These specific advertisements are called “native advertising,” but are also tagged as “sponsored content,” “partner post” or other labels consumers don’t understand. They look like news articles, with headlines, photos with captions and polished text. But they are really ads created by, or on behalf of, a paying advertiser.

With declining revenue from traditional display advertising and classified ads, news outlets are increasingly relying on native advertising — a sector in which U.S. spending was expected to reach $57 billion by the end of 2021.

Fashion and entertainment companies buy native advertising. So do corporations that produce products with potentially significant environmental or health connections, such as fossil fuels, opioid medications and cigarettes — including in attempts to counter negative news coverage.

Deceiving audiences

In one example from spring 2021, Philip Morris International, the tobacco company, ran a native advertising campaign across many media outlets, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post.

The ads complained about the “disinformation campaigns that muddy the truth” regarding the benefits of vaping products while themselves muddying the truth.

In the past, the tobacco industry sought to manufacture public uncertainty about the harms of its products. This time, Philip Morris is using a practice that media critics say is deceptive and media scholar Victor Pickard calls “subterfuge … creating confusion between editorial and advertising content,” to make claims about the benefits of its products.

These advertisements that look like real news are labeled as ads, as required by the Federal Trade Commission. But research studies have repeatedly shown that those labels are largely ineffective at helping readers distinguish between the two types of content.

Made by journalists

Many media companies have created content studios, separate from their newsrooms, to create native advertising on behalf of corporate and special interest groups. While newspapers traditionally had ad departments that designed and mocked up advertisements for their clients, today’s native ads are in the form of a “story” that often does not focus on — and sometimes does not even mention — its sponsor in order to resemble the seemingly objective journalism it imitates.

Sometimes those efforts have the help of intermediaries such as so-called “product marketing” teams that work between the newsroom and studios. A former “creative strategist” at The New York Times says that arrangement allows publishers “to skirt the implication that news staff work directly with brands to craft commercial content.” In other cases, journalists write for both the newsroom and their publisher’s content studio.

Because native advertising typically has no bylines, most people are unaware that advertisements may be created in such close connection with mainstream newsrooms. Former employees, including a former executive editor of The New York Times, say most publishers are not transparent about it with their audiences. One digital journalist told researchers, “Some people will say the ad is labeled so it’s not bad. That’s crap … the unsophisticated won’t get it and then they’ll click on something meant to look exactly like a story. That’s a problem.”

Disappearing disclosures

When native ads are shared on social media, they’re often distributed in ways that further confuse or deceive audiences.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, has retweeted posts from its Custom Content studio from the same Twitter account that promotes its news content. While this particular retweet disclosed the commercial nature of the original tweet, this is not always the case.

More than half the time, the FTC-required advertising disclosures disappear when the content leaves the publisher’s website and is shared on Facebook and Twitter. For example, when I recently shared an American Petroleum Institute native ad on Twitter, the disclosure disappeared — ea violation of the FTC’s labeling mandate.

I believe it is the responsibility of publishers, not consumers, to ensure that sponsored content is accurately labeled when shared online. Otherwise, people will amplify undisclosed commercial content they think is genuine news.

Suppressing news coverage?

I have another concern about this type of potentially deceptive advertising. Since as early as 1869, anecdotal evidence has indicated that reporters are hesitant to write about advertisers that are lucrative to their news outlet. My recent research with digital advertising scholar Chris Vargo signals that similar concerns may occur with this new form of advertising.

We counted all the native advertisements between 2014 and 2019 we could find from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, by looking at native ads those news outlets posted on Twitter and with a custom search process we built on top of Bing. We noted what dates the native ads were published and what company sponsored them.

We also used the GDELT database, which collects online news stories from those three outlets and many other mainstream, partisan, and emerging news sites across the U.S. In that data, we noted the number and dates of news stories naming major companies.

We found 27 companies for which there was enough information in both data sets to make a meaningful connection. For each of those 27 companies, we charted how many mentions they had in news stories over time, and compared those time periods with the timing of that company’s releases of native advertising.

We found that for 16 of the companies, news coverage noticeably decreased after a native advertisement was published. For just three companies, news coverage noticeably increased after a native ad was published.

These results suggest that advertiser-driven “news” stories — written and approved by paying sponsors — often go unchallenged.

For example, Wells Fargo — a multinational financial services company plagued by a litany of scandals, such as deceiving customers with fake bank accounts — engaged the content studios of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal to create nearly a dozen native ads. One, created by The Washington Post’s BrandStudio, touted how Wells Fargo was investing in a cleaner environmental future. If it had been a real news article, it would have reported that the company was also financing the controversial underground oil transport system, the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Our study found statistically less reporting on Wells Fargo not only within those three elite news organizations but across all U.S. online media following the native advertising campaigns.

Native ads are potentially very deceptive to consumers in their content, their presentation, and how they are shared on social media. Our research does not prove a direct connection, but when we add it to the anecdotes that news management discourages stories critical of important advertisers, we also wonder about the power of native ads over journalists’ supposedly independent decisions regarding what to cover and when.

Nieman Lab readers may remember reading about The Continent here recently. It’s a digital publication that launched in April 2020. Each issue is published on WhatsApp and Signal. The publication is currently funded and published in collaboration with the South African weekly Mail & Guardian, and accepts donations from readers. It’s never had advertising before, let alone sponsored-ish content.

On page 3 of the August 28 issue, the editors explained that accepting the offer would mean that regular ads for the bank would run in the paper, but alongside stories of “themes ranging from inclusive financing to education and promoting a just society.”

“Our policy has been that we set the terms of engagement, by going to funders and advertisers with an idea they can support,” the editors wrote. “Doing it the other way around, allowing someone else to define a broad frame in which we then work, might set a dangerous precedent. Then again, we could really use the money — high-quality journalism is expensive. And we would only use the funds to pay for more quality journalism.”

The Continent then gave readers a clickable link to a Google Form survey where they could vote yes or no and then offer their opinion on the issue.

Within a week, the survey had 445 responses, with 82% of respondents saying they were in favor of the deal, as long as The Continent maintained its editorial independence.

“It was a test case to see whether our readers would engage on substantive issues about the direction of the newspaper,” editor-in-chief Simon Allison said. “We were blown away by the responses, [many] of which were really detailed. We had people writing essays, going into weighing the various ethical implications and the financial side of things, and how they thought it might affect our journalism and what we should be weary wary of. That input really helped clarify our own thoughts in the editorial team and helped us to reach the decision.”

Last week @thecontinent_ was offered an advertising deal by a major bank. We weren’t sure whether to accept it – so we asked our readers for their advice. Here’s what they said, with big thanks to everyone who participated. pic.twitter.com/gCaJGvXEhy

— Simon Allison (@simonallison) September 7, 2021

Based on reader feedback, The Continent decided to accept the advertising deal.

“Readers are smart. The readers of our publication can be trusted to weigh in thoughtfully and meaningfully on complex issues,” Allison said. “Why not take advantage of the combined intellect and have a really smart group of people who are invested in your publication? It seems like a resource that we really should be taking advantage of.”

Love this. I voted yes. Good Journalism costs money. And to survive, it will have to accept money from different sources – readers, advertisers, philanthropists. https://t.co/BdN3C9ze9D

— Oláyínká (@solomonelusoji) September 7, 2021

In recent years newsrooms have started to more frequently engage their audiences directly for stories and feedback on their journalism. But The Continent’s experiment to include readers in its business decisions is a new level of transparency that goes beyond just disclosing its revenue sources. Since The Continent is distributed mainly on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, it relies on its readers for growth. It asks readers to share their work with their friends, family, and anyone else they think could benefit from the journalism.

“I think it’s a really important part of establishing editorial integrity, and establishing trust with readers,” Allison said. “The Continent is in a place where we have been funded by donors that cover our most of our core funding. Our readers know about this. We’re very clear about that. So bringing in advertising is a new thing and bringing in this particular form of advertising — an advertiser wanting us to do reporting on a specific issue — is a sort of gray area when it comes to how ethical that is, and so we thought it’s better to flag it before we do it.”

Allison said that in the meeting he had with his staff (three full-time and five part-time employees) about whether or not to pose the question to readers, the decision wasn’t unanimous. Some team members were concerned about the paper outsourcing its editorial judgment” while others were worried about what the next step would be if the readers came to a different conclusion than the staff.

Ultimately, Allison said, the benefits of asking outweighed the concerns. Doing so also served as a way of holding the paper’s ground with advertisers. Allison explained that in South Africa, and across the continent, more and more advertisers want to place native advertising or sponsored content that doesn’t look like advertising unless you’re reading very closely. Advertisers feel that it gives their brand more legitimacy, but sometimes journalists worry that accepting these kinda of deals lowers its journalistic integrity and can erode trust with the readers.

“Part of what we were doing with this is also trying to educate the advertisers and show them these are serious ethical issues that [they] are bringing into our newsroom,” Allison said. “If we decide that [they’re] pushing us too far, we will say no, and we’re lucky we’re in a position to do so.”

Most recently, the giant taking action was Apple; in April, it instituted a strict new anti-tracking regime on its devices that is making it significantly harder for ad networks to create user profiles for targeted advertising.

But the biggest move of all is coming from Google, which controls the antitrust-stimulating triad of the internet’s biggest (a) search engine, (b) advertising business, and (c) web browser. Google has been planning for some time to remove support for third-party cookies, those little bits of code that connect your behavior across many different websites and thus allow shoe retailers to remind you, over and over again, about those Asics you left in your cart. They’re the spine of online advertising’s nervous system, and a bit of a privacy nightmare.

Cookies were set to disappear from Chrome later this year, but today Google moved that date back substantially. Here’s Dieter Bohn at The Verge:

Google is announcing today that it is delaying its plans to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser until 2023, a year or so later than originally planned. Other browsers like Safari and Firefox have already implemented some blocking against third-party tracking cookies, but Chrome is the most-used desktop browser, and so its shift will be more consequential for the ad industry. That’s why the term “cookiepocalypse” has taken hold.

In the blog post announcing the delay, Google says that decision to phase out cookies over a “three-month period” in mid-2023 is “subject to our engagement with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).” In other words, it is pinning part of the delay on its need to work more closely with regulators to come up with new technologies to replace third-party cookies for use in advertising.

Few will shed tears for Google, but it has found itself in a very difficult place as the sole company that dominates multiple industries: search, ads, and browsers. The more Google cuts off third-party tracking, the more it harms other advertising companies and potentially increases its own dominance in the ad space. The less Google cuts off tracking, the more likely it is to come under fire for not protecting user privacy. And no matter what it does, it will come under heavy fire from regulators, privacy advocates, advertisers, publishers, and anybody else with any kind of stake in the web.

Google’s announcement says it wants “the web community” to “come together to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web…In order to do this, we need to move at a responsible pace. This will allow sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions, continued engagement with regulators, and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services. This is important to avoid jeopardizing the business models of many web publishers which support freely available content.”

Google’s proposed replacement for third-party cookies thus far has been something called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. The idea is to enable some degree of user targeting, but not in ways that rely on personal cross-site-generated profiles. Instead of building an individual user profile by gathering up all of someone’s tracked browsing activity, FLoC uses it to place someone into a “cohort,” a group of “several thousand” internet users with browser activity similar to yours.

So for example, third-party cookies can build a profile of me, Joshua Benton, by tracking all the websites I visit over time, letting advertisers target my interests. FLoC will instead take all that browser data and use it only to determine that I’m a member of FLoC No. 5916. That’s not a guess on my part; I’m apparently one of a small portion of Chrome users being tracked by FLoC now. (You can find out if you’re in that number at the EFF’s charmingly titled site Am I FLoCed?)

So in a FLoC world, an ad unit on a website wouldn’t know that it’s me, Joshua Benton, visiting — only that it’s one of a few thousand people who, presumably, spend a lot of time searching for 19th-century newspaper archives, south Louisiana news stories, old New Orleans Saints stats, and (most important for capitalism’s sake) a new front-loading washer to replace the one that just died.

(Shout out to my fellow 5916ers! Can we all get on a group chat or something?)

Unfortunately for Google, FLoC has not been a hit. Privacy advocates say it doesn’t do enough to limit tracking or discriminatory targeting. All the non-Chrome web browsers of note have said they won’t be implementing it. Amazon, WordPress, and other major players are also blocking or planning to block FLoC, either because of privacy concerns or because they’d like to keep all that sweet, sweet data to themselves.

And FLoC — meant to help solve some of Google’s regulatory problems — instead seems to have generated a new round of them. (While removing third-party cookies would seem to hurt Google, which counts on them to build user profiles for ads, it’ll almost certainly hurt every other ad network and provider more — because Google will still have so much of its own first-party data to use for profiling purposes. Not great when you’re under investigation for your monopolist tendencies.)

Combined with some pretty significant bills to rein in the tech giants advancing in Congress, not the best 24 hours for Google. For publishers, the delay should (should!) give them more time to pursue the best third-party-cookie alternative available to them: building out their own first-party data strategy.

This year, Apple announced two big changes that could well make life more difficult for publishers, along with quite a few welcome features, reasonable tweaks, and interesting side experiments. All in all, while the news business was nowhere near center stage Monday, I think this will end up being one of the more impactful Apple events in a while for publishers.

These are the highlights; read straight through or skip ahead to whatever interests you.

• Meaningful changes to notifications that could bury your breaking news alerts on users’ screens
• Some tighter rules on privacy, one of which will change the newsletter industry forever
• A couple of interesting new ways to share news articles with friends
• A long list of changes that could make you more productive at work
• System-wide text recognition in images, opening up lots of possibilities for research
• A few improvements that could make your videos sound and look better

More focused notifications

Apple spent a lot of time pushing a new set of features around focus — about better separating the important stuff you want to focus on from the junk you don’t want to. The biggest, er, focus of that work is in push notifications.

If you’re anything like me, you get a gazillion push notifications on your phone a day. Not to get all Eisenhower Matrix on you, but some of those are important and urgent, some are important or urgent, and some are neither. But on your home screen, they’re all mixed together in reverse chronological order, and it’s easy for the dumb stuff to push the important stuff several screens down.

Apple’s tried to improve notification triage before; think of those “You don’t seem to be tapping on these DumbApp notifications; should I stop showing them to you?” notices you’ve probably seen. But it’s now going significantly further — and in a way that is risky for news outlets that rely on those push notifications for traffic.

• You’ll now be able to create a Focus mode that determines which notifications get through and which don’t: “Customers can set their device to help them be in the moment by creating a custom Focus or selecting a suggested Focus, which uses on-device intelligence to suggest which people and apps are allowed to notify them. Focus suggestions are based on users’ context, like during their work hours or while they’re winding down for bed…Users can create Home Screen pages with apps and widgets that apply to moments of focus to only display relevant apps and reduce temptation.”
• You’ll now be able to have your lower-priority notifications all bunched together and delivered just once a day, in a “notifications summary” delivered “at a more opportune time.”
• If you’re wearing AirPods, Siri can now automatically speak to you when you get an “important, time-sensitive” notification — while staying silent for all the other ones.

These all sound appealing as a user — but they’re worrisome as a news publisher. How, exactly, will the “priority” level of an app be determined? There will be ways for users to manually adjust those settings, but the main work is done by Apple’s machine learning, based on how you interact with the apps on your device each day.

Will my iPhone’s algorithms decide that a breaking news story from Bloomberg is “urgent,” “important,” or “time-sensitive”? How about something more feature-y pushed by The Atlantic, or a game score notification from ESPN?

Maybe the algorithms will make only wise judgments — or maybe they’ll be like every other algorithm in the world and sometimes be a little off. As a commenter here noted, the example given on Apple’s site for the “top” message in a notification summary is…a very ad-like push from Yelp recommending a Thai restaurant.

Given that news apps send a healthy number of pushes per day — and that the value of those notifications often doesn’t require a tap to launch the app, which might make your phone think you’re not paying attention to them — I worry that these changes will make it harder for news to get noticed. At a minimum, it’ll be something for publisher tech teams to monitor, and likely to optimize for. Once you get away from straight reverse-chronological order, you’ve created SEO for push notifications.

It reminds me most of back in 2013, when Google introduced tabbed inboxes for Gmail — you know, the little sections that separate out your important emails from “Social,” “Promotions,” “Updates,” and “Forums” emails. As a user: helpful! But publishers know that having their newsletter or breaking news email buried in Promotions or Updates means it’s less likely to be opened. Gmail users can adjust the algorithm’s decisions — but most will always just stick with the default behavior. This change is worth watching.

Privacy, for better and for worse

Apple has spent the past few years leaning into its reputation for respecting user privacy, using its market position to influence how industries like ad tech operate. Just last month, it made every app that tracks your activities across other apps explicitly ask for your permission to do so. Turns out, people don’t want to be tracked, putting a big crimp in the ad models of Facebook and others.

The OS updates include a number of privacy and security features. Safari will now push you to the HTTPS version of a website if available. If someone steals your phone, you’ll now be able to track its location even after it’s been wiped clean. If some rogue app is using the microphone on your Mac to record you, a little notification will appear to let you know, as it does in iOS.

For paying iCloud customers, it’s offering something called Private Relay, which functions a bit like a VPN for web traffic, encrypting your data and splitting it into two intercept relays, allegedly making it impossible for your device to be connected to your web activity.1 And Hide My Email will make it easy to create (and later delete) burner emails that forward to your real one, building on last year’s Sign in with Apple. (Interesting that those last two are paid features; Apple’s previously opened its privacy features to all users to buff up its brand aura.)

But these updates also add a new battle to Apple’s war against the digital ad business. One of the few bright spots in the news business in recent years has been this little boomlet in newsletters — maybe you’ve heard about it? Newsletter advertising is hardly the data-hoarding beast a Facebook ad is, but it does rely heavily on one little tracker: the tiny tracking pixels embedded in many emails that tell the sender whether their email has been opened, and often by whom and how many times. (Those little images are fetched live from a server, and the URL the email uses to grab it can contain some limited information, like the email address it was sent to.)

These images are the only way newsletter senders know if their emails are actually being opened. And that open rate is an important part of how newsletter publishers sell ads — as well as how they judge the relative success or failure of the email.

Along comes something called Mail Privacy Protection, a new feature that “helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

There are very legitimate concerns about some distant server being notified whenever you open their email. But on the other hand, it’s kind of the bedrock of the newsletter industry.

There have long been ways to block tracking pixels, but they were mostly only used by nerds like me; this is Apple Mail, the dominant platform for email in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to the most recent market-share numbers from Litmus, for May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens.

Those numbers are crazy high — much higher than Apple’s device market share because Apple users spend a lot more time receiving and reading email than users on Android, Windows, or Linux. Overall, 61.7% of all emails are opened in Apple Mail, on one device or another.2 So even a small change in how it handles email has a huge impact on the newsletter industry writ large.

Maybe Apple will bury Mail Privacy Protection in some settings menu two levels down or something, and people won’t find it! Nope — this is apparently the first thing you see when you open Mail on iOS 15.

iOS 15: First launch of Mail app. pic.twitter.com/W4ewu9XFCk

— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) June 7, 2021

As with the cross-app tracking permissions Apple started requiring last month, this is a very in-your-face feature. I’m certain the overwhelming majority of people will tap “Protect Mail activity,” because of course they will. And if you somehow don’t see that screen, it’s turned on by default.

Privacy protection in Mail is a setting that’s pre-selected. Don’t really see anyone turning that off. pic.twitter.com/noOrzwIdJk

— (@alexcwilliams) June 7, 2021

This 85-second video from one of Apple’s WWDC developer sessions makes it clear: Open rates will now officially be useless. Mail Privacy Protection will fetch those tracking pixels not just anonymously, but also automatically — meaning that every email you send to an Apple Mail user will appear as if it’s been opened, whether or not it actually has been.

here’s a video from Apple explaining in-detail how their upcoming “Mail Privacy Protection” feature works

tl;dr – email open rates & tracking data will continue their descent into irrelevancy pic.twitter.com/bBjg6dvILw

— Dame.eth (@jacksondame) June 8, 2021

(There’s also some good detail on the importance of tracking pixels to newsletter publishers in this thread from ConvertKit’s Nathan Berry.)

Creators will have to choose between taking extreme list cleaning measures where healthy, engaged subscribers get removed because they aren’t clicking emails.

Or they won’t do any list cleaning which will likely lead to spam filtering for both engaged and unengaged subscribers. pic.twitter.com/iSKPaMgLAK

— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) June 8, 2021

Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, calls Apple’s new policy “lazy” and says it hurts small publishers most:

…much like generally-sensible-in-theory provision like the GDPR, moves like this from Apple are going to most hurt the solo publishers with their Substack newsletters.

A major publisher will be hurt, sure. They’ll lose a lot of data on which they sold their newsletter sponsorships. They’ll be less able to confidently purge subscribers who haven’t opened their newsletter in months (what if they’re iPhone users?)…

A smaller publisher, a local newspaper, a solo freelancer, a small blog; all these will lose data on a significant part of their audience. A likely valuable part of their audience. And it may stifle or slow their growth or opportunities.

Where previously you could unsubscribe readers who hadn’t opened your newsletter to save money, now you don’t know if they’re loyal or not. You’ll have to find other ways to entice them to let you know they are reading. A larger publisher can afford to keep 20,000 recipients on a list that never open an email. A smaller outfit cannot…

Apple’s fight for privacy is really a fight against the web. In signing up for a newsletter, a publisher or marketer already has a more valuable piece of PII: your email address. By focusing on IP addresses, and blocking trackers rather than proxying them on a fuzzy delay (which would provide the same useful publisher data without any PII leak of location or time), Apple are not really fighting for their users so much as they are fighting against email.

I’m sure newsletter publishers will adjust, somehow. If open rates are gone, they’re gone — you’ll have to find some other way to convince advertisers you have an attentive audience, and some other way to see how your email performed and keep your list clean. (Clickthrough rates live on, at least for now. Should we expect stripping URL parameters to be a feature in iOS 17?) But this is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook — they’re also coming for your Substack.

