The pundits (ourselves included) just can’t get enough of analyzing, trashing and otherwise second-guessing The New York Times‘ new online subscription plan. Here are some recent posts we noticed.

Steve Outing Pretty Much Trashes the NYT Paywall

For starters, it’s too expensive. The $15/mo minimum makes the Times all but inaccessible to cash-strapped young readers, which happen to be the people the paper most needs to engage. He also hates the defensive posturing publishers are using to justify subscription fees: “We need to do this to survive.”

Now THERE’s an incentive to customers to support you: Tell them if they don’t, you’re going to go out of business. How’s that working out for you, General Motors?

Outing points to the Times‘ own David Carr as the source of the right price: $4.99/mo. Respondents to Carr’s defense of the paywall plan posted on nytimes.com repeatedly refer to that fee as one they can swallow. Is anyone upstairs listening?

How To Hack the New York Times Paywall … With Your Delete Key

Mashable reports a new way to easily breach the paywall: “Readers need only remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL. They can also clear their browser caches, or switch browsers as soon as they see the subscription prompt. All three of these simple fixes will let them continue reading.”

The NYT’s Melting Iceberg Syndrome

Frédéric Filloux suggests that The New York Times could improve its profitability by going to Sunday-only publication and forgetting about the other six days of the week, at least in print. “Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays…Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday…Some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of the paper’s entire advertising revenue.”

If the Times could cut more than half its expenses by eliminating six days’ worth of print, it could theoretically make more money by publishing less frequently.

We also liked Filloux’ use of an iceberg as the analogy for a business that’s collapsing from within: “As an iceberg melts, the resulting change of shape can cause it to list gradually or to become unstable and topple over suddenly.” See any similarities to what’s happening to print?

A Big Op to Upgrade Op-Ed at New York Times

Alan Mutter believe the departure of Times columnists Frank Rich and Bob Herbert presents an historic opportunity for the Old Gray Lady to become the amazing technicolor dreamcoat of diversity of opinion. If Times‘ columnists are so smart, how come they missed the historic events going on the Middle East? Mutter asks. That’s what happens when your world is limited to Manhattan and the Beltway.

“Instead of dedicating the bulk of its limited and precious op-ed space to another generation of slightly more diverse Pooh-Bahs, the Times should publish the best of the online conversations in its print editions,” the Newsosaur recommends. That would be both good journalism and good promotion for the Time’s pricey paywall.

New York Times Digital Subscriptions: The Unofficial FAQ Updated

PaidContent.org has a useful rundown of the ins and outs of the Times‘ paywall, including pricing tiers, thresholds and platforms. Can you get a family account to nytimes.com? You’ll just have to read this FAQ to find out.

From the Onion: NYTimes.com’s Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move

“In a move that media executives, economic forecasters, and business analysts alike are calling ‘extremely bold,’ NYTimes.com put into place a groundbreaking new business model today in which the news website will charge people money to consume the goods and services it provides.”

Wow, that was fast.

Just six months after it was launched as the most ambitious hyperlocal news operation in the US, Washington’s TBD has cut expenses deeply and narrowed  its mission to arts and entertainment. One third of the staff – or 12 employees – were let go this week. The apparent chaos at TBD is evidenced by the fact that general manager Bill Lord, who came on board just two weeks ago, said layoffs were only one of several options being contemplated at that time. Owner Allbritton Communications cited low traffic figures as the cause of the cutbacks. Considering that TBD racked up 6 million page views in January, it must have needed a lot of traffic to cover expenses.

The breathtaking speed with which Allbritton reined in the TBD venture shouldn’t be lost on other hyperlocal publishers. Alan Mutter sums up the difficulties that all such organizations face:

• Small audiences are difficult to monetize in the first place;
• Finding and converting advertisers to reach small audiences is expensive;
• Advertisers are reluctant to spend a lot of money on online ads in general, particularly when the audiences are small.

Mutter calls AOL’s Patch.com, which now encompasses more than 800 hyperlocal sites, the next litmus test for the concept. AOL is reportedly spending $50 million on the venture, but the tone of Mutter’s analysis is that that money is probably wasted.

Keep reading, though,  if you want a different perspective. Nearly every one of the 20 or so people who weigh in on Mutter’s post disagree with him, some vehemently. They argue that hyperlocal news does work if publishers don’t get too greedy. Comment writers include several people who are successfully running the kind of small operations for which Mutter see so little hope.

“Hyperlocal is just a way of expressing the need for news that is more local, closer to the neighborhood or town level, than the metro daily ever could be,” notes  Jay Rosen. “And of course it corresponds to a class of advertiser that was priced out of and ill served by the metro daily and TV stations.”

Adds Oscar Martinez (left) of NeighborsGo, a successful hyperlocal venture by the Dallas Morning News, “If nothing else, [the Patch.com] effort should be applauded because the competition will remind newspapers that there IS money on the table and, more important, there’s still time to go after it.”  We interviewed Martinez more than 2 1/2 years ago, and his hyperlocal operation is still alive and kicking.

Our take: Mutter’s analysis is accurate, but publishers continue to debate the wrong thing. The issue isn’t whether there’s enough advertising out to fund a lot of successful hyperlocal ventures; there probably isn’t. The solution is in finding other ways to monetize small businesses in the area. We laid out our proposal two years ago, but with the exception of Sacramento Press, a hyperlocal venture that is truly flourishing, we haven’t seen a whole lot of interest.

Promoting Newsroom Innovation

Lauren Rabaino picks up on a Twitter chat with Jay Rosen in which the professor said newsrooms need to radically revamp their culture. Rabaino points to a few examples of how tech startups break the mold in interacting with the customers and investors. While her use of the word “awesome” is a bit excessive, her examples aren’t.  Why are biographies on news sites so boring? Probably because newspaper cultures have traditionally buried the identities of all but their most prominent columnists. In contrast, tech startups use bio pages to point out that there are real people behind the products. Why not humanize the staff that brings you the news? Chances are they’re members of the community, anyway.

