Paywalls continue to spring up across the news landscape while new-media enthusiasts warn that gated news is a throwback to a bygone age.

Britain’s Telegraph and Sun announced plans to erect paywalls almost simultaneously after successful tests. The Telegraph, which claims to have the largest circulation of any U.K. daily, will give away 20 articles free every month and charge £1.99/mo. thereafter for unlimited access to the website and smartphone apps. The Sun‘s move is timed to make the most of parent company News International’s £20M deal to show near-live clips of Premiership football highlights on its websites beginning in August.

In Canada, Postmedia Network will roll out paywalls across all 10 of its properties, including the National Post. The move completes an experiment that began two years ago and has been deployed in stages. Digital-only subscribers will have to ante up $9.99/mo. for reading more than 10 articles in any title within a month.

Perhaps most indicative of the surging popularity of paywalls, though, is Politico’s decision to experiment with the idea. The Washington, D.C.-focused news service, which was once personified the new breed of digital-only publishers, has given in to the reality that advertising rates continue to fall and subscriber revenues must become part of the business. “We believe that every successful media company will ultimately charge for its content” said a memo signed by several of the Politico’s top executives.

Circling the Wagons

We continue to be more interested in experiments that break new ground in publishing economics than efforts to resurrect old models. There’s plenty to report there, as well.

Ken Doctor kicks us  off with a fine analysis of where NewsRight went wrong. NewsRight was a consortium of 20 publishers that sprung out of the Associated Press in early 2012 with the mission of tracking down copyright violators while also creating a subscription model that would permit digital publishers to license quality content for redistribution.

“Publishers have seethed with rage as they’ve seen their substantial investment in newsrooms harvested — for nothing — by many aggregators…” writes Doctor on the Nieman Journalism Lab, “…but rage — whether seething or public — isn’t a business model.”

Bingo. Consortia are good for only two things: setting standards and raising awareness. They’re a terrible way to create new products. The idea of pursuing copyright violators individually is ludicrous, anyway. It’s like trying to stamp out ants. There are always more where the first batch came from.

The only anti-piracy tactic that works is a public awareness campaign, and the newspaper industry has shown little interest in that. NewsRight died because the members inevitably had conflicting priorities, and it was impossible for everyone to find common ground when everyone had something to lose.

Does BuzzFeed Have it Right?

Doctor points to the work being done at NewsCred, BuzzFeed and Forbes, among others, as examples of new ideas worth developing. “In 2013, we’re seeing more innovative use of news content than we have in a long time,” he writes. We’re particularly interested in BuzzFeed, the viral content engine started by Jonah Peretti and others in 2006. At first glance it looks like any other new-age news site, with a bottomless home page stuffed with a jumble of seemingly unrelated content ranging from the profound to the ridiculous.

As New York magazine points out in a lengthy profile, though, there’s a lot more going on there than cat photos. BuzzFeed is tuned to create content that people want to share, and it could care less who the authors are. The home page blithely mixes contributions from staffers and advertisers with minimal labeling. Every element within every story can be shared on every social network you can imagine. Every page is designed to maximize audience interaction with the content.

BuzzFeed makes little effort to segregate advertiser contributions from the work of its own staff. A photo essay on “12 Tips to Have An Amazing Barbecue” from Grill Mates sits next to “Just The London Skyline, Made Out Of Sugar Cubes” by staffer Luke Lewis. Some of the branded stuff is actually pretty good, like, JetBlue’s “The 50 Most Beautiful Shots Taken Out Of Airplane Windows.”

Is this serious journalism? Well, no. We don’t think corporate brands will ever produce that. But if they want to run their grilling tips next to similarly lightweight content from professional editors, why not let them? The genie that goes by such names as “brand journalism” and “content marketing” isn’t going back in the bottle. A recent survey concluded that corporate marketers and agencies consider branded content to be among their most effective branding tactics, and that 69% plan to spend more money on it in the coming year.

The bigger issue is whether sustainable publishing business models can be found that don’t rely entirely upon display advertising or subscription revenue. BuzzFeed and NewsCred are making some progress there. We don’t believe they produce serious journalism, if sex, gossip and voyeurism can attract a large enough audience to support real journalism, then we’re in favor of it. The idea isn’t new. It’s worked in the U.K. for decades.

