Gannett CEO Craig Dubow (right)  resigned last week for health reasons, saying that back and hip problems prevent him for fulfilling his duties. He leaves a job that could pay him as much as $9.4 million this year, but don’t feel too bad for Dubow: He’s eligible for severance pay of up to $37 million.

The irony of this kind of executive compensation for a company that has laid off nearly 40% of its workforce over the last six years isn’t lost on former New York Times columnist Peter Lewis, who posts a savage send-up of Gannett’s extravagance on his blog. Lewis is particularly brutal in contrasting Dubow’s performance to that of Steve Jobs, who died last week:

Annual base pay: Steve Jobs $1. Craig Dubow $1.2 million.

Stock price during CEO tenure: Apple, up 4,000+ percent. Gannett, down 85 percent.

Job creation during CEO tenure: Apple, plus 28,000. Gannett: minus 20,000.

Notable new products as CEO of Apple: Macintosh, iMac, MacBook, iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores, iPhone, iPad, etc., etc.

Notable new products as CEO of Gannett: ?

Executive pay has been out of control at US companies for decades now, but the practice is particularly offensive at companies in dying industries that are downsizing their way out of existence. Is it conceivable that a talented and motivated executive could be found to lead Gannett at a salary of less than $9 million? How does a company look its employees in the eye and ask them to accept yet another layoff or salary freeze when it nearly doubled the salary of the head of its US newspaper division?

We might just go occupy Wall Street over this.

Open Source Journalism

Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis dig into the application of open source software principles to journalism and find some parallels. “The news industry is one of the last great industrial hold-overs, akin to the car industry,” they write. “Newsrooms are top-heavy, and built on a factory-based model of production.” In contrast open source software and the so-called “maker” culture exemplified by Make magazine encourage collaboration, sharing and continuous experimentation.

Rethinking journalism requires time and open-mindedness that a lot of journalists might not have, but the power of the open source model can’t be denied. Usher and Lewis imagine a new role for journalists as creators of “the building blocks for the story. And while they write this code, it can be commented on, shared, fact-checked, or augmented with additional information such as photos, tweets, and the like.” Seems to work OK for Wikipedia. The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is working on ways to make this model viable. We hope they succeed.

Quality at 5¢ a Word

Demand Media, whose mission is to erase the distinction between journalism and typing, says it doesn’t need freelancers so much any more.  That’s because Google changed its search algorithm, and that means Demand’s editorial mission has shifted.

In case you’re not familiar, Demand Media employs freelance writers to churn out search-optimized content for posting on enormously popular websites like Cracked.com, LiveStrong.com and eHow.com. The company assigns stories based upon search popularity, meaning that it favors how-to and top-10 formats. A perfect Demand story would be “10 Ways to Remove Coffee Stains.”

Demand is noted for paying freelancers next to nothing while touting the benefits of brand-building and flexibility. “No matter where you end up, you have the potential to influence millions of people with your articles,” says its Writing Jobs page. Writers can make up to $25 an article, or even more! With so many journalists out of work, Demand has succeeded in a recruiting a large pool of contributors, despite its starvation wages.

But apparently not so much now. Google is on a campaign to remove the stuff that these content farms churn out, so the company is shifting to slide shows and videos. Demand says it has eliminated 300,000 low-quality articles from eHow and is focusing on going upscale. “It’s all about quality for us,” said Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford. At a nickel a word.

It’s Not a Paywall, It’s…

Paywalls continue to sprout like crabgrass, but publishers are beginning to show some creative thinking. The Day of New London, Conn. will now charge between $9.99 and $22.99 per month for access to its online content, archives and mobile versions, but subscribers will also become part of a brand loyalty program called The Day Passport, “which features rewards, events and giveaways to local businesses, entertainment venues and cultural institutions.” We were pushing this idea two years ago. Publishers need to expand their revenue base beyond advertising and subscription fees. Affinity programs for local businesses are a natural extension.

We also like what the Richmond Times-Dispatch is doing: Instead of firewalling its content, it’s creating premium content packages such as this one on the Civil War sesquicentennial. The Civil War feature combines historic pages from the newspaper archive with original new material. Pricing begins at $1.99/month, though it’s not clear what other premium packages are planned. We like the concept the concept of charging for added value, and we’re particularly glad to have the chance to use the word “sesquicentennial” in a sentence.