There’s also an interesting idea about bringing webcams into the workplace, something that text-messaging startup Tatango has reportedly done for its investors (although we can find no evidence of it on Tatango’s website). We’re not sure if webcams in the newsroom would be very interesting to look at, but the idea of opening up news meetings to the public has always intrigued us. Yes, competitors would be free to watch the action, too, but might the involvement of the community in the news gathering process also give the open newsroom a competitive edge? We’ve always thought that when it comes to reporting the news, more participation is better than less. Some traditionalists still resist that idea.

In a similar vein, Editor & Publisher has an essay by Neil Greer, CEO and co-founder of ImpactEngine.com, about how to motivate people to innovate. We think the recommendations are mostly management common sense, but they’re valid anyway.. T

Miscellany

The Selma (AL) Times-Journal will put up a paywall next Tuesday, becoming the latest in a trickle of small papers to charge for access. It’ll cost you $48/year or $4.95/month to get the news, and PayPal is accepted. Print subscribers will get in for free, but only after paying the online fee and then asking for a rebate. The story about the paywall is bylined by Times-Journal news editor Rick Couch, who temporarily abandons journalistic impartiality in failing to explore the controversy around paywalls or the possibility that this could actually be a bad idea.

---

The University of Colorado should eliminate its standalone journalism major in favor of an integrated information science or digital communications program, according to the chancellor of the Boulder campus. If approved, the shutdown of the current journalism school could happen as early as  next year. Chancellor Phil DiStefano isn’t calling for journalism education to fade from this earth. Rather, he thinks it should be incorporated more holistically into a liberal arts education and perhaps become a minor concentration. Boulder’s Daily Camera presents both sides of the debate, including anxious statements from the current journalism faculty who will be moved, like displaced persons, to other corners of the campus.

---

The Detroit Media Partnership is borrowing an idea from the fast-food industry and offering a $5,000 prize to the person or group who can come up with the best idea “for helping The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press increase their audiences or better serve the community.” Management is taking suggestions now and will hold a public vote in early April. Finalists will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges that includes Domino’s Pizza Inc. CEO Patrick Doyle, whose policy of responding to customer complaints about his company’s crappy product is credited with turning Domino’s around.

---

Detroit’s second most famous business – rapper Eminem – shook up the local journalism world a bit by snubbing hundreds of media supplicants and granting a rare interview to East Hills Middle School eighth-grader Annie Reed. Reed, who had pursued the interview at the urging of her newspaper instructor,  talked to the 38-year-old rapper for about 10 minutes. The word “cool” was apparently used several times. The Detroit Free Press story is more about how Reed got the audience with Eminem than about what was said on the phone. It’s an uplifting tale and the photo is great. Lose Yourself.

---

“Launch glitches” will keep Rupert Murdoch’s tablet-only Daily free for at least several more weeks, according to Publisher Greg Clayman. Users have been reporting frequent crashes and freezes, which Clayman said is not surprising for a digital news publication that sometimes exceeds 100 pages per day. While people we know who have tried the Daily mainly dismiss it as gossipy fluff, Clayman says subscriptions are running ahead of plan, although he wouldn’t be more specific

---

The quarterly earnings season is upon us, and newspaper publishers are reporting better results, but not on the print side. The Washington Post Co. earned $11.59 a share in the quarter, which is nearly $3 dollars better than analyst consensus estimates.  However, print advertising revenue dropped 12%, continuing the ugly trend of the last five years. The good news: online revenues were up substantially.

A.H. Belo Corp., which publishes the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal, among others, lost $119.5 million, or $5.65 per share, during the final quarter of 2010. That’s way down from earnings of $5.6 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same period the previous year. However, a large charge to cover pension expenses responsible for much of the drop. Revenue was down about 4%.

Gannett reported a fourth-quarter profit increase of 30%, largely due to cost-cutting and strength in its broadcast division. However, advertising revenue on the publishing side dropped nearly 6% and circulation revenue was down 4%.

And Finally…

Thanks to Legends and Rumors for calling out this correction from The New York Times, which we publish in its entirety:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

With its $315 million sale to America Online, Huffington Post now has to be considered one of the U.S.’s most highly valued news operations, so it’s only natural that observers should begin to wonder when it’s going to start paying its contributors a meaningful wage.

The debate is fueled by HuffPo’s unusual content model, which is based upon a large volume of articles contributed free by unpaid bloggers, as well as syndication and aggregation services that effectively used other people’s content to sell advertising.

Arianna Huffington’s “blogger network is an amazing achievement; she’s persuaded untold numbers of people to write for nothing, to have their names on the page as compensation for their labor,” writes Dan Gillmor on MediaActive. That model fits perfectly with the one that’s emerging at AOL as it places new-media bets with sites like TechCrunch and the Patch constellation of local news sites. “There’s a common thread in many of the content initiatives: paying low (or no) money to the people providing the content,” Gillmor writes.

But is that wrong? After all, no one is forcing bloggers to write for HuffPo for free, and the site’s terms & conditions state that contributors aren’t entitled to any compensation. Writing on Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Kirchner notes that unpaid labor can actually be illegal in some circumstances. People have even been forced to accept payment when they didn’t want it because their volunteer work was deemed to be an unfair competitive advantage for the organization that benefited from their labors.

Even arrangements similar to HuffPo’s have been successfully contested in the past. Kirchner points to a suit filed against AOL years ago by a group of unpaid community managers who alleged that their efforts contributed to the company’s bottom line. The suit never reached trial and AOL finally settled for a reported $15 million, denying the world a clear precedent.

It’s unlikely that Huffington will change the practices that have contributed to its meteoric rise any time soon. But pressure from prominent voices like Gillmor could make executives uneasy. “The Huffington Post’s business model is perfectly legal. But is it right?” Kirchner asks.

Maybe not, but right in what context? We believe the debate over Huffington’s pay scale is a straw man for the bigger issue of content devaluation brought on by the Internet. Nate Silver contributes a fascinating analysis in this respect. He dissects the Huffington Post’s revenue model and determines that free content generates just a tiny percentage of the business. “The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4,” he writes. Even blockbuster articles contribute less than $200 to the site’s revenues.

