revenue makes up about about 30 percent of most daily newspapers’ overall revenue. Who contributes that revenue? The huge majority of it comes in from print subscribers. Then there are the all-access (print + digital) subscribers. And then the digital-only subscribers. At most American dailies, that last group makes up only 1 percent or so of their total digital audience; that number is now about 3 percent for The New York Times.
• When we count digital revenue, of course, we count digital ad revenue. There, though, the story is parallel. In my talks with publishers, they tell me that between 40 and 66 percent of all pageviews are generated by just 10 percent of the digital audience. Further, some significant percentage of those heaviest readers are — guess what — also print subscribers.

The takeaway: While the overall digital audience — measured by “unique visitors” who may hit (purposely or otherwise) a measly one page per month — often exceeds the print audience by 20× or 40× or more, it’s only a small part of the audience that meaningfully supports the business and its future. At the Times, that number is 12 percent. Given how few digital-only subscribers local dailies can count, for many of them that number is 10 percent or less.

Of course, then, it makes sense for the Times — and probably everyone else — to focus on the most engaged digital readers. The 2020 memo pledges to do that, but what does it mean?

Mark Thompson ticks off a list of things that heightened attention to new engagement means. Smarter, more personalized presentation to the most engaged. Direct marketing that takes into better account current engagement level. Different kinds of related news presentation that reinforce time spent — and make that time spent worthwhile.

I asked him if it meant moving around resources to back the doubling-of-highly-engaged readers goal. He said he didn’t look at it primarily as a resource quesion. If successful, habituation means pulling the newsroom, the Times’ 50 data scientists, and engineers together around the goal of serving the best customers better. Expect habituation — measured by time spent and frequency, among other measures — to become a major internal metric.

Focusing more on the more engaged won’t mean doing less to find new audiences. The Times has moved strongly, but with more nuance than its reborn rival The Washington Post, to test Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, and the other new mass distributors. It will continue to do so, but will also emphasize internal top-of-mind attention to better serving the best readers.

As we see the connection between more engaged readers and the $800 million goal, what’s on the short list that Times needs to do over the next four years to get there?

What the Times needs to do: Digital advertising

Let’s look at one benchmark for digital ad growth.

According to PWC, overall digital ad growth will run at a CAGR of 12.1 percent through 2019. If the Times needs 12.5 percent to double then, it needs to keep its share of the digital ad market level.

On the optimistic end, Meredith Levien’s major restructuring of the sales organization and strategy is matching that number. One big bet for 2016 and beyond is T Brand Studio (“What are they thinking? Times aims to double its branded content business”). Branded content remains a growth engine and could bring in 15 to 20 percent of overall digital ad revenue as it scales. Branded content, though, is such a new field, with competitors still entering, that its performance is a tough one to bank on.

Then there’s video. Ad rates remain high, and the Times remains ready to take yet another stab at producing high-enough-quality, low-enough-cost video to win big audiences and serve ’em up to advertisers. Expect a big new push in 2016.

The biggest question mark, as it is for almost everyone: mobile.

The advent of ad blockers on iPhones only puts an exclamation point on the mobile ad opportunity question for now. The nature of ad buying and selling will certainly change greatly over the next four years, in ways that no one can yet forecast well.

Given all those factors — many beyond the control of the Times — we can bet that the Times won’t achieve a steady-as-she-goes 12.5 percent annual growth rate. It could well be higher or lower, and could veer more wildly before — someday? — stabilizing.

What the Times needs to do: Digital subscriptions

“Right now, reader revenue seems more predictable [than digital ad revenue],” says Mark Thompson.

Here, the Times feels like it has already climbed a steep learning curve — and it has.

That 1 million subscriber number provides not just confidence, but also oodles of data. The Times has come to understand much more about the who buys what when and at what price points — and about retention, the secret sauce to the digital sub game.

As it moves forward, consider two factors: volume and pricing. Despite some of us (including me) expecting the Times’ digital subscriber total to plateau more quickly than they have, they’ve kept growing nicely. Over time, the company has tested numerous marketing approaches, just recently offering free digital day passes to anyone buying a print newsstand copy, a technique long used in the U.K.

The Times has already picked much of the higher-paying, low-hanging fruit. Loyalists — sold on the Times brand — will pay full price, and can probably be priced up selectively. As the Times passes 1 million, though, its increases in digital-only subscription volume haven’t been matched by increases in digital-only subscription revenue.

In the chart below, we see the Times’ great progress in volume since the introduction of its paywall. We can still see a steady 20 percent increase in year-over-year volume. (Click to enlarge.)

Comparatively, revenue growth comes in at about two-thirds of volume growth, or 13 percent. That tells us that as the Times continues to grow digital reader revenue, it’s having a tougher time maximizing each subscribers’ spend. That’s not unexpected, and it offers opportunities in product, in pricing, and in removing friction from the sign-up process. All are in progress.

Finally, expect the Times to grow into the global shoes it has laid out for itself. One indication of that global reach is its reporting corps; it can now claim the largest number of full-time international correspondents in its history (75), housed in 30 bureaus.

Already, more than 100,000 digital-only subscribers live outside the U.S. — about 12 to 13 percent of the overall total. Some of those pay a lower price. We can expect major moves in serving and attracting non-U.S. audiences, with pricing to match, beginning next year.

All those moves, based on experience, fuel the Times’ optimism about the future of reader revenue.

So how likely is the Times to meet that $800 million 2020 goal? I think we can give it pretty good odds. In fact, Mark Thompson might be being a little conservative with that the number. That would be smart: A goal to double is simple to grasp and meaningful to the marketplace. And as any experienced CEO knows, it’s much better to underpromise and overdeliver than the alternative.

What will 2020 indeed look like? Where will be on print/digital revenue crossover and the relative decline of print? How much of our reading will we do in Times apps or on platforms elsewhere? Those are a few of the many questions we’ll need to ponder as we think about the big question: Will $800 million in digital revenue in 2020 be enough to support the Times in the journalistic style to which we’ve become accustomed?

It turns out that a significant percentage of this diverse group says it’s willing to pay for content, according to research released today by the Media Insight Project. But news is a harder sell than other forms of entertainment, whether digital or not.

The study found that 93 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds surveyed regularly use some type of paid content (whether they’re paying for it personally or someone else is) and 87 percent have personally paid for such services (but that includes things like Netflix, Candy Crush, or iTunes downloads). Forty percent say they have personally paid for some sort of news product or service (though that can also include anything from The New York Times to a gaming magazine. Older millennials were understandably more likely to pay for news than their younger peers. Some other notable findings — with the caveat that all of these data points are self-reported, and that people sometimes like to say they do civic-minded things like pay for news when they don’t:

— More millennials say they’ve paid for print magazines (21 percent) and newspapers (15 percent) than digital magazines (11 percent) and online newspaper content (10 percent).

— No significant socioeconomic differences between those who pay for news and those who do not pay for these services.

— Those paying for news are more likely to follow sports (56 percent vs. 44 percent) and current events such as national politics (51 percent vs. 38 percent) than those who do not pay.

— Those paying for news also tended to engage with the news more on free platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

This is not to say that getting this younger group to pay for news is easy. As one 19-year-old interviewed in the course of the research said: “I really wouldn’t pay for any type of news because as a citizen it’s my right to know the news.”

The data for this study was drawn from a nationally representative survey of 1,045 adults between the ages of 18 and 34, conducted between January 5 and February 2. The Media Insight Project is an initiative of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and you can read the full report with more detailed findings here.

While Amazon has never released the number of its Prime memberships, the latest estimates range from 25 to 40 million. That’s a powerful installed base of customers to expose to the Post offer. The initiative, long in the works, bolsters the Post as a revivified national and global news source, one more competitive to the New York Times, among others. In addition, it opens a new skirmish in the platform wars of 2015, as major platform Amazon puts the Jeff Bezos-owned Post front and center while Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News and Snapchat Discover re-work the mobile presentation of news…

Since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post two years ago, we’ve speculated on how and when he would hook up the power of Amazon to the Post. The most logical connection: Amazon Prime. What began as a $79-a-year, guaranteed-two-day delivery program has grown into one of the country’s biggest membership plays. The Post will be the sixth major benefit offered Prime memberships, after “free” shipping, movies and TV, music, photo storage and a Kindle lending library. Prime membership now costs $99 per year…

In the Prime foray, we see the wider Bezos strategy now playing out more clearly. Unsurprisingly, it is a profoundly Amazonian strategy: Build the customer base for years; reap the profits later. It is, we should note, also the driving philosophy of the Big Three of the digital news world, Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox Media.

“Growth is the fundamental goal,” Steve Hills recently told me. Hills is the Post’s president, who just last week announced his end-of-the-year departure after 28 years at the paper.

Read Ken’s piece for a lot more detail, but a few quick reactions:

— Post access for Prime members is cheap, but not free. Ken argues that won’t be much of a problem:

The new offer will be an easy one for Prime members to accept. Those signing up will get the Post’s National Digital Edition — its national and global coverage — free for six months. Then, they’ll be charged $3.99 per month — indefinitely. That’s a $48-a-year price point, and one that could shake up wider digital news pricing.

That is cheap. (Though not quite as cheap as the 19-bucks-a-year offer the Post was making this summer.) But the difference between free and cheap is a big one. Or, to frame it more accurately, the difference between “being a Prime member for $99 a year” and “being a Prime member for $99 a year and paying another $48 a year for The Washington Post” is not insubstantial. A lot of this will come down to pricing psychology: How well can Amazon convince people to let the price tag fade into their mental backgrounds?

(Note that the Post’s press release about the deal says simply: “Amazon Prime Members Enjoy Digital Access to The Washington Post for Free.” Not “Free For A Few Months Until We Start Charging.” You can get a free trial of Amazon Prime too, but I doubt Amazon would headline a press release “Amazon Customers Now Enjoy Access to Amazon Prime for Free.” Also: That press release also doesn’t mention the name Jeff Bezos anywhere, which is odd.)

Amazon also tells Doctor that “this is a limited time offer,” though it’s unclear what that means — it’s hard to imagine them stepping away from a free-trial model anytime soon.

Perhaps the most interesting issue here, from Amazon’s perspective, is why limit this subscription deal to Prime members? I doubt many people will sign up for Prime just to get a better deal on the Post. It’s possible it’ll help with Prime member retention, though I suspect that benefit will be small. But what about the many millions of non-Prime Amazon customers — should they get a deal too? Will they?

— Prepare not to know how well this works. Amazon doesn’t release any hard data around Prime or its Kindle business, and I fully expect the Post to do the same. Bezos has made it clear he sees no need to share that sort of business information publicly or with outside audit groups.

— The New York Times should be a little more nervous today. The Washington Post, back in the Graham days, famously decided not to commit to national distribution as the Times had. As Sarah Ellison put it in Vanity Fair three years ago:

From the moment he became publisher, in 1979, [Donald Graham] insisted that the newspaper must concentrate on its Washington readers. But not everyone got the message. Inside the Post, there was always a powerful tension between Graham’s view and the view of the newsroom, which, starting with [Ben] Bradlee and for a period of decades, sought to compete on a national stage with The New York Times — and to a significant degree succeeded.

And indeed, the Post made outsized profits in the those final pre-Internet days by building a deeply local product in a city that also happened to be the capital of the world’s superpower. But the Times’ play for a national (and global) audience has reaped dividends. The local news business is a deeply troubled one.

Since buying the Post, Bezos’ strategic moves have largely been about recapturing that national market. His partnership deals with local newspapers have sold the Post as a membership benefit to subscribers around the country. The new apps they’ve developed are focused on a national audience. (The Prime deal won’t include most local news, which means it should limit cannibalization of D.C. subscribers.) Bezos hasn’t talked much about his Post strategy publicly, but see what he said in this Business Insider talk around 46:45:

The big change we’re making at the Post is, the Post was always, even though it had a national and global reputation, the product was a local product. And that was by design, and I think for the time, it was a very good strategy, and the Post as a business was super successful for decades. But that is what we’re changing. We are in the process of remaking the Post in that way so that it can also be — we will continue to do good local coverage in Washington, D.C. — but the Post has the good fortune to be the newspaper of the capital city of the United States of America. And that’s a great place to starting point to being a national and even a global publication.

In terms of strategy, that’s a direct shot at the Times, which has been dominant in that national-general-interest-premium-publisher space. Adding in the scale of other newspaper publishers is one thing, and not a driver of revenue. Adding in a potential national (and global) audience via Prime is a big boost to that effort.

— This is a technology strategy as well as a business one. If you want to produce a national, digital, general-interest news product, you don’t want to be hamstrung by newspaper design, newspaper workflows, and newspaper structures. You want to create something new. That’s just what the Post has been doing, and my Press Publish interview with the Post’s Cory Haik is, in retrospect, a nice window into the sort of restructuring they’ve done to prepare for this moment.

The new Tribune Publishing is made up of eight — and maybe soon to be nine — metro papers spun out of what is now the broadcast-centric Tribune Media last August. It is indeed playing a rough game, and doing so from behind. If you had to pick one segment of the daily newspaper business to bet on, you probably wouldn’t pick metros, which have underperformed even smaller community dailies by about 10 percentage points over the past half-decade. And if you were handed two handfuls of metros, you probably wouldn’t want to operate them within a public company, with shareholders looking for increasing profits, quarter after quarter and year after year. That, though, is precisely, the hand TPUB’s been handed. How Griffin and his team are playing that hand was better revealed today, though still only sketchily. That’s not surprising: In five months as a spun-off company, Griffin has greatly reshuffled his top team, with new publishers in three of the eight markets and several other high-level appointments. At this point — as would be expected — much is still prologue, and we shouldn’t expect this set of numbers to show much progress, which they don’t. It will take another good six to 12 months to judge TPUB’s real progress.

Also as would be expected, though, early reaction of the public markets was a thumbs down. TPUB was off as much as 6 percent earlier today because of, due to a quick (and likely fairly uninformed) reading of the headline numbers, which weren’t surprising. (It did recover a bit toward day’s end, finishing down 2.8 percent; TPUB is down nearly 30 percent from its opening price last August.) Despite the whirlwind of activity that Griffin could point to on the call and in other company interviews, the markets expect financial miracles, a near impossibility in this publishing climate. Jack Griffin is trying to thread a needle, a quite thin one, in the latest attempt to transform the Tribune newspapers, turning tough metro properties into market leaders. It also has to find a way to keep pruning expenses, given revenue shortfalls.

The real issue with TPUB’s transformation, a word Griffin returns to often, is how much it’s a game of catch-up. Many of TPUB’s peer companies have already been executing on similar theories, with overall tepid results. The initiatives all make sense — but even executed at a high level, they produce no better than close-to-flat results, if that. That’s why the industry keeps falling deeper into a money hole (“How deep is the newspaper industry’s money hole?”), losing a couple of points of revenue a year. TPUB’s 2014 overall results are similar.

That catch-up metaphor cuts across all the business initiatives:

• Digital subscriptions: Griffin’s team inherited a mixed bag of digital/all-access subscription efforts. Last year, when I tried to compare what the Orlando Sentinel offered as compared to the L.A. Times, for instance, I found myself confused. Apparently, I wasn’t alone. Griffin says new systems coming into place now reduce a seven- or eight-step (!) signup process to two or three; he is aiming for one or two. “There wasn’t even a subscribe button” on some sites, he says. He says the company is now doing A/B testing as well. All good things — but that’s catch-up.
• Selling multiplatform audience: TPUB, under new chief revenue officer Michael Rooney (formerly of The Wall Street Journal), is making a push to sell audience across print and digital platforms. Again, a smart strategy, but one that others have a head start in implementing. TPUB’s 42 million uniques, across its properties, is impressive — and it’s trying to represent more non-Tribune titles in its ad selling as well — but it’s not a huge number in comparison to so many other available ad networks out there.
• Digital revenue: 11 percent of all TPUB’s revenue is now digital. That’s largely ad-driven, and it’s a number that needs lots of work. For instance, The New York Times now counts 31 percent of all ad revenue as digital, and other daily chains count higher numbers as well. Also of note: Digital revenue overall is essentially flat. That’s a problem, given that digital advertising is growing 13 percent-plus in the U.S.; it’s the major issue confronting Rooney in his fledgling sales reorg.
• Digital services and content marketing: Tribune can point to a current doubling of content marketing clients, and its Jewel-Osco video model is a smart one, bolstered by its investment in Contend. With 22 “custom clients” signed up into 2015 — more than half of what the company served in all of last year — there’s a lot of upside. Again, though, doubling a tiny business, at this point, still adds relatively small dollars. Likewise, in digital marketing services, Tribune showed a whopping 54 percent increase — but, given, its small size, that amounts to only $8 million.

Griffin noted in his 2015 outlook the possibility of more “bolt-on” acquisitions. TPUB’s purchase of Maryland and suburban Chicago properties have already netted $5 million in increased earnings; expect $10-12 million in added earnings this year, due to those buys. TPUB’s got a bit of cash for more acquisitions, and as I reported Monday (“Tribune in final bidding for U-T San Diego”), it’s hot on the trail of a ninth metro property, U-T San Diego, at a likely purchase price of $85 to 90 million. TPUB’s metro bet isn’t for the fainthearted.

Take a look at TPUB’s overall 2014 performance, and you see a lot of red ink:

• Earnings down by $20 million on an adjusted basis, to $160 million. Without the adjustments, TPUB shed $55 million in earnings, but the company’s split and less good deals the company now has to manage in digital recruitment (CareerBuilder) and digital car classified (Cars.com) take a real — if predictable — toll here.
• Total revenues down 4.9 percent.
• Total ad revenues down 8.7 percent.
• Preprint ad revenues down 8.9 percent.
• Circulation revenue managed to find a bit of black at 1.4 percent up.
• Expenses are flat, reflecting both zero-based budgeting and small, targeted investments in the strategy.

Those numbers speak broadly to the overall down market — but also of metro papers’ particularly poor performance. Griffin offered his outlook for full year 2015, forecasting largely flat earnings, with revenues a bit up — and costs down another $65 to 70 million. The revenue forecast is what stands out — it will be quite tough to pull off.

Where might that cost-cutting come from? Chief financial officer Sandy Martin cites “centralized procurement” as the No. 1 suspect; as Tribune, like so many of its peers still, finds “waste”, operating individual properties too individually. Editorial headcount isn’t on the hit list, though given market pressures, reduction in overall FTEs through technology and centralization, should be expected. Griffin gave a shout-out to good journalistic work in both Chicago and L.A., and reiterated: “The lifeblood is content.”

A few more takeaways from Tribune’s numbers:

• Digital-only subscribers stand at 61,000 — across all eight papers. That’s a small number, given the readerships and markets of L.A., Chicago, Baltimore, and more. Yet it’s up 24 percent year-over-year, 11 percent quarter-over-quarter. Again, that’s indicative of good recent execution — after years of stagnation. But there are a couple of standalone metros that themselves approach that 61,000 number.
• Moving from anonymous to known: The number of registered digital readers is up (24 percent) to 3.2 million, and activation — getting print subscribers to “activate” and then actually use digital products — is up as well. Those are good markers, fundamentals of what a successful digital business needs to invest in.
• TPUB’s in-sourced printing and production business is slowing down. In part, that’s because of lost business from the termination of its deal with the Orange County Register in L.A. But in general, the general decline of print is now sapping what has been a go-go revenue and profit source for bigger papers from coast to coast. TPUB’s commercial print and delivery business moved down 9.4 percent year-over-year, symbolic of a wider trend of print’s overall disappearing act pulling down all print-related revenues, not just print advertising (“Jim Moroney’s digital-reaching Dallas Morning News”).