The post below was submitted to us by Scott Talkov, Editor-in-Chief of ThingsToDoInlandEmpire.com, a guide to entertainment, events and discounts in southern California. If you want to see an impressive example of what people can do with a free copy of WordPress and free Facebook and Twitter accounts, check out this site. 

The claims and statistics cited in this article are the author’s, and we don’t vouch for their validity. 

The local blog ThingsToDoInlandEmpire.com, focusing on arts, entertainment and events in southern California, recently surpassed well-established print media outlets in Riverside and San Bernardino on several well-known metrics.

The site now averages twice the traffic of the region’s most widely distributed weekly print publication and four times the traffic of the region’s most widely distributed monthly magazine, both of which cover the same arts and entertainment focus, According to third party traffic verification firm Quantcast. Those estimates are mirroredby well-known Internet ratings website Alexa.com.

The website also counts more Facebook likes than the region’s largest weekly or monthly print publications, as well as one of the region’s largest daily publications.

The site began with an idea from Adina Hemley, a non-profit director in the Inland Empire. “My fiance and I would search the Internet for fun events every weekend, and then it occurred to me, ‘I know I’m not the only looking for things to do in the Inland Empire,’” said Hemley.

Scott Talkov, a 30-year-old lawyer in Riverside and self-described techie, started the website with Hemley in early 2011 to aggregate their research on the hottest places to go in the Inland Empire. Since then, traffic has doubled every three months.

By working together with more than 20 authors, the site collects data and perspectives from dozens of cities throughout the inland Southern California region known as the Inland Empire. The region counts over four-million people and witnessed the fastest growth over the past decade among the nation’s top 25 metropolitan areas.

“While the economy and print media may be down, people are still having fun, they’re just turning to new sources to find out what to do,” said Kris Daams, a former newspaper reporter and author on the site.

Talkov says new technologies allow information to collected and distributed instantly at essentially no cost. The website is based on WordPress and communicates with followers through the social media tools Facebook and Twitter, all of which are free.

When asked what drives this site, author Nate Hutchinson insisted “We want to continue to prove people wrong who claim there is nothing to do in the Inland Empire.”

M.E. Sprengelmeyer with the first issue of the Guadalupe County Communicator

It was a man-bites-dog story.

Young newspaper reporters have typically dreamed of working their way up from a small-town weekly to a big-city daily. The title of Washington bureau chief or foreign correspondent was the pinnacle of success.

Michael “M.E.” Sprengelmeyer had those dreams as early as age seven, when he decided he wanted to be a reporter. But something in the back of his mind drew him toward the small-town roots where he and thousands of other young journalists got their start.

Sprengelmeyer got to the summit, becoming a national reporter and foreign correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News. When the Rocky abruptly shut down nearly three years ago, he went searching for his childhood dream: To run a community weekly.

Strange Quest

It seemed a strange quest for a reporter who had been near the top of his profession, but Sprengelmeyer had caught the community itch at a young age. “At 17 I saw a movie called Milagro Beanfield War,” he said. “There was a character who ran a small newspaper and I always wanted to see what a newspaper could be if I ran it.”

Sprengelmeyer’s career had been anything but small town to that point. A graduate of the prestigious Northwestern Univerity journalism program, he had worked at a variety of small- and medium-sized papers before landing at the Rocky in 1999, a month before the Columbine shootings. His career advanced quickly. Within two years he was sent to the paper’s Washington bureau, where he arrived just before the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon. That job morphed into a military beat, overseas assignments and a coveted job as a presidential campaign reporter.

But even as he was setting up the Des Moines, Iowa bureau for the Rocky to cover the 2008 presidential race, he kept searching for the opportunity to take over a small-town weekly. When the 149-year-old Rocky suddenly went up for sale in 2009, he was as surprised as anyone. But instead of wringing his hands, he stepped up his small-town search. “I was hunting for newspapers to buy within a week,” of the Rocky’s closure, he says.

When the paper shut down, he hit the road, eventually landing in the beautiful but impoverished community of Santa Rosa, N.M., on the staked plains where the Pecos River crosses historic Route 66.