Silver’s analysis makes a number of assumptions, due to the lack of publicly available information, but the number that caught our eye was his estimate that HuffPo publishes about 100 articles per day. If you figure that nets out to 30,000 articles per year and revenues of $30 million, then the average article is worth about $1,000 to the site. Assuming that HuffPo pays a 20% royalty to the author, then the average writer would expect to receive no more than $200 per piece. Silver’s methodology, which is based on traffic, estimates the actual value at much less than that. Under any scenario, unsolicited content is worth no more than a few bucks.

Huffington Post is only the most visible example of the new economics of news in which writers can expect to receive much less payment for work than they did in the heyday of mainstream media. Forcing the business to pay more to its writers doesn’t change those economics. Operations like Demand Media are standing at the ready to pay a nickel a word. The market will continue to find its low-water mark.

The good news — if there is any — is that this dynamic isn’t new. Back in the pre-Internet days, The New York Times was able to get away with paying freelancers a pittance for their work because it was The New York Times. The value of the  byline was enough to reward contributors, even if the actual paycheck was only beer money.

We believe that there is an explosion of demand about to come from corporations that are embracing the new tactics of “content marketing.” These businesses must increasingly compete on the value of their content rather than the size of their advertising budget, and they will need to hire professionals to help them. This may be small consolation to many journalists, but at least it offers the possibility of a living wage that enables them to practice independent journalism, if only in their spare time.

---

Second-half magazine circulation continued to tumble in 2010, with Hearst down 6% and Condé Nast off 10%. The biggest culprit is declining newsstand sales as consumers increasingly turn to their smart phones for information. Paid subscriptions were actually up 3.2%. Magazines continue to cut distribution and increase subscription prices in order to prop up profitability.

An interesting side note to this story  is that Sports Illustrated will stop selling print-only subscriptions. Instead of paying $39 to receive the magazine, people will now have to pay $48 to get a bundled print, web and Android app edition . Why no iPad version? The publisher and Apple are still trying to work that out, but nothing is expected soon.

---

More shenanigans in the Tribune Co.’s Chapter 11 mess. It just gets uglier and uglier.

And Finally…

If you think “crowdsourcing” is destroying the economy, then don’t read this…

• “Princecharming” will type up a poem about anything you want and send it to you, signed, in the mail.
• “Nick0000″ will turn a black-and-white image into a color image (left).
• “Berthold” will proofread 800 words of English or German.
• “sugars68” will write a unique original article for any keyword, with delivery in 24 hours.

What do these stunts have in common? They’re all things people will do for $5. At Fiverr.com you can find people to provide products and services ranging from the ordinary (deliver parenting advice) to the bizarre (design your name from energy drink tabs) for a lousy sawbuck.

Fiverr is a real e-commerce site. If you want to take someone up on an offer, click a button, pay by PayPal or credit card and wait for the results. Buyers can rate the quality of the transaction and sellers can accumulate feedback scores, just like on eBay. You can even post a request for people who will fulfill your desire. All for five bucks. Amazing.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is profitable again, and “This ensures that we can continue to produce the quality journalism that you’ve told us is important to you,” crows Publisher Michael Joseph in a 1,000-word tribute to all that the paper is doing for its community. “Our improved financial picture is allowing us to again expand content offerings that are targeted toward what you’ve told us really matters in your lives.”

It will be interesting to see if area readers agree with this publisher’s optimism (comments are disabled on the essay), for the AJC has suffered some of the worst cutbacks of any major metro daily. In early 2009, the paper laid off 30% of its editorial staff, reducing its total size to less than half of what it was in 2006. Distribution to seven outlying counties was discontinued, coming on top of an earlier decision to cut all its regional editions. The AJC daily circulation fell 52% between 2002 and 2010, although some of that loss was self-inflicted due to distribution cutbacks.

The question is whether a newspaper with a staff of 230 journalists can produce the same quality of material as one with 500. We don’t want to dismiss out of hand the possibility that it can, but it won’t look anything like the paper it was a few years ago. In a desperate bid to survive amid its circulation free-fall, the AJC has completely upended its editorial model over the last five years, turning most of its attention to the suburbs and vacating its downtown offices in August in favor of cheaper space near the northern suburb of Dunwoody It has taken steps to address a perceived left-wing bias and chosen not to endorse candidates in recent elections. The AJC has partnered with local Cox TV and radio stations on tag-team reporting projects, attempted to partner with local weeklies to share content and even run occasional pieces from Demand Media, the crowdsourced editorial engine that assigns stories by keyword relevancy.

Can you cost cut your way back to success? The AJC will be on the leading edge of answering that question. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to focus the mind, and in slashing its costs, the paper has had to make some grueling decisions. Its experience is probably familiar to many in the industry, where the shift of the audience to the suburbs has challenged publishers to remain relevant at the local level its audience cares most about. It helps that the AJC has a near monopoly in its market, and that its website is the default destination for news about all things Atlanta. There’s nothing particularly special about its Web presence, but it was one of the first major dailies to release an iPad app.

Its free classifieds service is an acknowledgment that there is no more money in that business anymore. The question is where the revenues are going to come from? A lot of eyes in Atlanta will no doubt be on The New York Times as it attempts to launch a paid online subscription model in the first quarter. For a paper with the regional clout of the AJC, that may be just what the doctor ordered.

---

The New York Times asks if comedian Jon Stewart is the modern-day Edward R. Murrow, citing Stewart’s advocacy for legislation awarding health-care benefits to 9/11 responders that passed in the last hours of the 111th Congress. Stewart devoted his Dec. 16 show to the bill, which had received little coverage in mainstream media and was about to die with Congress’ adjournment. That show is widely credited with having resuscitated efforts to get the measure approved. Stewart says he isn’t a journalist, but the Times points to similar advocacy reporting by Murrow and Walter Cronkite that shifted public opinion about events in their time, and suggests that Stewart’s appeal to young audiences may kindle an interest in advocacy journalism by a new generation.