Related articles

• Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret? (Andrew Rice/New York Magazine)
• BuzzFeed business news wants to be scoops (Chris Roush/Talking Biz News)
• Get your cat on: BuzzFeed creates new section where readers can publish [GigaOM]
• They put the U in UGC: BuzzFeed builds a Community vertical as a talent incubator
• The newsonomics of recycling journalism

Police Roam MA Suburb In Search Of Boston Bombers (Photo: Talk Radio News Service)

Those who fear that crowdsourcing may soon make professional journalists obsolete should take a look at some of the links below related to an amateur sleuthing experiment on the popular Reddit social news site that went horribly awry last week.

The goal was commendable enough. A “subreddit” was set up to enlist the members of this massive community (14 million monthly visitors by one report) in the hunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. Participants were told not to name names and to focus their effort on combing through thousands of photos posted on the Internet in hopes of finding the origins of the backpacks that exploded, killing three people and injuring 282 others.

The rules quickly went by the wayside, though. Names began being tossed out more or less at random, photos of anyone carrying a backpack were flagged as suspicious and chatter from the Boston Police Scanner were posted as fact. Most damaging was a rumor that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing for a month, was one of the bombers.

Twitter did its part both to spread misinformation and to serve professional journalists who sought to calm the hysteria.  Some mainstream media organizations picked up on the Tripathi rumors and amplified them, while other journalists tried to settle the crowd by pointing out, among other things, that police scanner reports are unconfirmed and often wrong.

The accusation that Tripathi was involved in the bombings was particularly damaging. When the popular @NewsBreaker Twitter account reported that the missing student had been confirmed as a suspect based upon police scanner chatter, “social media went crazy,” said Reddit General Manager Erik Martin in an interview on Atlantic Wire. “It was posted so many times in [Reddit subgroup] /r/FindBostonBombers that I had to stay up the entire night deleting them.”

Martin called the experiment “a disaster,” and issued an apology to the Tripathi family on behalf of Reddit, which is owned by Conde Nast. Media critics have been swarming in the wake of the incident, with Reddit getting nearly universal condemnation. About the only contribution the crowd made to the investigation was to identify one photo of the suspected bombers that the FBI hadn’t seen. However, the distraction the experiment caused as professional reporters tried to untangle the web of amateur accusations more than offset the small benefits. A chastened Reddit has since launched a new crowdsourced campaign to help locate Tripathi.

Questioning Crowdsourcing’s Value

Does this mean crowdsourcing is a bad idea? In certain situations, yes. Criminal investigations require specialized expertise that no group of amateurs can match. FBI and police investigators had access to intelligence that enabled them to evaluate and discard spurious information that the Reddit crowd didn’t. In a highly charged atmosphere like this, investigation is best done behind closed doors, with information revealed selectively when it can move the process along. The crowd is enlisted to help authorities but not to solve the case.

We can’t help but wonder what the public response would be if police officials conducted their investigation the way Reddit did. If every rumor and bit of speculation was held up to public comment, then our opinion of law enforcement might be quite different. Sometimes there’s good reason to withhold information from the public, as the irresponsible actions of the Reddit crowd made very clear.

However, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath. Crowdsourcing can have great value when applied to analysis of very amounts of data or eyewitness accounts. Witness the comprehensive Wikipedia report on the Marathon bombings for an example of how many eyes can tell a story better than a few.

The incident also offered some shining examples of traditional media at its best. On Friday the Boston Globe, which has been a poster child of newspaper industry tumult, posted this marvelous account of the factors that set two likable young men on the road to terrorism. It was mainstream media at its best.

Update

Mathew Ingram has a different view. He believes Reddit, Twitter and other popular tools are capable of producing quality journalism, but not in the way we’ve traditionally defined it. Ingram believes that journalism is “atomizing” into component parts, and that the fact-checking and validation functions can be better handled by a crowd.

Related articles

• Inside Reddit’s Hunt for the Boston Bombers
• Reddit apologizes for ‘online witch hunt’ for Boston bombing suspect
• Reddit, Boston and the missing student
• Three things that Reddit did right during the Boston bombings and why that matters [GigaOM]
• Reddit apologizes for fueling ‘witch hunts’ after Boston blasts
• Media, old and new, takes heat for Boston coverage – Chicago Tribune

Traditional media took it on the chin in marketing plans researched by Aquent and the American Marketing Association (AMA). One in three marketers plans to decrease spending on newspaper advertising, making newspapers the big loser in the study. They were joined in the cellar by consumer magazines, radio, trade magazines and television, all of which were cited by more than 20% of respondents as targets of budget cuts. The winners? Mobile media, social media and marketing automation. More than three in four marketers plan to increase spending in those areas.