The local Guadalupe County Communicator served up the usual local fare of local government meetings. The paper had a circulation of less than 2,000, but Sprengelmeyer saw potential. Despite its economic distress, Santa Rosa has a disproportionately large base of businesses on Rte. 66. Sprengelmeyer negotiated the purchase, leaving him with just $1,700 in the bank. He told the story of his quest on the blog of former Rocky publisher John Temple.

Changing the Model

Like many local weeklies, the Communicator served up coverage of local government meetings and photos of winning high-school football teams, but Sprengelmeyer wanted to take it to another level. “I kind of had a chip on my shoulder about the closure of the Rocky and I wanted to send a message about what a newspaper could be,” he says.

His first move was to shut down the paper’s website. “Community newspapers have a captive geography. As long as you can keep everyone within 10 miles reading your piece of paper, you can deliver value for your advertisers,” he says. “The Web gets people from all over the world, but you can’t tell an advertiser they’re going to walk in and buy avocados at his variety store.”

He then started investing. He hired a veteran daily photographer on a freelance basis, contracted with local stringers and engaged professional cartoonist Drew Litton. The first issue of the Communicator under Sprengelmeyer’s hand featured a giant photo from the county fair and the first editorial cartoon the paper had ever run. It was a shock to locals, but also a signal that the paper had turned a corner.

You can’t easily find high-resolution images of the Communicator online, but you can get a sense of the layout, story selection and headlines from thumbnails in the paper’s Facebook album. The look-and-feel is big-city all the way, with a clear emphasis on local government, citizen advocacy and people-oriented features. The headlines and story selection are cut from the major metro mold.

Pleasant Surprise

“The reaction has been incredible,” says Sprengelmeyer. While some residents miss the point-and-shoot photos of Little Leaguers on page one, most have responded positively to the tougher coverage of town government, crime and local regulations. The Communicator won seven state journalism awards its first year. Sprengelmeyer’s unusual odyssey has landed profiles in The New York Times, CNN and other national media outlets.

Scrutiny of local officials has ruffled a few feathers, but the newcomer says his outsider status and commitment to fairness has kept the pushback to a minimum. “You smooth out the feathers when you write an accurate, fair story,“ he says. And the Little League photos still run in the Communicator, but no longer on page one.

More importantly, circulation has grown to more than 2,000, or nearly equal to the population of Santa Rosa. Its Facebook page, which was started by a local enthusiast and is now maintained as a joint effort, has been liked more than 1,100 times. Circulation growth has been largest among native Santa Rosans who now live elsewhere. “I’m real proud of that, because we’re a town in economic trouble, where kids grow up, go off to college and settle elsewhere” says Sprengelmeyer. “Now they’re re-connecting with their community.”

Advertising business has grown steadily, if not spectacularly. The publisher’s philosophy is to invest most of the profits back into the property. “When you start cutting expenses to match revenue, you’re on a backwards slide,” he says. A small staff handles advertising sales.

And each week, the new Communicator becomes more embedded in the community. Sprengelmeyer still works seven days a week, but the hourly load has gradually declined. “I’m not banking a lot, but each edition pays for itself and I have enough left to pay my rent and fix my car,” he says.

“I won’t become a millionaire, but that wasn’t the point. The first year was about surviving. The second year was about expanding. The coming year will be fun. This started as a fancy way to spend my life savings in six months, only we’ve gone on for two years. It’s the best thing I’ve done and it’s still left me excited about what we can do next.”

To subscribe to the Communicator, e-mail your info to comsilvercom@plateautel.net and cc: ersthap@hotmail.com. Order a full year’s subscription and send a check for $30 (U.S. delivery only) to The Communicator, P.O. Box 403, Santa Rosa, NM 88435.

Update 10/29/11: The Communicator won 26 awards and “Best of Show” among small weekly newspapers in the 2011 New Mexico Press Association/Associated Press Managing Editors’ awards.

USC journalism professor Judy Muller goes back to her roots in small-town weeklies and writes an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that concludes that “there are thousands of newspapers that are not just surviving but thriving.” Muller points out some of the unique challenges of publishing in a small community, such as having to unmask wrongdoing by the town councilor who may be your brother-in-law. She also made us laugh with this example of a typical item on the local police blotter: “Man calls to report wife went missing 3 months ago.”