---

People passing by newsstands in Sacramento may do a double take when they hear the “talking news rack” deliver a 15 second recorded message each time a newspaper’s purchase. The news racks also have a scrolling LED that can display news, messages from the editor and even ads.

---

In the weeks before her death from the rare disorder of peripartum cardiomyopathy, Shana Swers documented her ordeal on Facebook. Reporter Ian Shapira was intrigued, and when the Washington Post assigned him to tell the story, he chose to anchor it in Swers’ own Facebook posts. The clips from Swers’ wall were annotated by Shapira, who did the traditional blocking and tackling of interviewing family members and medical experts, but the writer chose to sacrifice the journalist’s traditional privilege of owning the narrative. The piece is already being held up as one of the most innovative alternative news stories of the year. Mallary Jean Tenore provides more background on Poynter.

We can’t remember the last time we went two weeks without updating the Death Watch, but a crush of work (though not so much money) has overwhelmed us recently. Plus we saw the new Harris Poll that found that over half of online adults now believe traditional media as we know it will no longer exist in 10 years, causing us to wonder if there’s really any point to “chronicling the decline” any more when the majority now agree  on the end point. But we forge ahead for SEO purposes, if nothing else. Here are some stories we’ve bookmarked lately.

Nielsen: 362K Paying for London Times

How are the early Murdoch paywall experiments in the UK faring? That involves unraveling some complex formulae about the value of free versus paid circulation and the opportunity cost of a paid subscriber. However, for now we are calling the early figures from Nielsen encouraging. The media monitoring service recently estimated that some 362,000 people have been accessing subscription content on the Times of London’s website each month since a paywall went up in June. The trade-off: unique monthly visitor traffic is down about 44% from 3.1 million to 1.78 million.  A separate analysis by Hitwise concluded that there had been a “large reduction” in visits to the Times’ website since the paywall was erected, resulting in a drop in online market share of nearly 60%.

So does this mean the Times’ paywall is a good or a bad idea? Here’s one way to look at it: The Times charges £1 per day or £2 per week for online access, with print subscribers getting a free ride. The back of our envelope says that if the Times can get half of those 362,000 monthly visitors to pay for one week’s worth of access each month, then it will have traded 1.3 million visitors for £362,000, or about 25 pence per visitor. The question then is whether those lost visitors can be monetized to the tune of 25p.

That actually should be a fairly easy calculation. If the Times looks at its online advertising revenue for the prior year, for example, and compares it to average unique monthly visitor volume, it can calculate the value of a free visitor pretty quickly. If that value is less than £.25, then the paywall is working, at least for now.

It isn’t that simple, of course. Those 362,000 monthly visitors aren’t necessarily paying the full price for Times content. Some are using free or heavily discounted promotions account or are print subscribers when get the online product bundled. However, they may also be more valuable that afree visitors. If advertisers are willing to pay more to reach paying customers on the theory that they’re better prospects, then those 362,000 visitors could be worth more than two bits apiece.

There are also intangibles, like the lower cost of operating a computing infrastructure to serve a smaller visitor base. However, we would suggest that the quick and dirty calculations aren’t all that complex, and if other Murdoch titles forge ahead with similar strategies, then the paywall is probably working.

A Case for Editorial Accountability

“In reality, publishers and CEOs have little understanding about what their editors are doing,” writes Neil Heyside (left) of New York-based CRG Partners in a provocative piece on MediaShift about the cost of content. Heyside shares some anonymized cost figures from client newspapers in the US and UK showing that the ways in which publishers allocate budget for different kinds of content varies wildly.

He makes the argument that publishers can reduce the amount of staff-generated content by increasing contributions from free (aka citizen) sources and making more use of “reworked” or rewritten material like press releases. He also suggests that publishers can make use of pooled or wire service material for topics that have little local relevance but that are important to carry anyway, such as international news and movie reviews.

“One paper printed 8% of its material from free content,” Heyside writes. “If that number moved up to 20% …a reduction of the use of 16% of staff-produced material led to a savings of 28% in staffing costs.” Sounds easy, but as anyone who’s worked with a substantial amount of contributed free content will tell you, the time required to massage it into something worth publishing can nearly equal the cost of paying for good material in the first place. Commenter Scott Bryant makes this case with some passion. Both Heyside and Bryant are right. Publishers should scrutinize the process and costs of creating content more carefully and editors should be more accountable for what they spend. However, quality is an intangible that defies rigid classification. As Sam Zell and his team found out at Tribune Co. a couple of years ago, boiling editorial content down to column inches, source counts or other rigid metrics is a recipe for trouble.

AP: Newspapers Are Now Loss Leaders

For the foreseeable future, publishers don’t seem to be funneling their investment dollars into wire services. Associated Press CEO and President Tom Curley (right) tells Poynter’s Rick Edmonds that newspapers now make up only 20% of the AP’s revenue and that figure is expected to continue to decline by 4% to 5% a year for the foreseeable future. In fact, “The AP loses money on services to newspapers and effectively subsidizes those offerings with more profitable lines of business,” such as photo wires and corporate business news, Edmonds writes.

The silver lining for the AP is that the drop appears to be a consequence of the industry’s overall decline rather than the contentious battles that erupted between the AP and its member newspapers two years ago. Curley says that unpleasantness has largely been put to rest as a result of adjustments to AP’s licensing fees and a lot of face-to-face meetings.

There is one battle still ongoing, however: with CNN. The AP claims that the broadcast giant is effectively using wire service material without paying for it by picking up (and attributing) stories moments after they hit the websites of AP subscribers. Here’s another area in which copyright law has failed to keep up with the velocity of digital information. As long as CNN summarizes and attributes information, it isn’t technically doing anything illegal, but the AP also has a defensible case for arguing that those actions are unfair to it and other members.

Miscellany

Could Starbucks soon compete with the newspaper publishers whose products it places next to the cash registers at its ubiquitous coffee shops? Yes, but for now it’s taking pains not to call its new in-store information service a “news” network, even though it sure looks like one. Instead, the Starbucks Digital Network is being positioned as a means for the retailer to gather more intelligence about what interests its customers in order to deliver to them better…um…latte? Sounds like a bit of a stretch to us. More likely, Starbucks is testing ways it can use localized and even personalized news as a way to improve customer affinity and maybe even sell advertising.