Perhaps marketers are simply reflecting the interests of the audiences they want to reach. Alan Mutter gathers some statistics that point to ominous demographic trends:

• Only 6% of people in their 20s and 16% of 40-year-olds regularly read newspapers, compared to 48% of people over 65.
• Only 29% of the U.S. population regularly read a newspaper in 2012, down from 56% in 1991.
• Three-quarters of the audience at the typical newspaper is 45 years of age or older. In comparison, over-45s comprise only 40% of the population.
• Print advertising still generates between 80% and 90% of revenues at the typical major metro daily.

Mutter asserts that newspaper publishers will never pull out of their tailspin unless they can create products that appeal to the new generation of digital natives who can’t be bothered to drag around paper, CDs or books. For them, the phone and the tablet are their windows on the world, and that will change industries ranging from news to travel to banking.

There are always ways to make statistics say what you want them to say, of course. More people read a newspaper than visited a social network in the past month, according to KPMG International. Traditional electronic channels fared even better: 88% of respondents to the survey said they’d watched TV in the previous month and 74% said they’d listened to the radio. That compares to just 57% who had tweeted or Facebooked. The survey measured habits of more than 9,000 people in nine countries. It did not ask how much time respondents spent with each media.

There’s some evidence that the novelty of Facebook is wearing off. A new Pew Research study finds that 28% of Facebook users say the site has become less important to them, and a third have cut back on the amount of time they spend on Facebook. Asked about their plans for allocating time to Facebook in the coming year, 38% of 18-to-29-year-olds said they’ll cut back, compared to only 1% who plan to spend more time.

And speaking of Pew, another recent study finds strong support for a bastion of the print world: libraries. More than half of Americans 16 or older visited a library during the past year, and of those who did, 26% plan to increase library usage during the next year while 22% plan to cut back. Asked if libraries should clear out some of their book stacks to make way for more technical resources, 36% said definitely not, compared to 20% who supported such a change. It would appear that while print may be on the decline, the role of the library as a community gathering place is still secure for now.

Miscellany

Writing in Scientific American blogs, Frank Swain tells of  a new initiative by the Royal Statistical Society’s BenchPress project to teach young journalists how to interpret statistics. The program sends volunteer working scientists into schools and newsrooms across Britain to help ensure that “journalists produce science news stories that are as robust and accurate as possible.” This seems like a great idea to us. Any yahoo with a SurveyMonkey account and a mailing list can field a survey these days, and publishing tools make the results look like they came from Gallup. Scientists complain of having to squeeze the conclusions of complex research studies into tweetable sound bites in order to get attention – and more funding. There’s so much bad research out there, and statistics isn’t a core part of the curriculum at many journalism schools. Maybe it should be.

The Washington Post has come up with a “Truth Teller” app that compares statements made by public officials and corporate spokespeople to databases of facts in near real time. The project, which was funded with a $50,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund, is said to be able to extract audio, convert it to text and then conduct searches based upon the content. We’re somewhat skeptical, given that our Google Voice app still converts all our voice-mail messages to Martian, but maybe the Post found better technology.

The video below tells more, and stresses that this is a prototype. The technology is ultimately intended to be used behind the scenes to help reporters more quickly scope out falsehoods. We see huge potential for politics and mischief with this technology. Imagine a CNN vs. Fox “Leaderboard of Lies” or a plug-in that tweets falsehoods in real time. That we would follow.

Related articles

• Majority Of U.S. Consumers Watch TV And Access The Internet At The Same Time: KPMG International Survey
• Newspapers still as popular as SocNets in the US according to @KPMG, by @MarketingCharts
• Majority Of U.S. Consumers Watch TV And Access The Internet At The Same Time: KPMG International Survey
• Marketing Survey Shows Continued Shift Towards Digital Media

Journalism traditionalists who suffer from high blood pressure probably shouldn’t read this piece by Forbes editor Lewis DVorkin. In it, he outlines the role of what he calls “brand journalism” in the evolution of Forbes.com, and even in Forbes magazine. He also scolds journalists for their objections to this increasingly popular concept, saying that their interest in keeping marketing content cordoned off from staff editorial is in part an instinct to minimize competition.