Today, Politico, which he cofounded in 2007, has taken that newsletter metaphor and inflated it into one of the most successful digital news startups in the U.S., now employing 244 journalists and 431 people in total. At the start of 2015, Politico is at a turning point, as cofounders VandeHei (now CEO) and John Harris (now editor-in-chief) focus on company growth and increasingly turn over the daily operating reins to others — prompting organizational change and some turmoil.

Politico now goes both global and local, extending its influence and its model as far as Berlin and Warsaw and as close as Tallahassee. This spring, Politico Europe will launch, a 50/50 partnership with German media powerhouse Axel Springer. And fresh off last week’s announcement of Politico hiring ace Miami Herald political columnist Marc Caputo, Politico Florida is poised to take off — soon to be joined by other state-focused Politicos. Politico has even named a executive vice president for expansion — a title I haven’t seen anywhere elsewhere in the news business. (Danielle Jones took on that post in October.)

Politico Europe is a noteworthy effort on several levels; the state-focused Politicos may be more surprising. Politico’s launch eight years ago was met, predictably, with great skepticism within the news industry. A “government vertical”? Daily newspaper’s websites saw little value in political news; we heard that advertisers wanted health, tech, sports, and other areas of more passionate interest — not tired, old boring government news, the kind newspapers had long stuffed into their metro sections out of a sense of public service and reflex. Starting with a little tab newspaper circulating among a valuable group of politicos around D.C.’s influentials, Politico turned conventional wisdom on its ear, reinventing “politics” and “policy” and beginning to grow.

Then last year, the company — owned and continually invested in by Robert Allbritton, a scion of the family that once owned the Washington Star, who sold off his broadcast TV assets in 2013 for $985 million — ventured beyond Washington. It bought Capital New York, a four-year-old government- and media-oriented start-up, finding kindred editorial partners and a new place to apply the unique Politico business model. (Full disclosure: In addition to my work here at Nieman Lab, I’ve recently started a new column for Capital New York. My interest in Politico and its model, though, is a longstanding one, including a 2013 Lab post, “The newsonomics of influentials, from D.C. to Singapore to Raleigh.”)

What’s are the ideas fueling the expansion? “The most important meta-takeaway is this: There’s a big block of influential high-end readers who want to read high-end, nonpartisan political and policy content, and there’s a good chunk who will pay a significant amount. If you deliver the goods, there’s a market there, for ads and for subscriptions, and we’re now plunging into events,” says VandeHei, who talks about building a durable company, “deeper into Washington, broader into the states and globally” — and one that can last 25 years.

Can you apply the Politico model to New York? It’s not the country’s political nerve center, but it’s the center of so much else, so maybe evolving ads/premium subscriptions/events there could work. But Florida — or perhaps Illinois or Texas or California? In the nation’s capitols, statehouse coverage has seen major cutbacks, with dailies cutting staff and expenses. We’ve seen dedicated local journalists try to fill the vacuum, though in too few places. The Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and the Center for Investigative Reporting (in California) have gotten some notice for their statehouse investments, and there are smaller outfits that have gotten less attention, but deserve recognition, including Maryland Reporter, NJ Spotlight, WyoFile, and the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Collectively, these sites have replaced some of what newspapers cut.

In fact, the biggest news in this kind of coverage slipped out in December. The Associated Press, newly reenergized as CEO Gary Pruitt has righted its finances, announced building out statehouse coverage as a major priority. In all, AP has hired 13 statehouse reporters over the past year; some are jobs that had been vacant, some new positions. In addition, AP says it will add about “40 additional contract reporters to cover legislative sessions” this year, in addition to its regular staff. That’s significant — and welcome — firepower, but it won’t compete in consumer product terms with Politico’s undertaking.

Why? Politico’s model is a smart one, and one I’ve urged daily newspaper companies to consider (to little success). It’s a three-headed revenue model, and the important part is Politico Pro. While, at birth, Politico immediately mined advocacy advertising, and still does well it, it soon figured out it is categorizable influentials that could prime the pumps of each of the three revenue streams — with Pro at the center of the business and responsible for driving its spurt of editorial hiring.

The diversification of Politico’s revenue breakdown is the envy of many news companies: roughly 40 percent Politico Pro subscriptions, roughly 50 percent advertising, and about 8 percent events.

What exactly is the Pro model, and why does the company believe in may be extendable to Sacramento, Austin, Springfield, and Frankfurt?

In 2011, Politico launched three Pro products, in health, tech, and energy (“Politico Pro grows to 1,000 subscribing orgs, moves into print”). At last count, it offers 14, a model that it’s adapting in New York. The Pro products are aimed at insiders: people in the topical fields who want to know the more important details immediately, with as much context for potential decision-making as possible. Individuals can pay four or five figures per year for the actionable intel, but customers are more likely to be companies buying licenses to allow a certain number of their staffers to have access. In short: Figure out who’s got the checkbook and will open it for what kind of content. Here, too, the pricing model is no invention; it sits atop LexisNexis-like practices long used in the B2B marketplace.

Though only four years old, Pro drives four out of every 10 dollars earned, and VandeHei says Politico hopes to get Pro to 50 percent of revenues in the near future. That’s hugely important in the digital news business: Reader support is far more durable than the vagaries of digital advertising. In addition, Politico is seeing a 95-plus percent renewal rate for Pro. Finally, Pro connects to the growing events business and offers advertisers proof of reader engagement.

How big and fast will the Politico advance into states be? VandeHei says his team will finish figuring that out in the next couple of weeks. Expect a number of launches this year, with staff numbering in the handfuls in the big ones. The initial hiring of Marc Caputo in Florida is instructive; he’ll be doing a Florida Playbook, a descendant of Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook that initially defined the site’s aggressiveness and immediacy.

The biggest question for Politico in the states is how big a staff and business each state can support? What are the sectors in each that will pay for dedicated Pro coverage? That’ll be tested this year. If it finds success, we’ll once again have to ask the question of the U.S.’s major metros: Why haven’t they built anything similar of their own?

If the state-level opportunity is hard to figure out, the European opportunity is less so. The European Union is about 66 percent greater than the U.S. population, at 500 million. It’s a big potential market for Politico’s model — if it it can be transplanted into MittelEurope. Europe’s press — in political, business and general news — is massive, and struggles with all the same business issues as we do in North America. Politico’s play centers around crossing boundaries; the EU by its very nature is a boundary crosser. With bureaus in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, Politico Europe will try to connect dots that others haven’t, weaving together politics and policy and explaining their implications.

That’s a tall order for a news startup moving into a place where American digital imperialism is something felt, not liked. Politico isn’t Google or Facebook — two prime targets of European scrutiny — but it is another case of Americans believing they have a superior digital formula.

VandeHei and Harris see that challenge. In part to counter it, Politico signed on to a 50/50 partnership with German media powerhouse Axel Springer, which itself has been exiting print assets (“The newsonomics of the German press’ tipping year”) and diversifying. Just this morning, Springer announced that it was leading a new $25 million funding round for Business Insider’s expansion; Jeff Bezos is also part of that investment group.

Springer provides Politico with a card of introduction in Europe as it sets up shop. Smartly, the new joint venture bought the weekly European Voice (circulation 16,000), providing both a beachhead for operations and a platform for growth — “it’s a campus newspaper for insiders,” as VandeHei puts it, the campus being the rich one of European governance.

Politico Europe will launch — in English — with a staff of about 30 in the second quarter; a German language site is likely next up. Expect it to grow to 60 to 70 before too long, under what we may call the Politico Doctrine, or use of “overwhelming force. Better reporters, more reporters, so we can dominate an area,” as VandeHei said in Europe in December.

It’s a $10 million joint venture. These are two strong companies, but 50/50 ventures often end in tears, and this one will be closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic — and a big test of how extendable the Politico Pro B2B model is beyond the District of Columbia.

Back in the American capital, it will be curious to see how the newest Politico evolves as it grows and Harris and VandeHei move away from the day-to-day. A year and a half ago, VandeHei and Harris hired Susan Glasser to head its “new long-form journalism and opinion divisions.” Glasser, a Washington Post veteran, had won numerous national magazine awards at Foreign Policy, transforming a tired title. Flash forward: Glasser has now become editor-in-chief of Politico overall, named to the job in September. Already, Politico’s magazine strives to match the best of the East Coast’s thought-leader journals, and a hiring spree (the most recent one here) is changing the kinds of pieces Politico produces. It’s seen great staff turnover, with as many as 40 staffers leaving, in addition to the hiring, predictable given both its growth and new leadership. (Erik Wemple details the organizational angst, both before and after Glasser’s appointment, in the Post: “Politico editor Susan Glasser: We’re in a ‘period of growth and rising ambition.”) Politico now finds itself in the fierce hunt for top-end journalistic talent, both losing and gaining staff as the bidding increases. There’s also a union organizing effort underway.

The new Politico is certainly open to criticism — but readers and critics alike find a much different product to critique today than even two years ago. For some, it’s been too “inside the Beltway.” Others disparage it for covering the horse race of politics better than the substance of governing. Some peg it to the left; others to the right. Whatever the truths of these observations, in its sheer breadth, the new Politico now emerges to do more of more kinds of things.

Isn’t that what the news business, startup and legacy, should be about? Last week, I wrote about the newspaper industry’s “money hole,” attributing it to too much samethink and too little step-out-from-the-crowd innovation — innovation in this case including adapting others’ good ideas, not necessarily inventing whole new ones. That’s what Politico has done, from its newsletter model to its Pro pricing. As VandeHei acknowledges: “We didn’t invent anything here.”

In our recovering economy, companies that have a sense of (and confidence in) the future express that by investing in innovation. We’ve seen a few of those investments — but mainly by venture capitalists intending to cash out well short of Politico’s 25-year timeframe. Politico’s expansion shouldn’t be a rarity, but in 2015, it is.

Last week, the company debuted Contributor, an experimental platform that lets people pay publishers for visiting a site. Instead of buying a subscription, readers put $1 to $3 a month into an account that is used to pay publishers on a per-visit basis. Currently 10 sites are participating in the experiment, including Mashable, The Onion, Science Daily, and wikiHow (others have not been announced by Google).

The way it works is that each publisher gets the equivalent of the market rate for an ad shaved off their contribution each time they visit a site, according to Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville. Users can support their favorite website and enjoy an ad-free (or at least Google-ad-free) reading experience. People using Contributor get a NSFW-looking pixelated box in the familiar ad slots on a page, along with a message thanking them for contributing.

Contributor is currently invite-only, but the project has the potential to be expanded out to more publishers and a broader collection of users, Faville told me. “A healthy web depends on healthy publishers,” she said.

Whether or not banner ads are dead, media companies of all sizes are trying to invest in new ways of making money. According to Paul Cafiero, a spokesman for Mashable, the company is curious to see what the experiment with Google yields.

“Mashable is continuously experimenting with new platforms, formats, and technologies to provide our audience with the best possible experience,” said Cafiero. “We are excited to work with Google in this experimentation phase of Contributor to test out this new form of ad distribution.”

Contributor is one of a number of reader-revenue options a publisher can use alongside advertising, events and other sources. A number of publishers like The Next Web have already experimented offered ad-free reading as a premium, subscription-level service. Getting funded by the crowd is also becoming a popular strategy, through sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo that offer easy mechanisms for supporting passion projects. Artists, inventors, and established companies are appealing to the audience’s wallets.

Contributor is the latest in a line of efforts from Google to reach out to an industry that has seen it as an adversary at best and a thief at worst. In September, YouTube introduced Fan Funding, which lets viewers throw a few dollars towards video producers.

Google Consumer Surveys is another kind of paywall alternative for publishers, asking readers to answer questions in exchange for access, with Google paying publishers per response. So far, the survey system has remained small, favored by medium-to-small news organizations.

One of Google’s original experiments in paying for content was One Pass, a transaction tool that let readers pay for their news subscriptions through Google Checkout. Debuting in 2011, One Pass was seen as an alternative to Apple’s Newsstand that offered ease of use and fluid transactions without Apple’s 30 percent cut.

One Pass failed to catch on, with only a handful of publishers using the system before it was shuttered a year later.

Then, as now, Google faced a problem convincing publishers to work with them. Even as the company has courted favor with the media by branding its products as tools for journalism, they remain a target from publishers who say Google search wields too much power over the distribution of content.

Faville said Google is committed to finding ways to help publishers support their work. If Contributor proves successful they might expand it to more partners, she said. “This is another experiment in that same vein in looking at different models in helping publishers fund their content,” she said.

The idea was that, rather than shut a lot of good content off from the free web, maybe you could increase digital revenue by creating a “premium” experience — a nicer look, getting rid of ads — and charging people 12 bucks a month to access it. As the DMN story notes, the premium experience was also “launched with promises of personalization and loyalty programs to come later,” which never really materialized.

I appreciate the Morning News’ willingness to stray from the newspaper norm in seeking revenue. It was an early leader in wringing more revenue out of its most loyal print subscribers; it’s tried out multiple approaches to a free targeted daily product; that paywall strategy went against the grain. But you could see this result coming a Texas mile away. The premium site was not some beautiful, immersive experience — it was aggressively ugly and a pain to navigate. I found it actively worse than the non-premium site, and far from good enough an offering to drive payment. From last fall:

All Dallas Morning News articles: free! All articles laid out onto rectangles with photo backgrounds: $143/year http://t.co/U5ZZWk3c4e

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 30, 2013

@saila Just frustrating. It’s my old paper! I love it! And this seems dumb. Hope I’m wrong!

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 30, 2013

My rough early estimate for how many people will pay for the DMN’s “premium” visual version of the same stories is 0 http://t.co/U5ZZWk3c4e

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 30, 2013

@abeaujon Bottled water offers convenience and portability. Those are real things! This is rectangles.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 30, 2013

@abeaujon I am totally on board with the idea that dropping the paywall could be smart. Not on board with what the premium here offers.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 30, 2013

For some more background and details, see this blog post from D Magazine, which features a good insider-juice-laden comment from Dallas journalist Eric Celeste, which I’ll just copy-and-paste here:

• It’s hard to know what lessons were learned by The News because so much of what went wrong here was a result of disorganization instead of strategy. The central question the premium site tried to answer — would people money for a better web experience (what they internally called a “velvet-rope experience”) — was never answered because that experience never materialized. This was partly due to the suicidal timeline the project employed (which caused all other digital projects current and future to be neglected) but also because some elements were never rolled out. The experiment was supposed to have three components (what Dyer would often call “three legs of the stool”): 1) a better looking site; 2) one with little-to-no ads; 3) one that offered significant subscriber perks. The third part — which was Dyer’s responsibility — never really happened. [I’d argue the first never happened either. Dyer here is chief marketing officer Jason Dyer. —Josh] They imagined offering Christmas card photos taken for you by Pulitzer-winning photogs, or game-watching parities with beat writers. They ended up offering T-shirts. That was part of the problem. The other:

• The marketing/sales folks who were effing this cat never got newsroom buy-in. Top newsroom folks were against the premium site from Day 1. Once the premium site went live and starting siphoning traffic (not much, but some) from the basic site, the newsroom freaked. Understandable, since you were diluting the newsroom’s only real measure of success. And even if you think big gray corporate newsrooms need disruption, you’re not going to convince them when your efforts fail spectacularly. The number of non-subscribers who actually came to the premium site, looked around, and said, “I’ll pay for this” was “a fingers-and-toes” number, I was told today.

• The News is not thinking right now about how to squeeze more money out of subscribers. It’s just trying to find a way to reach a mobile audience so it can THEN figure out how to then monetize it. The mobile efforts to which Dyer refers is just a mobile version of the premium site — I know, I know, at least this time everyone will get it for free. But there is a comprehensive, integrated (advertising/newsroom/marketing/subscription) strategy being put in place for a mobile-first platform that should start rolling out this fall and continue for a few years. It’s another valiant effort by the DMN to be nimble, to figure this new-media landscape out before it kills them. But first …

• They have to do what Dyer wrongly says they’ve done: Take valuable lessons from their failures. The DMN learned NOTHING from this it didn’t already know. The paper learned it with its paywall, and its tablet app, and when it tried to charge for high-school scores: People won’t pay for content that is ubiquitous, and the newsroom will (perhaps rightly) sabotage any effort that doesn’t get its reporters the biggest audience possible.

Now, a quarter century after those early driving days, the Orange County Register owner and publisher is displaying his latest errant skills behind the wheel. On Tuesday, the Register — not long ago a poster child for confident community news investment and a revival of targeted print — slashed and burned some more, raising new questions about its very viability in the year ahead.

The immediate news confirms that many of the warning signs of the last six months were very real:

• A mandatory, company-wide, two-week furlough that employees must take before the end of July.
• Buyout packages offered to as many as 100 newsroom employees. The package is less generous than the one offered in January, which saw a headcount cut of 30. It includes one week of pay for each year worked at the Register, to a maximum of 20, but no company-paid COBRA health care extension this time around. Journalists must make a decision on the offer by Monday evening, a few hours after a Kushner-led “Town Hall” meeting earlier in the afternoon. If the company doesn’t hit its targets, expect layoffs, with lower severance packages to be the standard.
• Immediate layoffs in sales, in the name of “restructuring to ensure sustainable, cost-effective growth.”
• The Long Beach Register, the paper’s first big expansion, is being scaled way back. The L.B. Register moves from a six-day edition to largely being absorbed within the newly launched L.A. Register (“Six things to consider about the new L.A. Register”). On Sundays, a Long Beach-only section will wrap around the L.A. Register and be delivered, for free, to a select 61,000 Long Beach households, in addition to the relatively few subscribers the Register has picked up there.

As a package, the announcement — delivered by email, without a newsroom meeting — shocked the company. It’s a big red flag, screaming we’re running out of money really soon, following numerous months of yellow flags.

Even as Aaron Kushner surprised everyone with an announced plan to publish an L.A. Register in December, those yellow flags had already started to pop up.

Two months earlier, it announced the purchase of the neighboring Riverside Press-Enterprise for $27 million from A.H. Belo. Before the deal finalized around Thanksgiving, Kushner suffered public embarrassment as the high-wire act required to locate the cash and close the deal became clear. Then, in January, weeks after the L.A. Register announcement, the Register took 32 jobs out of the newsroom and saw its four top newsroom leaders, including longtime editor Ken Brusic, quit, in something between protest and pure emotional resignation. Who would staff the Los Angeles Register — serving a three-times-larger population in neighboring L.A. County — if jobs were being cut in Orange County? Forty or so staffers soon were prepped to be sent over the county line; no new journalism jobs were to be added.

About the same time, its much ballyhooed five-day-a-week print community sections — colorful and well designed, the centerpiece of its community reporting investment — went back to weekly.

Throughout it all, we knew that Freedom Communications, the parent company that Kushner and his business partner Eric Spitz had bought out of bankruptcy two years ago, was a pencil-thin financial operation. Even as it’s tried to innovate, expand, and impress among the multiple challenges of modern-day, digital-disrupted journalism, it’s had little cushion. It had only $6 million on hand in November. Payrolls reportedly weren’t easy to make, though the publicity machine rolled on. In May, it once again made payroll, but you can assume not by much. Now the paper’s vendors are seeing slower payments. Then, Tuesday, this seemingly panicked lurch back to massive — and immediate — cost-cutting.

The yellow flags have turned red. What happened?

First, we can look at the strategy — and some observers question how much there has been one all along — and see a series of lurches.