We proposed more than two years ago that Starbucks could become a major force in the US media market (see slide 28 in embedded presentation below) if it chose to pursue the opportunity. Our scheme was to provide printed, personalized mini-newspapers optimized for reading by commuters. Since we floated that idea, though, the iPad happened, and it now makes more sense to deliver news digitally to a tablet-toting public. However the plan works out, we think publishers should look at Starbucks as a potential partner rather than a rival, because anyone who feeds the caffeine jones of millions of affluent professionals enjoys a chemical bond that no editor can hope to match.

---

Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici rang up a media appraiser who correctly estimated the value of Newsday two years ago in order to find out what the Boston Globe is worth. Kevin Kamen’s guess: a maximum of $120 million and a realistic value of $75 million. That sounds terrible in light of the $1.1 billion that Globe parent New York Times Co. paid for the New England Media Group in 2003, but remember that money was relatively easy to come by in those day and that the Times Co. couldn’t find someone to take its Boston Harbor boat anchor off its hands last year for a paltry $25 million. Since then, cost-cutting has made the Globe a little more valuable, Kamen estimates. Perhaps that’s why a group of investors, led by entrepreneur Aaron Kushner, wants to buy it, Bercovici reports.

And Finally…

Rupert Murdoch has been the most strident of all publishers in demanding that readers pay for content, which is why the circulation promotion now being used by his Sun in the UK is so deliciously ironic. The paper stuffed thousands of banknotes into Saturday’s issue. Presumably it used small denominations so as not to encourage assaults on its street vendors. The daily has recently suffered a 4% drop in circulation. Perhaps Murdoch is hoping that readers will put their winnings to work to pay the access fees for the Times or News of the World.

About 55,000 readers of the Los Angeles Times in the San Gabriel Valley and Riverside were surprised to open their morning papers late last month to discover that the Times had acquired a sudden fixation with topic of “briefs subhed (see below).” Actually, it was a production error.  “About 55,000 papers were printed before the error was discovered,” the Times wrote in a correction. “Readers feared that all the copy editors had been laid off, or even ‘massacred,’ as one put it.”

We find ourselves, once again, completely in Jeff Jarvis’ camp on the issue of tearing down the advertising/editorial wall. Jarvis makes his case here in response a thoughtful but retro post by the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade. The ad/edit wall that has existed in newspapers for the last three generations is a luxury that media institutions can no longer afford and also an insult to the journalists within them. Are reporters children who are so incapable of safeguarding their own integrity that they need to be shielded from the business? Are advertisers such a corrupting force that they must be prohibited from any contact with the people who create the product they support with their ad dollars?

Jarvis notes that nearly everyone who’s starting a media operation these days has to wear both editorial and sales hats. And guess what? Many of them still manage to deliver fine products. In fact, we’d argue that the informal standards that top bloggers apply to their work are at least as good as the written standards put forth by various news organizations. That’s because integrity is one of the few assets media people have, and they know that bartering it away undermines their future. Readers are also smart enough to figure out when they’re being taken for a ride.

We’d go one step further and suggest that one reason that the American public has been blindsided by affairs like the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the S&L meltdown is that the quality of business journalism in this country is so terrible. At most newspapers, the business desk is either Siberia or a necessary labor one must complete on the track to a glamor job in the State House. How can a company like Enron build a financial house of cards that ultimately collapses and throws 20,000 people out of work without someone at the Houston Chronicle noticing if something was fishy (BTW, did you know Enron had a code of ethics?)

Probably because newspaper reporters have traditionally been told that business is evil, ad-buyers are a corrupting influence and you’re best off staying as far away as possible. That’s not really an option any more, and maybe the new breed of online publishers will prove that journalists don’t have to be treated like 10-year-olds in order to do their jobs effectively.

Miscellany

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has kicked off quite a ruckus at the Miami Herald over his skewering of citizen journalism.  His target is James O’Keefe III, the political activist whose hidden-camera wizardry is credited with bringing down the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It turns out O’Keefe’s videos exhibited questionable editing practices that caused prosecutors to decline to file charges. What’s more, O’Keefe has been in a raft of trouble since then. “It is a mark of the low regard in which journalism is held that that load of bull pucky ever passed as wisdom,” Pitts writes. “If some woman flashed a toy badge, would you call her a citizen police officer? Would you trust your health to a citizen doctor just because he produced a syringe?” No, but the contexts there are somewhat different. We agree that the O’Keefe case is an example of citizen journalism gone wrong, but we think trashing the whole concept over a few bad examples is no more responsible than dismissing traditional journalism because of Jayson Blair. About 80 commenters weigh with their views.

---

Let’s keep this death watch thing in perspective. World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers CEO Christoph Riess told the World Editor’s Forum in Hamburg last week, “Whatever form the newspaper takes, it will remain the dominant media force in the world.” He cited the 61% growth in print newspaper circulation in 185 countries over the last year as evidence, and noted that print newspapers “reach more audience than the Internet.”Riess is right that newspaper circulation is growing dramatically in many developing countries. However, whether that trend holds up for long is questionable. As these economies mature, it’s likely that more-prosperous citizens will leap directly to online outlets and bypass the 15-year learning curve that the U.S. went through.

---

Which may not be such a bad thing. Scarborough Research reports that the 9 million people who use e-readers are also avid news consumers. “E-Reader households are 11% more likely to read a newspaper regularly than an average adult,” writes Editor & Publisher. What’s more, e-reader households are nearly 50% more likely than average consumers to visit a newspaper website. You can find the press release here.

And Finally…

From The Onion:

Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.

Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.

Read more…

So what are they thinking at The New York Times Co.? Having failed to sell its New England properties last year at an asking price that was reportedly 97% below what the Times Co paid for the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette in 1993, the company has now settled on splitting the Globe into two parts: one paid and the other free.