DVorkin has been a vocal critic of those who cling to the traditional Chinese wall principle of strict separation between advertising and editorial. In his view, the new economics of the profession demand radical new ideas, and journalists are standing in the way. “After five years of media turmoil, the profession I love clings to the belief…that the industry’s problems are for other people to solve. And when steps are taken to solve them, my colleagues will put up a fight if they can’t do exactly what they did before,” he wrote a couple of weeks ago in a summary of the changing advertising landscape and Forbes’ adaptation strategy.

Like it or not, DVorkin’s vision of increased integration between marketing and editorial content is gaining favor in traditional publishing circles. The trend is called “brand journalism,” “native advertising” or “content marketing,” but whatever the title, it’s breaking down some traditional walls.

Boston.com, which is the online arm of the Boston Globe, recently launched “Insights,” a sponsored advertising feature that showcases blog posts from advertisers. Boston.com is a little more aggressive about labeling Insights material as advertising than some other brand journalism practitioners, but it’s the same basic idea. The publisher appears to have no problem with participants like Business Intelligence Solutions embedding the banner ad at right on its blog, saying nothing about the sponsorship arrangement.

Some other publishers have all but erased the lines between staff and brand content. BuzzFeed, which is one of the new breed of breathless, celebrity-stuffed news sites for the ADD set, expects to derive nearly all of its revenue from branded content and sponsored posts. So far, things are going pretty well. The site was a magnet for political advertising during the US presidential campaign and is expected to triple revenues this year. Branded features, like this one from JetBlue, look the same as BuzzFeed content and carry only lightweight advertiser labeling. The Atlantic is also in the pool with Quartz, a news site that blends branded and staff-written content more or less seamlessly.

Writing on emedia, Rob O’Regan has a good summary of this trend, which has been fueled by Twitter’s sponsored tweets and Facebook’s sponsored stories. Those companies, which have no preconceptions about ad/edit separation, say these new vehicles are a resounding success. Publishers are taking notice, but a news site is not a social network. News organizations trade on credibility, and “native” ads tread into new territory. Recent research by Mediabrix and Harris Interactive found that  readers often feel confused or misled by branded content.

Compatible Content

The reason all this is happening, of course, is that the traditional print advertising model doesn’t work in the highly targeted online world. Display advertising is the fastest growing category of online advertising, and publishers have always known that display ads surrounded by compatible content perform best. Advertisers have traditionally bought space next to compatible content, but now they want to provide the content, too, because people are rejecting traditional messaging.

Businesses are quickly glomming onto this trend. Cisco relaunched its press room last year as a news stream, hiring laid-off journalists from major business publications to write thoughtful trend pieces. Intel is doing the same thing. Coca-Cola just overhauled its corporate site as a lifestyle news magazine under the “Coca-Cola Journey“ brand. Expect many others to follow.

Sponsored content is nothing new. Mobil Oil bought space on The New York Times‘s op-ed page in the 1950s. What’s different today is that a severely weakened mainstream media is willing to be more the creative than ever in placement and labeling – even if that means potentially compromising their own brands.

Is this a horrifying development? The journalism purest in us says yes, but we’re inclined to keep an open mind. Lewis DVorkin has a point when he says journalists live in a bubble.  Social media have shown that good information can come from anywhere, even from people who aren’t journalists. As media organizations have learned to their chagrin in recent years, you can’t shove anything you want down people’s throats when they have infinite choice. The same applies to advertisers.

Regardless of who the author is, anyone who publishes content is at the mercy of readers. Marketers who publish the same dreck on branded media sites that they use to fill their purchased ad units won’t see much return on their investment. If people don’t want the content, it doesn’t matter how much you pay to publish it.

So the stakes are higher for marketers, too. The question is how many of them can successfully change their perspective to think like publishers. In our experience, precious few can. The natural instincts of people who have grown up in the traditional marketing world is to sell at every opportunity, not to serve the informational needs of the audience.

This will change over time as a new generation steps in, and publishers will play a key role in effecting that change. They will need to work with their clients to make sure the sponsored content they carry is worthy of their brand. It can be done. Admit it: If you clicked on the JetBlue link above, you scrolled down the entire page. It’s good stuff, even though it’s sponsored.

The silver lining is that if “native advertising” can become a major new revenue source, it can enable publishers to re-invest in quality journalism. In the end, that’s more important than labels or Chinese walls.