It’s a fun and inspiring read, and would be even better if it were true, but Muller makes an essential journalism error in not providing any factual evidence to support her “thriving” claim. In fact, weekly local newspapers have been taking it in the neck for years. We long ago stopped tracking news of local newsweekly closures because the volume was overwhelming. Back in 2009, Journal Register Co. closed scores of weekly holdings in one fell swoop, and Gannett and others have followed. Weeklies were some of the hardest-hit properties in Media News’ recent consolidation. Reports of other weekly shutdowns hit our Google Reader every couple of weeks. We’re frequently asked how many local weeklies have closed but we know of no one – not even the amazing Erica Smith – who keeps count.

Which isn’t to take anything away from the many dedicated journalists who put up with long hours and low wages to publish the thousands of small-town weeklies that still survive. Local publishing has never been a lucrative business to begin with, and the pressure is only getting worse as low-overhead online operations like Patch – not to mention bloggers and independent Web publishers – nibble away at their local advertising base. We admire the dedication of these publishers and are inspired by stories like that of M.E. Sprengelmeyer, a daily journalist who found fulfillment running a 2,000-circulation weekly in Santa Rosa, N.M. after losing his job in the Rocky Mountain News closure in 2009 (see video). Muller celebrates Sprengelmeyer in her op-ed, but also uses a word we hear a lot when discussing this topic: “exhausted.”

Small-town weekly publishing is a lot of things: rewarding, fulfilling, responsible, important and endangered. There’s one thing that it clearly isn’t, though: thriving.

Boston Globe Splits Web Presence

The Boston Globe has come up with a novel twist on the paywall concept: It’s launching a paid portal that “offers an innovative, inviting reading experience that is the only gateway to all of the Globe’s journalism.” BostonGlobe.com is the new online companion to the 139-year-old daily that provides the full contents of the print edition as well as bonus features. It will be free through the end of this month and $3.99/mo. thereafter. Home delivery subscribers get access for free. The website will be formatted for reading on a variety of desktop and mobile devices, although few details were provided.

Boston.com, the regional site that the Globe launched in partnership with several local media outlets in 1995, will remain free. It will focus on daily sports coverage, online features and lifestyle information, and also include five stories from the daily print edition and summaries of other content that can be read in full on BostonGlobe.com.

In positioning the bifurcated strategy, Globe Editor Martin Baron described Boston.com as a site for the common man with BostonGlobe.com as its more erudite sibling. “BostonGlobe.com is essentially purely journalistic, and Boston.com is more of a town square where you get news and information, but you can also buy tickets to events and exchange information and opinions with your neighbors,’’ he said. Boston.com will continue to be advertising-supported.

The Globe was actually an early innovator in hyperlocal journalism. When Boston.com was launched as a partnership between the Globe and several local print and broadcast outlets, it broke the then-emerging newspaper mold by focusing on regional coverage rather than delivering an electronic version of the print product. However, as partners dropped out of the venture over time, Boston.com increasingly became the online face of the Globe, eventually getting to the point that articles about Israel and Japan routinely led the home page. With the new strategy, the Globe appears to be returning Boston.com to its roots.

Miscellany

If you’re still on the fence about buying a tablet computer (we took the plunge last month and are enjoying the experience), you can get one at a really good price if you also buy a subscription to two Philadelphia newspapers and a website. The Philadelphia Media Network, which publishes the Inquirer, the Daily News and Philly.com, has teamed up with three local sponsors and the French electronics company Archos to sell Archos’ Arnova 10 G2 Android tablets preloaded with gobs of Philadelphia news for $285. The advertised price of the tablets themselves is as low as $99, or about half what they cost on eBay. The catch is that you have to buy a subscription to three news apps as part of the deal. We suppose there are enough Philadelphians, who can never get enough Eagles coverage, to sell out the 5,000 units being offered on Phillytablet.com.

We were contacted by the Washington-based International Center for Journalists last week about our opinions on the future of the newspaper industry. They published a nice Q&A which starts below and continues on their website.

Since 2007, veteran technology journalist Paul Gillin has been tracking the demise of newspapers and highlighting the ones that thrive on a website called Newspaper Death Watch.