More ways to share news

I don’t expect either of these to be earth-shatteringly important, but Apple showed two interesting new tools for sharing news.

In Apple News, macOS and iOS will now have a tab called Shared With You. (There’ll be similar tabs in Music and Photos.) If someone texts you a link to a Washington Post story, the Messages app should notice that and ship it off to that Shared With You tab — so it’ll be there for you to see the next time you’re checking out the News app.

How much people will use this is unclear to me; Apple News has a ton of users, but most of them fall on the relatively casual end of the news consumption spectrum, and I don’t know how many will find these time-shifted stories useful. One other question I don’t know the answer to: Will Shared With You will bring in any news article someone texts you, or only articles that already live inside Apple News? I’d assume the former, but that would mean, for example, articles from The New York Times (which isn’t in Apple News) would just not show up where users expect them to.

The second sharing feature isn’t even designed for news: SharePlay will make it easier for multiple people to consume the same content — like watch the same video or listen to the same songs — simultaneously during a FaceTime call. The most obvious use case here is for watching a movie or a baseball game with a friend who lives a few states away — while being able to chat as if you’re sitting next to each other on the couch. But I did notice that a number of streaming platforms that include news video to varying degrees — Hulu (which simulcasts ABC News), Paramount+ (CBS News), ESPN+, Pluto TV — are on board for SharePlay.

I wouldn’t expect many people to actually use SharePlay for news, but this is an interesting concept for watching it together. On Election Night, you and your politics-junkie friends could all get on a call and watch the returns coming in together. Or Oscars night, or the NFL Draft, or a presidential debate. Or, more depressingly, a hurricane hitting your hometown, or a terror attack, or a mass shooting. News recommendations get shared on social a bazillion times a minute, but news consumption is a pretty solitary experience on digital — more solitary, even, than the old network newscasts the whole family might sit in the living room for. Nice to see some efforts to bridge that gap.

Tools for reporters

A lot of journalists spend most of their days staring at an Apple-made screen, whether a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, and there are a few updates here that will be welcome for getting your work done.

iOS Safari can now install desktop Safari extensions — and those extensions can now include a ton of Chrome and Firefox extensions that Safari has lacked. And Safari’s new Tab Groups seem like a surprisingly decent solution to tab triage and organizing. (It looks better to me than Chrome’s clunky tab groups or Edge’s Collections, but of course no one’s actually used it yet.)

If you juggle devices all day, Universal Control — which lets you use the same keyboard and mouse/trackpad across up to three Macs and iPads at the same time — is a little mind-blowing, letting you treat multiple devices as three different screens for the same device.

Macs can now use Shortcuts, the iOS platform for scripting a series of actions across multiple apps; it could let you reduce some multi-step workflows to one click. (It’s more user-friendly in my experience than the old Automator app.)

Quick Note makes it easier to jot down a quick note on your iPad or Mac. Most interesting to me is that if you take a Quick Note while, say, you’re looking at a webpage in Safari, apparently the next time you visit that site again, the note should pop up and be accessible. Notes also has some tagging features that might make it full-featured enough for some to use it as their main scrap-text app.

If you use an iPad for work, multitasking looks a little better, but still nowhere near as intuitive as tapping command-tab to switch apps. There are still a lot of hurdles in the way of bringing the iPad to laptop quality for the sort of writing/editing/researching tasks reporters do all day.

Finally — and perhaps most importantly, at least at certain moments! — Macs will now have a Low Power Mode that’ll let you extend your battery. So if you’re tight on deadline and watching your battery tick down to 0%, Low Power Mode might just save the day.

System-wide OCR with Live Text

Four years ago, Apple introduced Vision, a framework for developers that lets apps perform a number of camera-driven tasks, like detecting a face in a photo or scanning a barcode. Two years ago, it added VisionKit, which made it easy to scan an image for text. That led to a small little explosion for instant-OCR (optical character recognition) apps for both Mac and iOS. Basically, OCR used to be a resource-intensive and complicated process to add to an app. It isn’t anymore.

I have to say: Easy instant OCR has been one of the most transformative recent features on the Mac for me. I use a little $7 app called TextSniper that lets me, with one keystroke, copy all of the text on a particular part of my screen to the clipboard — even if it’s just a picture of text, not text itself. (There are other apps that do the same thing, but TextSniper’s been the more accurate and reliable one for me.)

This is amazing for things like an old scanned PDF or print newspaper article: If it’s on your screen, you can copy it into a text document — which makes it searchable in all the usual ways. If you take nothing else away from this article, go try out TextSniper or a similar app and be amazed how many times a day you were retyping some chunk of text you couldn’t just copy.

Anyway, in the new macOS and iOS, Apple’s put that OCR ability and essentially made it automatic and systemwide. Have you ever taken a screenshot of some text? Your device will now automatically scan every screenshot you take (and every photo you take — every image on the device, basically) for text and make it searchable. (On Macs, this is apparently limited to devices with Apple Silicon.)

Maybe you need to be a digital hoarder like me to find this extremely exciting. But for some historical research I’ve been doing, I now have thousands of image files that contain text that isn’t recognized as text. Scans of 150-year-old newspaper articles. Paragraphs from a Google Books preview. Handwritten notes on an old letter. Screenshot of video stills. As soon as all that text is searchable, finding needles in that haystack gets a lot easier. I’ll be very anxious to see how well it works.

Better sound in your videos

One thing the pandemic taught is the value of a good webcam, and the Mac’s (despite 18 years of practice) have been mediocre for years. (Weird, given that Apple makes some pretty amazing cameras for its iPhones.) The new M1 iMac it released in April showed the first real webcam quality improvements in a long time, and now macOS Monterey promises software improvements.

Probably most important for people recording video on their MacBooks is Voice Isolation, which promises to remove background noise from the room you’re recording in. (Sorry, Krisp.) The flipside is Wide Spectrum sound, which might improve your b-roll. Newer Macs can also use Portrait Mode in videos, which might look nice in a straight-to-camera news video. All three features will also be in iOS 15 for iPhones and iPads.

Apple announced all these as improvements specific to FaceTime, its video chat platform, but it appears they’ll also be available to other apps — so your Zoom calls or Instagram videos should also be able to benefit too, without any updates from the developer.

You’ll also now be able to join FaceTime calls from non-Apple devices like Windows PCs and Android phones. But they can still only be started on an Apple device, so your newsroom will probably stick to Zoom.

1. For that reason, Private Relay won’t be available in countries keen on monitoring their citizens’ web use: China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.
2. I should note here that email market share data is notoriously bad, so the error band around these numbers is substantial. But whether the true number is actually 52%, 63%, or 71%, it’s still a lot.

Comparing second-quarter reports between 2019 and 2020, researchers found advertising revenue at newspaper companies fell an average of 42%. Meanwhile, TV news — and one major network in particular — fared much better.

Total ad revenue across major cable news networks remained steady, but a closer look reveals the pandemic-related downturn has impacted each differently. The Pew Research Center found that though ad revenue for MSNBC and CNN declined by 27% and 14% (respectively), ad revenue at Fox News increased by 41%. It’s a reminder that the country’s most-watched channel — despite a series of sexual misconduct scandals, sharp criticism for downplaying the pandemic, and the high-profile desertion of advertisers from Tucker Carlson’s show — remains very, very profitable.

Ad revenue for nightly news shows on network TV also rose for an average of 11 percent across ABC, CBS, and NBC. Unusually for a presidential election year, average ad revenue for network morning news shows dipped — though only by a comparatively minor 4%.

Among publicly traded local TV news companies, ad revenue dropped an average of 24%. Researchers found, however, that rising retransmission fees “more than made up for the losses.” Predictably, political ad revenue was up compared to 2019, though three of five local TV companies had seen higher political ad revenue for the same period in 2018.

Looking at the advertising revenue losses at the six publicly traded newspaper companies collectively owning more than 300 newspapers reveals year-over-year losses that have only accelerated during the pandemic. Digital ad revenue — which dropped 32% between 2019 and 2020 — “offered little relief,” the report concluded.

Because newspaper circulation revenue declined less sharply — an average of 8% — three of these six companies now earn more revenue from subscribers than from ads. It would have been considered “an unthinkable state of affairs a decade ago,” the report notes, “when overall ad revenue was two-and-a-half times higher than overall circulation revenue.”

“This pattern was similar for all six newspaper companies analyzed here, with even the least-affected company, Gannett, showing a 35% decline in ad revenue year over year,” the authors added. (The six publicly traded newspaper companies studied were Gannett, The New York Times, Tribune, McClatchy, Lee, and Belo.)

Overall, these losses are steeper than those newspapers endured during the Great Recession, when second-quarter ad revenue declined, on average, 11% in 2008 and 30% in 2009.

Facebook calls what the Ad Observatory does “scraping,” but that’s not what this is. The data source, the “Ad Observer,” is a browser plugin. Researches often use plugins like these to collect information for data science and algorithmic accountability projects. It isn’t a script serially visiting websites in some independent or autonomous way from a human at a browser. It is a small piece of software, installed by the data subject, that extracts data from the local copy of a webpage that is inherently made when a person loads website onto a computer.

All data collection techniques are capable of good and bad uses, but collecting data through a browser plugin has qualities that make it preferable to scraping. A plugin more naturally gives an opportunity for data subject consent, or revocation of consent. You can, as the Ad Observer does, explain to the data subject what you plan to do before you do it, and give the data subject an unambiguous way to manifest their consent. As the Clearview AI case is making painfully obvious, scraping data off of sites is rarely done with this level of informed user choice.

On the technical side, collecting data in this way places no greater load on the site than a normal browser. It doesn’t get access at any deeper layer. The research project is not going to crash a site by accidentally overloading it with requests. It simply works off the data the user already gets — in the parlance of cases interpreting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this tool is not changing the level access that a user gets to Facebook, it enables a subsequent use of data that Facebook is already allowing them to access.

Of course, like scraping, the technique is capable of abuse. It’s a program running on a data subject’s computer, so it inherently lets you do a lot of things. One could use a browser plugin to try to gather personal information about the data subject or their social circles, as some commercial plugins have done. That is likely why Facebook is risking further PR backlash by going after these researchers. As Alex Stamos initially noted and Mike Masnick has elaborated on, Facebook may feel pressured to argue that they are compelled to try to shut this down after their recent revised FTC consent decree, which came about after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when a researcher lied to Facebook and exfiltrated massive amounts of user data.

But this is not Cambridge Analytica and most researchers are not Aleksandr Kogan. When designed and deployed like it is, a tool like the Ad Observatory is a sound and ethical way for researchers to shed light on critically important social activity. The professors by all accounts are professionals following ethical rules on human subjects research and are mindful about their methods, and Facebook knows this.

And perhaps most importantly for algorithmic accountability, and unlike most company-sponsored research, researchers using tools like these are not constrained or beholden to the platform. They act independently because their access is permissionless. The platform is in no position to exert influence on the research or silence any of the results. Facebook may defend its actions on the grounds of user privacy, but the real threat is in the surrender of control of scrutiny.

This technique of data collection is becoming more common, perhaps in part due to how well one can map good research ethics onto these tools. The students in my law clinic have advised numerous research projects that have adopted this technique. A best practice for designing a research plugin would include making the source code available for inspection, and even without it there are numerous ways to verify what data is collected from these plugins.

Facebook appears to assert the legal right to stop this research through because it is a violation of its terms of service, what is effectively a breach of contract claim. It is important to note, though, that Facebook also uses more serious laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to stop data exfiltration on its site. They continue to do so even as courts trend away from applying the CFAA to public websites, in part thanks to a federal appellate court case from 2016 that said Facebook is not a “public” website because users log in to see its contents. This gives Facebook a power that is denied to other major platforms like Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn. A CFAA claim in this case would be especially dubious, as the plugin merely works off of the local copy of a page that a Facebook user has already downloaded.

There are also reasons to refuse to enforce this contract. One court in New York recently noted that non-negotiated contracts that attempt to control copying of data off of websites should be preempted by federal copyright law, a law that allows many forms of copying to balance the rights of authors with the copying needed to create new expressions. As a matter of consumer protection, courts are empowered to declare contract terms like these unconscionable and thus unenforceable, especially when, as here, they are asserted to stop scrutiny of the company itself. This is in essence the concern that led Congress to enact the Consumer Review Fairness Act in 2016, which prohibits companies from restricting via contract a consumer’s ability to write a negative assessment or review of the company’s services.

Facebook should not be allowed to stop this critical examination of its website, nor should we assume that the actions of the NYU Ad Observatory are in any way nefarious or inappropriate. The technique they have chosen effectively balances data subject autonomy and the public interest in examining how Facebook places political advertisements. The law should defend it as an acceptable research technique, especially when it provides us a rare insight into how political advertisements are influencing voters in the most important election of our lifetime.

It seems unlikely that most people would say yes. But that sort of tracking, in digital form, lies at the heart of the online advertising industry. It’s just that, by and large, advertisers and developers haven’t been required to ask you whether you’re cool with it. They signed your name on your behalf.

Apple has announced plans to change that. And after much uproar, today the company announced it was hitting pause on those plans. Here’s Bloomberg’s Apple oracle, Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc. is delaying a change to its upcoming iOS 14 iPhone software that Facebook Inc. and other developers have warned would hurt their advertising businesses.

The move, announced in June, requires users to give explicit permission before letting apps track them for advertising purposes. This was due to be implemented this fall with the rollout of iOS 14. It is now being delayed until early next year, Apple said on Thursday.

“We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year,” Apple said in a statement.

The company added that the feature will still be implemented when iOS 14 is released, but the delay means it won’t enforce the rule and require developers to adopt it. Apple said it will release more details on implementing the feature later this year.

At issue is a unique code that’s attached to every iPhone and iPad called its IDFA. At its June developers conference, Apple announced that iOS would soon start asking users to allow that sort of tracking — in every app and website whose adtech stack uses it. Few expect most iPhone users to agree happily. With this one move, Apple — whose software runs on roughly half of American phones — slices up the network of data that connects you to your online history. (That Apple is the largest tech company with essentially zero reliance on ad dollars gives it a strategy credit here.)

Facebook, for one, is not a fan of the move, but says the impact will be felt more by the game and app developers who use its ad network than by Facebook itself. (The sprawl of Facebook properties across your homescreen leaves it plenty of ways to track you within its walls.)

But publishers are bracing for an impact too. As the Journal’s Lukas I. Alpert and Patience Haggin put it:

Some publishers worry that most users will opt out, hobbling their ability to show personalized ads in apps and dealing them a blow at a time when the industry is trying to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. “When every publisher is fighting for every last advertising cent, this couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Martin Clarke, publisher of DMG Media, operator of the Daily Mail and MailOnline…

Sheri Bachstein, the global head of consumer business at the Weather Co., which operates weather.com, estimated that the price advertisers are willing to pay to advertise within iPhone apps could decline by as much as 40% as a result of the change. That is because advertisers generally pay a premium for ads targeted based on users’ interests and behavior on the web. Apple says it doesn’t plan to prohibit tracking, but will simply require app makers to obtain permission from their users to do so.

Apple’s new policy was set to go into force with the release of the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 14, which is expected in the coming weeks. (iOS updated usually come out in September along a new batch of iPhones, but Covid-related factors will likely push that into October this year.) With today’s announcement of a delay, though, D-Day will now come in 2021.

Many news publishers will struggle to adapt; few have the sort of robust data systems that would allow them to create something like the ad targeting Apple would be limiting. Publishers who sell most of their own advertising directly will have an edge over those who rely on programmatic ad networks. In the long run, that’s probably a healthy tradeoff for publishers — but there’ll be pain in the meantime.

One likely winner: The New York Times, which decided months ago to phase out all third-party ad tools in favor of its own inhouse data stack. The Times will let advertisers target 45 or more audience segments, defined by its own data. That’s great for the Times and other big dogs, like The Washington Post and Vox Media, who have the tech capacity to pull this off. But it’ll be harder for smaller fry.

One impact I’d expect to see from this: more news sites tightening their registration walls, requiring drive-by readers to create and log into an account to see even a single news story. The Times and McClatchy, among others, have moved in this direction in the past year; it’s awfully hard to gather good targeting data as a publisher without having your readers logged in and identified. (Sorry, incognito-window fans: Your paywall-evading days may be numbered.)

• Making more revenue from digital sources than from print.
• Making more revenue from readers than from advertising.
• Achieving net revenue growth, with digital dollars rising more quickly than print dollars are falling.
• Having more digital subscribers than print subscribers.

This morning, The New York Times became the first American newspaper I’m aware of to reach all four. (I only know of one international newspaper, the Financial Times, that beat them to the title. The Guardian would also be there if it had a true paywall rather than remaining free to all online.)

The Times today reported Q2 2020 results and, for the first time, a majority of its revenue came from digital: $185.5 million, versus $175.4 million from print. It had already reached the other targets — more reader revenue than ad revenue, more digital subs than print subs, and net revenue growth — in recent years.

(A brief self-pat on the back: In February 2019, I wrote that, “given the trendlines in print and digital, it won’t be too long until it hits that 50 percent tipping point — I’d guess Q2 2020.” If you put money down on that prediction, I’ll be happy to take a cut of your winnings.)

The Times also hit yet another strong quarterly subscriptions number, adding a record 669,000 new digital subs in Q2. In 2016, the Times set a seemingly ambitious target of having 10 million digital subscribers by 2025. If it keeps adding new subscribers at this quarter’s pace, it would hit that number by early 2022, three years ahead of schedule.

(Another brief aside: Remember when some people thought the Times’ digital subscription success was just attributable to a one-time “Trump bump” tied to the shock of his election? Well, the Times added 583,000 digital subscriptions in all of 2016; it added more than that in just the past quarter. When Trump took office, the Times reported having 1.853 million total digital subscriptions; today it has 5.7 million.)

All of this is, as usual, great news for the Times and a reminder of the yawning gap between it and America’s local newspapers. Gannett — the nation’s largest newspaper chain by far, with more than 250 U.S. daily local newspapers, USA Today, and another 140 local news brands in the U.K. — has about 863,000 digital subscribers in total. The New York Times adds that many digital subs roughly every four months.

And while the rest of the American newspaper business struggles to match the Times’ subscription success, it’s unfortunately likely to share in the Times’ advertising pain. By far the worst number in today’s report was the utter collapse of ad revenue in the second quarter, driven by COVID-related shutdowns and the economic downturn.

Ad dollars were down an astonishing 43.9 percent in Q2; that included drops of 31.9 percent in digital and 55 percent in print. Given that most newspaper companies are more print-reliant than the Times — meaning greater relative exposure to the “55 percent” in that equation versus the “31.9 percent” — other newspaper earning reports are likely to be U-G-L-Y ugly. The 40-plus percent drop in advertising I estimated from McClatchy’s bankruptcy numbers may well prove to be too conservative. (Gannett and Lee Enterprises will announce its Q2 earnings tomorrow; Tribune Publishing will do so later today.)

Back to the Times. It will likely recover some, maybe even most, of those advertising losses in whatever future quarter American life returns to some semblance of normalcy. But the longterm decline in advertising dollars will continue. The digital subscription engine the Times has built will continue to protect it, though. The magic of a NaaS business — news as a service — is that the marginal cost of each additional subscriber is minimal. Having 10 million subscribers doesn’t cost the Times twice as much as having 5 million subscribers. That potential for up-cycling profits will buoy the business for years to come.

Right now, the Times has $756.7 million in cash on hand — up almost 10 percent so far in 2020 — and has no outstanding debt. Its recent acquisitions have been smallish in size; it paid just $8.6 million for the audio company Audm in March, and its recent purchase of Serial Productions cost about $25 million. It has the capacity to think at larger scales now.

(For context, all of Gannett is currently valued at just $212 million; the Times could buy Gannett three times over and still have cash on hand. Note: The Times should not buy Gannett, three times or one time.)

All of that is why I argued what I did in my open letter to incoming Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, who assumes the role in a little over four weeks. The gap between the Times and the rest of American newspapering has exploded, and every trend line suggests it will only keep growing. If the Times cares about journalism beyond its walls, I hope it starts treating the health of the broader ecosystem as a key part of its mission going forward.

But we do have an interesting set of data points that can give us a more nuanced perspective of what it’s like to run an American newspaper company in 2020. And we have the bankruptcy of the nation’s No. 2 chain, McClatchy, to thank for it.

McClatchy’s bankruptcy is coming to a close; its chief lender and stockholder Chatham Asset Management has won an auction for the company and now only needs court approval. The price tag is believed to be in the neighborhood of $300 million — which would mean that the professional fees McClatchy paid during bankruptcy equaled roughly 1/10th of the entire company’s value.

Given that Chatham is taking the company private — and that any potential return to the stock market would involve merging into some other consolidator — these may well be the last real financials we ever see from McClatchy.

Combined with previous earnings reports, they show a company that has managed the digital transition better than most; at last public count, it was making nearly half of its ad revenue in digital, and digital subscriptions were up 45 percent year-over-year.

They show a company that was able to be operationally profitable while still doing good journalism.

But they also show a company so laden with 14-year-old debt that it had to enter Chapter 11. A company that is trading 163 years of family stewardship for a hedge fund that also owns the National Enquirer. And a company, like all of its industry peers, that got walloped by a virus it had no control over.

For many, it represents the unique New York City politician whose presidential flirtations reshuffled our politics for a time. For some, it’s his immense wealth and the places — both philanthropic and political — it flows. Then there’s “the Bloomberg,” the business news terminal that built Michael Bloomberg’s company and fortune, and which remains a cash cow today.

What it didn’t represent until relatively recently was streaming video — an online channel first known as TicToc and then, when the app TikTok annexed the world’s mindshare, rebranded as QuickTake.

QuickTake is Bloomberg Media’s latest product push, and another piece of evidence that the company is a long-term, high-impact news media players — even though it gets relatively little coverage compared to its peers.