Take the Long Beach Register as just one example. Last July 15, Kushner announced that he was moving into Long Beach, a large and always-somewhat-separate community of 465,000 just over the Orange County border in L.A. County. He’d be doing so with a staff of 20 journalists — doing it right, investing in journalism, smartly leveraging the Register’s presentation workflows, editing hubs, and sales staff — and proclaiming to Long Beachites that the new five-day-a-week would become their trusted new community paper. The paper launched on Aug. 19. On Nov. 24, its new Sunday edition hit the streets.

Six months later, the experiment is dramatically reduced, the promise quickly changed.

It seemed like the Register’s strategy in Long Beach matched that of its original Orange County investment. Kushner’s early hiring spree expanded a recession/bankruptcy-damaged newsroom of 188 to as many as 400. Today, it stands at 345. His promise to readers, advertisers, and the communities the Register serves: “We care deeply about Orange County’s communities, and the best way to help them grow and connect the people of each city to one another is to cover them with greater depth and frequency.”

The strategy: Rebuild the product. Boost subscription pricing. Reap the ad benefits.

Then the Riverside buy offered a different strategy: regional consolidation. Not a bad idea on paper, but fundamentally different than the OC/Long Beach plan.

Then, the L.A. Register plan — by removing O.C. resources and adding no new ones — flew in the face of the original strategy (“The newsonomics of the Orange County Register’s new, newer, newest plan”).

All of these moves, amid financial tightness, occurred in rapid succession. Amazingly, Kushner’s and Spitz’ revolution has spun itself into a hole in less than two years — they took possession of the paper on July 26, 2012.

A few months ago, I asked Aaron Kushner how long would it take to really replace the incumbent Long Beach Press-Telegram as the go-to news source of Long Beach? Kushner told me it was a 10-year play, acknowledging that no matter how good a product you put into the marketplace, it takes time to change reading habits.

Six months later, the strategy is changed again.

Second, the Kushner contrarian business strategy hasn’t worked. The over-investment in print, as print continues to slowly die off, and the under-investment in digital, has only exacerbated the effect of ownership’s poor driving habits.

The enthusiasm of Kushner and Spitz is hard to dislike. In a short period, they’ve brought numerous good marketing ideas forward (“The newsonomics of Aaron Kushner’s virtuous circles”). But those have been swamped by the many issues of money and management. That newsroom, built up to a level of 375, may be down to 245 soon. That’s still more than 50 greater than when Kushner and Spitz took it over, but several dozen of those 245 are interns and trainees, young journalists with more enthusiasm than experience covering their communities. Certainly, a case can be made for the massive change in the staffing, but the problem that now dogs the O.C. duo is credibility. How can they convince readers, advertisers, staffers, and their communities that they are really invested for the long haul?

Overall, it’s been a down year for those looking for out-of-the-box models to local newspapering.

First, AOL’s Tim Armstrong finally succumbed to investor pressures and jettisoned Patch late last summer. Though the new privately held Patch still employs 65 journalists, and had The New York Times buy its turnaround story, its model-making days seem long ago. Digital First Media’s digital-first revolution has been suspended, as its owners prepare for sale. Advance’s day-cutting fervor is producing new problems along with its new solutions. Now, the Freedom revolution seems more like a school play than a way forward for the industry. Big broad ideas, though sexy, may matter less in rebuilding the news business than brick-by-brick, block-by-block work.

Finally, the wider area — the Register’s playbox of southern California — emerges as ground zero in whatever comes next for metro newspapering. Tribune is about to spin off Tribune Publishing and its L.A. Times; its eventual fate and ownership is unknown. The Los Angeles News Group, soon to be up for sale by Digital First Media, faces its own uncertainties. And now, we have to wonder what the next turn of the Register will be.

Will it be further cut back, or be able to cajole new investment, or be sold, or embark on court-supervised restructuring? All are possible. One thing’s likely: We probably won’t have to wait too long for next act.

As we look forward to the second half of the year, we already know some of the big stories to watch, and leadership will be key to those. How will the spun-off Tribune and Time Inc. companies do, and how will they be led? As Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post reaches the one-year mark, will the revolutionary disruptor announce any shape-shifting moves for the Post — moves which might serve as models for his besieged new brethren? Who will buy the dozens of former MediaNews and Journal Register properties that Digital First Media will be putting on the block?

But let’s focus on the major changes we’re seeing now instead of looking ahead. It’s been a season of positioning, movements less seismic than slowly shifting. It’s a season that is seeing a lot of housecleaning and — barely noticed — the crumbling of some of the newspaper industry’s vestigial structures. Let’s start there, with one announced dissolution, and then check in on three other storylines involving many of the long-established players in the U.S. daily industry.

The wires business recedes farther into the 20th century.

Once there was a flourishing “supplemental” wires business — all those wires that complemented the Associated Press (and, long ago, United Press International). The epoch spoke to the robustness of the news business. Many newspaper companies invested in content, both using it themselves and finding buyers among their newspaper peers. It wasn’t unusual for a half a dozen wires to flow into news desks every day. Back in the ’90s, we counted how much content flowed into the St. Paul Pioneer Press each day and how much of it we used. We printed just 5 percent of what we received.

Retired Scripps Howard News Service editor Peter Copeland neatly recounts a two-decade tale of consolidation and loss.

In the 1990s, McClatchy had a news service that was mostly in the West. They didn’t want to operate it anymore, so Scripps Howard set up a deal to start a Scripps-McClatchy Western Wire run out of the Scripps Howard News Service office. When I took over SHNS, the Western Wire was not doing well, so I folded it into SHNS. In 2006, McClatchy bought Knight Ridder and the old KRT [Knight Ridder Tribune] became MCT, and McClatchy was back in the wire business. LAT-WP [Los Angeles Times-Washington Post] broke up, and LAT went to MCT. WP joined up with Bloomberg. Along the way the Cox News Service disappeared; so did the Hearst News Service, Christian Science Monitor and the Newhouse News Service. Then, SHNS sold out to MCT. Then, McClatchy sold out to Tribune. I didn’t think that Tribune would be the last one standing.

Whew.

Tribune and McClatchy announced that latest move last week, with McClatchy selling its half share.

We know that Tribune — which has long run the business side of the wire but will now take over editorial operations as well – is consolidating the wire in Chicago. Layoffs of the D.C.-based editing staff are in progress, though it’s important to point out that both McClatchy and Tribune will maintain their D.C. reporting bureaus.

We can expect that the Chicago Tribune will leverage its position as a central hub for the current Tribune chain in reorganizing what will become a Tribune wire. Tribune has already said it would meld the operation into the Tribune Content Agency. So what has been a roughly break-even venture will become part of a profit center. Expect new packaged products, something the Chicago Tribune has gained in proficiency in over the past several years.

How will the hundreds of newspaper clients of the wire react? Will the fact that it will soon be more a Tribune company than a quasi-coop (some newspapers contribute content to the wire as well as receive it) make any difference to them?

The move tells us a lot about newspapers and content. The supplemental wires have remained largely print-oriented, and as newspapers have finally gone more local in print and cut newsprint overall, there’s less space for wire copy. In addition, relatively few newspapers have made effective use of this niche-y content — the McClatchy Tribune wire has distinguished itself with strong features across a variety of topics — in their digital products, one of the failures of imagination evidenced over the years. Now new syndicators like NewsCred bring new models of audience-targeting content licensing to the marketplace. Wires fade into the history books.

Gannett is now an advertising company.

Last June, when the largest U.S. newspaper publisher bought Belo TV stations, I said that Gannett had become a TV company. Now, with the latest likely move — buying Cars.com outright from its newspaper partners — we’ll have to adjust that description (“The Newsonomics of selling Cars.com”).

The best new description may be this: Gannett is an advertising company. Of course, it’s always been a major ad seller, but as its newspaper ad revenue has cratered along with the rest of the industry’s — down more 50 percent over the last seven years — the company has looked for new ways to generate replacement profit.

Adding the Belo TV stations to longstanding Gannett Broadcasting made it one of the top four broadcast players in the country. Just yesterday, it bought six more Texas stations to add to its standing. The logic: Broadcast may be maturing, but it’s not gasping for its breath like newspapers are.

The Belo deal meant that Gannett would plan to see two-thirds of its operating income come from broadcast, a dramatic turnaround once for what was once the plumpest of cash newspaper cows.

That broadcast money is mostly advertising, bolstered by a healthy stream of retransmission fees paid by cable and satellite companies — though those fees are increasingly under legal and competitive pressure.

Now if it completes the Cars.com deal, it will add as much as $350 million in additional advertising revenue to its mix. (I expect Gannett will partner with private equity to buy Cars.com, which may complicate the accounting.)

Add it up, and we get to the ad company definition. We can figure that at least 75 percent of Gannett’s revenues will be ad dependent. While that’s better than being an ad-dependent newspaper company, such a reliance could be problematic. Digital disruption is slowly eroding the broadcast ad business. While Cars.com has an enviable No. 2 position in its sector, its new competition will come from all sides, known and unknown. The question for Gannett’s shareholders, and employees: Has the company charted a strategically defensible future, or just bought a few years of time?

As Gannett finalizes its Cars.com buy, exiting the business ownership will be McClatchy, along with Tribune, A.H. Belo, and Graham Holdings. All those companies exited Apartments.com earlier in the year, selling to private equity. Group the three transactions — Cars.com, Apartments.com, and the McT wire dissolution — and we see the partnership culture of an earlier generation fading fast.

New national news networks are forming.

Look back in time 20 years and you’ll find plenty of ideas for creating a reader-accessible site for most newspaper-produced content: a portal for all the news from the country’s 1,350 or so dailies. Start with New Century Network, one such mid-’90s effort that hardly left the gate. Knight Ridder’s Real Cities was a pretender as well. At various times, Yahoo News has aggregated lots of newspaper content.

Still, in 2014, there’s no simple-to-use, single place to go for to tap into newspaper content overall. This year, we see new stirrings.

Expect to see the next upgrade of the Associated Press’ AP Mobile app soon. Since its launch in 2008, it’s been an intriguing product, embracing that broad expansive network notion. AP identified the green fields of mobile early and convinced hundreds of newspapers to contribute to the mobile-only product. AP Mobile gets impressive traffic, but mainly to its own national and global content; local content drives less than 20 percent of its traffic. The key going forward will be the user experience: How do you present many firehoses of reader-relevant national and local daily content in a way that makes sense, especially on a tiny smartphone screen?

Consider, also, the new Washington Post network plan. The idea: Allow newspaper partners to show Washington Post content to their own subscribers. Certainly, it’s small today, and nothing like an all-inclusive network; a half-dozen newspapers — The Dallas Morning News, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, The Toledo Blade, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — have signed on. The business deal: Affiliates offer up otherwise paywalled Post access (without additional cost), increasing their own reader value propositions. The Post gains more ad inventory. No money changes hands.

Post president Steve Hills tells me that the program will expand rapidly, intending to serve “multiple millions” of the roughly 30 million U.S. newspaper subscriber population. Although Hills says there are no plans to create a single authenticated user experience, we can see how the Post network could grow into such a product – and do so within paid digital circulation strategies. If we expect new Post owner Jeff Bezos to break some traditional business molds at some point, wouldn’t such a networked approach be a logical one? The potential of an integrated iTunes for News experience may be in the back of the Bezos brain.

Then, there’s the newly launched Dutch Blendle model. It’s innovative, and it pushes into the one area that the Netherlands dailies would allow for aggregation: pay per article. Blendle is aiming at other markets, though don’t expect it to land on American shores soon.

The obstacles to creating a state-of-the-art network experience are formidable. How do you avoid cannibalizing reader revenue in an age of individual paywalls? How do you share new revenue, and how do you give readers what they really want? They may be insurmountable. Further, the growth of compelling news content well beyond newspapers is so great that it’s possible a newspaper-only product no longer makes sense. Still, expect the dream to be pursued.

The new News Corp’s colicky infancy

Last week’s News Corp’s financials told us the company hasn’t yet figured out its post-spin-out way forward. The big number: Down 9 percent in its news and information segments, with both ad revenue and reader revenue down. Even with some allowance for currency impacts, the results lag its peers.

While the problems of News Corp can be found on three continents (Australia, U.K., and U.S.), it’s the American face-off with The New York Times that must grate Rupert the most. So far, the Thompson vs. Thomson face-off I described as both companies hired new CEOs has gone in favor of BBC transplant, NYT CEO Mark Thompson. Compare The New York Times’ recent growth (“New numbers from the New York Times”), in both ad and reader revenue, to News Corp and you see one company in modest turnaround, the other still looking for it.

There are a couple of reasons to believe this battle is still in the very early stages.

As it released its problematic numbers, News Corp announced the expected appointment of Will Lewis as CEO of Dow Jones, removing his “interim” title. The early reports on Lewis’s DJ/Wall Street Journal are good ones. The damage done by Lewis’ predecessor as CEO, Lex Fenwick, though, will take at least a few quarters to repair, even as the wider competitive marketplace around Dow Jones moves on rapidly. Lewis’ listening tour is now over, and the painful reconstruction of the company’s Factiva/B2B business has begun.

How painful? News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the B2B do-over this way on the financials call: “At Dow Jones, where we had obvious difficulties with our business-to-business offering, the team has started to stabilize the institutional revenue and refined our product and pitch.” That’s painfully honest, with a tad of spin. Product and pitch cover the whole business.

Meanwhile, Lewis must get the consumer side of Dow Jones — largely the Journal — reenergized as well, just as energetic turnaround tests are in midstream at News Corp properties in Sydney and London.

The current shakiness of the company is buoyed by two hard realities: Rupert Murdoch and money. Just this year, Rupert bulled through his family succession plan and this week moved forward with a long-planned effort to create a consolidated Europe-dominating Sky TV company through his other company, 21st Century Fox. The man lies in wait for opportunities, showing the doughtiness of a man a third his age. Then, there’s the cash. News Corp’s the best-funded news company on the planet, and that can make the recent Dow Jones chaos and current financial woes mere speed bumps on the long Murdochian road ahead.

By now, it’s common knowledge that most companies producing digital news are approaching — and at times surpassing — the mobile-majority mark. It’s no longer uncommon for smartphone plus tablet to surpass desktop plus laptop in morning, evenings, and weekends.

The audience is way ahead of the money: Only 17 percent of U.S. digital advertising revenue (“The newsonomics of newspapers’ slipping digital revenue”) is now mobile, though the percentage more than doubled in a single year. Too much of the mobile ad money now goes to Google and Facebook, 75 percent or more. So the question: How to create mobile savvy news products that can win good audiences and take in some of what is now the fastest growing ad category? (Mobile ads are growing at a four-year-compounded annual growth rate of 127 percent.)

Let’s take three newish mobile news products — each quite different from one another — to see a few versions of mobile-first thinking look like 2014. Yes, Circa — a hot topic among newsies — is one of them. The two others are News Republic, produced by Bordeaux-founded Mobiles Republic, with editions in seven countries, including the U.S. and U.K. Next Tuesday, Amsterdam-rooted NRC Q debuts its beta mobile business news product. What ideas, business models, and sheer hunches are each of the three bringing to this concept of “mobile first”?

Circa

Let’s start with Circa. Launched in fall 2012, the company has been a hot ticket for those on media tours of the Bay Area. CEO and cofounder Matt Galligan (“Permanently Midwestern at heart, Temporarily San Franciscan for the coffee”) says that the company has had to limit its tours so it can get its work done. It’s not just Americans competing for a peek under the Circa covers; Germans, Japanese, and Scandinavians have all knocked on the doors. Somewhat obsessed with BuzzFeed’s innovation, these outsiders are intensely curious about Circa’s.

What is that innovation? In a word, atomization.

You, dear mobile reader, may not have known you needed a news atomizer, but others do. I asked pioneering news techie Matt McAlister, now general manager of new digital businesses at Guardian News & Media and a Yahoo alum, why he called Circa “brilliant”: “They’ve worked out a model for engaging with information at the fact level,” he says. “The way they’ve applied it makes personalization an amplifier of what they’ve editorialized. The presentation and flow balance what matters and what you want to know nicely. That’s not easy in any environment, and doing it well on a mobile device with fact-level information is a real breakthrough.” (You can check out McAlister’s wider thoughts on atomizing the news, “Making Smaller Things Have Bigger Meanings.”)

The best way to understand Circa is try it. Wednesday’s stories extended from the South Korea ferry tragedy to Ukraine to the company behind Candy Crush tripling of revenues. Each is presented as a series of cards, which the user swipes through. Each features no more than a single paragraph, with some focused on an individual quote, a map, or an image with caption. “Bridges,” below some stories, provide more short Circa-written context. Circa’s editors use a wide variety of top-notch sources to write their paragraphs, and those sources are noted in citations at the very bottom of each story.

Though the content is atomized into paragraphs, David Cohn, founder of Spot.us and Circa’s chief content officer, says the site is, in its arrangement of cards, providing context to the biggest stories of our days and weeks. “People think we are just summarizing,” he says. In fact, each card tries to answer a single question, he says. While Vox uses its own version of a card system for its backgrounders, it aims to answer the “why,” Cohn says, while Circa goes for the “what happened.” The three editorial values of Circa: “concise, thorough, accurate.”

Terminology is tough — not because it’s jargon, but because Circa is thinking hard about the structure of news. Cohn leads a full-time staff of 11, with a couple stationed in Beijing and Cairo, to make its 24/7 posting schedule work. Serial tech entrepreneur Galligan founded the site out of news frustration: “Frankly, I wasn’t being fulfilled.”

“We pioneered this space and now it’s quite hot,” says Galligan, citing NYT Now, Yahoo News Digest, and Inside as three examples of those joining the mobile-majority fray. “We’re not going to roll over. We’re just getting started.”

Business model: Uncooked. It is in the audience-building phase, not yet selling advertising. (I suggested to Galligan that he consider charging significant fees for media visits as a good short-term source of revenue.)

Where is it headed? Circa has raised about $4 million in seed funding, led in part by Lerer Ventures (which I profiled in the recent media issue of Politico Magazine: “1. Destroy the Village. 2. Save the Village. Why Silicon Valley VCs suddenly love the media“). Galligan has been out raising a Series A round, one that could value the company as high as $40 million. He’d like to get media company investment, but wants to keep control of his independent company, understandably fearful that Big Media could smother Circa with its love bounty. As he bolsters Circa’s profile and leadership cred, he’s just hired as president John Maloney, formerly of Tumblr, a company that managed to cash out big time (and remain semi-independent). Internet culture connoisseur, investor/entrepreneur, and Cheezburger.com CEO Ben Huh is a Circa cofounder.

Galligan says he’s keeping options open on whether Circa will remain a consumer-oriented destination or white-label its atomization services to major media — or both. In fact, expect Circa to announce several media partnership deals before the end of the year. The main holdup is the completion of workflow technology that will enable partners to use the same tools that Circa editors themselves use right now. That likelihood opens up all kinds of possibilities. Right now, Circa can only play in a very small sandbox, offering up just what its 11 editors can produce. What could a news organization creating hundreds or thousands of stories a month do with Circa thinking and presentation? Plans are afoot.

Audience: How much of an audience is Circa now serving? The company won’t offer up any numbers yet, but the word is that the audience numbers don’t match up with the high industry interest. iTunes apps store downloaders love it, giving it a 5-star rating. Is it for news junkies who consume a lot of news daily, or for the more casual reader looking to catch up on the news? “It’s both right now,” says Galligan, who says he thinks the site is likelier to go wide. “We’re not going to target the news junkie.”

Voice: Very straightforward — as David Cohn puts it, a reimagined wire service.