Related articles

• Lewis D’Vorkin and j-students lively 90 min conversation about the future of journalism
• Inside Forbes ‘sustainable” model for journalism: It’s 4:30 pm
• Coca-ColaCompany.com Relaunches as Brand Journalism Site
• Inside Forbes: The Birth of Brand Journalism and Why It’s Good for the New Business
• Media Walls Crumble: Brands Benefit

• The newsonomics of native, indigenous, and immigrant content (niemanlab.org)

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, a fixture in the Big Easy since 1837, will slash its staff and production schedule, going from 7 to 3 days a week beginning this fall. The body count isn’t known yet, but estimates are that at least a third of the staff will be fired. Those who stay are expected to take pay cuts.

The Times-Picayune, which is owned by Newhouse Newspapers, is apparently taking a page from the Ann Arbor News, another Newhouse paper that cut its frequency to twice-weekly more than three years ago. The Detroit Media Partnership was the first to eliminate daily frequency in late 2008. Many smaller papers have since quietly cut money-losing Monday, Tuesday and Saturday editions.

The strategy is aimed at preserving the newspaper brand – and a viable business – by eliminating unprofitable editions. The newspaper will continue to be published on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, which are typically the three most profitable days of the week.

The New York Times‘ David Carr was the first to break the story in an item published just before midnight last night. Ricky Mathews, who will become president of the newly created NOLA Media Group, confirmed the news in a statement this morning that contained the usual sugar-coating. “NOLA Media Group will significantly increase its online news-gathering efforts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while offering enhanced printed newspapers on a schedule of three days a week,” he said. The only enhancements specified were to food and dining coverage.

All the spin-doctoring in the world doesn’t change the fact that New Orleans will soon become the second major U.S. city without a daily newspaper.

Publishers are struggling with strategies to preserve their brands while transitioning to a digital-mostly strategy, which typically requires between one-third and one-quarter the staff of a printed newspaper. U.S. newspaper revenues have plummeted to levels not seen since the Truman administration on an inflation-adjusted basis, and there’s no indication the trend is likely to turn around. The thinking in New Orleans is that frequency cutbacks can keep the brand in front of readers while enabling the cost reductions to take place and still preserving enough margin to invest in new digital products.

The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer prizes in 1997 and two more in 2006 for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Former staff members include William Faulkner and O. Henry.

Update: As noted in the comments, The Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and Huntsville Times will also reduce frequency to three days a week. They’ll become part of a “new digitally focused media company” called the Alabama Media Group. Read more on Al.com.

Marketplace Radio’s Kai Ryssdal interviews Chris Rose, who worked at the paper for 25 years and helped it win two Pulitzers for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

We were interviewed on Marketplace as part of its coverage of this story.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Near the end of the overview section of the Pew Research Center’s exhaustive study of the business issues facing American newspapers, one unnamed executive sums up the industry’s dilemma:  ”There might be a 90% chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10% chance you might find the new model. No one is willing to take that chance.”

That’s it in a nutshell. The newspaper industry is standing on a railroad _­trestle 100 feet above a rushing river while a locomotive bears down on it. The only thing worse than getting hit by the train is jumping out of the way. The study outlines in depressing detail how paralyzed the industry is in its search for new business models, although there are glimmers of hope in the successes of a few innovators.

Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism surveyed 38 US newspapers and conducted extensive on-site follow-up interviews to examine the industry’s search for new business models. The sample was representative of the composition of US newspapers as a whole, with a mix of geographies and a preponderance of smaller titles.

In general, small papers are faring better than the large ones, but all are facing the same specter off print advertising declines that far exceed growth of digital alternatives. In fact, researchers concluded that for every $1 gained in new digital revenue, newspapers are losing $7 of print revenue.

“There’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now,” said one executive.

No Names, Please

One of the project’s most frustrating characteristics is its anonymity. Researchers had to promise not to name names in order to get executives to let down their guard. The result is some memorable quotes but few actionable examples. We learn of one small paper that posted 63% growth in digital revenue in the last full year while also growing print sales 8%. Another major metro daily was said to have grown its digital business 50% in the last year. It would great if these outliers would come forth and tell everyone else how they did it, but we may never know their identities.

The Pew study is emphatic in identifying the industry’s core problems as more cultural than operational. “There’s a big difference between understanding the new media environment and comprehending what it takes to adapt,” says one executive.

Fifteen years after the arrival of the commercial Internet, the industry continues to rely on print advertising to an alarming degree and has made only halting progress in developing new revenue streams. That isn’t for lack of trying. Everyone is trying to find digitally savvy salespeople, most are paying premiums for online ad sales and all publishers are aware of the need to experiment with alternative revenue sources like daily deals and business services.