As COVID-19’s financial damage deepens, there aren’t many media companies in the position to be able to take advantage of a recession — and invest. Bloomberg Media, headed by CEO Justin B. Smith, is investing in QuickTake, with a staffing up to 100, and big plans for fall.

“Starting in September, we’re actually creating full streaming programming with anchors and shows and new series,” Smith says. “We’re going to be unveiling a whole slate of new programming.”

Smith is known as an innovator, viewed by many of his peers as a transformer. As CEO at Atlantic Media, he assembled and led a team that built a respected and talented company, emerging out of (very) Old World magazines into a diversified B2B and B2C leader — a model operation that owner David Bradley has been selling off piece by piece for several years.

Smith moved to Bloomberg Media in 2013, and I first captured his strategic plans for growth there in 2015. The company includes the various verticals of Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg Businessweek, the recently bought-and-relaunched CityLab, and the expanding QuickTake.

All of that’s powered by what is probably the largest number of journalists working for any single company outside of Japan: 2,700 reporters, editors, and analysts working in 120 bureaus around the world. That’s scale, and it’s produced a big consumer business:

• Bloomberg Media reaches an audience of 90 million per month.
• About 30 percent of its revenue comes from outside the United States.
• Ad revenue contributes about 55 percent of that total revenue, with subscriptions and licensing adding about 20 percent a piece.

Bloomberg is one of the Digital Dozen, a term I first identified in my 2010 book Newsonomics. It’s one of the limited number of enduring, largely global news brands for which the Internet was a true opportunity for expansion, financially, editorially, and in terms of audience. It’s taken most of those news companies more than a decade to transform their businesses for digital — but they’re now seeing the fruits of that effort.

Adaptability has always been key to Smith’s strategies, and it remains so today. In this Q&A, we talk a lot about consumer reader revenue — a business line Bloomberg Media came relatively late to, in 2018

“You need to constantly evolve your business model,” he told me. “I mean, what we’ve been talking about here, basically, is taking a huge global business media company and turning it into a reader-revenue company, and turning it into a company that is playing in the global OTT, full video space. And then the third leg of the stool, is live events piece.”

(Live events are on hold, of course, and we also cover the quick move to virtual events — its challenges and longer-term opportunities.)

Bloomberg is — like the Times, the Post, the Journal, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, and others in the Digital Dozen — a case of the old and the new working here. Targeting well-heeled business news readers with high digital subscription prices…while moving aggressively to lure a younger demographic into business news video, hopefully leading them into long-term Bloomberg customers. One foot on the shakier ground of today, one looking for a step forward.

With advertising’s coronavirus recession, why lean way into a new ad-driven model with QuickTake?

“The answer is that, if there is any part of the advertising ecosystem that you actually want to be leaning into for 2020, 2021, 2022, it’s this demographic on mobile, on social, and in video,” he says. “When things come back, as they will, I think that traditional advertising will probably suffer, and you want to move your business and your model to the place on the media chessboard where the dollars are going to be going” — the TV money that will follow the audience to streaming.

Amid all the model evolution, though, Smith is perhaps stronger than ever before on one key element: It’s people who make the difference. “At the top of every one of my lists, the super ingredient is talent,” he says.

Talent, scale, superior tech, and continuous innovation are the keys to the Bloomberg Media model. In our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, we talk about selling advertising in a Google-Facebook-dominated world, remote work, virtual conferences, paywall lessons, and QuickTake’s future.

The news year so far

The subscription business

Bloombergian scale

QuickTake

Virtual events

Revenue promiscuity

Ad tech. Two little words that cause so much headache, heartache, and according to a report published today by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and PwC, bewilderment. (If not a little anger.)

Tracing the advertising spend supply chain — from 15 brands, eight agencies, five DSPs, six SSPs and 12 publishers — the report found:

• “publishers receive 51% of advertiser spend on average; and
• “taking other visible costs such as DSP/SSP fees and other technology costs, 15% of advertiser spend — an ‘unknown delta,’ representing around one-third of supply chain costs — could not be attributed.”

The industry, both the buy- and sell-side, has long known of the existence of the ad-tech black hole. Now, with this report, and with this fancy visual, we can put some kind of number behind the old Wannamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Here’s that fancy visual:

(DSP = demand-side platform, SSP = supply-side platform.)

Josh goes on to have some good analysis that’ll primarily be of interest to advertisers and the ad industry. But for publishers, the mere fact that half of the cash vanishes before it reaches them — 15 percent of it to, I dunno, werewolves? — should be enough to prompt some evening brown liquor. Google and Facebook have built giant businesses serving as middlemen between publisher and audience. But don’t forget about the anonymous ad tech firms who profit as middlemen between publisher and advertiser.

“We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week.

At least. Ask an American newspaper exec a few weeks ago what they thought 2025 would look like, and they’d tell it you it would be much more digital, far less print, and more dependent on reader revenue than advertising. Some of them would have told you they think they had a plan to get there. Others, if they were being candid, would have said they didn’t see the route yet, but they hoped to find one in time.

The COVID-19 crisis has clearly accelerated that timeline — and may have ripped it to shreds altogether, depending on how long the shutdown lasts and how deep the resulting recession gets.

Make no mistake, though: Many of the decisions being made right now and in the next few weeks will be permanent ones. No newspaper that drops print days of publication will ever add them back. Humpty Dumpty won’t put the 20th-century newspaper back together again. There can be no return to status quo ante; the ante was already vanishing.

Will these decisions “save” the local press, as we’re bombarded with stories of systemic, perhaps irreversible failure in North America, the U.K., and Europe? One way or the other, these are now existential decisions that can no longer be avoided or postponed.

Right now, publishers are combing through Friday’s federal bailout legislation, “trying to determine if they qualify, for how much and when the money might be available,” David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, told me Monday. “That is going to take at least a several more days (if not a bit longer) — and I assume that some of these publishers are holding off personnel actions until they know the answers.”

Gannett, now by far the largest local news chain, has already announced pay cuts and furloughs, in both the U.S. and U.K. But all publishers, big and small, are now considering their options. Those include layoffs, rapidly eliminating several days of print publishing, reducing their ad sales staff, and questioning their need for large central offices as remote work becomes a workable norm.

All of those ideas have been discussed for years. But now they have to make decisions they’d hoped could wait a few more. The decisions they make, and how they can act on them, will tell us a lot about how much of the local press is left — and how much isn’t — come 2021.

That’s an internal view. Of course, local newspapers operate in a broader media world — including local public media, local TV, and local startups. In some larger cities, public radio stations are taking audience (and sometimes talent) from the dailies. Local commercial TV stations are feeling advertising pain too, but they still have more capacity to sustain themselves — and grab future market share. “They’re expanding more in digital and in social,” says TV business expert Bob Papper, who tracks the industry closely. That’s true even after Michael Bloomberg’s one-man subsidy of local TV ran its course.

Then there’s the nascent independent local press, from VTDigger to Berkeleyside, Charlotte Agenda to The Colorado Sun, The Memphian to MinnPost. Many of these green shoots are finding a little more sunlight — but they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a tough road replacing their town’s flagging ancestral dailies. Meanwhile, amidst the carnage, some schemers and dreamers are strategizing about what they see as the detritus of a daily industry, waiting to be bought out or taken off by a new generation of local news builders. They’re early in that process; that’s a story for another day.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the larger society in which local news — and all of us — now all operate. The double whammy of virus terror and economic calamity has made real a whole host of underlying issues — from generational equity to the ragged safety net, affordable child care to cramped housing, the entire panoply of inequities baked into our society.

Perhaps this will be merely a short bout of home detention followed by a fast, v-shaped economic recovery. Maybe these issues will dissolve quickly in the public discourse. For tens of millions, though, they will remain ever-present, defining their lives and their possibilities.

How will the local press of the 2020s cover these realities of life on the ground when we return, blinking, into the sunlight? Will journalism at all levels be strong enough to contribute the deep reporting and analysis that that intelligent fixes require? Will a society shocked by American incompetence in the face of an enemy find its future aided by the press it deserves and requires? Or will a nation of emptied-out newsrooms be unable to meet the moment?

As I wrote Friday, the biggest problem in America isn’t (yet, at least) newspapers going under. It’s ghost papers, strip-mined by ownership, disguised as news sources but actually offering very little in the way of local news or community leadership. The press, whatever its form, finds itself in a classic position: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In the shorter term, though, the set of life-or-death questions local newspaper companies face right now is fairly clear.

• Will we keep seven days of print publishing?
• What does it mean to run a mainly reader revenue-driven business?
• How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?
• How many journalists will our new business reality allow us to pay?
• Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?
• What do “advertising” and “events” look like?
• Should we merge or sell?

So let’s look at each of these more deeply to see what a prematurely arriving 2025 means to readers, journalists, newspaper employees, and publishers.

Nearly every publisher has looked at this question — and nervously stepped back, ever since Advance Local stepped out way ahead of the crowd in 2012. Their compelling fear: Would ending seven-day print be a final breaking point for the habits for decades-long subscribers — the ones now paying $400 to $1,000 a year for home delivery? How many of these customers wouldn’t even transition to a lower price point for some print and more digital? How many would, like so many newspaper subscribers before them, just go away?

McClatchy provided one of the best and most watched dress rehearsals in the trade last year. Last summer, I wrote about how the company began its program of dropping print Saturdays for a single weekend edition — something the Europeans did successfully ages ago. Now McClatchy’s little experiment has become the standard across the entire 30-title chain. And its results are clear.

“The retention from digital Saturdays has been nearly total,” Sara Glines, regional publisher for McClatchy’s Carolina properties, told me Monday:

We lost less than a dozen subscribers in each market, in some markets less than a handful. Digital activation went up immediately. E-edition usage went up on Saturdays. In today’s coronavirus environment, those digital activations have gone a long way in bringing more readers to our digital platforms for breaking news and updates. Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald were our last markets to launch digital Saturdays. Their first digital Saturday was March 21. It went just as smoothly as all other markets.

How well does McClatchy’s Saturday strategy translate to the broader industry? We know the lessons:

• Communication: Talk to readers early and often about why day-cutting is happening.
• Move relevant features and news into other products, digital or print, that make sense to readers. Reconfigure the Sunday paper into more of a week-in-review, stronger-in-features product.
• Set new pricing that customers think is fair.

But those essential-to-execute guidelines only tell us so much. Dropping Saturdays saves publishers some money — but not that much. With as much as half of their ad money evaporated by COVID-19, publishers will need bigger savings — which means cutting more days.

Readers who might easily adjust to the logic of a weekend paper might also think that saying goodbye to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, all at the same time, is too much. If it’s too much for readers, and they drop their subscriptions entirely, then the local news business spirals downward even more quickly.

If it works, though, it can save a lot of money.

A huge portion of newspapers’ budgets remains tied up in manufacturing: presses, paper, ink, trucks, and all the people who handle them. (These are the often forgotten newspaper employees, the ones who realize their jobs are going away, but nonetheless like the idea of that happening in 2025 more than 2020. Let’s not forget them.)

“There are so many variables,” one veteran of the trade told me:

Most important: Do you outsource printing or not? If you do, then you can usually cut days and save money. If you own your own presses, it’s harder to manage. Pressmen don’t work just two days. What does it do to your distribution network; can they afford to operate just two days a week? Do you have an agreement to print and distribute other papers like The New York Times or USA Today?

That reckoning — to in-source or outsource — has led to much more regionalized printing, like The Columbus Dispatch being printed 175 miles away in Indianapolis. Those longer distances lead to much earlier editorial deadlines, which means missing late news or sports — often resulting in a print product that’s 36 hours behind the news we read on our smartphones. That’s part of this unending spindown of the newspaper industry.

What’s the 2025 business view here? Expect that most surviving dailies will offer as robust a Sunday print product as they can, and digital through the day, through the week. Or maybe it’s Sunday and Wednesday, for midweek print advertising, depending on individual markets. Or maybe the big Sunday paper shifts back to Friday or Saturday to capture more weekend reading and shopping. Done well, a publisher that shifts from seven days to a couple can expect to retain 75 to 90 percent of existing print advertising. But publishers have been properly wary of that ripcord now dangling in their corner office.

We’ve already seen several titles, most prominently the Tampa Bay Times, announced radical day cuts, within this crisis, and we’ll see more. The question is how many more, and how many days will they be cutting? Even in relatively prosperous California, major publishers are planning to drop Saturday print by early next year, knowledgeable sources tell me.

What does it mean to run a mainly reader-revenue-driven business?

The national news brands offer the best-practice playbooks here.

Business intelligence forms the foundation of their business, with an ever-evolving understanding of how to win — and keep — paying subscribers. That intel has then led to newsroom staffing expansion. They’re creating a virtual flywheel of more and better content and services to readers, who then pay for subscriptions and build a new — bigger — business.

For the locally oriented companies, though, that model is daunting. Do they have the will, capital, time, and talent to apply proven lessons?

How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?

Going digital (doesn’t that sound odd in 2020?) means committing to a business run by people with digital skills, and not enough publishers have truly done that. Time’s now up. As I noted in my start-of-the-decade Epiphanies piece: “The brain drain is real. What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers? Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.” That truism makes the accelerated movement to “digital” even tougher.

How many journalists will our new business reality enable us to pay?

Some smaller chain newspapers were already down to the most skeleton of product-producing staffs, pre-COVID-19. We’ll now see tested the question of how low on staffing they can go — just to get a product out. The more important question, though, is: How many people do they need to produce something readers will pay for?

Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?

Having learned that they can produce the news almost entirely remotely (other than printing and distribution), how much will news organizations want to reconfigure their workspaces to generate savings out of reduced office space?

“We’re 100 percent remote,” says Mike Klingensmith, publisher of the Star Tribune. “Nobody is in our office. I don’t know how we are doing it. Everyone may figure out we don’t need an office after all.”

About 20 percent of newspaper employees work in the physical business of print, manufacturing, and distribution. For the rest, this small unthinkable is now thinkable.

What do “advertising” and “events” look like?

Publishers have continued to make and re-make their ad priorities, staffing, and skills as The Duopoly and digital have forever changed the nature of advertising. This crisis — with some portion of that missing advertising likely never to return — will prompt more rethinking. How much inside sales versus how much outside? How much branded? How much direct versus programmatic?

The events business is also a big question mark, as Josh Benton explored last week. O’Reilly Media deciding to end its big event business was shocking. I agree with the sentiments of Rafat Ali, founder of travel B2B leader Skift: “If we ever give in to the idea that face-to-face events will be over, then we should also give up on the idea that people will travel again. We might as well give up on, well, everything.” Rafat-like, and as ever, to the point.

He expresses a global POV; let me add a local one. The future of the local press is in a deep and authentic relationship with its readers and communities. And that means people in close contact, post-coronavirus. Events of all kinds will be a major part of that future for the successful.

Will we have to merge or sell to stay in business?

The Olympics may have been pushed to 2021, but The Consolidation Games is going ahead as scheduled, virus schmirus. In fact, there’s good reason to believe this crisis is accelerating an M&A process that had already been moving fast.

Share prices for publicly traded chains have dropped dramatically, with Gannett floating just below $2 Monday. When GateHouse bought Gannett — just over four months ago! — this was the deal: “$12.06 a share in cash and stock, based on New Media’s Friday closing price, with a promise of $6.25 in cash and 0.5427 of a New Media share for each Gannett share.” From that to two bucks is quite a fall.

Depending on the duration of this crisis, Gannett’s shares are likely to rise eventually. But its big question remains the $1.8 billion in debt — at 11.5 percent interest — that it took on to make the merger work. Will Gannett be able to keep on schedule with those payments — while, you know, actually operating the company — if the ad exodus extends into summer or fall?

It’s not just future earnings that these companies need to worry about it. It’s also collecting on what’s already been sold, on ads that have already run.

“One of biggest issues is cash flow,” one news industry financial veteran told me. “What if all those SMBs [small to midsize businesses] don’t pay for January and February ads? Even if they have cash, they don’t want to cut checks. Even places like Macy’s may just not pay for January inserts.”

(Here we meet one of the great players in any crisis: attorneys. “In this whole mess, expect full employment of lawyers arguing ‘force majeure’ as a reason not to enforce contracts businesses want to get out of,'” that finance source continued. Is a pandemic an Act of God? It’s a legal “gray area.”)

These are more than abstract concerns. Metro publishers have already told me about major advertisers asking for givebacks and “accommodations.”

Some, including me and much wealthier investor Leon Cooperman, have long doubted Gannett’s ability to pay off that five-year loan while continuing to pay a hefty dividend to shareholders and keep enough people in its newsrooms with the cash flow it could expect.

This crisis only makes those doubts grow stronger.

It’s way too early to mention the “D” word — default — though it is being brought up offline.

Now consider the other drama that’s been submerged in the virus crisis. What will become of Alden Global Capital’s essential takeover of Tribune Publishing? It’s likely more “logical” — in terms of profit maximization — than it was before. Sources tell me a merger between Tribune and Alden’s MNG Enterprises is likely to be announced before the June 30 that is so pivotal in Tribune’s future.

One financial source tells me the deal will be a mix of cash and stock: “Tribune is the acquirer. That would leave them with more liquid security, a big beneficiary of all the synergies. Tribune can fit it into their balance sheet, since it has little debt, with no problem.” (At the moment, Tribune debt stands at $37.6 million.)

Tribune has already begun to look more like Alden’s MNG, notorious as the industry’s most aggressive newsroom shrinker. Tribune has been cutting costs, reducing management positions, and searching for efficiencies wherever it can find them. This current crisis only adds impetus to that work.

In that scenario, Tribune properties — in major cities like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Orlando — will probably begin to look more like MNG papers The Mercury News and The Denver Post. Newsrooms cut to be the bone. Disinvestment from what Alden has always seen as a largely mythical digital future.

Financially, it’s a strategy that has worked for Alden. Enough older subscribers have accepted its higher pricing, and it’s found just enough buyers of its minimal digital products to keep the profits coming.

While its numbers aren’t as good as what I reported two years ago, its top properties still throw off (or did pre-coronavirus) margins of more than 20 percent. That’s unheard of among nearly all other publishers.

So what will this crisis mean to Alden and its president and chief dealmaker, Heath Freeman? “Heath could use this to run the table,” one observer said.

It’s easy to see why and how that indeed might be possible. Look at what the chain landscape may be by summer. McClatchy, one of the now lonely “independent” chains, will emerge from bankruptcy in four to six months (unless virus-driven delays lengthen the process). At that point, controlling owner Chatham Asset Management will look at its options.

One will be merging with the new Alden+Tribune.

Another, maybe, would be turning to Gannett. That would require a larger financially rejiggering, though, with lender Apollo a key player.

Either way, given the deep declines the industry faced pre-COVID, plus the unknown toll going forward, we could well see this reality: four hedge funds and private equity firms controlling a majority of America’s daily press as 2020 rolls on into darkness.

Chatham, Apollo, Alden, and Fortress Investment Group (which holds a contract to manage Gannett through 2021) may well get to decide amongst themselves how to divvy up the properties that deliver the local news most Americans get.

That’s not the picture Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen has in mind as he has launched his “Save The Free Press Initiative” in December. But it’s a reality we may all soon face.

This extreme moment is forcing publishers’ hands. Undoubtedly, some may look back on the other side of COVID-19 and say: “That worked well. We should have done it earlier.” Others will wish they’d had more time to think about jumping.

If publishers’ can still see any water in the glass at all — it seems to be emptying day by day — they might invoke Rahm Emanuel’s timely advice about the Great Recession at the start of Barack Obama’s presidency: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

This is a crisis. This is serious. And there’s no time left to waste.

What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”?

Newspapers, of course — the communications medium that, along with its media peers, has been formally recognized as a public good by cities and states trying to determine which slices of their economies not to shut down. Factual local reporting is indeed an “essential” in an age of fear and misinformation.

That’s the sliver of silver lining in this time of unprecedented financial stress. Our work, as journalists and as institutions, is being consumed and appreciated.

“We’ve gotten all these great letters that ‘Our respect and admiration for your work has never been higher,” says Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith, whose Minneapolis daily has seen big spikes in readership as well.

“Your reporting during the COVID-19 crisis has been top-drawer and inspired me, finally, to execute the much overdue annual subscription ‘donation’,” one new member wrote Colorado Sun editor Larry Ryckman this week. “Please keep up the good work and know that your reporting is incredibly valuable, not merely during this crisis.”

Colorado Public Radio also feels the love, including this heartfelt tweet:

So true. My auto-donation to @CPRNews came out of bank today & I admit I was tempted to cancel it before next month (husband lost job and our health insurance this week) but after 2-seconds I realized they’re some of my best friends right now and I’m happy to pay that bill https://t.co/AvnVUtghtQ

— KB (@kb80202) March 19, 2020

“Audience feedback and digital use has been tremendous, and the numbers are stunning,” sums up Colorado Public Radio head Stewart Vanderwilt.

A giant story like coronavirus is often when journalists feel most connected to the sense of mission that got them into this line of work. It’s the love — plus a much-appreciated viral bump in audience, subscriptions, and memberships — that is buoying otherwise overwhelmed publishers and newsrooms.

More bittersweet is how one innovative local news exec put it to me: “This may be our last chance to prove how valuable we are.”

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the AP, and more are providing the national reporting. They show us, through words and graphics and images, the scale of the tragedy and the many flaws in the federal government’s response to the crisis. But they can’t answer the fundamentally local questions urgent on minds nationwide.

How many people are sick near me? How well equipped is my hospital? Where can and can’t I go? What’s my mayor or my governor doing to help? Who can deliver what? Where can I get tested? And a hundred other perhaps life-or-death decisions as half of Americans nervously face indefinite home detention.

Many of the country’s 20,000-plus journalists have risen to the occasion, working the phones, filing remotely, and venturing out into the invisible threat to get the stories that require the sight or even touch of other humans. All while wondering: How long will I have my job?

That’s the terrible irony of this moment. The amount of time Americans spend with journalists’ work and their willingness to pay for it have both spiked, higher than at any point since Election 2016, maybe before. But the business that has supported these journalists — shakily, on wobbly wheels — now finds the near future almost impossible to navigate.