NRC Q

Unlike our other two products, NRC Q tumbles out of a big, old newspaper company. NRC Media publishes the well-regarded evening Handelsblad and morning NRC Next. (It’s part of the 2014 explosion of Dutch news innovation, including the pay-per-view model of Blendle and crowdfunded Der Correspondent.)

Een nieuw product, dien je te vieren! @nrcqnl pic.twitter.com/B0heJACjoa

— Martijn Standaart (@MStandaart) April 30, 2014

NRC Q launches in beta Tuesday. It’s a mobile business news app with an attitude. Importantly, it’s about leverage: The NRC newsroom pays about 200 journalists and counts 25 global correspondents. Its business news staff numbers 20. Fifteen-year NRC editor Freek Staps chose the new NRC Q staff, hired about equally from inside and outside the newsroom, which numbers 10 editors. Their task: Take the best of the company’s business news content, mix and match with FT and Bloomberg stories and video, and provide a window on the news of the day to come.

“We’re your guide for the day,” says Staps. He says the app borrows heavily from the lessons of Quartz (“The newsonomics of Quartz, 19 months in”). Its content is structured around repeating features like “Three questions about,” “While you were sleeping,” and “This is what you need to know,” all highly visual and arranged in an endless scroll. Like Quartz, but unlike Circa or News Republic, it also offers a full web product.

“We aim for people who don’t read a newspaper,” says Stap, meaning professionals in their 30s and 40s, who will be asked to pay €15 a month after a sponsored free introductory period ends. It’s not just a niche test, along the Paywalls 2.0 line; if it works, NRC will apply the model back to its dailies, which are still free online.

Business model: Reader revenue and Quartz-like large-unit and native advertising.

Audience: A business-interested, non-newspaper reading audience that is bilingual. NRC-written stories are in Dutch. Bloomberg and FT are in English. The 5:30 a.m. newsletter is NRC Q’s opening daily reach for engagement.

Voice: Playful, along the developing serious/casual style that owes so much to the blogosphere and is now represented from Vox to FiveThirtyEight to Quartz to Business Insider and well beyond.

News Republic

News Republic is a smart, scalable, tech-driven model. No editors, no fuss — just lots of content-ingesting, product-creating apps. Now funded at the $12 million level, with Intel Capital leading its last round, Mobiles Republic launched its first edition in its native France in 2009. France still provides the leading number (about 20 percent) of its 2.6 million monthly uniques, with the U.S., U.K., China, Germany, Italy, and Spain now hosting in-country editions as well. All the news is available in any country; the highlighting of news in each nation varies. It’s smartphone-oriented, with tablet and web TV apps.

CEO Gilles Raymond, now based in San Francisco, heads a staff of 27 globally. He acknowledges that News Republic is a lot like Flipboard — highly visual, lots of sources — but different in that it is only using licensed content; it doesn’t link out. Who might he be competing against, in addition to Flipboard? He names Feedly, the post-Google Reader-resurgent RSS reader, whose model of selection and reader intent is far different. Interestingly, the tablet-oriented news/features readers that were Flipboard’s early competition are no longer independent. LinkedIn is figuring out how best to make use of its Pulse acquisition; Flipboard itself bought Zite from CNN, which decided that modestly cashing out and partnering with Flipboard was its best alternative.

Business model: It’s advertising (Square is a current one) — and device manufacturer payments. Raymond says his 900 news-providing partners receive a 50-50 revenue share of all revenues driven. Building that direct-to-consumer business, though, is hard. Mobile Republic has found an additional source of revenue and traffic: HTC. Raymond says the company powers the first-screen news on HTC handsets in 42 countries. (Those aren’t included in News Republic’s audience figures above.)

Audience: Its users are a broad group. Raymond says about 60 percent customize; the others take what the site’s algorithms supply. 20 to 30 percent of the views are on Top News, with the medium and long feature tales telling.

Voice: There’s not much of one, as is true of algorithmic-driven sites.

What do we make of these three, the others out there, and the many more to come off media company whiteboards? NRC Q is the most straightforward: You’re Dutch. You want business news that makes sense of the world. You want it on your phone. It will work — the only question is one of scale in a nation of 16 million. Can it pay for those 10 new staffers and then become solidly profitable?

Circa and News Republic are longer shots. Each has hunches about readers want general news of the day, but no one’s got a formula that is certain, with the single, big brand smartphone products of The New York Times, the FT, and The Wall Street Journal making the most all-access sense, and cents, right now.

Circa, like much of what’s forming on mobile news web, is made of wet clay, pliable and still uncertain clay, even if the desktop news web continues to dry to no great satisfaction. Circa is a next-gen Newser, which, too, looked at earlier news opportunities and created its own write-from-scratch summaries of the news, with a Hollywood Squares look and a much sassier tone than Circa. Newser survives, though hasn’t seen wide adoption and is much more a creature of the web than the phone.

If you put it into context, Circa becomes an even more curious play as the wave of full-voiced, analytic, explainer sites — The Upshot, Vox, FiveThirtyEight — sweep our attention. Is there a place for a just-the-facts-ma’am site? Should there be? How much value does it add?

Its ideas may be winning, but its overall experience is to this point underwhelming. You marvel at the sheer order, and differing look, of the app, but as you read it, you may wonder how much there is there — if you read lots of news. In some ways, it reminds me of a news Wikipedia, though put together by known journalists, of course, rather than the masses. It injects facts (or are they more like better-dressed factoids?) into the news arena. It’s a great reference to the news, but I’m unclear who will use it regularly as a go-to, find-out-what’s-happening app.

As a Silicon Valley startup, Circa wants to keep its options open on audience and business model. It will have to decide both sooner than later. On audience, it’s hard to see how its small amount of content and lack of voice will attract multitudes of news readers. Maybe voice isn’t even the right word: It’s certainly a resource, with citations well shown, a credible site — but it seems to lack an authority.

Equally, if the app is for news grazers, is the facts-are-good-for-you format likely to win lots of more casual readers? Circa may be in a mushy middle for the moment, still to figure out how to market its high-concept beliefs about news. Even industry watchers who like Circa’s thinking wonder how it can ever scale. They believe it must go white label, licensing its technology to big publishers, or sell itself to someone.

News Republic, on the other hand (like Switzerland-based NewsCron, “your newspapers in one app,” which specializes in European and Latin American publishers) offers a comprehensive set of major news sources, all arrayed in those 13 categories. It’s straightforward — lots of stuff from top publishers in one place — but by its nature lacks a spirit.

Ah, aggregated news: We love the idea of aggregated/curated products. At a Spark unconference gathering in Cambridge a couple of years ago, several of us (CNN’s Meredith Artley and Heidi Moore, now at The Guardian were co-conspirators on a lovely lawn outside Walter Lippmann House) briefly imagined we had it figured out. Take a story like Ukraine. It’s the kind of story that Circa has done a deep dive into, creating dozens of cards, with bridges here and there. The Circa cards, though, are fact cards. What we talked about in Cambridge was a simpler, yet deeper idea: What if you could point to the best three to five stories (changing over time) about the Ukraine crisis — whatever their sources? We wanted some mix of (wo)man and machine to find those five stories, providing an intelligent news reader a good perspective on the issues. We wanted some sense of editorial judgment, of a smart, trustworthy editorial authority.

We’re all aware of the obstacles: imagination, revenue models, and operational issues. But getting the best of news reporting to us on our phones would seem to be a simple concept. Someone will figure it out.

Clearly, getting the context right — whenever that happens, and whoever paves the way — will require some combination of algorithm and human judgment. It will probably align along a 90/10, robot/human equation. That 10 percent, though, will make all the difference. Call it aggregation, curation, good judgment, or whatever you want: I like high-end editing, to resuscitate a term that has been showing more recent signs of appreciation.

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.

While high-level speculation continues on the future of news and information, research studies are providing a more under-the-hood look at the practices of journalists, outlets, and the digital networks in which they operate. Here’s a recent sampling from the world of academic journals and conferences. For a look at the bleeding edge of ideas, also check out new research papers on using “crowd workers” to generate encryption keys and the social costs of “friendsourcing” questions and information.

“Rumor Cascades”: From Facebook and Stanford University, prepared for the 2014 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. By Adrien Friggeri, Lada A. Adamic, Dean Eckles, and Justin Cheng.

The researchers start by identifying known rumors through Snopes.com, the urban legend reference site, and analyze how nearly 4,800 distinct rumors circulated on Facebook. Among the rumors studied, 22 percent were related to politics and 12 percent involved fake or doctored images. It appears that false rumors thrive on Facebook: In the entire Snopes database of rumors, 45 percent are flat-out false, while 26 percent turned out to be true; in contrast, 62 percent of rumors on Facebook are false and only 9 percent prove to be true. Interestingly, the authors note, “true rumors are more viral — in the sense that they result in larger cascades — achieving on average 163 shares per upload whereas false rumors only have an average of 108 shares per upload.” Some rumors are shared hundreds of thousands of times. Even when people discover the falsity of a rumor and delete their reshare, it does not appear to affect the unfolding cascade.

Friggeri, Adamic, Eckles, and Cheng note the fast-moving, highly sudden nature of these information cascades. The “popularity of rumors — even ones that have been circulating for years in various media such as email and online social networks — tends to be highly bursty. A rumor will lie dormant for weeks or months, and then either spontaneously or through an external jolt will become popular again. Sometimes the rumors die down on their own.” The paper does not propose a mechanism to explain these sudden “mystery” flare-ups, however. “It would be interesting,” the researchers conclude, “to examine whether rumor flare-ups are fueled by the presence of individuals who have never been exposed to the rumor, or whether, to the contrary, the rumor relies on those who know it well to retell it when prompted.”

“Coproduction or cohabitation: Are anonymous online comments on newspaper websites shaping content?”: From Western Washington University, published in New Media & Society. By Carol E. Nielsen.

Based on a substantial national survey of 583 journalists conducted in 2010, Nielsen explores how media members feel about anonymous comments on their articles, and whether or not they find them useful. The data show that “35.8 percent of journalists reported that they ‘frequently’ or ‘always’ read comments on their own work, 29 percent reported they ‘sometimes’ read comments on their work, and 35.2 percent reported that they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ read comments on their work.” About three-quarters of journalists surveyed said that online comments should not be anonymous. Nielsen quotes one reporter who gave some qualitative feedback: “Those who post are free to lie and vent without accountability. The result is that online comments sabotage the credibility and dignity of the entire news organization.”

Just under half of respondents (45 percent) “slightly or strongly agreed” that they should not respond to online comments, though three-quarters agreed they should respond to set the record straight with regard to factual inaccuracies. Most journalists surveyed said it was not because of a lack of time that they forego reading comments, rather it’s because they don’t think it’s worth it. “While 53.5 percent of journalists responded that comments sometimes showed them a new perspective, only 8.4 percent said that frequently or always happened and 38.1 percent said that rarely or never happened.” Comment forums are for readers, as far as most journalists are concerned. “This study,” Nielsen writes, “concludes that journalists have viewed readers not as coproducers, but rather as users cohabiting the platform.”

“Customer orientation on online newspaper business models with paid content strategies”: From Carlos III University of Madrid and the University of Texas, published in First Monday. By Manuel Goyanes and George Sylvie.

The study sets out to examine how news organizations measure customer satisfaction and respond to preferences with their paid content strategies — “paywall, metered model, freemium or the various sorts of virtual kiosks.” Goyanes and Sylvie analyze Britain’s The Times and the Financial Times, as well as Spain’s El Mundo. They base their conclusions mostly on 2012 interviews with digital, marketing, and sales representatives at the news outlets and available internal documents.

How aggressive are these organizations in responding to the wants and needs of customers, and what factors seem to influence their strategies? The Financial Times boasts a data analysis team of 25 — five in London and 20 in Manila, allowing the outlet to begin to “differentiate content over different devices and time slots.” Meanwhile, the Times allows comments on the platform only from registered users, “avoiding ‘information noise'” in terms of user feedback. Customers now get “more personalized attention” than ever. At each outlet, there are “intense processes of innovation, experimentation and testing of new business and product campaigns and practices.” The case studies show an “enhanced effort to develop and have online tools — e.g., registration, comment feedback and social media — to supplement the traditional vehicles of market studies, reader panels, etc., and deliver additional, analyzable reader data.” The authors conclude, however, that “despite the strategic planning of media groups employing paid content strategies, the economic uncertainties and discrepancies on their adoption indicate that charging for content remains an option of an experimental nature,” and other revenue streams, such as print editions, remain crucial to supporting the business.

“Embedding content from Syrian citizen journalists: The rise of the collaborative news clip”: From California State University Northridge and UCLA, published in Journalism. By Melissa Wall and Sahar El Zahed.

Analyzing the way that The New York Times’ blog The Lede incorporates Syrian citizen journalistic video, Wall and El Zahed coin the term “collaborative news clip” to describe the joint gatekeeping and shared framing news process that takes place. They examine 82 blog posts from 2012, which used a total of 162 citizen videos. Citizen videos were more often labeled a “clip,” as opposed to professional videos, which were frequently called a “report.” Only 14 were in English, or had subtitles or a mix of Arabic and English. Most have no beginning-middle-end structure, instead existing in the middle of the story.

“Productive usage of the Syrian citizen videos requires context and place specific knowledge,” Wall and El Zahed conclude, “a level of understanding that The Lede achieves in part by turning to insiders, activists within the conflict, to help with their selection and explanations. In this way, The Lede provides a means for Syria’s citizen journalists and their supporters to have a louder voice on the Web pages of a major world news outlet. In the process, some narra­tive power may be shifting to a tier of citizen-activists who create and/or identify local content.”

“A Digital Juggling Act: New Media’s Impact on the Responsibilities of Local Television Reporters”: From Ithaca College, published in Electronic News. By Anthony C. Adornato.

This case study assesses how workflow issues play out for TV journalists who now must do much more than just standup reporting in front of an on-scene camera. Based on in-depth interviews with eight television journalists of varying levels of experience who operate in a medium-sized Northeast media market, Adornato offers granular detail on reporters’ experiences. The reporters generally felt that social media was useful for newsgathering. However: “Reporters were increasingly being asked to verify information that people were posting online; sometimes, this meant they were spending valuable time investigating rumors.” Daily responsibilities generally increased because of the pace of social media: “Reporters did not — and could not — wait for the 5 p.m., 6 p.m., or 11 p.m. broadcasts to deliver information about stories,” he notes. “Reporters recognized the audience expects information in real time and across multiple online platforms.”

Adornato reveals other challenges that are likely common to many local television reporters.”Reporters found the process of getting information to the Web team and others involved in the traditional news broadcasts cumbersome,” he writes. “Because of the lack of a coherent internal communications, reporters often had to carve out critical time to relay information to different coworkers — Web staff member, producer and assignment editor.” The TV reporters also found themselves “hard pressed to relinquish control of the story to the Web team. Instead, they spent a significant amount of time editing the Web version of their stories.” On the whole, the journalists interviewed said they believed social media channels brought them closer to viewers; their “ongoing interactions build a level of trust and credibility with the audience.”

“Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism? Evidence from the changing news ecosystem”: From the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, published in Digital Journalism. By Robert G. Picard.

Picard, a media economics and policy expert, furnishes a high-level overview of the industry changes at hand. He emphasizes that the “practices of journalism are shifting from a relatively closed system of news creation — dominated by official sources and professional journalists,” and that this is “not undesirable because it means that fewer institutional elites are deciding what gets attention and how it is framed than in the past.” However, he also warns that newer media institutions are “able to skew the availability of news and information through search, aggregation and digital distribution infrastructures. These are creating new mechanisms of power and a new class of elites influencing content.”

In terms of changes for the business model, Picard puts recent shifts in historical perspective: “What is clear is that news providers are becoming less dependent on any one form of funding than they have been for about 150 years.” This is also potentially a welcome change, as it reduces the “influence of commercial advertisers that significantly influenced the form, range, and practices of news provision in the 20th century.” Still, we cannot take quality news for granted. “We are experiencing neither an end nor a new dawn of journalism; we are experiencing both,” Picard concludes. “The historical, social and economic contexts of the changes occurring in journalism indicate we are in a transition not a demise of journalism.”

As we look back at 2013 — and forward to 2014 — we see that The Wall Street Journal, an innovative leader in the digital news business, seems to have lost momentum in its titanic battle with The New York Times. TWEET

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal and its parent Dow Jones six years ago, he declared that war, aiming to blur the historic line between a business newspaper and a general interest one. The declaration was pure Rupert: part real animus, part envy, part bluff, and wholly aimed at winner-take-all. Even as the deep recession wounded all publishers, Murdoch invested in the conflict, establishing The Wall Street Journal as a pioneer in news video, tablet innovation, and global growth, while also investing in old-fashioned reporting resources, launching expansions both in general news and in coverage of New York City. His moves on offense contrasted with the strategic retreats of the Times. The proud company was forced to sell its new headquarters space, take on onerous loans, and live perilously on the edge.

For much of the past half decade of hand-to-hand combat, the Times appeared uneasy in its footing. Through tough times, it managed to hold together its core asset — the 1,100-or-so–strong newsroom. But for much of 2012, the eight-month search for a new CEO emphasized the Times’ double vacuum of leadership and strategy. The media’s whispering classes conjectured that the Times was taking so long to find a CEO because the choice could be the one that would make or break the Times’ ability to survive as a standalone, Sulzberger-family–directed institution. Then, enter new CEO Mark Thompson, immediately dogged by various BBC messes, as he worked to establish credibility for himself on this side of the Atlantic.

Today, the tables have turned a bit. At the Times, the reader revenue strategy — exemplified by its digital paywall — has offered a greater sense of stability, a modicum of hope, and a budding confidence. It has completed a multi-year strategy to place all its chips on the flagship New York Times brand, selling off The Boston Globe and rebranding the storied International Herald Tribune as the International New York Times. Thompson looks like he has survived the North Atlantic winds of controversy. Though execution remains a big question, its areas of focus are the clearest they’ve been in a long time — innovating the second phase of reader revenue (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0”), finding new growth in digital advertising, and redoubling efforts and staffing in video and mobile. The Times organization is moving in a more unified direction than it had in previous years. Further, it is basking, even if just for a digital moment, in the glow of being the global pioneer in paid digital reader revenue models.

The year’s final financial performance (to be reported Feb. 6) will show a year similar to 2013, with maybe a little growth in revenue. It’s not out of the woods yet, but a clearing is visible.

The Journal is another story. At best reading, it’s been a year of reorganization, shuffling just about everything that could be shuffled, above and within the Journal’s reach. Its parent company spun off all its newspapers (and a couple of other balance sheet-improving ventures) into the new News Corp, complete with lyrical Murdoch-written logo, as the now-separate 21st Century Fox moves forward into the more profitable world of TV, film, and digital video. Lex Fenwick, the CEO of immediate WSJ parent Dow Jones, has brought Bloombergian B2B zeal to the remaking of the company.

Fenwick’s moves to radically rationalize and reshape Dow Jones B2B products have gained most of the attention, but a careful view shows that the same one-product, one-price strategy has fundamentally altered the Journal’s direction. Further, we’ve seen a profound exodus of top Wall Street Journal execs and much change in management overall — and limited new product development. Though fewer financial performance numbers are released about the Journal than the Times, a set of them affirms that the Journal’s assumed ascendancy in its head-to-head war with The New York Times is no longer true.

In previous years, I’d written much about the Journal’s innovations in video, mobile advertising, and other areas, more than I’d noted the Times’ product innovations. What happened in 2013 to turn the innovation tables? Though Dow Jones declined to comment on the company’s overall performance and strategic focus, I talked to numerous people in and around the war to get a sense of the wider newsonomics of the competition. Here we focus on their businesses, not their journalism — which continues to be distinguished in both shops. The success of those businesses, inevitably, will shape available newsroom resources for both companies in the years ahead.