However, they’re mostly having meager results. Few papers studied in the report are taking advantage of the growth in targeted digital advertising. Most are still reliant upon low-margin display ads. Nearly half of the publications have experimented with alternative revenue streams like consulting services and digital shopping malls, but only one reported any significant revenue.

Culture Clash

Unfortunately, rapid sales declines in the profitable print business are creating a hair’s-on-fire hysteria that sabotages change. The kind of salespeople publishers need to hire don’t want to work in an industry that’s in crisis. The number of print-focused sales representatives outnumber digitally focused reps by about 3-1 at the newspapers surveyed and there continues to be debate at some companies about whether digital is event the future. That sounds incredible, but the study identifies entrenched resistance among many publishers to diverging from the business model that served them so well in the days of monopoly market share and 20% profit margins.

Officials at 10 of the 13 companies said their biggest challenge was the continuing tension between people in their organizations who are advocating a more aggressive digital approach and those more aligned with the legacy tradition. In essence, they described a conflict between going faster and going slower…”We haven’t needed innovative people,” explained one executive. “So you get what you need. The kind of people that came into this industry were more operationally focused, executors instead of innovator risk takers.”

The good news is that there is broad awareness at the highest levels of the companies surveyed that the industry’s problems aren’t going to heal themselves. In fact, no one quoted in the report suggests that the current downturn is temporary or cyclical. Where they differ is on what to do about it. “The data and interviews suggest companies are almost evenly divided between optimists and pessimists-evidence of a lack of consensus on how to proceed in developing the new business model,” the report says. Unfortunately, at a time like this the only certainty is that inaction is death.

If you’re the type of person who skips past the international section in the newspaper because it just isn’t relevant to you, maybe you should have a look at Latitude News.

The fledgling operation, which was launched in November, doesn’t look particularly different from any news site on the Web at first glance. The intriguing philosophy that underlies it, however, says a lot about how the Internet has crafted a global village.

Latitude News’ focus is mainly on international events, but it approaches them with an eye toward the U.S. audience. A piece on the recovering business climate in Poland is framed in terms of the reverse diaspora it has sparked among Poles in the U.S., who are now returning home in droves. It was one of the few outlets to report on Brazilian aerospace company Embraer’s entry into the U.S. market for what has historically been an American stronghold: corporate jets.

These kinds of stories might have run in any U.S. newspaper, but Latitude news founder Maria Balinska wants them to be a staple of a new service that takes a novel look at international events.

“There are lots of people in the U.S. for whom it’s not a stretch to go to the BBC or The Guardian,” she said in an interview. “What’s missing is a bridge between their experiences and what those outlets are reporting on.”

In other words, one of the reasons most Americans care so little about overseas news is that they see no relevance to their own lives. The mission of Latitude News is to find those threads and draw them out so that Americans can understand how international events affect them. “People are put off by things that seem very far away,” she said. “Our view is that if there isn’t a local angle, we shouldn’t do it.”

Globe Trotter

The idea for Latitude News sprang from Balinska’s multi-cultural childhood and peripatetic career as a journalist working in Europe. She had lived in five countries and attended 10 schools by the age of 18. As a journalist working on the European continent and for the BBC she became fascinated with the international stories that captured the attention of British readers. “People were very interested in individual storytelling and in comparisons,” she said. “They wanted to understand what they could learn from the French health system or what mountains of garbage in Germany meant to them.” She explains some of the research and thinking that led to Latitude News here.

Balinska returned to the U.S. on a Nieman Fellowship two years ago and took advantage of an International Women’s Media Foundation grant to get the venture off the ground. She’s been able to hire a small full-time staff and has some freelance dollars to spend. “We’re looking for people who have a global perspective but who can scratch the surface of American communities and find links and parallels,” she said.

Storytelling is a core feature of the service. In contrast to the often detached perspective readers see in international news coverage, Latitude News strives to find people whose experiences illustrate the local impact of faraway events.

For example, the staff is currently trying to reach victims of the Syrian diaspora who have fled to the U.S. to see if activists living here may later emerge as leaders back in Syria. A story on the Greek debt crisis  is told from the perspective of three Greek citizens who are learning to cope with an economy in a tailspin.