The question of the hour: How many journalists will still have jobs once the initial virus panic subsides? How much factually reported news — especially local news — will Americans be able to get in the aftermath of this siege?

The answer lies in great part on the people in those quotes above: It is readers and their willingness to support the news who increasingly distinguish the survivors from those facing the end of the road. Advertising, which has been doing a slow disappearing act since 2008, has been cut in half in the space of two weeks. It’s unlikely to come back quickly — the parts that do come back at all.

The problem is the same it’s been for years: The increases in reader revenue are outmatched by the declines in advertising. So this very welcome swell of support from audiences is being swamped by the much larger evaporation of ad revenue. News publishers nationwide are afflicted with existential gut checks — aches that get a little worse with each day’s new dot on the chart of coronavirus cases.

Let’s look first at the cliff-edge effects — which are dramatic — and then plumb the good news of reader engagement and subscription. In an upcoming piece, peering ahead five years or so, I’ll take a look at the big takeaways and likely longer-term impacts of this sudden twist of fate.

A profound advertising crisis

This event isn’t just a black swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s parlance for an unexpected happening that forever alters the course of history. For dailies — in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., and really globally — it’s a flock of black swans.

Why? The daily newspaper industry has been on a respirator of its own for more than a decade. Ever since the Great Recession sucked 17 percent of advertising oxygen out of the system in 2008 — then another 27 percent in 2009 — it’s been climbing uphill, its gasps growing more frantic as financial operators consolidate and stripmine what was once a profoundly local industry. All together, American newspapers have lost more than 70 percent of their ad dollars since 2006.

The industry enters this turning-point event with about $1 billion remaining in total annual profits. That’s a fraction of what it was at its height, but it’s still a lot of money — which is why the financial consolidation I’ve chronicled over the last year has continued.

If the massive ad losses we’re now beginning to see remain in place for months, all of that profitability will be gone, and then some. We’ll enter a new stage of loss: The news deserts will become the norm, the oases the rarity.

How bad is it out there? The overall ad business — call it advertising, sponsorship, underwriting — is in depression.

I’ve spoken with more than a dozen well-placed executives in the industry, and the consensus is that, in April, daily publishers will lose between 30 and 50 percent of their total ad revenue. Things are unlikely to improve until we’re past mass sequestration, whenever that is.

“We’re hitting the end of March,” one highly experienced ad exec told me. “We see what’s coming. Big, big misses [of revenue expectations].”

The numbers are necessarily imprecise, and they change daily. March, ironically enough, started surprisingly strong for some publishers. Several noted stable businesses, even a little growth here and there.

Then the virus. April will start off with many fewer bookings and many more cancellations. The second quarter is one big question mark, but publishers also know what a 50 percent drop isn’t even the worst-case scenario. Retailers are closed. Car dealers aren’t selling. Few people are hiring, and who’s brave enough to venture into a new house or apartment to look around?

Then there’s preprints. These Sunday circulars and inserts have remained a robust, high-margin product for many publishers. But many of the big-box stores that paid for them are now closed, including major (if perennially dwindling) retailer Macy’s. Those that remain open, the Targets and Walgreens and grocery stores, wonder what they can advertise; supply chains for both essentials and non-essentials remains uncertain, and people aren’t doing a lot of spontaneous shopping sparked by a deal in an ad.

Is anything holding up okay? The legal ads that newspaper carry of official government actions. Obituaries (darkly enough). And, where they’re legal (and have been allowed to remain open), marijuana dispensaries. (They deliver!)

But the uncertainty is near-universal. “Even those who have something to sell are really concerned about doing it,” one revenue exec told me. “They’re unclear on how to get their message right and not seeming to profiteer.”

Seattle Times president Alan Fisco provides detail:

We have seen deep losses, not surprisingly, in travel, entertainment, restaurant, auto advertising (particularly in our smaller markets, Yakima and Walla Walla).

Our projections show April to be significantly worse than the hit we are taking in March. The annual print declines look to be double what we were experiencing prior to this.

And in spite of significant traffic increases, while we are seeing an increase in programmatic [advertising], it isn’t enough to offset our O&O [self-sold advertising] losses and some of our audience extension product losses (search and social).

(The Seattle Times’ remarkable coverage of the country’s first hotspot was highlighted here.)

Most local dailies have entered this crisis still more dependent on ad revenue than on reader revenue, even though the percentages have moved closer to parity after three years of double-digit print ad decline. They have envied The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for having achieved business models based primarily on reader revenue.

(Ironically, coronavirus will likely push a lot of local publishers into that elite club — but through cratered ad revenue, not soaring reader revenue.)

The devastation across news media is universal but, inevitably, uneven. All local sources of news — daily newspapers, local digital, public radio stations, local TV stations — are reporting deepening losses.

It’s those most reliant on advertising that are most at risk. As reported earlier here at the Lab, it’s alternative weeklies and other free papers that look to be in the first trench. Significantly, the alt-weekly trade entered this year weaker than it’s ever been; no more than a dozen of them nationwide could be called significantly profitable, sources tell me.

“Eighty percent of our advertisers are restaurants, clubs, performance venues and all that is gone for at least two months,” one alt-weekly publisher told me Thursday, underlining how alt-weeklies’ strength — their connection to a vibrant city life — has turned against them.

Among independent digital sites, many of them members of LION Publishers and/or INN, sponsorship/advertising has indeed taken a hit. But since few depend overwhelmingly on it, the effects are worrisome more than catastrophic.

“Ironically, the nonprofits we’re hearing from with struggles right now are those that have done a lot to diversify their revenue streams,” says Sue Cross, executive director of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. These are news organizations that were doing a lot of events — now cancelled and with a less-certain future. Or they had big in-person spring fundraisers now forced to pivot to virtual, but that doesn’t replace substantial sponsorship revenue.

Five years ago, Ted Williams founded Charlotte Agenda, one of the liveliest and most commercially savvy sites on the emerging landscape. CA is taking some fire, but has so far it’s been manageable:

Revenues are down around 25 percent. This decrease consists of the drop-in job postings, event listings, and short-term ad deals. We’re fortunate that over 65 percent of our revenue comes from 12-month sponsorship deals across 28 big brands, most of which are negotiated in late fall.

Public radio, too, which depends more greatly on membership revenue than on advertising (or underwriting, as they call it), is also taking a hit.

“On the revenue side, we could see a negative swing of as much as $2 million in the final quarter, ending June 30,” says Vanderwilt of Colorado Public Radio, which has seen a remarkable surge of online readership and radio listenership. “Thirty to forty percent of our sponsorship is from the categories most immediately impacted by the need for social distancing and actual shutdowns. Arts, entertainment, events, restaurants, clubs — and education. Just about all have cancelled/paused their schedules.”

“We have seen some upticks in unsolicited donations coming in,” says Tim Olson, senior vice president of strategic relationships at KQED, the nation’s biggest regional station. But it too has suffered some sponsor loss and is, for now at least, forgoing another tried-and-true revenue source:

Public media stations, particularly news and information public radio stations, have almost all cancelled their on-air pledge drives in order to continue uninterrupted coverage of COVID-19. On air drives are critical drivers of new donors, and reminder to current donors, so the loss of on-air drives is likely to have an effect.

Local TV stations are also assessing what the spring will look like. Several are forecasting a 20 to 30 percent loss at this point in advertising. While they don’t have reader revenue, their ample retransmission fee contracts provide a big steady source of income.

Even with record consumption of digital news, advertising there is fetching far less than you might think. The reasons are straightforward: Many advertisers specify that they don’t want their products to appear next to a virus-related story — and that’s where most of the traffic is, of course. And with all businesses on temporary hold, demand for advertising is down.

That has led programmatic pricing, several publishers say, to be down about 30 percent. One told me it’s now dropping closer to 50 percent as society closes more doors.

In any event, all legacy local media — newspapers, TV, and public radio — are still much more reliant on their core legacy revenue than on digital dollars. So even increases in digital revenue don’t do much to counter the current big declines elsewhere.

The public’s hunger for local news is proven

That’s a lot of bleakness in advertising. But amid it all, there’s a little sunshine in digital subscriptions — the closest thing to a path forward for local newspapers.

Mike Orren, chief product officer at The Dallas Morning News, ticks off these amazing numbers: “Pageviews are up 90 percent. Users are up 70 percent. New users are up 75 percent. Sessions are up 96 percent. Sessions per user are up 14 percent. Session duration is up 9 percent.” And all that has pumped up digital subs.

Digital subscriptions are way up at the strongest local newspapers, with new weekly signups up 2× to 5× over pre-virus times. That’s thousands of much-needed new customers.

(How well are the two general-news pay leaders, The New York Times and The Washington Post, doing? They won’t say. We’ll find out the Times’ experience at its next earnings report.)

That kind of digital subscription growth is widely reported among medium-to-large local papers that do two things well: (1) fund a newsroom able to cover the local crisis in knowledgable depth; (2) have a system in place that facilitates quick and easy subscription signups.

Many newspapers fail to meet both those criteria, and they’ve seen a flatter growth ramp.

Notably, several publishers say that lots of people aren’t waiting to hit a paywall and run out of free articles for the month — they’re hitting those Subscribe buttons earlier and unprompted. They’re acting on both the value of the journalism and the community service.

One other indication of increased loyalty: fewer subscription cancellations. Churn is down. “We’re adding 50 to 70 subscribers every single day and seeing very little churn,” Tampa Bay Times editor Mark Katches told the Local News Initiative. “Churn is as common as the sunrise, but we’re experiencing the lowest churn rate this month that we’ve seen since we introduced the pay meter about a year ago. We attribute that to high interest in our coverage.”

The New York Times requires a new user’s registration in order to have free access to its coronavirus coverage. But most publishers have just opened their coverage up without any friction.

The Dallas Morning News’ strategy is somewhere nuanced and in between. It requires readers to sign up for a virus newsletter in order to get to unlimited related coverage, but it doesn’t require any more information than an email address. “It’s less friction,” Orren says. The idea has paid dividends: That newsletter now has an astounding 334,000 subscribers.

Some of more ambitious local news startups also report impressive numbers. The 18-month-old Colorado Sun is seeing a spurt.

“We have had nearly 600 new members sign up so far this month,” editor Ryckman told me Wednesday. “We signed up 330 new members in February, so we’re easily on track to double that pace by the end of the month.” The site overall has more than 8,000 paying members, with about 1,400 of those at the premium level. “Our traffic has been regularly 3× a normal day — and has been has high as 10×,” he said.

The Daily Memphian, also about 18 months old, is seeing a response both to its coverage and to appeals from its editor Eric Barnes: “Sub starts have jumped 250 percent in the last 2 weeks. And that’s even though we’ve made all our COVID stories free (and that’s 80 percent or more of what we’re doing).”

Barnes underlines the need to remind readers of the costs of journalism. “But we’ve been very intentional with calls to action in stories and newsletters, along the lines of “Our articles are free — but covering the news is not. Please subscribe.” (Memphian sports columnist Geoff Calkins wrote his own direct appeal to readers, aiming to reach a different kind of reader-relationship connection.)

LION Publishers executive director Chris Krewson reports good uptake among his more aggressive member local news orgs. “Berkeleyside has signed up 267 new members since starting a campaign around the virus a few weeks ago, and also gotten donations from existing members, for a total of $50,000 in new-member revenue. The Berkshire Eagle launched a membership campaign and already has 300 members.”

“Many members are reporting huge increases in traffic — five, even ten times their normal pageviews, and also increases in community support and donations,” says INN’s Cross. “Even very small sites are hosting Facebook groups and seeing thousands join overnight, organizing collaboratives of all media in their towns.”

Pulitzer-winning Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week launched a voluntary membership program back in September. As of week ago, it had signed up 510 members. Seven days later and more than 1,100 new members have signed up. “In addition to the much-needed cash, those [and their comments] are tonic for the soul,” publisher and editor Mark Zusman told me Thursday.

For public radio, this crisis has been more about affirming its valued place in listeners’ and readers’ lives — in greater engagement — than in signing up new members. Over the past five years, most of the top 20 public radio stations have morphed more fully into “public media,” investing heavily in digital local news. Those that did are also reaping the returns.

“As of yesterday, CPR.org had over 2 million uniques and [on its separate site] Denverite 500,000,” says CPR’s Vanderwilt. That’s double and quadruple normal traffic, respectively. “The daily Lookout newsletter subs have grown 36 percent since March 1. We have also started publishing twice a day plus news alerts. Open rate has climbed from 32 percent to 41 percent.”

The public, for now, is eating up the added frequency and opening more of those newsletters. At KQED, pageviews have doubled and time spent on pages is up by a quarter. Overall, the public’s hunger for local news at this time is proven.

At metros, daily visits on digital are up an average of 122 percent as of the third week of March. And the pace is accelerating: “a 35% increase from Week 2 to Week 3 [and] no signs of slowing down as we enter the last week of March,” according to Pete Doucette, now a managing director at FTI Consulting. Doucette played a big part in building The Boston Globe’s digital audience and subscription business. His comprehensive take on digital subscriptions, and how to maximize both volume and pricing at this critical juncture is a must-read for all in the business. (The Local News Initiative at Medill offers an excellent roundup as well. )

These trends, we must underline, are global — both the traffic gains and the revenue losses. Major German publishers like Bild and Spiegel Online “all have huge gains,” according to journalist Ulrike Langer. “But none of these publishers have been able to monetize their huge rise in traffic volume in terms of advertising. Ad volume has sharply declined and most advertisers don’t want to see their ads next to coronavirus news.” Different continent, same issue.

What’s left to be “unthinkable”?

Humans are inherently adaptable. We have the life-affirming (and seemingly planet-destroying) capability of adapting to anything. We will adapt here too, no matter the human nor economic toll. A scale of destruction that would have once been “unthinkable” becomes quite thinkable indeed — then assessable, and then actionable. Those of us who’ve tracked the shrinking of the American press should have learned that lesson already.

We all expected a recession would arrive at some point, even if we thought of it kind of distantly, and we knew it would deal a new blow to the beleaguered newspaper industry. (In fact, I see that I’ve noted that possibility here at least three dozen times over the years — including this 2011 (!) entry, The newsonomics of the next recession.”)

Now that it’s arrived on our doorstep, our language has changed. Less “decline” and “deterioration,” more “annihilation” and “extinction“.

“Extinction” certainly draws a sharp picture, and it will be literally true for some of the press. But that picture may not be the most precise. More journalists gone. More publishers gone. Local news greatly reduced.

That’s all coming. But how do we — and the publics we serve — gauge what’s left?

The cuts at alt-weeklies and city magazines became public first. The earliest reports of cuts and layoffs at daily newspapers have begun to seep out. Expect a lot more of them. “Everyone’s making contingency plans,” one industry insider says. Layoffs, furloughs, salary cuts, four-day weeks — however it’s framed, cuts to staffing are on the way.

The fact that readers’ newfound appreciation of the local press is based on the work of those reporters and those newsrooms should limit the cuts. But they often won’t. And then there are the newspapers that have already been cut so much that they barely have enough people to put out a paper everyday. (And that’s before we see much of the most direct impact coronavirus can have on a news organization: sick journalists and other staffers whose extended absence from work makes everything harder.)

One wild card: the federal bailout, which features loans that can be turned into grants if companies maintain staffing. But it remains unclear if the scale of that help — and how accessible it is to publishers — will be enough to make a big difference.

Several years ago, Penny Abernathy’s mapping of America’s “news deserts” established a universal point of reference for discussions about local news. I’ve suggested that, for all the communities down to one or zero news sources, the bigger problem is the ghost newspapers that now pervade the landscape, stripped to the skeleton.

This crisis, like the declines of the past decade, will probably be less about pure extinction and more about new apparitions. Newspapers gutted in a way previously “unthinkable.” Badly wounded (but still faintly breathing) dinosaurs, if you will.

How do we judge if a newspaper is still “alive”? By most definitions, it’s the appearance of a product, usually in print but now digital, that carries a dignified nameplate, preferably in a familiar German blackletter font.

The financial companies that have and will continue to consolidate the local press — perhaps now at an accelerated pace — know that, and they’ve build a cynical strategy atop it. Keep the nameplate and fill the space between the ads with national wire copy, stories pretending to be “local” (but really from someplace three newspapers away), self-serving columns from mayors and local corporate leaders, and lots of low-cost calendar items.

“Fake news” is a truly odious epithet. But we’re now truly into the faux news era in local news. It’s a thin patina of fraudulent localness, packaged in the wrappings of a century ago, and priced at $600, $700, or $800 a year for seniors who nostalgically (or unknowingly, through the magic of the credit card) continue to pay until the day they don’t.

If we define “life” — or non-extinction — by the mere persistence of an old nameplate, we obscure the damage being done to local communities every single day. As we begin to list out the longer-term impacts of the current catastrophe, put that one higher on the list.

All of this — this March massacre of news revenue — is prologue, of course. We just don’t yet know what it’s prologue to. The 2020 calendar has never looked longer.

As one of the most successful, optimistic, and progressive of today’s publishers told me: “If it’s a couple of months, we’ll make it through. If it’s six months, all bets are off.”

It’s one of the news industry’s most significant attempts to address a real problem. There are probably lots of people who like your content enough to click on a link and have an ad or two put near the free story they want to read. And there may be a few people who love your content so much they’re willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for it. But what about everyone in between — the people who might be okay throwing you a dime now and then but who aren’t going to buy subscriptions to all of the news sites they read? How can publishers get revenue from them?

CEO Tony Haile — the former CEO of Chartbeat and a major reason news industry insiders have paid attention to the startup — says Scroll was born out of his own frustration as an online news reader who resented slow-loading junk ads and dodgy trackers. For lack of a viable alternative, he knew some of his favorite outlets were laying off journalists and doubling down on digital ads in ways that “just didn’t make sense from a user experience perspective.”

One common response to this onslaught of ads has been to install an ad blocker — something roughly a quarter of Americans say they do. But that usually prevents even the most user-friendly sites from getting much-needed ad revenue too.

Haile thought there was a way to offer a better online reading experience and ensure publishers receive more money than they’d get through advertising — especially advertising sold by some distant ad network and not the publication itself. As Ken Doctor reported back in 2018, Haile and his cofounders dreamed up the basics years ago, including the idea to distribute 70 percent of the $5 subscription cost to individual publishers based on how long each user spends on the site. (Haile said early adopters will pay just $2.49/month for the first six months; Scroll also offers a free 30-day trial.)

The lengthy beta period allowed Scroll to clear technical hurdles — like figuring out how to keep a user logged across multiple sites and across desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms. But it also gave the team, which has grown to 15 employees, time to refine and expand the initial ad-free idea.

“The key thing that has changed is that we’ve felt more confident in our vision,” Haile said. “It’s not just ‘Can you get rid of ads,’ but ‘What does a better internet look like?'”

For Scroll, creating a better internet means consciously designing a system to reward high-quality content over clickbait. The startup distributes membership revenue based on the share of time — calculated per individual user so smaller publications get a fair shake — that each reader spends on their site. Every user receives a monthly breakdown of how their subscription dollars were distributed.

My favorite little thing about @tryscroll is seeing where my money goes each month: pic.twitter.com/lFlRPo88Mb

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) January 22, 2020

A better internet also means reckoning with how most people read online news. After noticing that roughly two-thirds of traffic during the beta was coming from mobile devices, Scroll built features that allow a user to start an article on a desktop computer, pick up where she left off on her phone, and then switch to listening to the article on a commute. (One beta tester noted that Scroll had “just casually thrown in” the best text-to-audio speech the user had ever heard, according to Haile.)

In a demonstration just before launch, articles and home pages in Scroll’s 300-site network loaded markedly faster than their ad-filled counterparts. In one comparison, a USA Today page took more than 18 seconds to load, and readers would still have to click away from a full-page advertisement for “Star Trek: Picard.” With Scroll? The homepage, sans ads, was fully loaded in one second. (Obviously the difference would be smaller on article pages with less aggressive advertising.)

Similarly, Haile said he hopes the Twitter-aggregating news app Nuzzel, which Scroll acquired in February, will make users feel they’re using a more trustworthy version of the internet. Nuzzel, through curators and aggregation, provides “a healthier way to interact with social,” one that directs users toward quality content without, as Haile said, “getting dragged into the morass.”

User retention, based on the beta experience, seems to boil down to a simple question: Does Scroll have the sites the user likes to visit? As they’ve added more and more partner publications, Haile said there has been a direct correlation with retention. And as the network grows, more members get more value, more subscriber revenue goes to the sites, and more sites have an incentive to join.

“We know, as an industry, that we need to experiment in new business models and yet we see so little actually happen,” Haile said. “We’ve been very lucky to work with partners that believe we need to be innovating and take a data-oriented approach.”

Haile acknowledges that the self-selected beta testers probably belong to “a more specialized, media-aware category” than the general public — more like Nieman Lab readers than normal humans — but he’s encouraged by the user behavior he’s seen so far. In the near future, he says he’ll be paying attention to how engagement patterns change after the public launch and working to recruit additional media partners — including more local news outlets — to Scroll’s network.

“We built this to see if we can build a better internet,” Haile said. “And I don’t think you can have a better internet without local journalism covering the stories that matter.”

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

In media, there’s no fancy name for it, but it’s well established that people generally hate “the media” — but tend to like their local newspaper just fine.

Mash those two together and you can create a third rule of thumb: Members of Congress love to talk about how much they hate “the media” — but they tend to be happy to send a little legislative help to their local newspapers back home.

Call it McConnell’s Paradox.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has agreed to cosponsor a bill that offers antitrust relief to American newspapers (and other news publishers) who want to negotiate en masse with Google and Facebook. Here’s Bloomberg:

The Kentucky Republican added his support to the bill on Monday, according to Congress’s website. The legislation would grant publishers a four-year exemption from antitrust laws so they could negotiate financial terms with the tech giants that often serve as a gateway for readers and online advertisers.