Unexpectedly, this battle has between much more of a newspaper-to-newspaper competition. Six years ago, the Times still owned a variety of businesses from which it has now exited. Now it’s the Times alone. The corporate change in and around the Journal is more profound: While the Journal is part of a larger company, it is now a part of a newspaper company. Until the mid-2013 News Corp split, its performance could be subsidized by an Avatar blockbuster or healthy Fox News profits. Now it’s looked to as a profit center.

With News Corp’s London-based Times papers and New York Post being money losers, the Journal stands after the U.K. tabloid Sun (the best-selling paper in Britain) and its Australian newspapers in financial performance. Though new News Corp CEO Robert Thomson inherited a comfortable $2 billion cash cushion and no debt (in contrast to the planned Tribune spinoff), the cratering of the print ad business means that News Corp shares the financial pressures of its peers. The Journal must begin to stand on its own.

With that landscape in mind, let’s look at where the Journal now stands, in its management, its business performance, and its product innovation.

Management

Fenwick took command of Dow Jones two years ago. Long-time Murdoch loyalist Les Hinton stepped aside, as the collateral damage of Murdoch’s U.K. Hackgate threatened to impact the Journal.

Fenwick seemed like an odd choice at the time. A veteran business-to-business executive, he brought the legacy of his long-time Bloomberg tenure to what had long been mainly a business-to-consumer company. Though Bloomberg’s B2B terminal-based model has been wildly successful, its multiple attempts to grow consumer businesses in TV, radio, and magazines have far less so.

Public attention on Fenwick has focused on two things. One is his management style. Fenwick is universally described as a man who likes to be the decider, a top-down exec in an age where at least the hint of collaboration is nearly universally espoused. Secondly, the information world has been astounded at his remaking of the B2B side of Dow Jones.

Launched after lots of internal integration at year’s end, DJX has become Dow Jones’ Bloomberg. It’s one product, largely at one price, bringing together its Factiva enterprise information services, the Dow Jones Newswires, and much more. The early reaction to the higher pricing (with some customers being asked to pay three times or more what they previously did) and to the lack of separate product choice has been noteworthy. Cancellations have been reported, but it’s too early to know the overall business impact of the major change.

What’s important for Journal watchers to know is that the same single-product, single-price strategy now being tested in the B2B marketplace has been applied to the Journal.

As the application became clear, the exodus began. The Journal has seen dozens of managers leave. Alumni talk about the exodus of summer 2012 and summer 2013. Within six months of Fenwick’s arrival in February 2012, the departures had begun, concentrated early on in and around the Factiva business. Some were forced; many were voluntary. The summer timing wasn’t coincidental: News Corp’s fiscal year ends June 30, and annual bonuses are paid in August. Consequently, it is the last 18 months of the Journal that have seen the greatest change.

Across the Journal, top management change has been sweeping. A very partial list of the departed:

• Todd Larsen, president
• Alisa Bowen, head of the digital business
• Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer and ad head
• Beth Buehler, head of business management and business development
• Laura Evans, head of audience insights/analytics
• Jennifer Jehn, head of consumer sales
• Daniel Bernard, chief product officer
• Dean Delvecchio, chief information officer
• Bethany Sherman, chief communications officer of Dow Jones
• Christine Brendle, publisher at Wall Street Journal Asia

All but Bowen — who now heads the challenged-but-cash-flow-vital digital business for News Corp’s Australian papers — left News Corp.

Why did they go? While Fenwick’s management style is part of it, the reasons go directly to the nature of what they were able to do to move the Journal’s business forward. As Fenwick moved toward single-product, single-price, the execs found:

• they had less latitude to experiment and innovate in their groups;
• that if they could justify innovation, necessary resources — tech and otherwise — had been diverted to the massive DJX changeover; and
• that the B2C business had switched places in Dow Jones thinking, becoming the less-favored child.

Some weighed a personal strategy of waiting out the new regime. Most decided that even if top management were to change again, the unwinding of this single-product, single-price change would take a couple of painful years to happen.

The shock of the change — close to a 180-degree reversal — permeated all parts of the Journal’s consumer operation. It’s meant that the Journal — which put its model-breaking WSJ Live on more than two dozen non-WSJ video platforms (“The newsonomics of WSJ Live”) and did an early test with Pulse to determine the pros and cons of third-party distribution — cut back on its partnership and third-party platform testing. While the Times and the Financial Times are testing subscriber-authenticated reading on Flipboard, the Journal is absent.

The 2011 “WSJ Everywhere” strategy seemed an artifact of the past. Many of the business partnership plans and tests — all designed to pour new would-be paying customers into the top end of the customer flow via sampling — ebbed away. The issue: If you don’t throw out more fishing lures, through introductory pricing and wider sampling across platforms, paid subscriptions inevitably will flatten — which they have.

Further, the strategic change meant that new segmented, separately priced digital news products, like CFO Journal and CIO Journal, would be folded into the single subscriber proposition. Ironically, that comes at a time when separate niche products like Politico Pro is the new industry model — at the arch-foe Times too, where executives plan to test three such products in the spring.

That’s not to say that the Fenwick pricing philosophy doesn’t get credit. Even his critics say he has rationalized pricing that was too loose. The problem, they say, is that in swinging the pendulum over to stronger pricing, he hasn’t allowed that cheaper, introductory-offer sampling that the business today requires.

Among many of the exec replacements is a common career stop: Bloomberg. For instance, Trevor Fellows, who replaced ad leader Michael Rooney, is one of the many Bloomberg vets to have replaced the old guard. Beyond the question of clubbiness is that B2B background and how well it applies to the Journal’s consumer business.

To be clear, Fenwick had done with the B2B business what he was hired to do. Robert Thomson had longed talked about the B2P (professional) market, and how a company with Dow Jones’ vast resources should more smartly serve it. He’d been frustrated about the pace of that rethinking and reorganization. Thus he had a strong hand in selecting Fenwick. The goal: Make more out of the B2B businesses that may have contributed only about 30 percent of Dow Jones’ revenues — but a higher proportion of its profit.

The consumer impact of the Fenwick appointment may have been unanticipated.

When Robert Thomson leapt from his position as top editor of the Journal to CEO of the new split-off News Corp, the balance of power at the Journal shifted. Though Thomson had been the editor in title, he wielded much wider business influence. His successor, Gerry Baker, is much more a traditional newsroom leader. The business savvy that Thomson had brought to his job is no longer in place to balance Fenwick’s B2B proclivities, as the new CEO faces the big task of managing the new three-continent News Corp, the largest news company by revenues globally.

Financial performance

The Journal and Dow Jones financial performance is somewhere in the middle of the new News Corp pack. News Corp doesn’t break out the results of its individual companies. Overall, the company’s first quarterly report as a spin-off, issued in November, was subpar, down 5 percent in EBITDA and 4.3 percent in adjusted revenues.

Its majority News and Information segment was worse, off 6 percent in adjusted revenues year over over year. We do know that circulation revenues were down 6 percent overall at Dow Jones for the last quarter, or $11 million, though we attribute that decline to the company’s struggling B2B sales, not its Journal print and digital subscriptions.

Advertising still represents a majority of revenues for the Journal, sources say, in the mid-50s percentagewise, with circulation in the mid-40s. That’s the inverse of the Times, which recently reported that 56 percent of its revenues now come from readers. Given that reader revenue is now growing as paywalls have gone up, and that print ads remain in sharp decline, majority reader revenue seems to be the preferable market position.

Sources say that the Journal failed to make its advertising budget for 2013. Like all dailies, it is struggling with print, likely with a low-to-mid single-digit decline and a mild drop in digital advertising as well. That performance would be quite similar to the Times.

We can estimate the Journal’s current profit in the 5-8 percent range.

Readers

If we measure Lex Fenwick’s application of single-product, single-price to Journal subscription pricing, we can see where he’s had success. The Journal has long lagged the Times in pricing, and even his critics credit him with rationalizing print and digital pricing. While that has meant less sampling, it’s also meant more immediate revenue, with double-digit price increases in print and digital. How much more circulation revenue we don’t know, nor do we know how it compares to the Times’ year-over-year increase of 4.8 percent there.

The overall readership numbers for the Journal, though, appear flat. Total average circulation, as measured by the Alliance for Audited Media (the industry’s successor to the Audit Bureau of Circulation) is down 1 percent, 2013 compared to 2012, as we can see in the chart below. The Times is up 15 percent, as we see below.

Both papers have lost print readers, of course, but the Journal lost more last year: 9.5 percent of its daily (six days a week) print circulation, compared to a 5.7 percent comparable weekday loss for the Times. Over the last two years, the Journal has lost 13 percent of print circulation; the Times has lost 12 percent.

Over the last year, the Times posted a 31 percent gain in paid digital products; the Journal was up 15 percent. Over the last two, the Times posted a 265 percent gain in paid digital products; the Journal was up 55 percent. (Observers may note that The New York Times’ “total non-replica” number through September 2013 — 1,206,214 — is substantially higher than the paid digital-only subscriptions it announced at about the same time, 727,000. That’s because the AAM number counts digital usage as well as individual paid subscriptions. Constructively, that’s a double or triple accounting of some paid customers, a metric whose value is uncertain. For our purposes, the AAM numbers, though, offer apples-to-apples comparison between the Journal and the Times.)

Consequently, in all the available public reader data, the Times is faring better than the Journal of late.

To be fair, the Journal was a turn-of-the-century pioneer in paid digital strategy, and one might imagine a plateau would come given that 10-year lead. Acknowledging that, the questions become: What has the Journal recently done to build on that lead? And how come it let its foe catch up?

In digital traffic, October Nielsen data below shows the Times with far greater reach than the Journal in their home country. Its U.S.-based audience is more than double the Journal’s. The Times manages 36 percent more time per person than the Journal and a page more per month, a 9 percent advantage there. The Times’ new redesign, launched Wednesday, is intended to further that engagement lead, even as the Journal gets ready to launch its own digital redesigns later in the quarter.

Looking forward both on reader revenue and engagement, a critical question facing the Journal is whether to stick with its freemium model. That model, more commonly used in Europe, puts up a hard wall in front of many articles, especially the Journal’s unique stories, while allowing others to be freely read. Developed before the meter — which allows readers a free sampling of from 5 to 25 stories a month — the freemium model may be less flexible and consequently less successful in converting occasional readers into paying subscribers.

Products

New product development is a reach for new subscribers and readers, for advertising — and for buzz. Both the Journal and the Times have learned from digital startups the value of launch announcements.

Both have emphasized video. Late last year, The New York Times Minute won lots of notice as an attempt to satisfy news customers with quick three-subject reports several times a day. Its year-earlier Snow Fall project had redefined integration of multimedia into traditional storytelling. The Journal’s WSJ WorldStream, a first-of-its-kind video blog, launched in mid 2012, but has received less attention. Alan Murray, the Journal’s then deputy managing editor and a key part of much of the pre-Fenwick consumer innovation, is another of the execs who’ve left, becoming head of the Pew Research Center in November 2012.

Video is a key battle area between the Journal, which once had a substantial lead, and the Times. Chris Cramer, named head of video last March, is one of those trying to restart the innovation engines at the Journal. A BBC/CNN veteran, he has been joined by Edward Roussel as head of product and Michael Rolnick as chief digital officer.

Cramer points to growth in the video business, citing:

• expanded WSJ Live coverage in Asia and Europe;
• a 200 percent growth in WSJ Live pageviews since the September 2011 launch; and
• plans for a bigger focus on global technology coverage and U.S. political coverage in Washington.

Further, the December News Corp purchase of video aggregator Storyful should help video strategies — and indicates the potential of greater strategic alignment across News Corp news properties.

For all who’ve moved into new roles at the Journal, the tasks are straightforward and parallel the goals that Mark Thompson has set out at the Times. They are all around the familiar: more reader revenue, support of digital advertising, mobile expansion, video exploitation. That requires building on innovation, marketing it well, and being perceived as a leader. This is a game both about leading change — and grabbing attention for it. Here, too, the Times seems to have gained an edge on the Journal.

We’d have to believe that a comparison of the Journal’s and the Times’ recent trajectories would make Rupert cringe. He believed he had the Times on the ropes, and now he finds his prized Journal playing catch-up. at least in the game of media perception and in a number of key metrics. In trying to fix the B2B side of Dow Jones, the company looks like it took its eye off of the Times competition, allowing the Times to catch up after Murdoch and Robert Thomson had invested so much in the new Journal.

Thomson, himself, has got to be casting a more direct eye on the paper’s fortunes as Lex Fenwick enters his third year of reorganization with quite uncertain results in both B2B and B2C. We may see the News Corp culture — pick a top leader and give him room to make the changes he sees fit — tested strongly by the time 2015 comes around. Commanders have their place, but changing out the officer corps in mid-battle takes its toll.

In the Journal/Times faceoff, the competition is far from over — but the battle lines have changed.

Photo by Jonathan Seitz.

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.

The Forbeses, the Blodgets, and other digital builders may sense a top.

As Forbes Media put itself on the block last week, it did so as a digital media company, not a magazine brand. Why aim at something like a 5x multiple of earnings — if you can even find a “magazine” buyer — when you might be able to get twice that amount selling on your digital cred. Lots of good digital numbers tossed around: 25 percent digital ad growth, 55 percent digital revenues overall. Not highlighted: The familiar print struggles, as ad revenue is down 7.5 percent to $165.7 million through September, with ad pages down a percent.

Forbes, forsaking its traditional business roots, has been a poster child for how to digitize a legacy company. Take a look at its home page, and you see how it has floated far away from its Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek competitors, populizing, optimizing, nativizing, and rightsizing its content creation. Inevitably, in such transitions, something’s gained — a doubling of unique visitors in three years — and something’s lost, in this case the upmarket nature of its old magazine audience. Despite its great digital growth, it’s still sub-scale compared to many of the companies it now competes more directly with — not to mention the truly big guns like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and Twitter.

So maybe the end of 2013 — with the Dow over 16,000 and the shine not yet wiped off of Forbes’ remake under CEO Mike Perlis — offers a great time to sell. Sell the story (digital audience and revenue growth, a leader in “Brand Voice” content marketing) and let the next guys deal with the next era. Elevation Partners, which bought in seven years ago and now controls a large minority stake of Forbes, probably won’t get its investment back out, but its calculation may be a good one for Thanksgiving movie viewing: As Good As It Gets.

Similarly, I’d have to agree with Michael Wolff that Henry Blodget — the banned-for-life Wall Street trader turned publisher who recently told the FT’s tripe-eating Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, “I mean, first of all, I feel like an absolute moron for missing the top [of the market]” back in the dot-com days — may sense the same thing. Whether or not he is yet shopping Business Insider for $100 million, as Wolff surmises, he’s built a Forbes Media-like digital company, adept at creating and replicating newsy content. BI recently got a new infusion of needed cash from investors, and Blodget immediately pooh-poohed Wolff’s advice to sell. Yet the construction of such efficient content sites has its limits, and Henry’s got to be driven by his previous market experience.

These are businesses that have built value quickly on the explosive growth of pageviews. Though both Forbes and BI have branched out from display ads into events and other businesses, their fortunes lie greatly with ad monetization. As we’ll see below from Yahoo’s own ad math, that’s problematic for 2014-2015 growth.

The problem for both companies: The companies who may be the only potential buyers — the Yahoos, AOLs, or Voxes — can calculate fairly exactly what the digital audiences of page-spinners like Forbes or BI are really worth with their own state-of-the-art ad stacks applied. Those calculations would likely lead to significantly less than the desired $400-500 million price tag of Forbes or a possible $100 million for BI.

Will Alden be next? As Digital First Media improves its own balance sheet — putting up paywalls to goose circulation revenue, outsourcing printing, and centralizing national content creation — when will Alden Global Capital, the company’s prime driver, decide its time to cash out its investments? Like Elevation Partners, it won’t walk away a big winner — but walking sooner than later may be its best move.

As Katie Couric comes to Yahoo, she should bring Sarah Palin.

Let’s remember when Katie went viral — it was with her dance partner Sarah Palin, drawing millions of pageviews as a mesmerized electorate marveled at the candidate’s view of Russia. Couric will do an interview program for Yahoo, and it will be those interviews — separately judged and shared — that I think will bring the greatest value to Marissa Mayer’s new-look Yahoo. After all, appointment viewing is more about Walking Dead and Breaking Bad these days than the network news, or even Katie’s own disappointing talk show. As announced by Yahoo, Couric has been described as a new “global anchor.”

For Yahoo, being number one in online news “viewership” just hasn’t (yet, at least) paid off sufficiently. Yahoo’s like the most popular kid in a high school class who nonetheless struggles to pull together all the right application elements to get into a really good college. We’ll have to wait and see how Mayer further defines the new company. The shorthand of being a “content origination” company doesn’t do much; besides, why would that description be useful given the eternal business struggles of all the companies that do originate content?

Yahoo was down seven percent in display ad revenues in the last quarter, though the number of ads sold dropped only one percentage point. That’s the basic math that defines the mighty struggle of most companies other than Google and Facebook to grow digital revenue: Downward pricing pressures are overwhelming.

Though a big name in the old world, Couric is just one more puzzle piece in the Rubik’s Cube — inevitably, there are many more dead-ends than successes — of re-imagining digital news programs. At Yahoo, it’s Megan Liberman, ex- of the Times, assembling the parts, part Bai, part Pogue, part Couric — just as her former employer goes to the Times Minute, with its new thrice-daily one-minute video news update and names a new managing editor for video, Bruce Headlam. Place Yahoo’s “re-imagining” of digital video news among many others, from The Wall Street Journal’s early video news moves to Newsy’s pioneering multi-source programming to Oslo-based VGTV’s audacious move beyond print to the boundary-breaking (news/social/talk show) HuffPost Live (“The newsonomics of leapfrog news video”).

The experimentation will only grow, and be bolstered by more big names, in 2014. The reasons are clear: 45 percent of U.S. adults report watching digital news video, and video advertising continues to sell out — the only category of digital advertising that has more demand than supply. Yahoo doesn’t break out its video revenue, but we know that overall U.S. video advertising grew 24 percent in the first half of the year, to $1.3 billion. These video-forward moves are driven by demand-side economics.

Brian Stelter’s profile could grow (or fade) as he enters CNN.

Stelter has been the best bridge between the old business of TV and the new emerging business of video, with all its fuzzy-patterns transition. As the phenom, hired at age 21 by The New York Times, moves to CNN, he brings his unusually intelligent, perceptive, and deeply reported work with him. We have to wonder about the fit, though. He moved the Times measurably forward in the media/tech world in which it both excels and lags. Though it’s the announced plan, it’s hard to see him stepping into the dated media container of Howie Kurtz’s Reliable Sources show, old media doing old media, even though he’ll undoubtedly bring new edge to it. I like the idea of him doing a Morgan Spurlock-like show, one with attitude, authentic reporting, and a modern graphical sense — almost weblike on TV — of how to tell a story.

The problem is that there are so many CNNs. For every stretch of defining intelligence from the Fareed Zakarias, there’s another of numbing, talk-down-to-me bleating out of The Situation Room, leading to such gaffes as Wolf Blitzer announcing the segment on the Kennedy Assassination: “I’m Wolf Blitzer, reporting from Washington. The assassination of President Kennedy begins right now.”

As many of the non-TV-based giants, Yahoo and the Times among them, go deeper into video, the next remaking of CNN itself continues apace under Jeff Zucker. Everything from storytelling modes to business models are up in the air, as the reality of smartphone- and tablet-delivered video sinks in across the news industry.