Balinska won’t say how much funding the venture has raised or when it will become self-sustaining. The site is still rough around the edges (clicking on one of the featured stories on the home page today returned a 404 error) and working on a unique voice, but it’s yet another example of how journalists are stepping in to fill the vacuum left by traditional news organizations with innovative experiments.

Tablet computers have been hailed as the salvation of the newspaper industry, but most publishers are squandering the opportunity, writes Newsosaur Alan Mutter in a searing sendup of newspaper tablet apps on Editor & Publisher.

“In contrast to the crisp, graphically engaging and highly interactive apps flooding the Apple store, the typical newspaper site is filled with gray, meandering columns of text requiring multiple swipes to get to the bottom of the page. That is to say: Newspapers don’t come close to leveraging the power of this new medium,” Mutter writes, pointing to products from the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and even The New York Times as examples.

Many publishers are opting to use the native tablet browser to deliver content rather than customizing the experience for the device, and some are simply delivering PDF versions of their print products, Mutter says. This laziness is particularly alarming in light of the fact that people who consume information on tablets are among the most desirable prospects for paid circulation and advertising. The Newsosaur believes once they get a load of the visually rich and interactive offerings from magazine and broadcast competitors they’ll never come back to the digital broadsheets being offered by the dailies.

Although we own a tablet, we’ll admit we haven’t spent much time surveying the landscape of news apps. RSS feeds do the job just fine for us. However, if Mutter’s critique is on the mark, this is a head-slappingly stupid mistake on the part of publishers, who finally have a platform that at least some people are willing to pay for. Anyone who has worked in both print and digital media will tell you that the design and presentation skills that work in one format fail badly in the other. The worst mistake a print publisher can make is to put print designers in charge of online look and feel. It’s even worse on tablets, where apps offer a whole new level of interactivity. This is software, not ink on dead trees.

NYT Co. Takes Earnings Hit

Now the sobering news about The New York Times. Coming off a promising third quarter in which the company reported strong growth in subscriptions to its digital editions, parent New York Times Co. reported a $40 million loss in the fourth quarter on an 8% decline in print advertising. The paper’s paywall continues to thrive, and digital advertising revenue was up 5% in the quarter. However, the success online can’t make up for the continued free-fall in the much more profitable print advertising business.

The collapse of that revenue stream was dramatized by blogger Paul McMorrow, who came up with the chart at right. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, but the choice of scale demonstrates clearly the industry’s dilemma. Digital revenue is nowhere close to making up for the decline in print.

The Times Co. was also hurt by a dramatic drop in the performance of About.com, the online encyclopedia/how-to engine it acquired for $410 million 2005. About.com was victimized by recent changes to Google’s search algorithms that penalized so-called “content farms” like Demand Media, which pay freelancers pennies to produce crap in the name of driving search traffic. About.com used to top Google search results for a lot of popular consumer queries, but no more. Profits at the site dropped 67% in the quarter on a 25% revenue decline.

 Miscellany

Social media is beginning to cover itself. Social blogging site Tumblr, which hosts more than 42 million blogs, will hire two professional editors to write about what’s going on on Tumblr. The thinking is that a community with that many members must generate a lot of content all by itself. Twitter and Facebook have both recently hired journalists to write about what’s hot in those communities.

Speaking of Facebook, if you’re trying to improve your presence there, take a few tips from Entrepreneur magazine. Starr Hall’s advice includes naming your page appropriately and greeting visitors with a “welcome” page rather than the Facebook wall. And have you heard about the new subscribe feature that lets people follow your public updates without friending you? Read more about that. We also recommend these tips for small businesses and these tips for slightly larger businesses, perhaps because we wrote them. The key to success on the world’s largest social network is engagement, not publishing. Ask questions, prompt response, provoke and amuse. Our vote for the most awesome Facebook page: Skittles. Unique voice and dripping with personality. “Skittles now has 20 million fans? If I had that many guinea pigs, I’d be unstoppable.”

this release is republished verbatim from eMarketer. More here.

US online advertising spending, which grew 23% to $32.03 billion in 2011, is expected to grow an additional 23.3% to $39.5 billion this year-pushing it ahead of total spending on print newspapers and magazines, according to eMarketer. Print advertising spending is expected to fall to $33.8 billion in 2012 from $36 billion in 2011.

Online Growing Even Faster Than Expected: eMarketer’s previous US online advertising forecast from July 2011 was among the more bullish estimates issued during the year-forecasting 20.2% growth to $31.1 billion in 2011-yet consistently stronger-than-expected results from major industry players and the IAB/PwC benchmark through the first three quarters of 2011 contributed to the upward revision.