According to an account in Editor & Publisher:

Whereas Boston.com will continue to offer breaking news, sports, and weather from various sources, along with classified advertising, social networking, and information about travel, restaurants and entertainment, BostonGlobe.com will be designed to mirror the experience of reading the paper’s print edition. It will contain all the reports from the day’s paper as well as exclusive reports, in-depth news, analysis, commentary, photos and graphics, plus video and interactive features.

What does this mean? Will Boston.com become a My Yahoo-like text portal with wire feeds and little else? Will all of the material produced by the paper’s staff of reporters and photographers migrate to the paid edition but not be available to non-paying subscribers? How will those staffers feel about reaching a smaller audience? Will paid subscribers get anything more than an online version of the print edition? If so, why wouldn’t they just choose to receive the print edition in the first place and skip the whole online hoohah?

The answers to these questions will no doubt emerge in the nine months or so that the Globe has to consider its transition. Staffers will be watching the experience of their corporate parent as it imposes a pay wall at nytimes.com in January. BTW, we haven’t heard a whole lot about the plans for that experiment in recent months. We assume it’s still on.

We are on record as believing that paywalls will not work to salvage or grow the newspaper industry, but we also believe that the New York Times Co.’s strategy in this case is sound. Basically, management has recognized that trying to rejuvenate the print operation is futile, so it’s better to manage it into the ground as profitably as possible. This means raising subscription rates, erecting pay walls, holding the line on advertising prices for existing customers and generally trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the print operation that it can. It’s called milking the cash cow, and it’s a tried-and-true business strategy.

It is also a strategy of capitulation. The Boston Globe will never again see growth in its print edition,  so the best it can do is to wring profits out of the dwindling number of subscribers it has. Publishers are learning that over in London right now, where online readership of the Times fell 7.6% between July and August. Page views dipped 22% and time spent on site fell 16%. Some of this was no doubt due to the summer holiday, but the evidence is becoming abundant that pay walls significantly reduce traffic. The question is whether the incremental revenue offsets the corresponding declines in readership. No one has an answer yet, but it appears that newspaper publishers are increasingly willing to admit that print has no future and trying to get what they can out of a dying franchise. Believe it or not, than is healthy.

In the case of the Globe, The Times Co. will hopefully plow profits from paid subscriptions back into new properties that have the potential for growth, but it may choose to do something else instead. In the meantime, the message from the Globe’s move is that print is dead, resuscitation efforts are futile and those who still value print are going to pay for the privilege of receiving it. Not a bad strategy at all. At least it’s realistic.

Miscellany

Staffers at the Globe and elsewhere might want to look at the experience in Pittsburgh, where the Post-Gazette‘s PG+ is reportedly profitable and figuring out a sustainable business. The secret sauce in the publishing realm is sports, which motivates fans in the Steel City to fork over dollars in exchange for the latest information about local stars. However, a more important development may be the Web property’s shift into new areas of revenue such as sponsored events. “Those events have included a Post-Gazette “summer camp” featuring classes on fly fishing and cooking, as well as higher-brow discussions of the midterm elections,” writes Poynter’s Bill Mitchell. Hmmm… diversifying revenue. Where have we heard that before?

---

Did we really say that print is dead? Well The Wall Street Journal’s print advertising revenue jumped 21% in the just-completed quarter compared to the year-ago period, according to a memo from Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton. Online revenue was up, too. Those are impressive numbers, but one month does not a trend make.

---

Did we really say that print is dead? The Richmond (Mo.) News will reduce its print frequency from daily to twice weekly. Beginning Oct. 18, the 96-year-old News will be published on Monday and Thursday afternoons.

---

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes entertainingly about the history of the op-ed page, a 40-year-old invention often credited to The New York Times. Not surprisingly, the idea of portraying opposing viewpoints directly across from a newspaper’s editorial page has many fathers, given that it “has undoubtedly been one of the great newspaper innovations of the century,” in the words of John B. Oakes, a Times editorial board member who proposed the concept in the late 1950s. Oakes says the idea was his, but others who were at the Times dispute that, and other papers used similar vehicles as early as the 1920s. The Times‘ move to action was actually spurred by the death of the New York Herald Tribune in 1966, which removed a major conservative voice from the market. Editors realized there was an opportunity in dissent, and began openly soliciting prominent foes to write for their pages. This turned out to be a good business decision, since public figures write for cheap and the Times was able to realize an immediate advertising windfall. The concept was quickly picked up by other newspapers and  became a staple. It’s hard to believe that something we accept so easily today was the subject of so much controversy a few decades ago.

---

They’re on a bit of a roll over at Verve Wireless, which just raised $7 million for development and expansion of its local ad network and publisher platform. Among the investors are The Associated Press. Verve creates apps to deliver news to mobile devices. In addition to contracts with McClatchy, Belo Interactive and The AP. the company was selected earlier this year by the Audit Bureau of Circulations to measure the audience on mobile applications, mobile browsers and tablets. Verve Wireless claims that 750 publishers worldwide are using its apps.

And Finally…

Publishers could do worse than to rely upon the genius of their reporters. In Chicago, Sun-Times reporter Kara Spak won a “Jeopardy” quiz show to the tune of $24,001. In response to a question about an 1863 poem that mentions “the eighteenth of April in Seventy-Five,” Spak correctly identified the source as “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” We don’t believe her employer requires her to contribute her winnings to the company pension fund. Had she worked for Tribune Co., we’re not so sure that would have applied.

‘When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,’ says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. ‘I worry about burnout.’”

He’s talking about the pressure of the new online newsroom. It used to be that daily deadlines were considered intense, but in today’s hyper-competitive environment, many reporters are expected to file several times a day. “Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers,” writes The New York Times.

Some staffers at The Politico start their work days before dawn. Editors walk the aisles asking who’s broken a scoop that day, and reporters may wake up to find an e-mail sent at 5 a.m. asking why they were beaten on a story. The pressure is on to file something – anything – that a reader hasn’t seen before.