Aaron Kushner emerges with a small SoCal duopoly — and a deeper question about his contrarian strategy.

Kushner’s Freedom Corp. wired its $27.2 million to A.H. Belo Corp. Thursday. It wasn’t that the acquisition of the Riverside Press-Enterprise took that long to close, only six weeks after the agreement was announced. What was unusual was the public commentary on the delays, as Belo put out releases both giving Freedom more time to complete the deal and to announce very clearly its alternatives and ability to extract a non-refundable million dollars if the deal went south.

That’s just the public tip of discussion. Behind the scenes, people in the news industry — some rooting for the contrarian publisher who has smartly promoted a $10-12 million investment (“The newsonomics of Aaron Kushner’s virtuous circles”) in the Orange County Register’s staff and product; others deep doubters — are linking the delay in the Riverside buy to Kushner’s ability to stay the course in Orange County. Kushner has been quite clear in saying that his investment will take a good three to five years to pay off, rebuilding the readership and advertising base of a paper that had been drained by cutting and then bankruptcy.

So the question: Does he really have the financial wherewithal, or access to it, to advance his strategy? Completing the cash deal seemed to be the holdup. “We have no inability to stay the course,” he told me, three days after the deal closed. “We’re on the offensive.”

How well is that offensive going? Kushner says that the investment in the Register products and the rationalizing of reader pricing has led to a 16 percent increase in circulation revenue year over year. That number doesn’t significantly count the impact of a unique paywall put up in April.

While those dollars may be good, an improvement on what was a substandard base, the Register is still, like its peers, down in advertising. Figure mid-single digits of down in print, and down in digital ads. One issue with latter: The Register’s hard paywall has caused a 40 percent loss in pageviews, traffic that Kushner says is beginning to come back.

Those numbers tell you one thing: Even if successful, the Register’s approach will take years. That again raises the question of wherewithal. As the new year rolls in, we’ll see how much of the Register investment philosophy is — and can be — applied to the Press-Enterprise.

While the Register sees the L.A. Times — and its pointed reporting on the Register’s Belo delay, and three lawsuits in which it is involved — as the sour grapes of a big competitor, the hint of question about the future of the Register will hang in the air for awhile.

Southern California — which has the twin distinctions of being both the region having the most dailies with paywalls and with the most to have emerged from bankruptcy — remains ripe for a rollup, a cost-saving consolidation.

When other SoCal properties — Digital First Media’s numerous MediaNews dailies and/or the Times itself, as it’s spun out or directly sold off by the Tribune Company — are put on the market, the acquisitive capacity of the new Freedom will arise, fairly or otherwise, as a question mark.

Jay Rosen’s arrival at Pierre Omidyar’s “Newco” provides bedrock.

It’s a good problem to have: What do you do with a possible fund of $250 million to build a new news company in 2014? That number, offered up by Pierre Omidyar as the reservoir of financial capacity for his new Glenn Greenwald+ news company, deservedly won headlines. While the site may not need to show profit any time soon, it needs to prove itself a credible news source — and that money can’t buy. So Jay Rosen’s decision to get aboard the new enterprise, actively advising it on navigating the editorial waters, is great news. I’ve known Jay for 20 years now, and you couldn’t ask for a clearer thinker on what journalism needs to do in the digital age. The business issues of establishing credibility for personal-branded journalism site are still profound, but Rosen offers a fundamental belief in the power of honest, fact-based journalism to do good. His joining of Omidyar parallels former academic Clark Gilbert’s move from Harvard to Salt Lake City, as he’s driven one new model after another, many based on his teachings over the years, at Deseret News. Everyone into the swim.

Photo by Chris Hsia 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

Today, Press+ — with about 450 clients and 200 more contracted and in the pipeline for set-up — is again on the market, I’ve learned. A number of companies have heard the pitch, and prospective buyers are going through their due diligence.

Among the key questions: Would a buyer get a services company, a tech company, or a data company? The 40-person Press+ unit of RR Donnelley is a mix of the three at this point, and a new owner would have to decide which to emphasize going forward. It’s also a profoundly U.S-centric company at this point, with about only five percent of its 450 active clients found outside the United States.

How much will it go for, and to whom — and what does its selling tell us about the future of paid digital content — not just in the U.S., but globally?

Cofounders Gordon Crovitz, the one-time Wall Street Journal publisher, and Steve Brill, serial entrepreneur and journalist, declined comment on the shopping of the company. I’ve talked to both over the years, though, and the company’s path, its challenges, and its opportunities are quite clear. In fact, the potential growth of paid digital content sales is one we should all be focused on. Whether those sales come through Press+ or elsewhere, we’re clearly on the cusp of a new understanding of consumers’ willingness to pay for digital news and feature products.

I’ve come to call this new emerging era Paywalls 2.0, built on the lessons of Paywalls 1.0, the last four years’ foundation built largely on The New York Times’ pioneering general news pay model and the work of Press+.

First, a basic question. Why is RR Donnelley selling?

Donnelley bought Press+ and several other companies, including ereader Libre Digital, in a burst. The old printing and packaging company needed to expand its footprint from legacy businesses and to demonstrate to investors that it was getting in tune with digital times. Motley Fool described it this summer as a high-dividend-paying “buggy whip” stock, even though it has managed recent small growth. Check out the Donnelley website, and you see lots of stuff on “end-to-end” publishing solutions. Its “Custom Point Solutions Group” encompasses some of these new solutions, emphasizing the company’s move beyond printing to “integrated communications management.” Donnelley is a $10-billion-plus company in revenues, and while the plus part of Press+ may have seemed attractive, the business is but a freckle on its balance sheet.

Though the Donnelley acquisition looked like it might offer a new B2B market for Press+, it’s now clear that Press+ managed to grow largely within its original market: news publishers. Eighty percent of Press+ clients are newspapers, and many of the rest are news-oriented online-only or newsletter companies. The Donnelley acquisition, as is often the case, didn’t provide the kind of synergies we hear about when such deals are announced. It may have been an odd fit in any case. And now Donnelley is moving on.

For the global news industry, approaching 2014, the question of this reader revenue revolution is intertwined with making sense of Press+’s potential. By mid 2014, well over 650 daily newspapers worldwide will have restricted digital news access. The majority of those are in the U.S., but systems are rapidly being deployed across northern and central Europe, as well as in Japan and Australia. What was a short time ago experimental is becoming an article of faith. Where we recently wondered whether the “information wants to be free” fantasy had become a reality, we now know that some consumers — given higher-quality news, or TV, or music, or movie content — will pay for it. Where circulation revenue was once flat, it is now going up 5-6 percent annually in the U.S. because of paywall-inspired and -abetted aggressive pricing.

Just as important: We now know that ad revenue struggling to find any growth. Add it all up and reader revenue — increasingly, digitally oriented reader revenue — becomes the most important and for many (“The newsonomics of majority reader revenue”) their leading way to pay journalists and eke out profit.

This new era will find its legs as we answer four questions:

• If, in fact, subscribers will pay for all-access and digital access, what else might these digital subscribers — increasingly positioned as members — pay for?
• What if publishers apply price-discrimination models for digital and all-access, in ways that hundreds of dailies have long done with print pricing? In short, charge different households different prices based on their buying history, demographics, and location, maximizing yield per subscriber. Matt Lindsay, whose Mather Economics is the go-to pricing consultant for U.S. dailies, identifies digital price discrimination as a top trend for 2014.
• If the market for all-the-content firehose digital subscriptions is getting saturated (a notion supported by the plateauing of The New York Times’ first offer and other similar learnings), then what kinds of niche paid products might non-newspaper loyalists — including those under 35 — pay for?
• Will there be a paid news content network, enabling publishers to sell other publishers’ paid content? Whether it’s a Press+ network, a Washington Post/Amazon network, or a Flipboard network, there will be efforts to create a Netflix for news.

I’ve written about “selling more stuff” as a signal trend for the next year. The New York Times is the most public about its niche digital product plans, and we’ve seen 2013 niche tests from the Chicago Tribune, Politico, Germany’s Bild, and The Times of London, among others. In addition, a number of large publishers tell me privately they are readying their own paid digital niche products. Sports, which Press+ has identified as an area of strong interest among a third of Press+-mediated subscribers, poses a lot of potential. So do travel, health, technology, and family.

Which brings us back to one of Press+’s strengths: data. Its current pitch to would-be buyers is heavily based on knowledge and analytics.

It’s good to be at the top of a healthy food chain, and that’s where Press+ is now perched. It is dropping billions of cookies on Press+-mediated content. While each publisher gets its own data, Press+ gets it all. Out of that, you get one of the major selling points Press+ uses with its clients: “We’ll share best practices with you.” Press+ has measured the differential between its highest- and lowest-performing sites at 10-to-1, and that would be an impressive difference-maker in revenue return. Get the metering, marketing, messaging, and more right, Press+ says, and you’ll more than make up the revenue share (~20 percent) you pay us.

That may be Press+’s best value in the marketplace. Data and analytics (“The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data scientists, and conversion specialists”) is the foundation of the new digital business. Press+ has a fair amount, but what it has may be more valuable to acquirers that have far more, and want to add consumer buying habit data to ad-related and other data collections. While it has just learned over the past year that is a “data company,” that personality seems most appealing on today’s market. It’s a services company, getting decent to good marks from its clients, though some have chafed about its limitations. It’s less of a tech company, those who’ve looked under its hood believe; they say its technologies, though smartly assembled, break little new ground.

So would a media company buy Press+, or would an e-commerce company make more sense? How about an agency looking to move beyond traditional agency bounds? For current Press+ clients, a sale may post a competitive question. If a competitive media company buys Press+, how comfortable will clients be with having their precious data used against them? One of the reasons Google never got much traction with its Checkout/OnePass e-commerce alternative to Press+ was publisher concern about data.

At the same time, given both the growing appetite for niche digital news/feature commerce and the complexity that it may require, Press+ will need investment to keep its lengthy lead against its own competition, a competition now splintered among Europe-based companies (Piano Media, Cleeng, MediaPass) as well as Tinypass in the U.S. A buyer could supply that in ways that Donnelley largely hasn’t.

A buyer will have to decide whether the Press+ business model has legs. The company, which doesn’t disclose revenues, largely receives its payments in the form of revenue share when readers buy digital-only subscriptions. Yet the growing trend among publishers is to offer single-priced all-access to print/web/tablet/smartphone/e-edition. On those subs, Press+ only takes a smaller annual fee, rather than a rev share. A new owner must fit the Press+ model to its best value proposition: Is it really best practice and analytics, as with the benchmarking product it already sells to those who don’t use Press+ as an e-commerce platform? Or is it software-as-a-service?

Of course, publishers face a paradox as they move more strongly into paid digital access. All-access reader revenue is becoming an absolute core of the business. Do they need own it — and what does owning it mean? For the bigger companies, building their own technologies and integrating it with customer databases has become a top priority. For the many others, what’s the best long-term solution? Press+ argues that its cloud-computing solution is fastest and cheapest, getting publishers into the new marketplace better than the alternatives. That may well have been true for the Paywalls 1.0 era. But as Press+ prepares to change hands again, its clients will have another chance to ask themselves that question.

Taylor sells neither religion nor rowdiness. He sells events. He is high on events, a Barnum & Bailey events promoter of the 21st century. And, he’s a newspaper guy. Just celebrating his sixth year as president of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, a WEHCO paper, the small chain run by early paywall advocate Walter Hussman, Jr.. Taylor is in the events vanguard.

Sure, Tina Brown just won a new round of notice, leaving Daily Beast and devoting herself to her new Tina Brown Live Media company. And “events” as a revenue strategy are seemingly everywhere nowadays, at the Times, Journal, FT, dozens of metros, public radio stations, the Texas Tribune, and many magazines. But the zeal Taylor brings to the idea — and his success — is worth noting.

But first let’s put the events business in a little perspective. It’s nothing new. But it’s been mostly been business-to-business business, with B2C events and conferences run largely by companies that specialize in them. In fact, about 10 percent of all marketing money in the U.S. is spent on events of one kind or another, amounting to $40 billion or more, according to Outsell research. Of that, $17 billion is spent on B2C events; in the B2C realm, that’s 6.5 percent of overall marketing spending.

Now news publishers are waking up to the potential. Why? It’s part desperation, as the ad business has forced them to push into all kinds of “alternative revenue.” There’s also the high-tech/high-touch angle: The more we go digital, the more we crave actual human connection, it seems. It’s the connection between the written word and the spoken word — from publishing to event to…more publishing. It’s a circle of reader usage, and publishers are starting to round it. If you speak the language of brands, call events “brand extension.”

The Times Free Press now puts on 12 big events a year, making “direct events revenue” 11 percent of its retail revenue, generating well into the seven figures in income; “indirect events revenue” contributes another three percent. Taylor, an ad guy by trade (now 39, he became an ad director at age 23), has made events a centerpiece of the sales push in Tennessee’s fourth-largest city.

His success has led to — of course! — an industry event. On November 3 to 5, the first annual Event Revenue Summit will be held in Chattanooga, sponsored by the Southern Newspapers Publishers Association. The price tag: $949 — which may be a bargain if publishers can replicate just a fraction of Taylor’s model.

There’s a lot of logistics necessary to making an events business successful. One key ingredient is passion. Listen to him describe the malaise surrounding the news business: “I get on a plane. I’m in the newspaper business. And they say, ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ They want to send flowers,” he told an industry group at the annual Vail Roundtable recently. “We’ve got our people excited. We’ve got penetration, brand, and creativity and we’re in the 86th biggest DMA. Mom and Pops [events companies] can’t come in and leverage. Use what you got.”

Competition isn’t an abstraction to Taylor: “Others will swoop in and take money out of our markets. If you don’t take advantage of events, shame on you. The Southern Women’s Show is an interloper,” he says, talking about the rival events company Southern Shows that produces 19 kinds of shows in 11 markets. “I don’t want them in Chattanooga. I came out with a better women’s show. We have to say no.” It’s the kind of fervor that tells us something about how to reassert newspapers’ roles in their communities.

The business model is straightforward. While many publishers are focused singularly on event sponsorship money, Taylor works both traditional ends of the newspaper business: merchants and readers.

Whether it’s a big service show or a major community-recognition awards dinner, all events have overall corporate sponsors. Then, in addition, the expos (senior, bridal, women’s, kids) sell booths to exhibitors. The banquets (“Best of Preps”, “Best of the Best”) also sell tables to companies. All events are paid admission — as little as $5 to more than $100 for a VIP entrance.

So there are two significant revenue streams at play here: businesses and individuals. The newsonomics of the Chattanooga model are intriguing ones and worth study by all publishers into or getting into the events business. The events gospel according to Jeff Taylor:

• Tap different budgets. Ad budgets are in decline, but promotion budgets are in ascendance, as Borrell and other studies show. Main Street is waking up to the range of digital marketing possibilities, well beyond buying space in print or online, and newspapers are servicing that need with local digital services businesses (“The newsonomics of selling Main Street”). So the events business taps marketing and promotion budgets more than ad budgets. That’s a smart move: Go for the widening slice of the pie, not the thinning one.
• Knock on the marketing budget door with a new hand. Taylor says his ad director had cold-called a local remodeler often times, to no response. When she called using the name of an upcoming Expo in the pitch — rather than the newspaper’s name — she got a hearing and a contract. Just rubbing elbows with local business people at a newspaper-sponsored event opens up new relationships. Lesson: Newspaper advertising may seem passé, but events participation is au courant and another way to open ad doors.
• Aim as much at non-advertisers as advertisers. The remodeler is like most local businesses: a non-advertiser. Taylor says the events business has exposed the paper to a large new set of businesses, a number of whom are now also buying ads as well as event sponsorships. That means new “indirect events revenue” as events-led ad packages find new life. Says Taylor: “These small business owners — when you do this stuff for them — it changes their perspective of you. We’ve changed the perception of the future of the paper in the market.”
• Figure out a new way to attract McDonald’s money. McDonald’s is not a traditional newspaper advertiser. But the paper’s Kids Expo brought McDonald’s on board as a sponsor, which then opened up other doors to new marketing budget revenue from McDonald’s. Today, says Taylor, McDonald’s is a “high, six-figures customer,” buying “front-page stickies” among other ads — showing the arithmetic of both “direct events revenue” and “indirect events revenue.” Similarly, events brought in sporting goods retailer Academy Sports into a multi-year contract, where other sales efforts had fallen short.
• Keep costs low. The paper’s events are coordinated by a full-time staff of four. Newspaper staffers also volunteer their time — trading a day of working an event for another day off — to help staff the big events. Taylor says that his events-business competitors have to spend 30 percent or so of their expenses on marketing; he’s got a free marketing machine, in print and online. Jim Moroney, Dallas Morning News publisher and incoming CEO of A.H. Belo, makes a similar point about using old-fashioned newsprint. “Our secret sauce is using our unsold inventory or extra space in the paper to sell tickets,” he says about the Crowdsource events company he launched a year ago. “Basically, its an arbitrage of the unsold digital inventory and the low cost to the publisher of newsprint to sell tickets.”
• Find events that are immune to economic cycles, such as traveling bridal shows. Taylor points out that, boom or bust, couples get married, making Bridal Expos — twice annually, each running a “six-figure profit” — recession proof. “When you get engaged, where’s the first place you go? The newspaper.” At that first point of contact, the newspaper begins its process of lead generation for the swarm of businesses serving brides and grooms. When non-local bridal fairs were in the market, Taylor says he sent his people to chase them out, handing out competitive flyers on the street.
• Use events as a content platform. The Kids Expo proved successful, so the paper launched a new kids magazine, with a 45,000 monthly press run, leveraging new readership and advertisers. Another side benefit Chattanooga is learning: “strengthen underperforming audiences.”
• Sell newspaper subscriptions at events. Newspaper subs? Yes, just as some papers are selling Sunday print to digital-only subscribers, events themselves offer just one more avenue for old-fashioned circulation. Taylor says the numbers sold are in the hundreds, a no-extra-cost side benefit of the events business.
• Do more, not less, if you want more money — and thanks. Remember that woman out in the New Orleans streets demanding a real daily newspaper? That’s the kind of thanks and loyalty that newspapers can (sometimes) earn. The Times-Picayune earned it during and after Katrina. Great community-serving journalism is a major part of the deal; so are the kind of community-recognition and services events the Times Free Press is putting on. “I can’t believe the number of people who say ‘Thank you'” after one of our events, Taylor says. Two thousand miles away, the new Orange County Register’s emphasis on community serving is a hallmark of its aggressive strategy.

Where is this all going? There’s plenty of room for creativity; the Austin Chronicle has just sponsored its 11th annual Adult Spelling Bee, with an added inducement: “Worried about stage fright? That’s what $3 ZiegenBock drafts are for.” We’ll have big, intellectual events — think the Atlantic-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival, or The New Yorker’s — and we’ll have many that help people with the little events (marriage, family raising, retirement) in all their lives. The common denominator is engagement.

For publishers, from the Chattanooga Times Free Press to the fast-innovating Atlantic Media, it’s all about breathing new life into the business. In fact, Elizabeth Baker Keffer, president of Atlantic Live, tells me that The Atlantic’s events idea really germinated about a dozen years ago, out of the experience Keffer and Atlantic owner David Bradley had with both the Advisory Board Company and Corporate Executive Board. Both those B2B businesses utilized events to deliver research and make money. So they adapted the events ideas to The Atlantic, as Bradley bought it in 1999.