McConnell’s support arrives as the companies increasingly come under fire in Washington on issues ranging from privacy to election interference. They have also been accused of controlling too much of the advertising market, to the detriment of news outlets who rely on the companies to reach advertisers and their audiences.

The bill, which has seven Senate supporters in total, was introduced by Senators John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, and Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. A companion measure in the House was introduced by the chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, and the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, Representative Doug Collins of Georgia.

Last month, two additional senators, Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican also signed onto the legislation.

Who would have thought it’d be an issue around media regulation that brought all these D’s and R’s together? Especially at a time when opinions about the media are one of the clearest fissures between left and right, anti-Trump and pro-Trump.

You’ve got a few factors converging here.

First, you don’t have to be much of a cynic to note that every member of Congress has newspapers back home, and that a lot of them make endorsements in congressional races.

American newspapers have been historically quite successful at getting carveouts in the law that benefit their businesses. They’ve gotten themselves declared exempt from sales taxes, encoded inflexible requirements for legal advertising in law, and benefitted from substantial postal subsidies.

You can argue that these are civic-minded, policy-driven state subsidies of important local information sources. Or you can argue they’re the spoils of the political power that comes with influential endorsements. You pick! But either way, it’s not hard to imagine why a Rand Paul — he of “Rand Paul literally flips off media after debate firestorm” and “Rand Paul and the media: No love story” headlines — would be willing to get on board.

(Actually, he’s proposed ending all antitrust enforcement, so this isn’t out of character for him.)

Second, disdain for the tech giants has become an oddly bipartisan affair, if not always for the same reasons. On the left, Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al.; on the right, Josh Hawley thinks that maybe they should just be stricken from the face of the earth. So a bill that pushes back against Big Tech is in everybody’s sweet spot.

What would the bill do? Here’s the Senate text. It defines “news content creator” broadly (“any print or digital news organization that (i) has a dedicated professional editorial staff that creates and distributes original news and related content…(ii) is commercially marketed through subscriptions, advertising, or sponsorship”). So if we buy a few Facebook ads promoting this story, Nieman Lab counts.

But it defines “online content distributor” — the bad guys — narrowly (“any entity that (a) operates a website or other online service that displays, distributes, or directs users to news articles, works of journalism, or other content on the internet that is generated by third-party news content creators; and (b) has not fewer than 1,000,000,000 monthly active users, in the aggregate, of all of its websites or online services worldwide”). A billion MAU is a big number; that’d include Google, Facebook, and (depending on how you interpret “online services”) maybe Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

The bill gives those publishers a four-year exemption from antitrust laws “for engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator…to collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.” For that exemption to hold, the terms they negotiate must be “available to all news content creators” — so newspapers can’t work out a deal just for themselves that wouldn’t also apply to Bustle — and “nondiscriminatory as to similarly situated news content creators.”

So publishers could get together and say: “Hey, Google [or Facebook] — you suck. You need to pay us $X to include us in Google News or Google Search [or the News Feed or the News Tab or Watch]. And if you don’t, we’ll all withhold our content from you.”

To which a tech company could then say: “Sorry, we’re just organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful [giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together]. We don’t pay every site on the Internet for the privilege; indexing web pages and displaying headlines are both definitely fair use. Get behind a hard paywall if you want off the open web, byeeeee.”

Based on Google’s experience in Europe, it’s hard to believe either company’s response would be anything different. (Oh, and they might throw a few million bucks the industry’s way, too, for “innovation.”)

Is the threat of a bunch of news sites going Benedict Option on Google and Facebook in unison credible? Even if every single newspaper in America agreed to — would local TV stations? Would BuzzFeed or Vox Media or Vice? How about CNN, Fox News, or ABC/NBC/CBS News — each part of giant conglomerates that do lots of business with Google and Facebook in lots of different ways? Would The Washington Post or The New York Times, which have built successful subscription models happy to take in lots of top-of-funnel traffic? How about NPR, other public media, or nonprofit outlets that either don’t run advertising or don’t rely on it heavily?

No matter how many major publishers stepped away, surely there’d also be lots who’d see “suddenly being a top source of news on Google” as an attractive proposition. And almost by definition, people who get a lot of their news via Google and Facebook are people who don’t have a lot of loyalty to any particular news brand. Would they miss those publishers when they’re gone?

Publishers today get around 85 percent of their external traffic from Google or Facebook, and around 40 percent of all traffic. Is everyone going to be okay giving all that up as a sort of ersatz mass labor action? Any news site that doesn’t want to be on Google can deindex itself today; they don’t.

I get it — publishers want to put pressure on the guys with the money, and this is one more arrow in their quiver to do that. The bones that Google and Facebook have thrown the industry’s way — not particularly meaty ones, mind you, but bones nonetheless — have come as a direct result of government and industry pressures in Europe and the companies’ concomitant desire to head off similar pressures back home.

But the reality is that news content isn’t nearly as important to Google and Facebook as publishers think it is. Only about 1 in every 25 News Feed posts contains any “news,” defined broadly. Google’s ad dollars come from people’s searches about products, not Iran or Trump. A news product can be useful to tech companies as a way to keep some users coming back. But there’s a reason that Facebook’s new News Tab is hidden behind a bunch of taps and submenus — it’s just not core to their business.

So even if an antitrust exemption for news is what ends up bringing all of Congress together for a few hours of Kumbaya, don’t expect it to make much of a difference in the long run. Maybe that’s the real McConnell’s Paradox: The issues that draw surprising bipartisan support are often the ones that won’t have much of an impact.

The first half of 2020 “will be the final dance of the newspaper industry,” one of my savviest financial sources told me Thursday — someone who’s been right on the money for years. “Everything will get resolved in the first half of 2020.”

By “everything,” he means the consolidation of ownership and control of the United States’ major newspaper companies. What as recently as three weeks ago were five big chains — Gannett, GateHouse, McClatchy, Tribune, and Alden Global Capital’s MNG Enterprises — could well, by the middle of 2020, be two. In sight is the big industry-wide rollup I first pointed to way back in 2011.

Because of their origins in local communities, the newspaper business historically lacked the centralization and scale of other industries. Even the “big” chains that developed as family owners cashed out in the 1970s and 1980s weren’t really that big. When Al Neuharth — “the brash and blustery media mogul who built the Gannett Company into a communications Leviathan,” according to his New York Times obit — died in 2013, Gannett owned 93 daily newspapers. That was still less than 7 percent of the nation’s total.

Why rollup now? It’s just seems so logical to executives in other industries: McDonald’s can make burgers a lot more efficiently than mom-and-pop joints in every town can.

One acid-tongued analogy has stayed with me for years. “You guys think you’re special in the newspaper business — it’s just like any other industry,” one experienced financial analyst told me mid-decade. “But it’s a distressed industry, and distressed industries get consolidated. In that way, news is just like waste management.”

Another industry insider I spoke with recently pointed forward a few years, to the middle of the 2020s: “These guys look out at their revenue projections for the next three to four years and they know what they have do.” That means consolidation is now Job One. Newspapers have all been cutting expenses, including deeply into newsrooms, for more than a decade now, especially since The Great Recession wiped out 20 percent of their revenue and ushered in a decade of red numbers on their balance sheets.

Much of the industry’s attention this week, on Twitter and elsewhere, has focused on the rumors and then news of massive Gannett layoffs, coming weeks after Old Gannett was acquired by the then-rebranded GateHouse.

We’re hearing that “thousands” of Gannett employees will be getting pre-holiday pink slips — but that’s no surprise. With $400 million or more in cost reductions to deliver, it was clear that the company would be cutting more than 2,500 jobs — likely 3,500 or more. Reports also indicate that much of Old Gannett leadership in high-ranking sales position was surprised to get the quick axe this week. A crowdsourced Google Doc is tracking the layoffs by newspaper; it currently shows more than 160 jobs lost, 33 of them in the company’s newsrooms.

But there’s a lot happening deeper in the background too. Back in January, I called the coming year’s round of tie-ups and acquisitions the 2019 Consolidation Games, and now its sequel is coming into shape. GateHouse buying Gannett seemed like the big play — and in raw tonnage, it was, combining the No. 1 and No. 2 chains. But look farther ahead.

On Monday, Alden’s pursuit of Tribune Publishing became crystal clear. The two companies publicly entered into a “Cooperation Agreement.” Cooperation is too kumbaya of a word for it; it’s really a kind of non-aggression pact, and we all know those always work out great.

In corporate parlance, it’s called a standstill. In this case, the always aggressive Alden agreed to retract its fangs — for the time being.

Alden president Heath Freeman had surprised everyone (including Tribune’s board and execs) by buying a 25 percent stake of Tribune stock from the group led by one-time Tronc chairman Michael Ferro on November 19. Then, just six days later, Alden told the SEC it had upped its stake to 32 percent.

The standstill prevents Alden from increasing its stake past 33 percent until June 30, 2020. It also, for the same period, bans Alden from launching a proxy fight — an attempt to replace current Tribune board members with its own, a tactic it tried (unsuccessfully) in its own attempt to takeover Gannett in May.

In return for that pause, Tribune enlarged its board to eight from six, letting Alden handpick the two new directors. Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Joe Cahill decried the giveaway as indefensible. His indignation is well-placed; the hometown Chicago Tribune — which has found a little stability over the last year or so after the Ferro/Tronc years — could suddenly face the same fate as the Alden-eviscerated Denver Post or (formerly San Jose) Mercury News. For Tribune, though — with its corporate life suddenly upended — it seemed like the best deal possible at the moment.

Alden, the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain, is now firmly inside the tent of one of the few big public newspaper chains not yet controlled by financial players. Not coincidentally, Tribune also carries the least debt of those chains — making it ripe for the sort of debt-piling-on that is the M.O. of players like Alden.

The 2020 Consolidation Games

So what kind of scenarios are now likely, or at least imaginable, in 2020?

While none of the companies involved in all of this intrigue will comment on the record, there’s broad agreement about what the would-be deal landscape of early 2020 looks like.

The most salient facts: Two standstills and that June 30 date.

We know about Alden’s standstill. What’s the other? Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune from Tribune in February 2018, is also standing still. Like Ferro’s bunch, he also owns about a quarter of Tribune — a stake he initially took when he was interested in acquiring the Times, but which he held onto even after he did. Back in January, he agreed to a standstill that prevents him from acting independently of Tribune’s board in most ways.

That standstill expires…on June 30, 2020, same as Alden’s.

So when the clock hits midnight, both Alden, with its 32 or 33 percent, and Soon-Shiong, with his 24 percent, will be free to vote their holdings as they wish, as well as to buy or sell more. Even the most math-averse journalist can see that, combined, Alden and Soon-Shiong will hold a majority of Tribune shares. That’s real control.

Is Alden, then, lying in wait for June 30?

It might not even have to wait that long. While its two new directors would have to recuse themselves from any Tribune/MNG merger negotiations, the Tribune board doesn’t have to wait for mid-year. Its board could appoint a special committee made up of its independent directors. That committee could then assess what’s in the best interest of Tribune’s shareholders and move to join the rollup party sooner rather than later.

In fact, don’t think of that June 30 date as the starting gun for M&A — think of it as the finish line. Or, in more newspaper-appropriate terms, a deadline. If Tribune can strike a deal with a merger partner before then, it can do so on whatever terms that it sees as most favorable. If it can’t, well, all bets are off on what happens when those standstills expire.

Who might that merger partner be? Two recent events have rearranged that chessboard.

New Gannett, absorbed into GateHouse, is fully occupied with its own big lifts: integrating two big companies, cutting everything that can be cut, and paying down the $1.8 billion in high-interest debt it took on to do the deal. New Gannett is off the rollup board — for now.

Then Tribune’s likeliest dance partner, McClatchy, stepped off the board, at least for the time being. As it focuses its attention on the financial reorganization of its capital structure and negotiates with the feds for a takeover of its pension plan, McClatchy’s appeal as a merger partner has greatly diminished. It sees the same logic in the large-scale cost-cutting a merger could provide. But it can’t do much until its own reorg is done.

How long might that take? Well, McClatchy will likely need most of the first half of the year to clear its position through voluntary reorg or bankruptcy. So, say, maybe sometime around June 30? That date will be circled on every newspaper exec’s calendar before long.

Add it up and the first two quarters of 2020 could mark the major reordering of newspaper ownership, control and management that’s been in the cards for years.

What’s likeliest? Observers put a Tribune/MNG deal at the top of the list. The biggest reason? Just the big cost cutting allowed by putting two big companies together. In recent years, there have been various non-financial roadblocks getting in the way of various tie-ups. (Do the geographic footprints fit together? How about the corporate cultures? Do they agree on strategy going forward?) But now, the imperative is cost-cutting, and that trumps all else.

A combined Tribune/MNG would become the No. 2 U.S. newspaper chain, behind Gannett. It would include Tribune’s small-in-number but metro-heavy roster, which includes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the New York Daily News, and the Hartford Courant. MNG would add bulk, with 97 dailies and weeklies in total, including such once major properties as The Mercury News, The Denver Post and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It has big footprints in both northern and southern California.

Most important: Who would control that combined company?

That begins a parlor game. What does Alden’s Heath Freeman really want at this point? He has milked and milked MNG through its Digital First years, making sure that when it comes to investment in the product, it’s Digital Last. Does he see a Tribune merger as a way to cash out, as further profits became harder to obtain? Or does he smell even more dairy refreshment in subjecting Tribune — already drained, yes, but not yet emaciated to Alden’s standards — to his cost-cutting discipline?

That’s one big question. Another is valuation, the fundamental question of most mergers. We know what the market thinks the publicly traded Tribune is worth — its current market cap is $444 million. MNG is a private company controlled by Alden, its majority shareholder. Observers guesstimate its value somewhere around $300 million, but it’s truly impossible to know from the outside.

A number of those who’ve been able to looked at Digital First/MNG books over the years have found some of the accounting questionable. Further, Alden has shown itself able to shift and move money between its various affiliates with the skill of a veteran three-card monte dealer — and has been sued and investigated for doing so.

Then there’s the big question of what value these newspaper brands will hold in the future if they’re shrunk even further. Or, as one company CEO put it, “How much life is left in the asset?” And how much of any deal would be cash and how much stock?

But despite all those questions, yes, Tribune could “buy” MNG. Or vice versa — recall that it was the smaller GateHouse that swallowed the larger Gannett. And one thing is clear: There’s a reasonable chance that Heath Freeman and Alden will get the opportunity to slice and dice Tribune’s papers as he has MNG’s.

McClatchy aims to mid-year

If the Tribune/MNG combo happens, that would bring those five newspaper chains we had a month ago down to three.

How might we get to two? That comes down to McClatchy. After a Tribune/MNG merger, McClatchy would again be the third-largest U.S. newspaper company — the position it held before adding Gannett to GateHouse promoted it to No. 2.

And as a standalone No. 3, struggling with the same operating economics as its peers, it would certainly like a dance partner as well. Except the dance floor is looking pretty sparse this late in the night. Not many options left. So it’s possible McClatchy’s play would be to join up with the new Tribune/MNG — or maybe even New Gannett. Either would be a level of consolidation almost unimaginable in the industry not long ago.

Of course, McClatchy would like to be an acquirer, as it almost was a year ago when it came close to buying Tribune. But its financial and strategic positions have weakened since then.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg’s Joe Nocera wrote an excellent piece on McClatchy’s challenges and CEO Craig Forman’s continued public focus on community difference-making journalism that matters.

Internally, McClatchy has its share of detractors who’ll argue that, while some of its journalism remains top drawer, the cuts its newspapers have seen aren’t that far off from those of its peers. But it’s nonetheless true that McClatchy seems like an industry outlier. It’s a publicly traded company, but its two-class share structure still gives the founding (1857) McClatchy family some control. While financial player Chatham Asset Management, its largest shareholder and debtholder, circumscribes management’s decision-making, the company stands out as an advocate of traditional journalistic values in the widening sea of hedge fund and private equity owners.

Forman, in Nocera’s piece and elsewhere, makes the case that McClatchy is leading the pack in terms of digital transition, especially in well-priced digital subscription selling.

But none of that will save McClatchy — by the time it finishes getting its internal financial house in order — from facing a vastly altered industry landscape. What choices might it still have by summer?

Five major companies could become two. Those could well both be run by investment companies with little real affection for or attachment to the newspaper business — Alden, whose sins are well known, and Fortress Investment Group, which has a management contract to run Gannett through the end of 2021. Though Fortress and Alden differ significantly in their management practices, the fact remains that both companies’ interest in the bottom line crowds out most thoughts of journalism’s role in serving its communities.

Those two companies would own probably close to a third of the daily press; New Gannett already holds a 18 percent share. Then there’s Lee Enterprises — in 50 markets, with mostly smaller properties — and the two big private companies, Hearst and Advance. Following them are a fair number of smaller chains, most of them focused on smaller newspaper properties.

So is this more Armageddon or doomsday, asks the New York Post?

We’ve got ghost newspapers, news deserts, and now an assortment of Biblical references to choose from. What sounds like Hollywood summer fare, though, comes down to one sobering word: reality.

Everyone in the subscription business decries friction, putting too many steps between the would-be buyer and the buy itself. Enter your credit card number; type in your address; pick a username and password; sorry, your password must have at least 3 uppercase characters, 2 lowercase characters, a number greater than 6, and any two of %, &, and #. Too many words, pages, clicks.

Some of that is hard to avoid. But as news consumers, we run into stupid friction all the time. You follow a link to a news site you’ve already subscribed to, but up pops a login screen. “Ugh, don’t you know me by now?” we scream, silently or otherwise.

Confronting (and shaping) all that that friction is one part of The New York Times’ plan for world digital news subscription domination. Times CEO Mark Thompson described that part of the Times’ strategy to me in an interview after the company reported its third-quarter financials last week.

The Times has decided to force non-subscribers to register in order to sample even a couple articles. But the move has an impact on subscribers, too — they’re often logged in on some devices or within some apps but not in others, making them appear anonymous. It’s “confusing to consumers and confusing to us. Someone who is a very loyal, 10-year subscriber turns into an anonymous user.”

What does the Times gain? Better information about potential subscribers, yes, but also better knowledge of subscribers’ activity across devices, unlocking more accurate personalization. That deepens the relationship while providing value in both directions.

That new emphasis on registration serves an overarching goal: Thompson’s goal to hit 10 million subscribers by 2025, which I’ve covered since he outlined it three years ago.

The Times is now more than 40 percent of the way there, amazingly to many, and Thompson says they’re on track to reach or exceed it in five years. When he offered the 10 million number to financial analysts, the Times had 1.6 million digital subscriptions to its news and niche products. 10 million seemed like an outsized stretch. Today, it has nearly 5 million. Here are the key numbers:

4.9 million. That’s the total number of New York Times subscribers overall, between print and digital. That’s already three times its peak in the good old days of print.

4.1 million. That’s roughly how many paying news customers the Times has across digital (3,197,000 subscriptions) and print (869,599 average Sunday circulation).

856,000. That’s the number of subscribers to its non-news products, Crosswords and Cooking.

10 million. That remains the Times’ goal for 2025 for digital subscribers. Its growth curve, says CEO Mark Thompson, will get it there in time.

500,000: That’s the number of Times subscribers outside the United States. They may pay less for their subscriptions than do U.S. customers, but their importance to the Times is increasing. Today, they make up 16 percent of all Times subscribers; by 2025, the Times forecasts that 20 percent of them — or 2 million in total — will.

Thompson and I discussed those numbers, as well as why and how the Times has changed its paywalls — and will soon be charging its most loyal readers more. Along the way, Churchill, Netflix, and the 1960s rock-pop duo Zager and Evans each enter the conversation, which is edited for length and clarity.

Why now? Why do that now? We just published interviews with [Financial Times CEO] John Ridding and Tsuneo Kita, the chairman of Nikkei. John talked about going narrower and narrower and narrower to drive value, decrease churn, and increase pricing over time. This is a whole value journey, right?

Inside.com, the startup that waited over a decade for the domain with its core product now in the inbox and not the browser, focuses on growing relationships using curated email newsletters to grab your attention. Last year, Inside saw $1.1 million in revenue, reached 750,000 active subscriptions, and circled a 40 percent open rate. With a recent $2.6 million fundraise — with more than 900 investors and $250,000 from founder/CEO Jason Calacanis — Inside’s topical newsletters are now joined by specific local newsletters for its main readership’s cities as well.

“Inside SF has been one of our highest performing open rates in terms of open rates and all the metrics we look at with these newsletters,” Austin Smith, Inside’s president and general manager, said. “I don’t think we’re well suited to solve local news because we’re doing curation, but we’re sending traffic to those publishers…We have tons of readers in all those cities and we can introduce them to it and get it off the ground with the initial audience.” Here’s a snippet:

“Those cities” aren’t exactly the places most parched for news, nor are the types of people Inside caters to under-advertised to; Inside San Francisco is now joined by Inside LA, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Seattle, DC, Austin, Denver, and Pittsburgh, among the other newsletters added as part of the fundraise/clues to their target demo: Inside Finance, HR, for CMOs, for CFOs, for CTO/CIOs, Marketing, for Founders, Sales, SaaS. (No Inside Food Stamps or Inside Affordable Housing here.)

Alongside Inside Beer, Inside Trump, yes, Inside Bitcoin, and a few dozen others, Inside’s goal is to be the definitive newsletter on each topic while building a massive scale to get there. The portfolio of 50 daily and twice-weekly newsletters are largely supported by advertising, though the company recently gave paid subscriptions and SMS (1. too unforwardable, 2. too clunky for ads, and 3. too expensive at scale) a go.

In 2017 the company launched a paid subscription option for premium access to one newsletter for $10/month or $25 for premium access to an unlimited number of Inside emails, removing ads. Smith said that now comprises just 10 to 15 percent of Inside’s overall revenue, with a thousand people out of the 750,000 active subscribers opting to pay. The SeedInvest campaign brought in supporter money in a different way, as “hundreds of our readers made investments between $1,000 and $5,000” according to Smith. Inside isn’t the first newsletter network to give it a shot, as local-focused Whereby.Us raised $250,000 via SeedInvest in 2017 — but advertising is definitely more valuable than reader revenue to the scaling startup, Smith said.