The Politico knows that the new competitive environment doesn’t tolerate delay.  “Everybody in the audience is his or her own editor based on where they want to move their mouse or their finger on the iPad,” says Politico’s editor in chief, John F. Harris. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Politico has lost about 20% of its news staff this year. But where are they gonna go? The website’s results-fueled journalism is becoming the norm.

The Christian Science Monitor sends a daily e-mail telling its reporters which stories had the highest view count the previous day. Gawker Media displays the top 10 most viewed stories, along with reporters’ bylines, on a monitor in its offices. Some news outlets even compensate their staff based on traffic. And then there are search-driven word factories like Associated Content and Demand Media that assign stories based upon search popularity and pay by the page view.  Search marketing expert Mike Moran calls these outfits “content chop shops” that cheapen quality by elevating search visibility. But you can’t argue with success. Yahoo bought Associated Content for $90 million and Demand Media is reportedly hoping to be the first $1 billion IPO in nearly a decade.

The good news is that some media properties are hot again. The bad news is that they’re places where few people can apparently stand to work (See also Search-Driven News).

Miscellany

A.H. Belo reported a narrower second-quarter loss, but what stole the headlines on the earnings call was the rising importance of circulation revenue, which now accounts for nearly 30% of the company’s sales. In fact, circulation revenue was up 66% in the quarter, largely due to price increases at the Dallas Morning News. Executives crowed that the Dallas paper is now the third most-expensive in the country, behind only The New York Times and the Boston Globe. The prices are a function of “the quantity and quality of what we put in the newspaper,” said Belo CEO Robert Decherd. They’re also a function of what the dwindling ranks of elderly print readers are willing to pay. Belo also reported that it has $60 million in the bank and is increasing is earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization (EBITDA), even though revenues continue to decline. The company’s strategy appears to reflect that of many of its competitors: milk the print cow while you can, cut costs and hope to get traction in new markets. That’ll work for a little while longer.

---

The Democrat-controlled Federal Communications Commission surprised everyone this week by choosing to defend rules adopted under the George W. Bush administration that loosed restrictions on media cross-ownership. In a filing with the US Appeals Court, the FCC supported the 2007 ruling by a Republican-dominated FCC that made it easier for media companies to own multiple media outlets in the same marketing. The agency had been widely expected to take the first chance it had to reverse that decision in the name of restoring more competition to the market. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement that we read three or four times and still couldn’t understand. Perhaps the FCC has decided that owning multiple local media properties doesn’t matter for much when all are tanking at about the same speed. Fellow commissioner Michael Copps attacked the FCC’s decision and vowed to move the strengthening of cross-ownership rules “to the commission’s front burner where it deserves to be.”

And Finally

Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist Steve Breen decided to satirize the Gulf oil spill by drawing some of his cartoons using oil instead of ink. The process turned out to be a lot more involved than you might think. Breen flew from San Diego to New Orleans on his own dime and then drove to Pensacola, FL to find tar balls of sufficient viscosity to work with. He then diluted the tar with various solvents until he hit upon gasoline as the perfect element to soften the tar enough to work with. The result is a striking sepia tone, with which Breen has skewered not only BP but also America’s obsession with oil. Here’s Breen’s page on the San Diego Union-Tribune site. Click on the image at right to see a gallery.

Victor Navasky and Evan Lerner throw some cold water on the iPad party, suggesting that e-readers could save the floundering magazine industry at the expense of journalistic standards. They point to research by the Columbia Journalism Review (which Navasky founded) that revealed  that magazine editors admit their practices are sloppier online than they are in print. Copy editing and fact-checking standards are looser and editors are more aware of the need to drive traffic to their work, which increases the temptation to sensationalize or invent. “Where advertising is based on traffic, and traffic is thought to depend on the speedy posting of new content, we’re seeing a gradual breakdown of [the ad/edit firewall] as journalistic standards become even more flexible to allow for greater and greater speed,” they write.

Their oped  raises an important point about the influence of traffic on journalistic quality and the declining value of circulation. As we noted last September, circulation at some of the country’s largest magazines is down between 60% and 75% over the last eight years. This threatens the business models of these publications and the journalistic standards that they support. Here’s why.

Circulation is a complex and arcane discipline that is critical to the health of publications. Publishers manage circulation carefully, each seeking an ideal balance between subscription and newsstand sales. For consumer publishers, a high percentage of newsstand sales creates subscriber churn which delivers new blood that is desirable to their advertisers. For professional and trade publishers, many of which don’t distribute on newsstands, renewal rates signify reader loyalty, which their advertisers crave. In all cases, circulation quality is at least as important as circulation quantity.

All magazines have paid subscribers who contract to receive the publication for a defined period of time, regardless of whether they actually read it. Subscriptions provide a degree of security for publishers because they increase the likelihood that a reader’s perception of the product will be shaped over time rather than by one headline. One of the reasons newspapering has been such a stable business for so many years is that renewal rates for newspaper subscribers have been astronomically high. Subscriptions create incentive for publishers to produce information that has broad appeal to their target audience. While some would argue that this leads them to “dumb down” content, it also gives them the luxury to deliver information they believe readers need to have, even if they don’t want to have it.

Google Is the New Newsstand

On the Web, of course, there is no circulation. While a few professional publishers do limit access to their content to paying subscribers, most rely upon search engines and referral links for the traffic that sustains their business. This severely disrupts their business models. When the luxury of subscribers is gone, publishers must compete for readers on every single story. This means that speed, sensationalism and search-friendly headlines like “Top 10 Tips for Whiter Laundry” become more important factors in delivering a volume of visitors that can be monetized (Consumer magazines honed this to a fine art years ago). It also creates an incentive to shortcut quality for timeliness. A notable example of this was the death of singer Michael Jackson last June, which was first reported by the celebrity gossip site TMZ. The Los Angeles Times reportedly had the story at the same time but held the news because of lack of verification. Quality lost out to speed.

The impact of the industry’s shift from subscriptions to search results and links is enormous. Publishers now have to compete on every single story, which means anything that doesn’t deliver a large audience is bad. You can imagine how this influences reporting on niche topics. It also creates an incentive to make stories bigger than they really are. The problem is compounded when editors are rewarded solely on the basis of page views. Balance gives way to expediency and errors are more easily excused when they can be quickly and quietly fixed online.