“We created a third dimension to our business [after advertising and circulation],” says Keffer. We wanted to get our editors and publishers out to an audience.” Finally, it’s about bringing to life what can sometimes seem like stodgy nameplates: “We wanted to animate the brand.”

Photo of Chattanooga Choo-Choo sign by Brent Moore used under a Creative Commons license.

“Runway” was one of the benefits he recently said his purchase of The Washington Post would give the institution — “runway” as in financial room.

We’ll have to stretch the metaphor to think about what it may mean. More length of runway, simply meaning more time to get the Post set in the right direction? More width of runway, meaning more room for more products and business models to be tested to find the best way forward? To stretch further: Are we talking landing or take-off?

None of our other recent buyers have talked publicly and specifically about offering “runway.” Yet that’s what Aaron Kushner is providing in Orange County, and now with his new Long Beach foray. It’s a multi-million dollar, long-term investment in the business.

Just this week, Politico owner Robert Allbritton, who provided plenty of runway for that startup to build scale, bought Capital New York. Out of the box, more runway: investment in editorial expansion.

We haven’t yet heard about John Henry’s plans for The Boston Globe, though we know he provided hundreds of millions of dollars of runway in order to resuscitate the Red Sox franchise.

Warren Buffett’s newspaper operations have had to focus strongly on systems and technology transition issues in its first year; will he now provide runway to his properties’ capacity for growth? We have one clue to the question. He told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in March that they should expect fewer newspaper profits in the next several years. That would indicate he’s willing to provide some kind of transition cushion.

What do all of these newspaper buyers have in common? They don’t have to look back at loss and what used to be. TWEET They’ve bought strong brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of reader/customer relationships and thousands of advertising relationships. Those are the kinds of assets that a master marketer like Bezos knows he can build on.

They are also private company buyers. (Berkshire Hathaway is, of course, publicly traded, but Buffett has never been one to cater to the markets’ whims — and in any event, his collection of newspapers is a rounding error within the larger company.) You can’t do a medium- to long-term turnaround and satisfy the quarterlies-watching public markets. Trying to do both — long-term turnaround and short-term profit maximization — looks impossible. It is also not in the long-term interest of the companies themselves, their readers, or the communities they serve.

These new billionaires and multi-millionaires are getting into a hallowed industry cheaply. They know that — just as they also know the bottom may not yet have been found. But they seem to be exhibiting patience, and that’s a new phenomenon on the news scene. If your point of view shifts from revenue numbers in 2014 to the size, engagement and penetration of the business in 2018 — given the ability of cheap digital technology to reduce costs and multiply customer relationships — whole new vistas open up.

Some, inevitably, will be more civic-minded than others. In this game of Billionaire Bingo, some communities and newspaper companies will fare better than others. Don Graham believes he found just the right combination of savvy, wealth, and civic mindedness in Bezos. Both Bezos and Buffett seem to be saying this about their new properties: You’re important to the society. You may have more financial value than current markets understand. Customers — reader and advertisers — will reward you if you innovate. I’ll provide with a cushion as you move from here to there.

When we think runway, we think horizon. The Grahams looked into the same horizon and came away frightened. In Don Graham’s candid interview after announcing the sale, he explained that the 2012 year-end financials had decided him on selling. There was no light at the end of the tunnel — only more tunnel. TWEET

That’s the simplest description for what all newspaper owners, in the U.S., Europe and Latin America now see as they peer into 2014 and beyond. A year ago, they had hope that new paywall revenue would approximately make up for print ad loss. Then, some new arithmetic could kick in. Through new initiatives, they could begin to grow again.

2013 has tossed cold water on the scenario. Print advertising continues to decline markedly, off a smaller and smaller base. Print ad loss is swamping paywall revenue, even as paywall revenue looks like it may plateau in the second or third year of operation.

Look where we’re at in the digital transition, two decades after its start. The industry’s own stats, via the Newspaper Association of America, put 2012 digital ad revenue at 11 percent of total revenue. Some part of the other reported “new revenue”, at 8 percent, is digital. We can figure, from both public reporting and private reports (and being generous), that newspapers top out at around 25 percent of their news-related-operations revenue coming from digital. (It must be noted that as far behind as they may seem, they are way ahead of magazines and broadcast — each earning no more than 5 percent of total revenues from digital sources.)

Yes, 23 years after the first web browser, 10 years after the iTunes Store, six years after the iPhone, at least three of every four dollars are still driven by old-fashioned, grimy print. TWEET

And the transition from print to digital isn’t anywhere near over: News companies are still closer to the beginning than to the end. In other words, the next several years are going to be tough years of transition — yes, still — even as the ongoing shift of readers, advertisers, and business models toward digital finally allow reductions in onerous legacy costs.

Faced with that reality, the Grahams blinked. Given their long and worthy stewardship, who can blame them?

For the Grahams, it was clearly not just the numbers — not just the the financial drain — but an emotional and intellectual fatigue as well. Though different in tone and timing, this 2013 affair reminds us of 2006 and 2007 when Knight Ridder’s Tony Ridder, Tribune’s Dennis FitzSimons and the Wall Street Journal’s Bancroft family turned over their companies without much of a battle. When push came to shove by pushy investors or desirous suitors, they were simply ready to move on.

With eyes wide open, enter Jeff Bezos. How will he navigate this new runway his deep pockets are paving?

In addition to his provision of financial runway, he offered three Amazonian principles: “Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” And: “If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.”

How could these principles — trotted out by many CEOs, but actually put in place by this one — actually play out for the Post? Let’s quickly consider three scenarios:

• Go mass market with the Post. Regain market share, building on the powerful circulation still in place in the affluent D.C. metro area. The Post, like many papers, has priced up and started charging for all-access digital/print subscriptions. At last report, it had 447,700 daily circulation and 646,700 on Sundays. What if Bezos went the other way, borrowing a page from his Amazon Prime strategy? With Prime — at $79 a year for guaranteed two-day delivery — he got members at a low price point. Then he found those members would buy as much as 40 percent more than non-members. What if the Post charged a low rate to enlarge its tent of members, and Bezos used his marketing genius to use that low rate as just the beginning of deeper commercial and editorial relationships — and sales. In the short term, that would mean more operating loss, but it could also be — Amazon-like — an investment in the future.
• Marry the best of Amazon and the best of the Post. Sure, Bezos is CEO of a public company and sole owner of a private one, which would create some conundrums. But let’s blue-sky it. Why not combine Prime, in the D.C. area, with a Post subscription? Why not offer Kindle Fires pre-loaded with the next-generation Washington Post tablet experience? The Kindle Fire is already constructed as something of a loss leader — selling hardware cheap to make more money selling content. The Philly newspapers and now the Chicago Tribune are packaging up tablet and newspaper subs. Bezos has a brand-name product with which to do that and can offer a smorgasboard of media, books, and news to sweeten the deal. AmazonFresh delivers groceries in Seattle and L.A.; why not add D.C. to that list, combining it with the Post or Post specials? With Amazon same-day delivery ramping up, what kinds of combos make logistical and consumer sense?
• Out-Politico Politico. Bezos has got to be asking how startup Politico outflanked the Post, both in political coverage and then with its Pro line (“The newsonomics of influentials”). What if wanted to retake those markets, investing heavily? Think Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog multiplied and niched.
• Out-Snow Fall The New York Times: In Joe Hagan’s in-depth profile of Mark Thompson’s impact on the Times, New YorkmMagazine pointed out how “to snowfall” has become a verb in the Times newsroom (and elsewhere). Multimedia creation is finally getting into the marrow of legacy news operations. Here, again, what if Bezos asked the question of how a new Post tablet product — in addition to its quite traditional current presentation — could take the Snow Fall metaphor and lead the pack in its innovation?

So we’re back to the runway questions: How wide, how long? How many of the “new ideas” that Don Graham acknowledged the next generation of the Post needs can fit on it? We can hope for nodes of innovation, with new owners and new money on both coasts and in between. Headed into 2014, that’s what the news industry needs.

Photo of plane on Polish runway by Mark used under a Creative Commons license.

In media businesses, little means few if any layers of bothersome decision-making. Agility. Nimbleness. Independence. All great and positive values. But little can also mean limited reach and resources. Little can mean a tough, long slog to success of any satisfying scale.

Big, of course, means impact: power of product, of story, of idea. Ability to reach lots of people and customers. Big, though, inevitably means greater expense and often cumbersome, sometimes laughable, response to market changes. At worst, it means paralysis.

What if you could mix big and little — and take advantage of the best of both worlds? That’s the aim of one of the more interesting new partnerships in news media. In early August, NBC News and GlobalPost announced an unusual mating. No immediate cash is changing hands in the deal, but there’s a lot of other currency involved here that tells where smart content companies — big and little — are going in the next digital age. Let’s look at the newsonomics of big and little, and their mating.

NBC is one of the behemoths, with tremendous reach and substantial expense — and, historically, not one of the nimblest companies around. Boston-based GlobalPost is a four-year-old for-profit startup that improbably launched an ambitious international news site — built on in-country original reporting — in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession. It’s been much decorated with awards, including a Peabody, since.

What did little GlobalPost and big NBC News see in each other? GlobalPost founder and CEO Phil Balboni knew what he wanted in a mate. After four years of learning, he’d found that his original hopes for a well-diversified business model couldn’t be realized. While syndication of GlobalPost content accounts for 19 percent of the company’s revenue and membership and “other” about 12 percent, both those numbers are significantly less than what Balboni had hoped.

Even before the digital ad challenge got tougher, Balboni knew he didn’t want to become too dependent on advertising. But today, digital advertising accounts for 69 percent of revenue. GlobalPost is finding some real success in direct selling, bringing in high-profile clients like Shell, Xerox, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Liberty Mutual, some of the same brands we see populating a number of premium news sites. However, the ubiquitous downward price pressure on non-premium ads is having an impact.

That led Balboni to look for a big brother. While he’d done various kinds of editorial partnerships with CBS and PBS over time, none had produced a game-changing business impact. What GlobalPost needed was two things:

• An ad partner whose ad technology stack could help GlobalPost better monetize its non-directly-sold inventory — pulling rates up from “remnant” pricing that, as at many other publishers, has dropped to mid-double-digits in cents, not dollars. Already the NBC Universal Advertising Platform is monetizing a substantial portion of GP’s ad impressions, taking advantage of its affluent and well-educated audience.
• A shot in the arm of consumer awareness. While GP has grown impressively to 3 million monthly unique visitors and 11.5 million pageviews — about a 45 percent increase year-over-year — that’s not enough. One sign of having “arrived” for startup news sites is the 10 million uniques plateau. Slate finally got there earlier this year and trumpeted that fact. GlobalPost needs much greater awareness to get there, and the NBC promotion of its brand and its stories will help. “We’re in the top 35 news sites, but we’re still a whippersnapper,” observes Balboni, who says GP is close to profitability.

What NBC News needs is more high quality international news content, at a low cost. Staff-produced content is expensive, and NBC, like its network peers, have seen significant cutbacks in staffing for years. For David Verdi, NBC News’ senior VP for worldwide news gathering, the GlobalPost deal is an extension of a commitment he made long ago: produce more content than ever before to feed the multi-platform beast, at a lower budget than ever before. Ten years ago, many editors, print and broadcast, would have said it can’t be done; many of those have left the field of combat.

NBC first partnered with U.K. broadcaster ITN in 1994. Verdi says that relationship has doubled NBC News’ global reach and made possible lots of shared resource efficiencies. Full circle, ITN/ITV news chief Deborah Turness assumed the presidency of NBC News this month, becoming the first female president of one of the Big Three U.S. network news broadcasters.

Inevitably, top editorial managers are facing a new world of metrics that no one taught in journalism school. Verdi has to take into account costs per program and per story as he strives to remake the business. It’s the high-end professional content that drives this relationship.

“In a world of social media and smartphones, everybody’s a journalist,” says Verdi, a 23-year NBC News veteran. To continue its differentiation, NBC News must stay at the top end of the trade. It’s not just the actual reporting that’s of value — it’s the in-country eyes and ears aware of trends and sentiments before big news, giving NBC a window into “events that you can see coming.” Says Verdi of the GlobalPost reporters: “They are living it.”

The GlobalPost deal helps fill some holes in NBC’s global map. GP’s editorial strategy places 13 full-time senior correspondents largely in parts of the world it sees as undercovered: Bangkok, Brussels, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Lima, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Seoul. GP also works with a roster of 50 in-country freelancers worldwide.

NBC News gets the ability to run three GlobalPost stories a day and tap into the GP reporters on air and for online video. Already, the month-old deal has accounted for Cairo correspondent Louisa Loveluck appearing on MSNBC several times, as has editor-at-large Charlie Sennott. (Founding editor Sennott is now heading up a push to expand the site’s “Special Reports,”, gaining foundation grants to support that time-intensive work.)

One acute observer of network international news — Andrew Heyward, who ran CBS News from 1996 to 2005 — thinks the partnership is a smart move, and an update of an old practice. “It is an outsourced version of the stringer system,” says Heyward, who notes that he has done consulting for NBC. Networks can make sure they have a presence on big stories by sharing video globally — but winning against competitors means distinguishing yourself, now more than ever.

“The next battle is to do reporting that stands out,” says Heyward. GlobalPost, then, being exclusive to NBC News, among its competitors, helps provide that differentiation, even as it flies in its Richard Engels to put the NBC face on the big story.

The NBC/GP deal, interestingly, was driven by NBC chief digital officer Vivian Schiller, who took on her post two years ago. Expect more such deals, Schiller told me, especially as NBC fills out its topic channel business. “This is a model to push external reach and footprint,” she says.

Both Schiller and Verdi long knew Phil Balboni, who built New England Cable News, so let’s note the continuing importance of trusted — and trustworthy — relationships in getting these kinds of deals done. It’s also noteworthy that the digital side of the business brought it to the editorial side, aiming at potential digital/broadcast wins. Too often, chafing between legacy and digital units has prevented such deals at many media companies.

It only makes sense that Schiller would use such a third-party content strategy at NBC. Though her experience running digital at The New York Times was more internally focused (the Times remains mostly resistant, if not allergic, to non-Times content), her NPR experience may be instructive. Think about how often you hear other media companies’ reporters on air — an intelligent, free borrowing of content from highly trusted sources.

As Schiller builds out that strategy, she can also borrow from the DFM playbook. On a local level, the biggest story in rewiring the content landscape is still being written by Digital First Media. Digital First Media’s Thunderdome, led by digital news pioneer Jim Brady, profoundly embraces the strategy — and the emerging economy — of third-party content.

In a nutshell, DFM CEO John Paton’s transformation of Journal Register and MediaNews properties, under the DFM banner, calls for a singular staff focus on local news. Since readers still expect non-local news in their papers and on their websites, the DFM aim is to assemble that non-local stuff from a variety of partners, as cheaply as possible.

The growing list of partners shows a profound change in the content landscape, a new ecosystem of value, one that echoes the philosophical underpinnings of the NBC/GlobalPost deal. We can also see the connections between GlobalPost and DFM beyond sharing philosophy; GP is a content supplier to DFM and Jim Brady is a member of GP’s editorial board. A partial list of DFM’s content partners:

Business: The Street, Mashable

Health: Kaiser Health News, U.S. News (rankings and ratings of local doctors, hospitals), WebMD

World: GlobalPost, Worldcrunch

Nation and politics: Stateline (Pew), Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica

Technology: Mashable, Find the Best

Home and garden: BobVila.com

Education: U.S. News (school rankings)

Autos: Find the Best, U.S. News (auto reviews)

Entertainment: HitFix

While many newspapers have complained about their reliance on AP (and its cost), few have moved to license lots of topic-specific third-party content. While many newspaper chains have begun centralizing print and digital page and channel development, no one else is doing both — the licensing and the centralization — on the scale of DFM’s 40-person Thunderdome unit. For DFM, Thunderdome is wholly aimed at the digital side of the business, but regional print hubs are beginning to do parallel work, beginning at DFM’s Los Angeles News Group.

There’s a high level of complexity in the creation of the digital channels, mating big and small (sites and content providers, on several levels) and national and local. Explains top Thunderdome Editor Robyn Tomlin: “On the digital side, we are working with NewsCred to develop channels that will contain both the best/most relevant national content — and they will integrate all relevant local content.

“So a health channel has news on the latest health study, the Affordable Care Act, and on local hospital news. Local is always the priority on all channels. This is much harder than it sounds, as it means you have to have the ability to manage content at different levels (national, regional, local) to make it work. NewsCred is helping us architect a solution that allows us to do just that. We will start launching these channels this fall [with health] and will continue to roll out several a month [totaling 18] through next spring.” (For more on NewsCred, see “The Newsonomics of recycling journalism.”)

Among other models, DFM uses the same no-money-changes-hand arrangement of NBC and GlobalPost, as bigger DFM sites provide traffic and awareness for smaller sites. In some cases, DFM pays directly pay for content. In still others, it engages in ad revenue share deals. The partner with the bigger ad sales group, or best ad contacts in a sector, sells the client and shares the proceeds. Sometimes, that’s DFM; sometimes, it’s a partner, like The Street. There’s that big-and-little mating playing out again.

These cost-of-content economics are a linchpin of the new content business. The paradox is ever clearer. Simply, no one can afford the substantial full-time costs of the old legacy editorial operations, given the great decline in advertising. Yet, voracious readers — especially those now asked to pay for all-access subscriptions — demand more high-quality content. If smaller companies can produce high-quality content at between 40 to 60 percent of what the big guys still have to pay, then the mating of little and big makes profound financial sense. Expect to see lots more of it.

We don’t often get a chance to pick our family. In the newsonomics of big and little, we do. Who’s the little brother or sister you’d like to hang out with every day, and feel comfortable introducing to friends — and customers? Who’s the big sib who’s reliable and has your back? Can you pick only a single sibling? GlobalPost’s relationship with NBC is a fairly exclusive one; media partners must decide what they are giving and getting in such exclusive relationships. Family breakups can be wrenching — and costly. Media companies — large and small — must choose carefully.

Photo by Tammy Simmons used under a Creative Commons license.

This summer edition of What’s New In Digital Scholarship has a few insights on some sizzling (and very wonky) questions: Are paywalls worth it? What’s the cosmic meaning of the SOPA-PIPA debate? What do we learn by visualizing millions of Instagram users? How filter-y are search engine filter bubbles, really? And did the early reporting on the Arab Spring miss the boat on social media? That and more among these half-dozen selected studies:

“Newspaper paywalls — the hype and the reality: A study of how paid news content impacts on media corporation revenues”: Study from Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, published in Digital Journalism. By Merja Myllylahti.

The researcher looks at the available data on outlets around the globe, including The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Times and The Sunday Times (U.K.), The Australian, and various outlets in New Zealand, Finland, and central Europe. The study is constrained, perhaps even hampered, by the fact that media outlets do not necessarily disclose full information about their online operations and revenue flows.

In any case, the researcher adds to the heated debate over paywalls by drawing the following conclusions: “It can be argued that online news paywalls create additional income for news corporations, but at the current revenue levels they do not offer a viable business model in the short term. Some newspapers have started to lower prices for their online news content and to offer discounted packages in order to enhance their subscription numbers, but in the short term this is most likely to erode their digital revenues.”

Over this relatively small sample, the study estimates, online subscriptions account for about 10 percent of publishing/circulation revenue. But even this figure is threatened by “softening” paywalls and decreasing subscription prices. Although the findings of the paper are only “provisional,” the researcher notes, the broader potential downsides of paywalls are given heavy emphasis.

“Interactions of News Frames and Incivility in the Political Blogosphere: Examining Perceptual Outcomes”: Study from Washington State University, published in the Political Communication. By Porismita Borah.