“These newsletters are for a super highly engaged audience that is there to consume info, trusts us, and has made these newsletters a part of their daily media diet,” he said. “These ad units can work really well in these newsletters in a similar way to podcasts where we have this sophisticated audience that has tuned out programmatic and social ads, but a native ad appearing in a newsletter they trust…works well.”

Each newsletter has a publicly shown goal of how many email addresses are needed for the company to green-light it and how many are currently signed up, with 2,000 as the baseline. Exceptions include 1,000 needed for Inside Pets, and — sorry if you’re waiting for optimism — Inside Good News has the highest set goal of 7,000. That’s “not because we don’t like good news,” Smith said — but is a testament to the value they can sell the subscribers’ attention to advertisers at. (Each newsletter is curated by a human editor.) Other geography-focused newsletters are in the queue waiting for more subscribers, including Inside Asia, Africa, Brooklyn, Tokyo, Australia, Beijing, Moscow, and Washington.

Inside built an ad server that should help advertisers get more specific in their targeting, though Smith was careful to walk back from Facebook-level targeting.

“There were a lot of advertisers we worked with who are looking for more in terms of targeting who they would reach. For example, we worked with advertisers who want to reach developers. We have an Inside Dev with 10,000 subscribers and we all have another 75,000 or 80,000 across all newsletters, much more than just Inside Dev,” Smith said. “That was what led us to build this ad server where…we can put people into buckets — not super specific like Facebook — but big buckets.”

Ken Doctor characterized Scroll this way last fall, when the startup was one year in: “Talk to people in the news industry about what they think of his new startup Scroll, and they hesitate. They may stumble describing its model. They’ll say it’s something they’re watching. And then they’ll tell you if Tony Haile is behind it, they expect to see something impressive.” So, no pressure — but the team is getting closer to delivering.

The bet Haile, Chartbeat’s founding CEO, is making with Scroll is that he can convince online news readers — both subscribers and non-subscribers — to pay $5 a month for a substantially better, ad-free user experience on the news sites they already frequent. If that pitch works, it could send publishers more money than they could generate from advertising revenue.

“The internet had been this thing that was done to us, not built for us,” Haile told me. Their guiding framework in creating a system for publishers to get their due: “What does the internet that’s built for you look like, feel like, and so forth.”

Last week, Ben Mullin broke the news at The Wall Street Journal that Scroll had brokered deals with Vox Media, The Daily Beast, and BuzzFeed to bring their sites onto the service. A total of 27 brands are now signed onto Scroll’s testing phase, joining USA Today, The Atlantic, MSNBC, and more. And Scroll has a serious new infusion of capital to keep it going: Investors, including The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer and led by Union Square Ventures, have now committed a total of $10 million over the past two years.

As the media industry focuses on ad-blocking, reader revenue, and data security, Scroll’s ten-person team (planning to grow to 40 by the end of this year) has been spending 2018 constructing its GDPR-compliant infrastructure, negotiating deals, and testing the startup’s model.

“Nobody has said no” outright, Haile said, of the publishers they’ve approached. But he isn’t measuring by number of publishers; they’re working to add organizations by content consumption coverage, or the top sites where potential Scroll users spend their time. “The consumer doesn’t think about how many sites are in the network, but how much time they get to spend in a better experience,” he said. The split of that consumer’s $5 (or rather, 70 percent of it, after Scroll’s cut) is distributed to publishers based on the amount of time the consumer spends with their site.

Scroll is one of a few nascent group of startups trying to connect publishers with reader revenue outside the boundaries of a strict subscription, like LaterPay, Blendle, and Invisibly. Scroll’s ad-free experience will be the same for any paying user, though it won’t get you around publisher paywalls. (If you don’t pay for The New York Times, for instance, you won’t get more free articles because you use Scroll — but the ones that you do get will be ad-free.) Scroll will also have to pitch itself to users outside those Nieman Lab niche types, in addition to publishers, to sign up.

A significant pull for publishers is Haile’s promise that Scroll can generate more money per user than a typical ad experience. Scroll’s team tested its model based on a group of Digital Content Next publishers with $7 billion in digital ad revenue from 234 million unique visitors in a year. “What that means is that cohort of people makes about $2.50/month/person altogether [through ads]. We knew we had to have a distribution pool that was bigger than that,” Haile said. Consumer research on pricing levels showed a substantial number of users willing to pay the $5, with Scroll passing along $3.50 of that.

Running the publishers’ numbers showed that nearly all organizations could generate 40 percent more than they do from ads, Haile said — all but one. (That site relied on a lot of slideshow-like content that generated quick visits with low engagement.) “The model is designed to reward engagement and loyalty. We think those things are the currency of publishing in the future, that relationship with the consumer. The better you do at that, the better you do under Scroll.”

While Scroll has been setting up shop, the publishing industry prepared to face off with adblockers and ended up taking more of a data security tack this year. Google’s in-house Chrome adblocker helped limit the peskiest of advertisements and GDPR whipped the Internet into data security shape (extra thanks to a little thing called Cambridge Analytica), but Facebook’s algorithm plot twist and, you know, just the general state of the world has reminded publishers of the urgency to grow reader revenue. Haile sees the moves as steps toward a better Internet world.

“There’s this newly reinvigorated focus on ‘how do we serve the consumer and put their experience first’,” he said. “Scroll is a symptom of that broader drive to put the consumer back at the heart of what we do as an industry again.”

Scroll through these about reader revenue beyond the standard subsciption:

• Will more than 2 percent of digital readers ever pay for news? “There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions”
• Newsonomics: Can Invisibly be the new revenue stream publishers dream of?
• Testing its pay-per-article model in English, Blendle launches in the United States with 20 publishers
• Discors wants people to pay for news via a low-priced subscription that crosses multiple publishers

Then there’s The Outline.

In April 2016, Joshua Topolsky wrote a Medium post entitled “Your media business will not be saved.” Topolsky, the cofounder of The Verge, had left his position as Bloomberg’s top digital editor several months before.

“Your problem,” he told his fellow media people, “is that you make shit”:

A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.

The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let’s say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people — they were made to reach the right people.

At the time of writing the Medium post, Topolsky was in the process of raising money for his own media company, The Outline, which launched at the end of the year as a “weird new adventure.” (The word “weird” appears five times in the announcement.) “No games, just something fucking interesting,” Topolsky wrote. One of its investors, RRE Ventures, called it, without any apparent irony, “the first new media company ever.”

Nearly two years later, The Outline is half the size it was at launch. It’s the subject of freelancer boycotts and subtweets. It took venture capital and then it laid people off, not once but twice.

It is still, however, doing what Topolsky said it would do at the beginning: publishing articles that fit loosely into the themes of “power” (“The million-dollar brownstone that no one owned,” “French girl fashion is…how do you say…le bullshit“), “culture” (“My dad painted the iconic cover for Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung,’ and it’s haunted him ever since,” “The unbearable wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow“), and “the future” (“I had a mastectomy to lessen my risk of breast cancer. Does new science say that was a mistake?”, “Better birth control options already exist, but we’re not allowed to have them.”)

So what happened to The Outline? Did it try to make the good shit and stumble by mistake into cheap shit? Did it overestimate how unique its editorial voice actually was? Or has it faced the same set of roadblocks the rest of the digital media industry has, only without much goodwill from all those cheap-shit producers?

“We’re not the enemy. This is a really shitty industry for writers,” Topolsky told me. “We should make it better, and we have been trying really hard to make it better here.” The Outline’s traffic has doubled year over year, he said, with upticks in returning visitors, time spent on site, and overall pageviews.

He acknowledges that the company “got over its skis” (starting out with ambitious video efforts that had to be scaled back, that team laid off), that it tried to do too much too fast. His goal for The Outline is still that it be break-even, sustainable, and advertising-supported.

“No one here is like, ‘Oh my God, guys, we’re gonna be billionaires,'” he told me. “The investors aren’t like, ‘Oh my god, you guys are gonna be billionaires.’ It’s very realistic. What would it be like to be in a business where the CEO is the editor-in-chief, and we’re not looking over our shoulders at some weird demand from somebody who doesn’t know how this stuff gets made? What would it be like to have a sustainable business where you tell stories that you really care about, and you don’t feel those enormous market pressures? How do we make another kind of business in an era of media that is, for lack of a better way to say it, completely fucked up?”

The Outline now has 16 full-time employees, down from 30 at launch. The most recent round of layoffs included the site’s only two remaining staff writers, and it was this fact in particular that led Study Hall (a sort of digital collective/support network/listserv for “media workers,” most of whom are freelancers, now with 1,100 paying members) to issue this statement announcing a boycott of The Outline. It was signed by 115 (unnamed) Study Hall members. From that letter:

When venture capitalists, which media companies increasingly rely on to survive, demand profit, it is staff writers and freelancers who pay the price. There would be no Outline (or any publication) without the labor of the editorial staff who shape it, and it’s disheartening to see management dismiss/toss aside their employees so blatantly.

This is why several dozen members of the media worker collective Study Hall will no longer write for The Outline until there are significant changes made at the company.

We are not happy to do this. Many of us have contributed to the site, which has a unique voice and, unlike many publications, pays both decently and promptly, rarities in this industry. But we cannot allow Josh Topolsky and his investors to rely on our loyalty to The Outline’s vision when they choose to devalue writers’ work and treat our ability to survive as externalities. The Outline started with a focus on power, culture, and the future; they’ve since created a workplace culture that doesn’t seem to value the labor that makes the site function, have fallen back on typical power structures, and are building a future we want no part of.

Since that letter was released on September 5, members of The Binders, the women’s/gender-non-conforming writing community, have launched a boycott of their own. Some freelancers who had pieces accepted by and in the editing process with The Outline pulled them. Neither of the petitions — Study Hall’s or The Binders’ — made specific demands of The Outline; they didn’t explain what, precisely, needed to change for the boycott to end.

“We increasingly feel completely disposable and financially insecure as freelancers,” Enav Emmanuel Moskowitz, a cofounder of Study Hall, told me (acknowledging also that they had been “a big fan of” The Outline.) “It’s one thing if one publication is struggling, but for essentially every publication to switch editorial strategy every month — pivoting to and back from video, longform, essays — it’s becoming harder and harder to make a living in our industry as a freelancer, and harder to know what’s going on.”

Topolsky told me his “understanding — my read of the letter — is that there’s a wave in the industry of people who are replacing full-time people with freelance people, because of the need to trim back budgets. For us, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not interested in replacing full-timers with part-time workers…We’re doing what we’ve been doing, but we won’t have the added asset of staff writers for the short term. We see this as a short-term change, not a permanent position for The Outline or any business that we’re interested in building.

“The Outline, as a business, has always relied on freelancers for the majority of our work,” he added.

“I’ve written for The Outline once before and I really enjoyed the experience,” Zachary Siegel, a freelance writer who covers public health and criminal justice and has written for publications like The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Slate, told me in an email. “The editor was attentive, I was paid well and on time. But signing on to Study Hall’s letter felt like an important demonstration of solidarity, more important than a paycheck. Media companies are increasingly run like tech startups, with big valuations and multi-million dollar funding rounds. It’s not just The Outline. These companies rely on our words to fill their pages, generate traffic, and build loyalty among readers. Yet in the eyes of shareholders, hedge funds, and venture capital, we’re expendable. I wanted to take a stand against these dark trends.”

But it’s really not just The Outline. Much larger digital media companies — Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice — have also all taken venture capital and also all had big layoffs (most recently, BuzzFeed’s podcast team). Why not boycott them? I wondered if The Outline felt like an easier target. It was small, so it would suffer more from a boycott than a large company would. Boycotting it might also feel like a safer bet for a freelancer than boycotting a big outlet like BuzzFeed, which seems more guaranteed to stick around in some form or another for the next few years.

Are the kinds of people who read Outline stories really some kind of special demographic? Or are they just thirtysomething news consumers? Before Topolsky launched the site, he told Ken Doctor about the kind of reader The Outline would try to reach:

They live in urban areas. They’re really tech-savvy. They fund Kickstarter projects. They eat farm-to-table food. They care about politics, they’re engaged…The data is really starting to show that there are a lot of people who self-identify as smarter and savvier and less susceptible to bullshit, and are hungry for a story every day, or multiple stories every day, that talk about their world. The world that is important and valuable to them, in a way that serves their intelligence and doesn’t talk down to them. It’s not condescending. It doesn’t dumb things down. It isn’t trying to play for every possible person who might read a story.

Topolsky told Recode earlier this year that “what we’re doing is insane — what we’re doing is not normal, for sure.”

I’m not sure what, exactly, The Outline is doing that is so weird. It wouldn’t be surprising to find any of these articles in any number of places on the web. It is maybe a little unusual to have this sort of motley highbrow-general-interest content be the focus of the site, rather than being a kind of side event with politics and tech news taking the main stage. My sense was also that there is an unusually large amount of women’s health coverage for a site that is not explicitly aimed at women.

I am in The Outline’s demographic, which can basically be summed up as “youngish coastal elites.” And while The Outline’s pitch from the beginning has been that there isn’t enough content for us, it actually seems as if there’s content for us everywhere, too much to ever possibly read all of. Does there need to be a special site aimed at us when pretty much every site — Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, huge sections of Twitter — is aimed at us? The number of people, in 2018, who want farm-to-table food, who think they’re not susceptible to bullshit, don’t want to be talked down to, is huge — and content for this group is everywhere.

Okay, so let’s talk about the venture capital. Even two years ago when The Outline launched, this seemed a little remarkable, a little mockable: Venture capital going to a white dude’s splashy new media company, what a shocker. WWD was at the goofy-sounding, pre-crash-vibe launch party:

Instead of trays, the hors d’oeuvres were nestled on boughs of birch or inserted vertically into holes in white plastic walls so large they required two servers to carry them through the crowd. Soft pretzels dangled from the spokes of an open umbrella ready for guests to pick them.

A post shared by nicole yoko (@nicoley_d) on Dec 14, 2016 at 10:18pm PST

The Outline has raised a total of about $10 million in venture funding — $5 million at launch, and another $5 million in a round that closed in May 2018, although the money for that had actually come in October 2017. The reason for the delay in closing the round was that The Outline was in talks about acquiring or merging with another property (reportedly The Observer). That deal didn’t work out. By the time the round officially closed, money that had come in months before was already well in the process of being spent. In Topolsky’s view, he didn’t squander the money, but he was, perhaps, overly ambitious about what The Outline could be at launch.

“I know a lot of people out there talk shit about investors,” Topolsky said. “VC-backed companies, particularly in media, have been a real mess. I think that we happen to have some investors who are truly committed to making something better…Probably one of my mistakes was that I hired a lot of people really fast before we knew exactly what the shape of the business was going to be.” One area where he “got over his skis,” he said, was video.

“We were like: We’re gonna build a new content creation platform, a new ad platform, we’re gonna do this crazy design, we’re gonna put together a brand-new editorial team, we’re going to do video, we’re going to do audio, we’re going to do interactives. In the first year, we had an amazing video team, people I’d worked with when I was at Vox [Media], who I loved. We were doing really good, interesting video. But as we were getting into planning for Year 2…we just felt like, from a focus and budget perspective, we were doing too much.”

“I don’t think the money was misspent,” said Erik Hinton, who was a senior developer at The Outline before he was laid off in early September, and who’s previously worked at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other places; he recently started at Medium. “They paid high salaries to their developers and their designers. They paid high salaries to their ad team and sales team. They paid good freelance rates. Those things just add up.” Nobody’s eating soft pretzels off umbrella spokes on the reg.

“One of the reasons we’re tightening our belts right now is because we want to speed toward that break-even point,” Topolsky said. “It would really prove something about this type of business. If we can get to break-even with the kind of business we’re running, it’s a really powerful signal. It’s something that few in media, and certainly none in media with the kind of model we have, have done in a very long time.”

Elias Rothblatt, the company’s COO, stressed that break-even for The Outline is based on advertising revenue. “The venture funding was so we could build these numerous pieces really quickly and amp up a new brand,” he said. “But when we talk about getting to a point of break-even or profitability, that’s all based on advertising revenue. That’s not to say we don’t consider other exciting revenue models that are down the road, but right now we’re really focused on advertising and we think we’ve got our best shot there.”

Topolsky compares The Outline’s advertising to the advertising you’d see in a glossy magazine. This is always what everyone says about their digital advertising when it’s the focus of their revenue model. (Also, print magazines are really not doing well.) Maybe a better way to describe it is what you used to see in a glossy magazine. “The model for us is much more like magazine advertising in its heyday,” Topolsky said.

Last year, for instance, The Outline did an ad campaign with Macallan, the expensive scotch. “There’s not that many people in the world who ultimately would think about buying a bottle of scotch, and we just had this perfect match,” Topolsky said. “Our audience is hard to reach.” Other recent ad campaigns include Hewlett Packard Enterprise (with readers spending an average of 2 minutes and 30 seconds on that campaign, Topolsky said) and GE. You will need to turn off your ad blocker to see these ads, which do look nice. Hey, at least it’s not oil companies.

If The Outline can get to a break-even point, what will be next? More podcasts. One-off events. Print. “A physical publication at some point is something I’m very interested in — whether it’s a quarterly or something more frequent than that,” Topolsky said. He also envisions “sister brands” to The Outline. He wasn’t ready to talk about specifics, but a reader survey that The Outline has been running recently asks if, for instance, people would be interested in seeing more cultural, political, or tech content on the site.

Maybe The Outline will fail. If it does, it won’t be because of just one thing. It won’t be only because advertising doesn’t work, or because VC funding doesn’t work, or because freelancers boycotted it, or because its content wasn’t good.

Maybe The Outline will succeed. If it does, it won’t be because advertising works, or because they had the one good VC, or because freelancers got treated better, or because the content was good. It will be because of a lot of little pushes, a lot of little things going right.

“In a lot of businesses, you do the thing you love 20 percent of the time, and 80 percent of the time you’re cranking out some Trump post or whatever,” Topolsky said. “I think there’s just gotta be another way.”

“People want to say, this was the big mistake. This was the bad move. But a lot of this comes out of a culture where it’s believed that what will save the media is some big idea or some new model,” said Erik Hinton, the former Outline developer. “The things that ail the media can’t be saved by one person’s big idea, or one person’s masterful vision…I don’t think media can be saved by the brilliance of individuals.”

No, really. Okay, if that concept’s beyond your immediate comprehension, let’s make the question a bit more concrete: Imagine what’ll happen to the news business in a world in which Donald Trump is no longer president.

Yes, the Trump Bump in digital subscriptions is long gone, replaced by a steadier, lower-key growth rate for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. But traffic continues to go through the roof, alongside the nation’s temper. No one has ever seen news days, or news weeks, like this. Like all things, it’s unlikely to last.

So the business question: If you ran a news company and could anticipate this future non-Trump time — one in which national attention isn’t riveted to every god-forbid smartphone notification — how might you prepare?

You might pay more and more attention to the non-national news interests of your readers, like focusing on their lives well beyond the politics of the day.

That’s the place that The New York Times’ new Wirecutter Money fits. Wirecutter Money is in a slow rollout, having begun populating its pages midsummer, says Mat Yurow, director of Wirecutter Money.

But even at this stage, we can see the insurance policy that CEO Mark Thompson’s strategy investments are now buying. That strategy has propelled to Times to consistent year-over-year revenue growth — despite the great print ad downturn afflicting publishers.

By itself, Wirecutter Money is small. A half-dozen new Times staffers: an editor, an engineer, two writers, a product designer, and a compliance manager. (Wirecutter overall employs nearly 125.)

It’s Wirecutter’s newest sharp edge. The Times bought the site, then focused mainly on electronics and some on home goods through its Sweethome companion site, in 2016 and has been quietly expanding its range and number of products offered since then.

One reason Wirecutter Money is important to note: “It is the first time that we have made a really strong, big investment in coverage of non-products,” says Yurow. It’s all about services, and in services, there’s a lot of money.

Add to that the Times’ Smarter Living expansion. Smarter Living, in its own series of lifestyle sitelets, newsletters, and guides, aims at the Times’ reader’s whole life, restyling the old features of yesteryear into timely guides — on tipping Uber drivers, maintaining digital security, or eating like a local abroad.

That reader is well off: In digital, their median household income is $95,000; in print, $189,000.) It’s a readership high in opinion leaders, power elitists, influentials, affluents, and most importantly, spenders.

Wirecutter stands parallel to the core business. David Perpich, who used to head up product strategy for the mothership, took over leadership of it in January 2017. It both stands apart from the Times — most of its traffic still comes via search — and carefully integrates with the Times when news and consumer content converge.

It’s 25- to 34-year-olds who make up Wirecutter’s largest customer segment. Wirecutter Money stretches into other parts of their lives, as it firmly focuses on the financial lives of millennials.

“The goal of that is really to try to empower young adults to navigate major financial milestones, and we’re calling those financial firsts — those really sticky subjects that every young person is going to have to navigate at some point in time as they work their way up to financial independence,” says Yurow.

“We’re really thinking about how to help this group of individuals who feel a tremendous amount of financial anxiety or anxiety around their personal finances. We want to give them a trustworthy resource that they can go to and really navigate these major milestones in their lives as they graduate from college, or as they take on student loans, buy a home, as they get married.” That’s a life-cycle-driven, “lifetime value” strategy.

Yurow, who had served as Wirecutter’s head of strategy before taking on the Money launch, says the Times learned from watching its readers. “We had noticed there was an interest in this type of coverage. Smarter Living has pushed a lot of momentum forward in having really honest and open conversations about managing money and the impact that it has on our lives. It felt really aligned to the interest and the brand and the authority and the trust that Wirecutter brings to the table for The New York Times, and so it really was this perfect combination of data and sheer passion.”