Navansky and Lerner implore people who care about journalistic quality to “take up the challenge of debating and discussing — and, we would add, codifying — the values, standards and practices that ought to prevail online.” It’s an admirable call to action but unlikely to result in any enforceable standards. As long as publishing success hangs on a thin thread like traffic, the temptation to practice bad journalism will remain strong. If publishers can come up with a persuasive way to sell the quality of their audiences, then the tide might begin to turn. Until then, we’re going to see a lot of articles on whiter laundry.

---

Speaking of the iPad, TechCrunch reports that Apple sold 300,000 units in the US as of midnight Saturday. That’s about 10% more than the total number of iPhones sold during that product’s first week on the market. However, it’s worth noting that when the iPhone went on sale, there was no iPhone to compare it against. In contrast, the iPad has the momentum of the iPhone’s popularity along with a substantial base of applications. On that note, the product’s opening week performance is notable. Apple said customers downloaded over 1 million applications and over 250,000 e-books.

TechCrunch has an interview with Marc Andreessen in which the Internet boy wonder advises media companies to “burn the boats,” an analogy to the instructions Cortés supposedly gave his army upon landing in Mexico nearly 500 years ago in order to insure that the soldiers pressed on.

Print newspapers and magazines will never get [to new online business models], he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.”

Andreessen has a point that it makes senses to abandon failing models in the long term, but setting fire to profitable print operations is the wrong strategy at the moment. After years of fretting over declining circulation and trying desperately to rejuvenate a dying business, newspaper publishers are finally adopting an intelligent strategy. They’re milking all they can from their profitable business while trying to manage it down to a level that new models can take over. It won’t be easy.

The strategy that most publishers have recently adopted has three parts:

• Raise subscription rates in order to milk as much revenue as possible out of an aging but loyal reader base;
• Manage costs downward in a manner that preserves profitability without alienating traditional readers;
• Invest in growth markets that can preserve the brand and generate new profits.

The New York Times reported last year that its second-quarter subscription revenues nearly matched its advertising revenue. Aggressive price increases, combined with a substantial reduction in discounted circulation, are turning paying subscribers into a profit engine. Other publishers are adopting this approach, which is why the seemingly catastrophic declines in circulation of the last couple of years aren’t as devastating as they seem. Many businesses have legacy customers that generate a small but profitable business. Successful long-term franchises, however, also have the skills to move on.

A Successful Online Model

New media news entities have demonstrated that they can earn a profit with about 20% of the revenues of print organizations. That’s because their operating expenses are about 90% lower. These organizations are profitable, but a lot smaller than print publishers.

In their most recent round of earnings reports, most publishers stated that they are now deriving between 12% and 16% of their revenue from online advertising. Most of them have also not done nearly as much as they can to monetize other sources such as events, transaction fees and value-added and classified advertising. Once publishers reach the threshold of 20% online revenue, they can conceivably shutter their print operations while sustaining the business and the brand. They’re trying to get to that threshold gracefully, though. Lots of money can still be made in print if publishers can manage that asset down steadily while reducing costs in lockstep.

That’s a tricky process. If publishers cut costs too deeply, they risk losing loyal print subscribers and circulation revenue could enter a free-fall. They also don’t have the luxury of much time to complete the transition.

Even harder is the third bullet point. The people who run newspapers are skilled at operations and asset management, not visionary investments in emerging markets. In the TechCrunch interview, Andreessen correctly points out that technology companies are adept at dealing with constant disruption to their markets, a situation that faces Microsoft right now. Successful technology companies manage this challenge through a kind of creative destruction process. Successful executives are experts at learning to identify new opportunities and quickly discarding old product lines without looking back.

However, technology companies don’t have the luxury of a loyal legacy base that newspaper publishers have. The audience of committed daily readers may still buy the newspaper industry another 10 years of life in print, although that business will eventually become unsustainable. It isn’t crazy for publishers to want to milk the cash cow for a few more years. The hard part is finding new opportunities and having the stomach to invest in them in the face of inevitable shareholder demands for greater profits.

Burning the boats isn’t a wise strategy at the moment. But it’s a good idea to start collecting firewood.

---

Newspaper executives and their largest advertisers will gather next month in Orlando to discuss the transition to a digital media world. Advertisers in attendance include Staples Inc., Walgreens, Best Buy,  Home Depot, RadioShack, Target and many other print media veterans.

It’s good to see the industry tackling its challenges head on, but we have to wonder if this is the right crowd to do it. Nearly every person in the room will have a career and a business built on a crumbling advertising model. It seems unlikely that much innovation will flourish in that atmosphere. And if you believe what people like Mark Potts and Steve Outing are saying, then the future of these companies is about diversifying revenue and cultivating local advertisers, not finding new ways to squeeze more blood from the display advertising stone.. Meanwhile, the agenda is packed with speakers from the newspaper industry. We trust Huffington Post wasn’t invited.

---

Meanwhile, Outsell has a new report predicting that US companies will spend more on digital marketing than print for the first time ever this year. Of the $368 billion that Outsell expects US advertisers to spend this year, roughly $120 billion will be spent online and $111 in print. Of the total online spending, 53% will be on company websites. Outsell expects print newspaper ad spending to drop 8.2% to $27 billion. The report costs $1,295. More here.

And Finally…

The folks who brought you the wonderful Fail Blog have aggregated some of their best media miscues into Probably Bad News, a site whose tagline is “News Fails, because journalism isn’t dying fast enough.”You can upload your own favorite typos, double entendres and acts of sheer stupidity for others to vote upon. Many of the examples are computers gone haywire, which lack the sheer hilarity of printed mistakes, in our view. But there’s some good stuff there, anyway.

---

Dan Bloom has been pushing the idea of renaming newspapers “snailpapers.” He’s put the cause to music. It’s six-and-a-half-minutes of countrified banjo-picking. Watch it if you can.