The research literature on media credibility and how incivility, online outrage and media polarization affect the public is all still evolving. How does the tone, presentation, style, words, associated images, and other attributes of stories — what scholars call “framing” — affect perceptions of truth? In a digital world of sharp-elbowed trolls, what are the signifiers of credibility for the average consumer? One would hope that calm, reasoned, civil discourse around news issues would engender the greatest degree of credibility. But this may not be so.

This study analyzes web survey results from about 240 college students who were asked to respond to stories around gay rights issues; in some instances, they first read a civil or uncivil blogger commentary. The researcher juggled a couple of different other variables. Some stories had a “strategy” frame — they focused on the performance and style of people involved — while others had a “value” frame, whereby the story focused on the clash of basic worldviews and beliefs. Ultimately, the study concludes that “uncivil blogger commentary increased the credibility of the news article” in cases where the content of the news story highlighted a clash of fundamental values. Although uncivil commentary can decrease trust in government and a reader’s sense of their power within politics, the researcher finds, it nevertheless increases credibility for news framed a certain way. Incivility, it seems, has its uses, even if they don’t necessarily serve the interests of informed, deliberative democracy.

“Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate”: Study from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. By Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling.

Did the SOPA-PIPA controversy illustrate a new world at work? Or was it a unique case? This study uses new digital mapping tools from the Media Cloud project (jointly run with MIT’s Center for Civic Media) to examine news coverage of the debate surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and companion bill PIPA, from 2010 to 2012. The research findings validate Internet scholar and philosopher Yochai Benkler’s well-known views on the networked public sphere and “networked fourth estate.” A tiny coterie of “small-scale commercial tech media, standing non-media NGOs, and individuals” managed to spotlight the issue, wake the mainstream media from their dogmatic slumbers and ultimately raise enough hell to thwart the bill.

A close look at the information flows over time shows certain subtleties that highlight how smaller actors played outsized roles at certain points: “A major node like Wikipedia may be secondary, while an otherwise minor node, such as the blog of a law professor commenting on an amendment or a technical paper on DNS security, may be more important. The dynamic nature of attention in controversies over time means that prior claims regarding a re-concentration of the ability to shape discourse miss vital fluctuations in influence and visibility…Fluctuations in attention given progressive development of arguments and frames over time allow for greater diversity of opportunity to participate in setting and changing the agenda early in the debate compared to the prevailing understanding of the power law structure of attention in digital media.”

In the ongoing debate over the relative power of Internet activism, SOPA-PIPA furnishes an “optimistic” story. Overall, the data lend “support to the feasibility of effective online mobilization providing sufficiently targeted action to achieve real political results.” However, the researchers concede that SOPA-PIPA activism could be a kind of one-off, not to be repeated on issues relating to other public policy realms. “Perhaps the high engagement of young, net-savvy individuals,” they write, “is only available for the politics of technology…”

“Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media”: Study from CUNY and the University of Pittsburgh, published in First Monday. By Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich.

The researchers produce fantastic, path-breaking visualizations of the way Instagram users are engaging with the photo-sharing application; they examine a sample of more than 2 million photos across 13 cities, slicing it in various ways. They take a textured, subtle approach — one more “humanities”-driven than some more “scientific” Big Data empirical examinations of patterns — to derive meaning from the data. They call it “multi-scale reading”: Looking at data at different levels, from different angles. It’s the technique of examining photo metadata and content in creative ways that can help tell more interesting stories about the people who engage in social photo-sharing: “This ability to visualize photographic content at multiple scales allows us to start asking questions such as: How can we compare millions of photos taken in London, Bangkok, and Tel Aviv in such a way that cultural differences between these cities can be revealed?” Prose fails to do justice to their results.

No earlybird-Nashville-sepia-valencia-retro-vintage-distressed-really-cool-yellow-light-1977 photo filters are necessary here. And the super-cool visualizations in the study — on display in greater detail at Phototrails.net — are all the more interesting for it.

“Connecting in Crisis: ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Media and the Arab Spring”: From Stockholm University, published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. By Alexa Robertson.

This study compares the approaches of Al Jazeera English, Russia Today, CNN International, and BBC World News in their coverage of the Arab Spring events. The researcher reviewed a representative sample of 71 hours of airtime in January 2011; she is particularly interested in how social media are represented and connections between people “on the ground” and media members filtering and reporting from afar. The study critiques the broadcast outlets in many ways for failing to capitalize on the available user-generated material and the new, networked media dynamics at play: “In the first tumultuous weeks of the ‘Facebook Revolution,’ less use was made of crowdsourced material and less attention was paid to the role of social media in global television news than is often suggested. On average, news items drawing on user-generated content amounted to less than 4 percent of all items and social media were part of less than 2 percent of all news stories.”

However, Al Jazeera English “outclassed the others in terms of the absolute number of reports it aired that drew on user-generated content or focused on the role of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or the Internet in general in these events.” It presents a case study of mainstream media gatekeeping and filtering, and the various growing pains global news outlets are facing in a world of mobile device-wielding protestors who each represent their own broadcast outlet.

“Searching the Web for conflicting topics: Page and user factors”: Study from University of Valencia and University of Seville (Spain) and Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany), published in Computers in Human Behavior. By Ladislao Salmerón, Yvonne Kammerer, and Pilar García-Carrión.

Adding to the vast literature now accumulating on the topic of information-seeking on the web — particularly relating to youth and the habits of the “Google generation” — this study analyzes how young people try to resolve conflicting information and how search results presentation affects how they operate and what they conclude. Of course, the top results heavily influence where people click and ultimately what they deem relevant and credible — a phenomenon scholars call the “top link” heuristic. In this way, search algorithms are like rail tracks — or to mix the metaphor with a more famous one, a “filter bubble” — guiding pathways to knowledge and allowing for cognitive shortcuts. But that is not the end of the story, it turns out.

The researchers asked 67 undergraduate students to review search engine results pages that had been manipulated to run in different orders and to bookmark pages for later evaluation; they were asked about greenhouse gas emission and climate change — a topic obviously requiring them to reconcile conflicting information. The findings “reveal that the participants employed a ‘top link’ heuristic while searching Web pages for a conflicting socio-scientific topic, but that they engaged in more systematic processing to assess the topic relevance and trustworthiness of Web pages when deciding which information to bookmark for later study.” This suggests that navigation patterns and actual use of knowledge are not the same thing — and they shouldn’t be confused in our understanding of search. “Conclusions based only on navigation data could result in misleading views,” the researchers state. The study also discusses how students’ prior knowledge influences their behavior and suggests some educational applications of the findings for instructors teaching online research.

Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.

• The sequestration of print legacy assets from other media holdings. Tribune’s dramatic spinoff announcement (“The newsonomics of Tribune’s detour”) is only the latest example. Time Warner, after failed talks to sell to Meredith, is taking the same route with Time, Inc. Last year, Media General exited the newspaper business to become a wholly broadcast one. Print is seen as a distressed asset — and best kept separate, for either valuation or sale.
• The clear recognition that seven-day print is going away. Advance’s audacious day-slimming stands out, but as newspapers offer all access, it is Sunday-plus-digital or weekender-plus-print offers that lead the way; seven-day print subscriptions are often a footnote.
• A growing movement to find the nooks and crannies of opportunity amid this digital crossover. Here, from New Orleans to Long Beach to Hearst Magazines’ HQ, we see targeted new investment.

Within those storylines, we’ve got a lot to watch for into 2014. Here’s the top of my list. Which of these stories (as the newly reemployed Keith Olbermann would say) will you be talking about in the next several months?

The great metro newspaper auction that wasn’t.

We thought that five of the 40 largest newspapers in the U.S. would be sold; now Tribune is just spinning them off. We thought there might be a half dozen bidders for The Boston Globe. Now there are apparently only three with bottom-of-the-range, sub-$100 million bidding. After low prices paid in Tampa, San Diego, and Philly, it’s clearer still that metro newspapers are distressed assets. Better, as Tribune has now done, to push them away from the mothership so they don’t drag down the financial value of a larger, diversified company. Broadcast isn’t a great business — its recent consolidation push is further evidence of that, as cost savings in a maturing industry becomes more important than revenue growth — but compared to newspapers, it’s a much better play. That seemed to be the case a year or two ago; the first half of 2013 has affirmed that. In brief, it’s tougher and tougher to make the argument that newspapers are creatures of the marketplace.

Real estate is a destiny of the fourth estate.

Unlike the Media General/Berkshire Hathaway Media and New York Times Co./Halifax Media Group sales, which included the real estate under the papers’ operations, Tribune Company’s split subdivides its to-be-spun-off newspapers. The fact that Tribune was holding on to all the real estate — office and production facilities — was lightly noted in the Tribune spinoff announcement. Most substantially, that move deducts at least a third of the financial value of the newspaper brands, and, in some cases, as much as half. Now Tribune has hired a president of real estate to maximize the value of what it describes as its “seven million square feet of real estate,” which probably includes all the terra firma today under its newspaper, broadcast, and other companies. It’s an intriguing play: Recent buyers have often highly valued the hard asset value of real estate in recent transactions. In addition, numerous newspapers have sold their iconic downtown office buildings, moving out to lower-cost burbs. It’s time to harvest financial value wherever you can, and we’ll see more of it in the next several years.

The positive gains of all-access circulation review will find themselves overwhelmed by print ad decline.

The U.S. newspaper industry found itself 2 percent down in revenue for 2012, as circulation revenue grew 5 percent year over year. The big 2013 aspiration: getting to zero growth. At the current rate, that aspiration will go largely unmet by the larger dailies. The reason: Print ad loss is accelerating. It seemed that the Great Recession accelerated the shift in ad dollars moving to digital; now it looks like the Mild Recovery is doing the same. Expect print ad losses to parallel last year’s, approaching 9 percent. Of course, even when the percentages remain the same, each year they slice off a smaller and smaller base. Circulation revenue gain plus tepid digital ad growth can’t match that 9 percent, so expect again a year of year-over-year revenue decline. That’s been the case since 2006. The bottom line is this: The only way to maintain profitability as revenues continue to drop is to cut expenses, staff, days of printing, or anything deemed least essential.

As readers and viewers are asked to pay more and more of the freight of media companies, content is a business weapon.

Take a lesson from the news industry’s cousins, movies and TV. There we see Amazon, Netflix, and now Hulu each investing hundreds of millions of dollars in acquiring and producing content. Their monthly all-access pitch to customers depends on two kinds of content: unique and more. So Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” debuting this week, is one more step on that path. Upstart media like Atlantic Media (which launched Defense One this week), BuzzFeed, and HuffPost have followed, more modestly, in those footsteps. So has Bloomberg in its various pushes. Among newspapers and magazines, the investments are few and far between, with the globals (WSJ, NYT, FT) doing small targeted plays. Most regional dailies are still in stable or cutback mode, given deteriorating advertising.

For many, the conundrum of producing more content with less means more basic restructuring. “This year will continue the leaning out of the troops,” says Laura Hollingsworth, a Gannett veteran who was recently appointed publisher in Nashville. “How do you really continue to prioritize what readers need/want most, along with managing all the different platforms, with much less of a team? [We’re talking about] managing UGC [user-generated content], key franchise and passion topics selection and honing our content output in for even further reductions and prioritization. Can we think about new models that shift our thinking from ‘content providers’ to ‘service providers,’ surrounding content and lots of other things to help people live and know better in their local areas?”

Then there is the contrarian Orange Country Register, the company that believes that more content produced by more journalists is the ticket to better business future. As editor Ken Brusic, who’s ridden through deep cuts and now restaffing, recently said plainly at ASNE, “Less is less.” (Video worth sharing).

Growth takes a bunch of new forms.

Hands down, marketing services is the go-to new play of most newspaper chains. They believe that selling digital services to small- and medium-sized businesses will be the new vital revenue source they need. In a recent report I wrote for Outsell, I estimated that digital services revenue could equal a tenth of ad revenue for daily newspapers within three years, to a total of $1.8 billion. Hearst’s LocalEdge platform continues to supply a lot of the industry. One of its earliest takers has been the Star Tribune. For chief revenue officer Jeff Griffing, it has been learning on the fly and, among other tactics, deciding whether to focus on existing Star Tribune customers or new business.

“Marketing services opportunity remains bigger than ever, although tougher than ever; even with the depth of competition in our market, there’s a significant untapped client base we have and continue to growth through new business development,” he says. “Now that we’ve had some time to build the Radius brand and get into the market, our near-term opportunity is to leveraging existing client relationships.”

It’s not large metros that believe in the strategy. Morris Communications, operators of smaller dailies, believes it’s a keeper as well, and it gets going after many non-ad customers as well. It set up a separate company, Main Street Digital (MSD), as a “pure-digital sales company.”

“This is the way we’re doing the digital services thing,” says Steve Gray, who heads Morris innovation efforts. “Operating in seven of our markets, the MSD teams use a completely different sales model from the legacy sales teams, based on calling on every business in the market with pure hunters and handing the business off to customer service managers. The KPIs and SOPs are like nothing our legacy sales teams have ever seen before.”

The Star Tribune’s Griffing points to marketing services’ twin: content marketing. The Star Tribune’s May-launched family health site, sponsored by Children’s Hospital, is prototypical of a revenue stream he believes may widen. “The benefit of content marketing and how it’s evolved is Star Tribune is engaging in more, meaningful, collaborative conversations with major local/regional advertisers, and moving the discussions beyond basic ad units. As a sales organization our conversations/value/deals become bigger. We’re in early stages here; this will be a major strategic contributor to growth this year and beyond.”

Then there’s the Orange County Register’s expanding strategy. In addition to its big push home county push, it is now poking into neighboring L.A. County, in Long Beach. The once-Knight Ridder-owned Press-Telegram is barely a shadow of its heyday self, and the Register believes a locally focused 16-page daily tab can win new ground with readers and advertisers. We haven’t seen too many recent forays into adjacent markets, so this one’s worth watching in the turbulent L.A. market. Then, there’s the competitive push of the New Orleans Advocate — a sign that what seems like daily retreat (that of Advance’s Times-Picayune) proves tempting to new entrants.

Meredith Publishing is taking another tack, adding a print edition (and a TV show) of the digital-only AllRecipes.com that it bought last year. Big reminder: Multi-platform publishing means strong print as well.

The Advance strategy will find few immediate followers.

So far, there are no announced or unannounced takers. Privately, peer publishers are confounded by the strategy, as they understand it. Even Digital First Media, whose CEO John Paton is the most sympathetic to the strategy, says that despite rumors, he has no plans to skinny home delivery in the L.A. market. DFM’s Oneida (N.Y.) Daily Dispatch has gone to three days a week, and several smaller California DFM dailies have dropped Mondays. Look for more papers to drop more days of print and/or home delivery, but over the next several years. The key here: how much more seven-day print subscribers are willing to pay home delivery.

That’s really the key here. As John Murray, VP/audience for the Newspaper Association of America, points out, the Advance strategy and the higher priced all-access subscription movement are really two sides of the same coin. Both strategies recognize that print is in rapid decline — and will go away at some point. The more than 450 North American dailies that have embraced all-access (print + digital) (“The newsonomics of Why Paywalls Now”) pricing are basically saying: If they want seven-day print home-delivered, make ’em pay. They’ve priced up subscriptions anywhere from 10 to 100 percent. You want the skinny, almost ad-free Monday paper? Pay more than a dollar a day for it. At some point, enough seven-day subscribers will tire of paying extra for print, as they transition to digital, and that’s when we’ll see seven-day print get its own Newseum space. The Advance thinking: With print audiences and advertisers eroding quickly, don’t spend effort and focus on propping up the fading business — get on, full-throttle, with digital. Day-dropping may be all about timing — though timing in years more than months. But in this time of great news transformation, timing counts, and will divide the winners from the losers.

The newest News Corp sets sail.

Cast adrift — but with a handy $2.6 billion in cash and no debt, making its peers oh-so-envi0us — the world’s largest newspaper company is in the midst of furious change. At the flagship Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, it’s tough to find anyone in management who’s doing the same thing they were a couple of years ago. That kind of change is unsettling, and means the company will take a while to find a new footing, under both new News Corp CEO Robert Thomson and Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick’s accelerating Bloombergization of Dow Jones. Fenwick’s push is a big bet and a tough one, given how relatively small the company (news + data) is compared to competitors Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. The Journal itself offers the greatest growth potential — largely global — for the new News Corp. We’ll begin to see the standalone energy of the new company this fall when it makes its first quarterly financial report. Those financials had been obscured in the old, larger News Corp.’s reports. We know that the new entertainment-oriented 21st Century Fox will rise and fall on the popularity of its film releases, its Fox TV strengths, and the challenges of its cable and satellite businesses. The new News Corp is left to share the multiple pressures of the limping newspaper industry, challenges it pursues on three continents:

• In the U.S., The Wall Street Journal faces similar struggles as its semi-peer, The New York Times. Print advertising’s decline is ever-present and the Journal, an early freemium leader in digital circulation, faces the same problems of enticing younger readers to pay up. In digital advertising, it’s up against the hyper-competitive forces of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, among other non-newspaper digital ad leaders. The New York Post continues to be a money drain.
• In Australia, its former cash cows have first been put on a diet, with thoroughgoing cost-cutting and now fairly complete re-engineering — if not genetic modification. Despite owning 70 percent of the Australian market, News Corp Australia is unlikely to return to its glory days.
• In Britain, recession continues to further dog the already overburdened news industry. The Times of London and Sunday Times still struggle, with the Sun throwing off the profits though itself facing tough ad markets.

Add it up, and Robert Thomson’s digital-oriented remaking of the company is one of the toughest jobs in publishing.

The other Thompson maintains his cross-Atlantic itinerary.

Americans pay little attention to the long-running set of British scandals, as News Corp’s Hackgate rolls through the courts and the BBC’s scandals multiply without end, Jimmy Savile’s molestation run, NewsNight blunder,s and BBC management platinum parachutes, among them. (All of which have helped give Guardian an audience growth run and progress on digital revenue.) The scandals have forced New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson, the former BBC chief, to cross the pond much more often than anticipated when he assumed his new job in November. NYT Co. felt compelled last week to reiterate his support: “Mark [Thompson] continues to have the full support of the New York Times Company board and of his colleagues in management.” Though he is credited internally with speeding up the pace of change at the Times, any disruption in focus can’t help as the Times’ 2013 has been choppier than expected. New numbers come out Aug. 1 for the second quarter. Into this perilous second half of the year steps new ad chief — filling the spot of long-time ad director Denise Warren, who continues to head up digital — Meredith Levien, hired away from Forbes.

Mobile remains the stealth story.

It’s incredible, really. About a third of newspaper site traffic now comes from mobile, up from about 25 percent last year and headed toward 50 percent by 2016. Yet, mobile generates little in direct revenue. Yes, it’s a big part of the all-access subscription offer, but in general it’s more of a problem than a solution for publishers. Raju Narisetti, now deputy head of strategy for the new News Corp, cites one key reason: data is harder to gather on mobile than on the web, limiting effective targeting. Add to that the small size of smartphone screens and lack of ad positions in tablet products, and many publishers see less than 5 percent of their overall digital revenue coming from mobile — even as it accounts for a third of traffic. It’s akin to the problem on traffic from outside the U.S.; it pumps up traffic numbers, but bears little relationship to making money. Of course, it’s now Google and Facebook that are beginning to solve the mobile ad future, forcing publishers to play a familiar game: catch-up.

Photo of Horologium mirabile Lundense in Lund Cathedral by mararie used under a Creative Commons license.