If the Times’ news coverage raises its readers’ blood pressure, consider these consumer forays a mild anti-anxiety OTC medication.

“Many of the Wirecutter staff is of this generation that’s felt these anxieties. And we felt like entering now at a time when student loan and credit card debt are an all-time high, when our youngest generations are feeling scared and confused and resentful about how the financial world works, that this was the perfect time for Wirecutter Money.”

In early September, Wirecutter Money published “The Best Cash-Back Credit Cards.” It is the kind of piece you might see on its personal-finance competitors, like Mint, Credit Karma, Nerd Wallet, Bankrate, or The Points Guy.

While search (and links from the Times itself) will drive traffic, Yurow hopes to make the site into a destination of its own.

“I’m hoping that we can build this landing page into a little bit more of a static experience, so that when you know that you’re about to approach one of these major financial milestones, you know where to go and where to find the information that you’re looking for and that you’ve got a sense of completion.” Wirecutter Money offers a mix of original content and pieces taken from the Times’ archive.

Perpich makes the point the Times learned from its new product development successes and failures: “One of the lessons that the Times’ learned and I certainly learned with NYT Now, was that we tried to solve product market fit and monetization at the same time,” Perpich says. “When what we should have said is: Let’s figure out product markets with a sense of what kind of scale we need to get to. And thankfully, that was the pivot we made with Cooking. We actually originally were going to launch with a paywall and we said, ‘Let’s hold back.’ The most important thing is that we create something that people love, and then we can get to a scale that would be meaningful enough to make the investment you need to be able to do monetization right.”

That means Money will be testing lots of guides and product recommendations well into next year to see what works. Though affiliate revenue will drive its business, it isn’t yet working that stream yet, and says it won’t until the business is more fully developed.

Wirecutter Money feels a lot like Wirecutter overall, but Perpich makes the point that it’s enough of a departure from the company’s roots to need special guidance.

“The reason that we set this up as a discrete team is just it’s been honestly my experience creating new things — realizing that you need real energy and time and dedication to be able to do it. It’s in a space that’s not like all the others. It’s not recommending a router — it’s a much more complicated thing.” The sort of information a reader needs depends on a wider set of circumstances — age, career, debt load, current financial position. “So, everything from the tech that you need to build, to the regulations you need to be aware of, to thinking about how you take that same Wirecutter kind of ethos but deal with a very different kind of situation and context” — those differences led Perpich to think the Times should “put a team of people against it and give them space.”

Where does money fit into Mark Thompson’s niche strategy?

Back to that seemingly distant question: What if national political times, at some point, take a deep breath? Where would these products place the Times against its competition, and most specifically against Competitor No. 1, The Washington Post? The Post has not yet put the same gears in motion as the Times, but should be having the same conversations. (And one imagines a Jeff Bezos-owned company would start any affiliate/commerce-driven endeavor with an edge in market intelligence.)

The Times set its non-news plan into motion years ago. Over the years, CEO Thompson has green-lit a number of projects, while flashing red at a few others that didn’t pan out.

Most notably, the Times — almost alone among its peers — has built two significant non-news subscription products. Together, the Crossword and Cooking products now total about half a million discrete subscriptions. Overall, they make up 17 percent of the Times’ total digital subscriptions (though, as lower-priced products, they only contribute about 5 percent of digital subscription revenue).

Though the dollars are still smallish — a $20 million-plus annual run rate — the non-news products are growing at an annual rate above 60 percent, both in subscription number and revenue.

Of strategic significance: Like international digital subscription sales, which now make up about 13 percent of the total, they represent a diversification beyond the U.S. news market.

By late 2018, Thompson had hoped to have a fourth, if not fifth, digital subscription product in the market. Watching — which early on saw emerging new reader needs in the age of Netflix and Amazon nirvana — never figured out a subscriber proposition, though it continues to drive traffic for the Times. Health, too, has long been under consideration.

Next up on the paid front: parenting. The Times indicated in the spring that it would launch a subscription parenting product; this week, the company told me it’s on track for a prototype release later this year.

Double diversification

Consider Wirecutter a double diversification strategy. Diversification of reader interest and diversification of revenue stream.

Subscribers don’t directly drive their revenue; Amazon does, as the fulfillment partner that drives most of the site’s revenue. The affiliate revenue shares Wirecutter earns off of reader purchases — clearly explained on the site — drive its revenue, which has surpassed $20 million. That’s up 50 percent since the acquisition, Perpich says.

There is one news company that has practiced a similar approach for most of this decade. That’s Schibsted, the Oslo-based international innovation leader. Years ago, Schibsted began investing a range of consumer-facing businesses, from insurance to personal finance to price comparison to wine buying. Today, Schibsted Growth drives a good share of the company’s revenue and building profit. (We have long covered Schibsted’s serial innovations here at the Lab.) Schibsted still stands as a global leader in business model innovation — finding new ways to pay for news.

Forget news, though, for a moment, and think about a greater lesson in these initiatives: the bid to regain habit. Habit droves newspaper readership (and broadcast news consumption) for decades, until it was decimated by digital, with only the news check-in smartphone habit for national news now reviving it a bit.

For the Times, it’s about acting judiciously when it comes to its trusted relationships with readers (as Gizmodo Media Group did with its ecommerce leadership) and with rebuilding the habit, a revival of another old concept: service journalism, something the better dailies practiced well in their heyday. (Indeed, it was the Times in the 1970s under Abe Rosenthal that led the way in boosting service journalism and “softer” feature sections to both broaden readership and satisfy advertisers.)

These products — from Crosswords and Cooking to Smarter Living and the Wirecutters — provide new on-ramps to habit formation. “Smarter Living is giving you advice on how to live a better life,” Perpich says. “And Wirecutter’s helping you get the gear you need to do it.” In those two sentences, we see a new frontier of 2020s business models for the news companies that may thrive.

Local TV news

Average audience decreased by 15 percent in 2017 over the previous year, with evening news remaining stable — though late night and early evening declined by seven percent, and midday declined four percent. (The data comes from ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC affiliates.) Partly because it wasn’t an election year (when political advertising bumps up the airwaves’ coffers), total over-the-air ad revenue for local TV decreased by 13 percent, to $17.4 billion. Online, advertising for local TV stations inched up by three percent, to $1 billion.

But the lack of an election didn’t slow down the political advertising revenue too much. In 2017, $112 million came from political ads, compared to $124 million in 2015 and $50 million in 2013, the two most recent non-election years. (Those figures came from Tribune, Nexstar, Sinclair, Tegna, Gray, and Scripps.)

Revenue is increasingly coming from the retransmission fees that cable and satellite systems fork over to carry local channels. Revenue from those topped $9 billion in 2017 — up from $8 billion in 2016 — and it’s expected to keep growing.

Local TV news outlets continue to show their creativity, running augmented reality experiments and crowdsourcing investigations. That innovation comes from the 29,000 reporters, editors, photographers, and visual editors who made up the broadcast newsrooms in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number’s remained roughly constant since 2004, though the quantity of local TV news content has steadily risen from an average of 3.7 hours per weekday in 2003 to 5.6 in 2017.

Audio and podcasting

Over in the non-visual corner, 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.)

As of early 2018, 57 percent of online radio listeners were tuning in once a week — up from 12 percent in 2007. Podcasts continue to gain listeners, Pew notes, citing previously published Edison Research data. The numbers are still an upward trend — not too bad for an industry a fraction of the age of TV and terrestrial radio, as advertising continues to grow. The revenue side of the radio dial continues to slide, down to $20.9 million in 2017 from $21.8 million in 2016.

News sites actually load more third-party content and set more third-party cookies than other top websites, according to a new study of websites across seven European countries from the Reuters Institute.

News sites in those countries averaged 40 different third-party domains per page and 81 third-party cookies per page, compared to an average of 10 and 12, respectively, for the group of top websites in those countries. (Among sites that run some kind of advertising, the study found that news sites on average load four times as many third-party domains compared to other top websites.)

U.K. news sites were, on average, the most bloated of the bunch:

The prevalence of cookies and third-party tracking varies across news sites that rely on different revenue sources, and thus have different incentives and advertising needs.

Public media sites, most of which depend on neither subscription revenue nor advertising, share the least data with third parties. German news sites are generally more restrained than their U.K. counterparts. Compare the news site for the popular daily Bild, for instance, to the Daily Mirror site in the U.K., and BBC News to German public broadcaster ARD/Tagesschau:

Researchers were able to compare all the third-party requests made on a selection of news sites (based on relative reach and prominence in their respective countries), as well as the 500 overall most popular sites in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the U.K., by using an open-source tool called webXray, which monitors and then records third-party content that loads on a given page in Chrome. webXray can identify about 400 different types of third-party services, 270 of which showed up in the Reuters analysis.

Surprise, surprise: Google services are on most of the pages the researchers analyzed (followed distantly by Facebook):

GDPR takes aim at the collection of identifiable data on internet users that the users have not knowingly consented to, and levies heavy fines for non-compliance, meaning news sites should have due diligence on what’s loading on their pages…like, yesterday. In their study, the Reuters researchers have included handy rundown of types of third-party content that a site might be carrying and the purposes of each, many of which are not inherently problematic. But just to give you a taste of the range: Loading images from hosting services like AWS? Run Google Analytics? Load ads via Google’s DoubleClick network? Have a Facebook “Share” widget? Include Taboola/Outbrain recommendations on your page? That’s all part of this.

So what are news organizations to do about their sites, with GDPR coming into effect in a little over a week? Researchers Timothy Libert and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen offer a helpful matrix for understanding relative privacy risk of each type of content loaded, as it applies to users:

News organizations should be able to make some simple improvements to protecting users’ privacy pretty easily (see especially, the “low risk,” “low effort to replace” items):

For sites focused on improving privacy especially in light of the GDPR, content which ranks ‘low’ on the effort scale could be prioritized for migration. Hosted JavaScript files, fonts, and images all have low-to-medium privacy risk, and in some cases changing a single line of code may provide immediate privacy gains.

Similarly, social media buttons frequently set cookies and may link browsing data directly to users’ profiles, representing a high privacy risk. While social media companies provide code to enable sharing, it is possible to implement widgets on a first-party basis which facilitate social sharing. Even if social media companies would prefer sharing to happen with their widgets, they have no interest in preventing sharing.

The full study is available here.

Trust is a result of delivering on expectations, whether the customer is another business or the public. Facebook and Google, more than any other two companies, have controlled and influenced the trust issues now being surfaced across our industry which impact the publishers and advertisers who choose to associate with their platforms.

In 2014, I wrote about Facebook’s questionable practices in The Wall Street Journal, focusing on Facebook’s mining of user’s browsing history. We argued that people do not expect Facebook to track them across the web and within apps in order to target advertising to them. Unfortunately, the backlash was slow to build (except for those most intimately involved in consumer privacy and regulation) and Facebook continued its practices. The 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal dramatically changed that.

Although Facebook recently added the ability for users to opt out (via a deeply buried setting) and announced new “controls” and “settings” are coming, the fact that it takes an avalanche of bad press and a #DeleteFacebook movement to motivate them to act in their consumers’ best interests clearly shows their products are designed to maximize profit rather than behave according to consumer expectations.

At Digital Content Next, we wanted to get a clearer picture of how consumer expectation does (or does not) align with Facebook’s data practices. So last week — at a time when consumer expectations of Facebook are likely at an all-time low — DCN surveyed a nationally representative sample to find out just exactly what people expect from Facebook.1 Here’s how they responded.

There were only two ways in which a majority of respondents felt that Facebook was acting according to their expectations.

Q: Do you expect Facebook to collect data about a person’s activities on Facebook?

Q: Again, thinking about Facebook and other applications it owns like Instagram and WhatsApp, do you expect Facebook to collect and merge data about a person’s Facebook activities with activities on its other applications?

There were five areas where respondents answered that Facebook was acting outside of their expectations. Importantly, these are the issues which drive down consumer trust, and they mostly involve activities where Facebook is taking data from publishers. These activities clearly show how Facebook’s financial gain comes at the expense of trust and profit for news and entertainment companies.

Q: Do you expect Facebook to track a person’s usage of apps that Facebook does not own in order to make ads more targeted?

Q: Do you expect Facebook to buy personal information from data companies and merge with a person’s online usage in order to make ads more targeted?

(Note: Facebook announced last week it would abandon this practice).

Q: Do you expect Facebook to collect data about a person’s location when a person is not using Facebook?

Q: Do you expect Facebook to collect data about a person’s online activities on a non-Facebook webpage if a person clicks the ‘Like’ button?

Q: Do you expect Facebook to collect data about a person’s online activities on a non-Facebook webpage if a person does NOT click the ‘Like’ button?

In summary, most users expect Facebook to be collecting some data about them in exchange for use of its “free service.” For example, most users probably assume that data is collected about things that they choose to “like,” or from information they enter directly into the Facebook app as part of using it.

However, when asked about some common Facebook tracking activities across the web on other properties, the survey results show that most people do not approve. These activities — and your data — have generated extraordinary wealth for Facebook and the limited number of executives who control the company. Your data is delivering more than $20 billion per year in profits at 50 percent margins.

Bottom line: Does Facebook have the ability and the desire to adjust its business model to better align with consumer expectations and attempt to rebuild trust?

1. ORC International Online CARAVAN®, 1,000 Adults 18+, March 29–April 1, 2018. 85 percent of sample replied yes to having a Facebook account.

Despite almost a decade of newsroom cuts, which have left no more 25,000 journalists in the more than 1,300 dailies across the country, journalists have been remarkably accepting of their buyouts and layoffs. We haven’t seen the kinds of mass strikes or work actions that have happened from time to time in Europe. We’ve seen instead an acquiescence to what’s been seen as the inevitable toll of digital disruption. Sadness, rather than spirited action, has marked the trade. That’s understandable, in part: No one wants to risk the lifeline of a paycheck for what may be futile protest. Only when the Niemöllerian logic kicks in do we see such stands as the Post’s.

By standing up for themselves and the value of their work, the Post’s journalists stand up for their community. “The Post has been an integral part of progress in Colorado,” recently resigned editor Greg Moore wrote in one of the Post’s audacious pieces. “It helped the community heal after fires, floods, and unspeakable gun violence. It explained how we were changing politically and demographically, and it exposed corruption and malfeasance. It has provided a window and a mirror to help us become a better community.” And by standing up for their community, they stand up for themselves. This is the relationship that must be renewed. The loss here isn’t in mere journalism jobs; it’s in community knowledge and self-government.

Even as we speculate as to where such protest may go, it’s one that must be put within its time. We journalists swim in the river of our time, even as we try to describe it from the shore.

The Post protest against its owner Digital First Media — and ultimately the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which controls DFM — came the same week that we recognized the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. 1968 turned out to be a major inflection point in American culture. Now — in a time of red state teachers madly striking, of fast-food workers demanding $15 an hour, of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter activists refusing to go away — it looks like our time could represent a cultural turn of its own.

According to a new Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation poll, some one-fifth of Americans found themselves on the streets protesting in the past year — a truly astounding number.

But it’s the Parkland students who may best symbolize whatever is changing. Amid the fiery, from-the-heart words that have transfixed a country, three continue to stand out for me. I first heard them in an NPR report from the students rallying at Florida’s state capitol, soon after the massacre at their school. “The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.,” student Emma Gonzalez said.

“Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teenagers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation: We are prepared to call B.S.

“They say guns are just tools, like knives, and are as dangerous as cars: We call B.S.

“They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: We call B.S.”

Calling B.S. resonated with me, as it would with any journalist. That’s what the press is supposed to do: tell it like it is. We take on the virus of every age, particularly virulent in this one: hypocrisy.

And as the local press has declined so greatly in confidence and in number — down to that 25,000 from a high of 56,900 in 1990 — the local press’ B.S. detectors are stuck in low gear. But in The Denver Post’s awakening, we see the press finally calling B.S. on the B.S. that’s been right under its nose for so long. Is the local press woke?

Maybe it took the bare-knuckled capitalism-without-conscience behavior of Alden Global Capital’s Heath Freeman to push journalists to this point.

While we can fete the courage act in Denver, the actions demands the question: What now?

Will Freeman pull a Ferro?

Just a couple of months ago, Tronc impresario Michael Ferro traded his once-flagship L.A. Times for a half-billion dollars — in part acceding to the pressure of the Times’ union organizing success. That opposition meant it would be too difficult to execute his strategies.

Might Freeman, too, decide he’s had enough — and made enough? Alden’s 50.1 percent ownership of Digital First Media has allowed him to maximize profits, minimize investment in the future, and according to recent court documents, divert millions of newspaper profits into other (losing) ventures. Freeman has seen the declining newspaper industry as just another distressed business to be milked until its supply literally dries up.

Certainly, the ever-increasing pillorying he’s received (The Washington Post, American Prospect, DFM Workers, and numerous Newsonomics pieces as far back as 2015) would cause many a corporate leader to think twice. Maybe a business reputation wounded by that minority shareholder suit that exposes Alden’s diverting of funds would prompt other pause. Perhaps the questioning of Freeman’s recent gift to Duke’s Center for Jewish Life would raise the question in his mind of the conflict between community values and heedless personal enrichment?

Yet the word “vulture” — the investor epithet frequently applied to Alden, including in Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton’s February Boston Globe op-ed and featured in Sunday’s takedown (“Editorial: As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved“) — has seemed acceptable to Freeman so far.

Though it would seem easy enough for Freeman to unload The Denver Post amid the outcry — taking a good price for it and moving on — such calculations in the post-recession financialized newspaper industry are more complex. It’s not just a matter of what the Post is worth, using standard simple multiple-of-profits calculation. First, the Post’s pension obligations are substantial; Alden would want to unload those, while buyers won’t want to take them on. Second, the Post is a significant contributor to Digital First Media’s corporate overhead. Someone has to pay for the corporate leadership, and a not-inconsiderate share of it — maybe 30 percent or more of the allocated expense — gets dispatched from the Post to cover them, sources tell me. Sell off papers piecemeal and Alden’s overall profits decline.

What a buyer would face

“The smart money is that in a few years The Denver Post will be rotting bones,” wrote the editorial board in calling for new owners. And that raises the big question: Who might buy it if it is put up for sale? It’s one thing to run the scoundrels out of the newspaper industry, a special kind of American business to which they should never have gained entry. It’s another thing to do better with new owners.

As usual, the newspaper game of Billionaire Bingo comes into play. Patrick Soon-Shiong takes possession of the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune soon, and we await his moves. We’ve got a wide range of bingo experience in the last few years, from Jeff Bezos’ wondrous re-ascendance of the Washington Post to John Henry’s ongoing transformation travails with The Boston Globe to Alice Rogoff’s failed Alaska turnaround. Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, owner of the down-the-state Colorado Springs Gazette, waits in the wings, his desire to buy the Post well on the public record. To be a buyer, though, he needs a seller.

Others who have bought DFM papers over the last several years each tell a familiar story: They’ve bought assets that have to be disentangled from the chain’s largely aging centralized technologies. That takes time — at the Berkshire Eagle, at the Salt Lake Tribune and at the New Haven Register — and it takes capital, patience, and a long-term strategy. But it is doable, contrary to such misunderstandings of the newspaper industry, as expressed in the New York Times story on the Post’s protest. “Hoping to avoid the slow trudge to irrelevance or bankruptcy, the Denver paper took the stuff of newsroom conversation and made it public in dramatic fashion,” said the Times. In fact, Alden is nowhere near bankruptcy, reaping big profits, and its increased irrelevance is self-inflicted by its greedy owners. The debate here — and elsewhere — isn’t cut or go bankrupt. The debate is whether to invest or disinvest.

Will Freeman decide, given the combination of worsening newspaper revenues and public pressure, to liquidate his holdings overall?

Three years ago, Apollo Global Capital — with its own plans to more rapidly transform the print business to digital — almost bought DFM, but that deal foundered at its end over price. Since then, Heath Freeman’s strategy has crystal-clear, say those who broker newspaper deals. Bring Freeman a deal that pays him about 4.5× to 5× annual EBITDA and he’ll usually entertain it. That math, in general terms — corporate overhead and pension issues aside — tells Freeman he’ll make as much money selling as he would in continuing to run (and cut) his current holdings. Of course, that compares a current sum of money, in an offer, to a projected future revenue stream, and newspaper’s deepening print ad woes may have altered Freeman’s calculations.

Then there’s the looming question that’s tough to confront publicly: If a paper like the Post has been cut back so much — from more than 300 in the newsroom to fewer than 75, with a product, print and mobile, much behind the times — can it still be revived? While peer metros — think the Star Tribune and The Dallas Morning News as the exemplars — execute a print-to-digital transition strategy on the foundation of still-robust newsrooms — can those that have been cut to the bone be revived?

It’s an ugly question but a real one. Subscription revenue, especially digital subscription revenue — one of the many areas DFM has underfunded — is the make-or-break linchpin of future success. But DFM papers, given their high pricing and ever-weakening products, have lost a higher percentage of subscribers than its peers. It will take a mighty, long-term effort to get them back.

So what could happen next?

The Post tells us layoffs begin today. The news world will be watching for what, if any, action is taken against the Post’s editorial board for its gutsy stand. Other DFM journalists await those signals before deciding on their own actions. But beyond watching and publicizing, what can be done?

Consider the Post’s readers — and best advertisers — on full notice. Sunday’s section and the coverage of it ensure that. Subscribers could be organized to cancel, or provisionally cancel, their subscriptions — a dicey game perhaps, but one to which Freeman would have to pay attention. In fact, the more I look at Alden’s strategy, the more the cynicism behind it shows through. It knows it can continue to cut and cut journalists — and raise subscription prices — and still take in enough money to keep profits flowing. Why? Two words: lag time. Enough subscribers of two, three, and four decades still want the paper, and even in DFM cities, they’ve continued to pay up. Alden works that lag time, squeezing every last cent out of every last year. Somehow disrupt the lag time, and profits plummet.