Total Ad Spending is Growing Too: Despite concerns about the troubled economy among agencies and marketers, total ad spending in the US is expected to rebound in 2012 after rising 3.4% to $158.9 billion in 2011, according to eMarketer. US total media ad spending will grow an estimated 6.7% to $169.48 in 2012, boosted by the national elections and summer Olympics in London, eMarketer estimates.

TV is Steadily Up: Spending on TV advertising grew 2.8% in 2011 to $60.7 billion, eMarketer estimates. This year, TV ad spending will grow an estimated 6.8% to $64.8 billion-driven the Olympics and election-while remaining resilient from worries about the soft economy.

Digital remains the sole bright spot for newspapers and magazines: eMarketer estimates US digital newspaper ad revenues grew 8.3% to $3.3 billion in 2011. Print advertising revenues at newspapers fell 9.3% to $20.7 billion in 2011. At magazines, US print ad revenues are expected to rise 0.5% to $15.34 billion in 2012, up from $15.3 billion last year. US digital advertising spending at magazines grew 18.8% to $2.7 billion in 2011.

We’ve posted several positive items about the local Patch operation in our community, a one-person news bureau that has become our favorite – and most timely – source of information about local events. So we feel it’s also important to share the news that AOL’s Patch operation, a constellation of more than 800 hyperlocal news sites, looks like a train wreck.

Business Inside says Patch has generated only about $8 million in revenue in 2011 on an investment of more than $160 million. InvestorPlace says revenues were closer to $20 million, but that Patch still lost $150 million on the year. Some investors are calling for the head of Tim Armstrong (right) the former Google executive who took the helm at AOL nearly three years ago. Armstrong conceived of Patch in 2007 and funded the first two years of its operations before assuming the top job at AOL in 2009 and buying Patch outright. Since then he’s embarked upon an aggressive expansion program to place hyperlocal news bureaus in as many US locations as possible. He’s also spent lavishly on the acquisitions of Huffington Post and TechCrunch. At this point, critics are calling the strategy a bust.

The problem with Patch is that the hyperlocal revenue model doesn’t work nearly as well as the hyperlocal news model. According to Business Inside, Patch sells advertising through a network of mostly outsourced telesales representatives. It’s clear that these sales people don’t have their tentacles into the local communities that are the core of Patch’s model. The advertising on our own local outlet is mostly a mix of display ads from big national brands (presumably sold at remainder prices), Google AdSense and a smattering of classifieds. With that kind of revenue base, it’s not surprising Patch is losing a fortune.

As we’ve argued before, the hyperlocal model needs to work from both the content and revenue perspectives. Patch has clearly succeeded in hiring editors who are closely tied in to their communities, but it isn’t doing that on the sales side. This is a tough problem to solve. Small businesses aren’t big advertisers to begin with, and the cost of deploying dedicated sales reps to 800 local communities would be far higher than the centralized telesales model. On the other hand, the centralized model isn’t exactly killing it.

We hope Patch figures it out, because it’s inventing some creative new ways to report the news. We continue to like the business model of Sacramento Press, which positions itself as an integrated marketing partner rather than an advertising outlet. Addiction to advertising revenue is one of the reasons newspapers are in so much trouble in the first place. In its current iteration, Patch appears to be making the same mistakes.

Miscellany

As if reporters don’t like to gripe enough, there’s a new website where they can do it anonymously in public. It’s called Dash30Dash.org, and it was started by a former newspaper reporter who wants “to give reporters, editors and others a chance to post comments about their jobs and their ever-changing profession.” So far, it looks like the commentaries are mostly limited to contributions from the site’s creator, but it’s still early. The writing is lively and pointed, so check it out.

An Australian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur has pledged more than $15 million to fund a new, nonprofit media venture called The Global Mail. Graeme Wood says he has only one goal in mind: “produce public-interest journalism.”

Wood, whose personal fortune is estimated at $337 million, was apparently taken with the example of ProPublica in the U.S. That nonprofit investigative venture was also started with a large grant from a single donor but has been successfully diversifying its support base and now employs 34 editorial staff members. Wood’s commitment to support The Global Mail for at least five years resulted from a dinner party conversation with former Australian Broadcast Corp. journalist Monica Attard, who is now the site’s editor-in-chief. That’s pretty good sales efficiency in our book.