Then there is the advertiser question. As the Parkland protests have shown us, ad boycotts can be effective. This too is a tough question, but would prominent Post advertisers be willing to weigh in on the kind of product they will support going forward?

Today, attention focused on Denver. But recent Alden-ordered cuts in the Bay Area, in Los Angeles, and in Saint Paul all have taken similar tolls. In total, DFM still runs 97 daily and weekly titles across the country. “Denver is getting hard hit, but some of the small papers actually are in more dire situations, when they only have a couple reporters or so,” one knowledgeable DFM observer told me.

After this big splash, how much will this sense of truth-telling rebellion grow? And similarly, will it give more backbone to the beleaguered Sinclair local TV station journalists, who have seen their own reputations besmirched as they are ordered to mouth corporate propaganda?

There is more at stake here than 30 jobs cut at Colorado’s largest daily. It’s the soul of the trade that’s seen new light shone upon it.

Is Alden an extreme case of vulture ownership? Sure, but Alden’s approach is only the steepest spiral downward, and only the most egregious approach to the business. Consider Michael Ferro’s cozy self-dealing over his two-year tenure at Tronc. Consider the endless corporate-ordered newsroom reorgs that have just shuffled fewer deck chairs year over year. Consider the many strategies based more on cost-cutting than on investment. All of these strategies have led us to the current local news tragedy. In the Denver Post protest, do we see the opening curtain after intermission, or a move to the final act?

These questions are addressed in “The Future of Advertising and Publishing,” a report released Monday by Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School, and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. It sums up an event that took place back in October; we wrote up an afternoon panel that was open to the public, but the report released this week focuses on a closed, invite-only morning discussion.

Some thoughts from the discussion:

— In 2006, $49 billion in advertising went toward newspaper revenues in the United States, Tow’s Emily Bell writes in an introduction; “by 2016, the equivalent amount was $18 billion.” In the panel discussion, “few participants could see a certain long-term future for advertising-supported journalism on anything like the scale of its historical basis…the clarity recognized among publishers around the collapse of the traditional advertising model is brutal, but it allows organizations to focus on the reader as a main source of support.”

— “It’s only advertising when it’s bad advertising.” A discussion participant who works in branded content said that many companies are asking why they can’t be publishers, too — the example of GE’s podcast The Message came up, for instance. Facebook and Google are so effective at reaching audiences that “it is becoming less clear what the value-add is for advertisers to work with publishers,” and publishers feel pressured to play by the platforms’ rules even though “we’ll all look the same in Alexa.”

— What’s the future for high-quality, free journalism, and who’s responsible for providing it?

One proposed scenario for how to keep news readily available, suggested by a participant from the advertising industry, was having publishers provide two tiers of content: 1) free content supported by brand partnerships and 2) premium content that people pay for.

A publisher participant said they were “deeply alarmed there’s no in-between,” meaning high-quality and free journalism. That, they said, is the current crisis, and advertisers don’t appear to be taking responsibility for that. (What didn’t come up for debate is whether this is the responsibility of advertisers alone.)

The group then discussed what the future institutions supporting journalism might look like and the question of subsidized access. One participant noted that the U.S. Government has long subsidized news distribution by covering the majority of Postal Service mailing costs, and suggested there might be more opportunities for similar funding.

— We need to find out what consumers want from advertising. “Help us have an unbiased perspective around what consumers really want,” one participant said, addressing the academics in the room. Another pointed out that maybe it’s publishing that’s broken, not advertising: Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing just fine, aren’t they? Maybe publishers should just stop thinking about advertising at all, suggested moderator Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “If advertising works but not for news, should publishers pay any attention?” A participant who works in branded content, meanwhile, “imagined a future where Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks would bid on them as they sat in their self-driving car, and the car would go to whichever business won. Then the participant added, ‘I’ve never been more excited to be in the business.'”

The full report is here, and our coverage of the open afternoon session is here.

He may have sold off his prized flagship Los Angeles Times — the cornerstone of his latest transformation strategy — but the publishing wheeler-dealer already has his top team consumed with finding new deals.

That deal-making appears to be traveling on two tracks. One involves newspapers — their purchase and consolidation. The other lays rail for a digital-only content business expansion. And then, there’s the seemingly wild-eyed Ferro dream: buy Gannett, a company reeling again, its stock price down more than 10 percent Tuesday after announcing dismal fourth-quarter and full-year 2018 financials.

One immediate Ferro goal: Deploy the cash that Tronc will gain when it closes the sale of the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune to Patrick Soon-Shiong. Tronc tells me the deal will finalize at the end of this quarter or the beginning of next.

Some observers have looked at the incoming half billion dollars and marveled at Tronc’s new spending power. But the real amount is more modest.

How much cash would it have to spend? Figure that the company may have $250 million or more in cash, post-transaction. By the terms of much of its debt, it must use the proceeds of such an asset sale to pay that off. Tronc will use the bulk of Soon-Shiong’s cash to pay off its approximately $360 million in debt, the company said in a release. Then it must pay taxes on its profit. Currently, Tronc shows about $185 million in cash on its books.

Right now, Ferro’s top team — made up of Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn, CFO Terry Jimenez, and just-re-anointed Tribune Interactive CEO Ross Levinsohn — is actively pursuing the acquisition of several digital-only publishers, confidential sources confirm. On the heels of announcing a majority investment in BestReviews.com, the Tronc execs are actively eying one high-profile business site and looking at several other potential buys.

Tronc representatives declined comment on those talks.

Meanwhile, on a seemingly parallel course, Tronc is aiming to be the high bidder for Cox Media Group’s Palm Beach Post. Cox placed the Post and its Austin American-Statesman on the market four months ago.

Expect the announcement of the Austin buyer soon; the Post’s sale will take longer. The Austin transaction, though, gives us some indication of what Tronc might face in its effort to win the Post.

GateHouse close to buying the Austin American-Statesman

GateHouse Media looks to be the winner of the Statesman, as final details of the transaction are completed this week.

This GateHouse acquisition would follow on the heels of its surprise loss of the Boston Herald, which it had expected to win out of bankruptcy court last week. Instead, Digital First Media, with a winning $12 million bid, won Boston’s second paper. Just a week earlier, GateHouse did add another significant daily — the Baker family-held Eugene Register-Guard — to its stable of more than 130 dailies. )

GateHouse appears to have made certain it would be the top bidder for the Statesman, a paper with 79,000 Sunday print circulation and 51,000 daily. The paper has sold only about 3,000 digital-only subscriptions despite the city’s status as a growing tech hub. Update, Feb. 23: The Statesman disputes this number, and it all comes down to how you choose to count digital subscriptions. Click here if you want a fuller explanation.

Both Tronc and Gannett declined to comment on their interest in buying the Post.

If either Gannett or Tronc win, the scope of consolidation may grow. Tronc has already considered buying a local broadcast TV station. The idea: amplify its expanded franchise, as the FCC’s elimination of cross-ownership rules allow new newspaper/broadcast combinations.

Beyond that, even greater newspaper consolidation could be in play. McClatchy appears to be neither a buyer nor a seller in the near term, but Tronc and Gannett could well push further mergers of operations. Either company could buy out the other’s south Florida property. That would create a regional newspaper behemoth, along a 150-mile stretch from Melbourne on the north through Ft. Lauderdale.

Such a strategy certainly fits with the dominant newspaper strategy of the day: consolidation of properties to reduce costs. GateHouse’s megaclustering model serves as the apotheosis of this model.

The next Tronc intrigues

To expand that thought: Could Gannett and Tronc swap multiple properties elsewhere in the country? For instance, could Tronc take over Gannett’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in order to combine some operations with its Chicago Tribune?

Even further intrigue: As recently as last week, Michael Ferro has told associates that he wants to buy Gannett, sources tell me. That’s a threat/promise he made two years ago, when Gannett mounted an ultimately unsuccessful hostile bid for Tronc.

Now, with the L.A. Times sale, Tronc’s overall financials have improved. Its market capitalization of roughly $670 million has remained sky-high, at a multiple of about 7× its earnings, despite the coming Times sale.

One big question is how long that investor confidence will remain in place, as a more capricious stock market considers the year-end financials the company will release Feb. 28.

One big Tronc doubter, one with longstanding financial acumen, assesses the value of the company this way: “Its market cap ignores any taxes on sale of assets, loss of cars.com cash flow, and continued deterioration of the business. Plus some of Tronc EBITDA is garbage (what multiple would you put on a contract to print the [Chicago] Sun-Times?) and the cost of Levinsohn, [Lewis] D’Vorkin, and Ferro’s bonuses, etc. So what’s the real 2018 number you’re buying?” That’s one school of thought — that Tronc stock will fall back to Earth, based more on traditional metrics and less on Ferro’s magic-making money spinning. They’d point to Gannett’s fall from investor grace as a foreshadow.

On Tuesday, investors took one look at Gannett’s latest financials and headed south, sending it already-in-the-doldrums share price down. In one day, it lost $120 million in market value; we’ll have to see how it recovers, as investors increasingly doubt its strategy. Ferro may see in that downturn an opportunity to pounce.

There’s no doubt that Gannett’s fortunes have turned sluggish since its ill-fated Tronc-buying foray of 2016. Still, Tronc’s own balance sheet — even after the L.A. Times sale — doesn’t suggest it has the wherewithal to make such a purchase.

Further, Gannett’s market cap remains almost double that of Tronc’s. Its potential market price of $1.4 billion-plus appears beyond Ferro’s immediate reach. Could he find a willing financing partner — as he did two years ago when he brought in Soon-Shiong as a major investor?

Tronc and Gannett may soon pick up their conversations, if they haven’t already, despite the bad blood spilled in 2016. But a straight-up merger, a willing combination, seems unlikely.

Gannett CEO Bob Dickey has been quite adamant that he doesn’t want Ferro as a partner. Ferro, for his part, considers Dickey “weak” — and no doubt weaker after Gannett’s stock tumble — and talks about a strong dislike of Gannett chairman John Jeffry Louis III.

But hey, stranger things have happened.

On paper, the merger of America’s largest (Gannett) and third-largest (Tronc) local/regional news publishers could make financial sense. Out of that transaction would come a more dominant, more national daily newspaper company.

So this new edition of Ferronomics offers a number of different scenarios (though available funding would make some of them mutually exclusive):

• A buy of the Palm Beach Post.
• Property swaps with Gannett and/or others.
• A struggle for Gannett.
• Ongoing interest in buying digital-only content assets.

Or Ferro could straddle a different kind of old media.

The same guy who bought both The Daily Meal and the New York Daily News last year could have his eyes set on one of the greatest of American publishing icons.

As one financial insider assesses the market for Tronc, the “big potential one out there will be the properties Meredith will discard out of the Time Inc. deal.” That deal will likely spring loose a number of iconic, but legacy-impaired titles — think Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time itself. These are the kinds of titles that the legacy-brand-fancying impresario like Ferro may value highly.

On Feb. 1, Meredith officially closed on its $2.7 billion acquisition, so it, too, is now ready to make a deal. (Meredith declined comment on its sales plans.)

Ferro has talked often about reaching the magic number of 100 million in U.S. digital audience; Tronc press releases — even those announcing such relatively minor purchases as the Daily News and The Daily Meal — trumpet progress toward that goal. But losing the L.A. Times and San Diego U-T, Tronc will lose about half of what audience it’s assembled.

So it will need to bulk up fast, perhaps taking the route of buying companies in the $50 million to $200 million range. How that process proceeds may let us see what kind of company Ferro wants his oddly named Tronc to become.

On the one hand, he seems to have tired of newspaper travails, exiting the southern California newspapers with a lot of hot dollars in his pocket. He could go “digital” and exit more of the newspaper business, perhaps keeping his hometown power center, the Chicago Tribune. Or he could pursue the grand transformation of the American press, that Tronckification that’s never really become anything more than a talking point over two years.

Why did Ferro sell the L.A. Times?

As Tronc watchers ponder the company’s next moves, it’s a good question to ask one more time: Why did Ferro sell the Times? The answer may tell us something about where he goes next.

As I laid out four potential reasons, the issue of union-organizing pressure emerged as a key. As veteran entertainment editor Janice Min noted this week in discussing why she rejected the possibility of the L.A. Times’ editorship last summer, “I think one of the things that was interesting to me is they were terrified of their newsroom,” she said. “They clearly didn’t want to interact with them.” (Min’s name is now back in play as a potential Times editor-in-chief, as Soon-Shiong and his people plumb the possibilities.)

In fact, the Times’ sale was more just than a visceral decision. Tronc had consulted with labor law firms about how to deal with a unionizing Times newsroom, several sources say. That strategizing also included how far it could go, and how useful it would be, to set up a parallel L.A.-based newsroom. (I detailed the nascent development, and the ensuing staff suspicion it stoked, of that network — briefly named the Los Angeles Times Network — last month.)

After gathering that legal advice, Tronc concluded that the unionized Times newsroom would create too great an obstacle to putting its new syndication strategy in place. Changed job descriptions, layoffs, and new work requirements would all be subject to News Guild bargaining. That turned out to be a key driver in Ferro’s turn-about sale to Soon-Shiong.

That sale was agreed to within a week of the sales offer, forsaking the usual due diligence and bargaining that such transactions usually entail. $500 million, plus U-T pension liabilities, Tronc told Soon-Shiong, sources say, holding out the possibility that a couple of other bidders were ready to pounce. Observers doubt Ferro had other buyers lined up — but he got his deal done, quickly.

The Tronc work-around network may be the subject of future dispute, I’m told. More than one of those hired to work for the Los Angeles Times Network LLC believed they were being hired by the Times itself, which officially operates as Los Angeles Times Communications LLC. Considering themselves “misled,” legal action may be in the offing, sources note. Tronc representatives declined comment on any such claims.

Clearly, Ferro’s L.A. plans took a rather abrupt U-turn, given the labor revolt he had only fed by his appointments — first of publisher Ross Levinsohn, but mainly by Levinsohn’s own appointment of editor-in-chief Lewis D’Vorkin, stingingly dubbed by the Columbia Journalism Review as L.A.’s “dark prince of journalism.”

Michael Ferro has shown himself to be a great multiplier of money, a deal-maker supreme — albeit often with deals done on the edges of normal corporate practice. If only he could multiply actual news reporting — the journalism his properties produce — as well.

Now, as Ferro faces himself in the mirror, he faces a new question: Does he really want to take on becoming the great consolidator of the American press, conquering once-mighty Gannett? Or will he exit the field — richer, but his ambitions humbled?

Chastened by the more than 5-to-1 union vote in L.A., he’s got to know that the News Guild, emboldened by victories in L.A. and elsewhere, will be surely be gunning for him in Tronc cities far and wide.

On Thursday, Google plans to release a new Chrome update that will introduce a built-in ad blocker for the browser. The feature, whose existence was first reported last April, will automatically block ads that don’t conform to the Better Ads Standards from Coalition for Better Ads, as Chrome Web Platform product manager Ryan Schoen explained to TechCrunch. On desktop, these include popups, autoplay, sound-on videos, and “prestitial ads with countdown,” a format that, for most, has become synonymous with Forbes.com. The mobile version of Chrome will target those same ad formats, along with flashing animated ads, full-screen scrollover ads, and ads that take up over 30 percent of users’ screens.

What makes this an even bigger deal is that Chrome won’t just block the obtrusive ads. Instead, the browser will block all ads on offending sites, (including, notably, those from Google’s own products, AdSense and DoubleClick). “Chrome blocks ads on this site because this site tends to show intrusive ads,” the browser will tell users (ironically, via a popup).

The move is a big deal, given that Chrome controls around 60 percent of the desktop browser market, according to NetMarketShare. Its mobile browser penetration is also high, almost entirely on Android. In other words, this is a feature that no ad-supported media company can ignore and one whose introduction could have, almost overnight, a material impact on how people experience the web.

Here’s how Chrome vice president Rahul Roy-Chowdhury explained the thinking behind the decision in a blog post on Tuesday:

The web is an ecosystem composed of consumers, content producers, hosting providers, advertisers, web designers, and many others. It’s important that we work to maintain a balance — and if left unchecked, disruptive ads have the potential to derail the entire system. We’ve already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren’t doing anything disruptive. By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today.

The Chromium blog (that’s Chrome’s open-source sibling) has some technical details about how the blocking will work.

As of February 12, 42% of sites which were failing the Better Ads Standards have resolved their issues and are now passing. This is the outcome we are were hoping for — that sites would take steps to fix intrusive ads experiences themselves and benefit all web users. However, if a site continues to maintain non-compliant ad experiences 30 days after being notified of violations, Chrome will begin to block ads on that site.

We’re encouraged by early results showing industry shifts away from intrusive ad experiences, and look forwarding to continued collaboration with the industry toward a future where Chrome’s ad filtering technology will not be needed.

But while Google is positioning itself as a benevolent protector of the web and a defender of its users, the move is still off-putting because it’s not hard to see how easily Google could tweak the Chrome ad blocker’s functionality to benefit its own ads, or disadvantage those of competing ad companies. One important point: The Coalition for Better Ads standard that Chrome uses is built around Google’s own data, as AdAge reported. That certainly complicates the notion that Google is a neutral party in all of this.Will this really be a good move for the web? It’s too early to say.

I would just like to point out again that having the world’s largest digital advertising company decide which ads to show in the world’s most popular browser is a bad idea https://t.co/lgAKGN7tgx

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) February 14, 2018

Singapore Press Holdings — publisher of its flagship Straits Times — is confronting the worldwide downturn in newspaper business fortunes. The large daily (383,000 daily circulation, print and digital) and its well-regarded parent SPH saw some tough numbers last year: down 16.9 percent in ad revenue, 13 percent in overall revenue and five percent in circulation revenue for the fiscal year ending September 2017. Profits suffered as well, down 33 percent. And SPH, which still employs 1,200 journalists across its array of 11 newspapers in four languages, magazines, and radio stations, announced significant job cuts in October, with 230 positions cut. The globally oriented company now plans to fund an overseas correspondent staff of 40.

None of those results is news to North American or European publishers, who have suffered similarly. Print business woes are universal across the developed world. What’s intriguing about SPH is its evolving set of strategies to forge a more robust future. How far will it extend itself in its new nursing home business? Can luxe retail malls continue to fund journalism? Might a plan for a state-of-the-global art city delivery service help revive readership?

Everyone who’s learned about the more than half-century-old Singapore experiment knows the city-state is a special case. It’s essentially a one-party state run by highly competent central planners. For a place that wasn’t much more than a fishing backwater at the dawn of the 20th century, English-speaking Singapore now ranks as the fourth wealthiest country on the planet. Its 1.6 million expats drive much of the regional economy, enjoying a relatively un-congested, well-working cosmopolitan center, even if they’ll tell you the state’s closed-circuit-TV-everywhere approach to security and societal control can be a bit unnerving. Meanwhile, Singapore’s four million multi-lingual citizens and permanent residents enjoy a level of housing, health, and education security that’s the envy of many around the world. All in a city-state that ranks third in population density (behind Macau and Monaco) globally.

SPH may be that virtual monopoly, but it’s a publicly listed company, and as such, it still has to make its numbers work. Part of its current challenge: the onrushing businesses of Google and Facebook. “It’s a rapid rise in the last 12, 18 months,” says deputy CEO Anthony Tan.

Adds Alan Soon, a veteran digital executive in Asia for Yahoo and other companies: “Singapore typically trails the U.S. by about two to three years when it comes to trends” Singapore-based Soon, who recently opened up Splice Newsroom “to deliver business intelligence on the media industry in Asia,” confirms that the hot breath of Google and Facebook has been more greatly felt in Asia more widely and more recently, though he notes that each media market experiences it differently. “In other parts, like Indonesia, that impact could take five years-plus to play out.” But the impact of the duopolistic ad dominance is truly becoming global.

Soon assesses SPH, which has seen its share price drop by a quarter over the past year, candidly. “SPH’s revenue and monopoly are the envy of the region. You’d expect a company with an annual operating revenue of S$1 billion (FY 2017) to be more aggressive in building out digital products and serving a distinct audience. SPH is hemmed in on two sides. First, it has a credibility problem. The government’s control of editorial policy and coverage means the organization will continue to be viewed as mouthpiece for propaganda. Second, the company faces the same disruption to its business as other media companies with digital. Newspaper circulation is down as people spend more time on digital platforms.”

I talked with Anthony Tan at his SPH office just after Christmas and got a wide view of the company’s thinking, plans, and bets big and small. Among them, a new business news radio station (Money FM 89.3, launching Jan. 29), participation in a project to assess newspaper delivery in the age of Amazon (which offers two-hour delivery in Singapore) logistics, and major investment in nursing homes and malls. The key word here: cross-subsidy.

That’s the building of ancillary businesses to support the basic craft of news. That’s a theme familiar to two European media contrarians, Schibsted and Axel Springer, both of which have built large non-news publishing businesses to help their news businesses in the long arc of business transformation.

Forty-four-year-old Tan, a savvy watcher of global news industry trends, moved into the company’s deputy CEO position 18 months ago, after joining the company as executive vice-president in 2015. Like many SPH executives, his experience included high-level governmental positions (deputy secretary in the health ministry, director in the manpower ministry) as well as ones in the private businesses of retail malls and the health industry — both of which have proved handy in his new role. His role has continued to grow and in 2017, he was given responsibility for all of the company’s publishing businesses, separated by language into the English/Malay/Tamil Media Group and the Chinese Media Group.

Tan has a big turnaround job in front of him. While “media” drives three-quarters of the company’s revenues, it now contributes only 35 percent of the company’s profits. Though it is making significant cross-subsidy moves, the company is playing catchup. That’s where the new businesses — headed by the acquisition of higher-end nursing home supplier Orange Valley Healthcare last April — will play a big role.

Here’s my interview with Tan on SPH’s road ahead, edited for length and clarity.

Of monopoly, culture, and boundaries

Investing in AI, apps, and maybe a revolutionary city delivery logistics system

The core business