In just the last month, Gillin’s site reported on the demise of the Bay Area News Group, which consolidated 11 newspapers into two surviving publications, costing about 120 people their jobs. These are just a few casualties among many as the print industry learns to adapt in the digital age.

IJNet spoke with Gillin about the current woes of print publications, evolving business models and whether the lives of newspapers are at stake.

IJNet: What kind of newspapers have been failing?

Paul Gillin: Regional newspapers, especially those with less than daily frequency, have been taking the hardest hit. Hundreds of weeklies have failed over the last three years; no one to my knowledge has an accurate count.

Read the rest of the interview on the International Center for Journalists website

When Tropical Storm Irene plowed into the New England coastline a week ago, Susan Petroni (right) was ready. Armed with a computer and a cell phone, she set out to mobilize the citizens of the largest town in the U.S. to help her cover the story.

Petroni live-blogged throughout the storm, encouraging her readers at Framingham.Patch.com to be her eyes and ears. Readers snapped cell-phone phones and e-mailed them to Petroni to post on the Patch site. Locals flocked to the Framingham Patch page on Facebook to update each other on power outages and roads blocked by fallen trees. Petroni stayed on the phone with town officials to update her audience on disaster preparedness warnings and clean-up plans. For residents who had lost power, the Framingham Patch Twitter feed kept updates coming to cell phones.

In the days that followed, Susan Petroni’s online outposts became rallying points for citizens trying to find out when power would be restored or whether the opening of the school year would be delayed. Much of this information came not from her but from each other. Facebook was a quicker way to find out where the lights were coming on than the overwhelmed officials at the local utility.

The same scene played out at dozens of Patch sites up and down the east coast, demonstrating the power and agility of a new type of media we might call “curated citizen journalism.” It’s a model that relies upon the news judgment of professionals like Susan Petroni, who is an accomplished and award-winning journalst, and the contributions of concerned citizens who want to be part of the action.

Like many online journalists, Petroni left the daily newspaper grind for Patch in order to gain scheduling flexibility and spend more time with her young daughter. She posts five to seven stories on a typical weekday and a couple on Saturdays and Sundays. Like any good Metro reporter, she covers the important local government meetings and any news that would be likely to make the regional newspaper. However, most of her posts are short and few are earth-shaking.

A typical Patch story might update residents on how long traffic will be disrupted by a sewer renovation program or tell how school bus routes are being changed. A weekly police log update tells where crime was a problem in the last week. Not Pulitzer Prize-winning stuff, but these are the stories that matter to the daily lives of the people who live nearby.

Curated Citizen Journalism

Patch encourages citizens to contribute to the effort without mixing their contributions with those of the single professional editor and assortment of freelancers who make up the core of the typical Patch site. Bloggers from the community get their own digital sandboxes, and comments are clearly distinguished from reported stories. People are free to post news reports to Facebook or the forums, but news only makes the main news feed after it’s been vetted by a pro.

Patch disclaims reports from the community, but also encourages them like crazy. There has been little problem with error or abuse, says Danielle Horn, Associate Regional Editor for Patch Metrowest Boston. The key is to know when it’s appropriate to turn over the reporting job to the citizens and when a pro needs to step in.

“If someone says the power is out on their street, then the power is probably out,” Horn says. “We haven’t run into any situations where people have posted news that is clearly incorrect. [Community newsgathering] is working out great.”

Patch has a thin staffing model, with typically one full-time editor anchoring each region. “Each editor knows his or her community like the back of their hand,” says Horn. The meat and potatoes of a Patch site is the little details that matter in residents’ everyday lives: library programs, school sports and street closings. “We want to be a resource for information that can enhance people’s daily lives,” Horn says.

Addicted

We’ve developed a mild addiction to our local Patch site, and we even contributed some photos to the recent storm coverage. Why? Because we were asked. As our photos began to show up on the gallery, we found ourselves mildly intoxicated by participating in storm coverage. We were also gratified to get a thank-you note from Petroni herself. At the nearby Boston Globe, e-mails to editors generally disappear into a black hole, and phone calls are rarely returned.

Patch, which now boasts more than 850 hyperlocal sites nationwide, has been criticized for maintaining a sweatshop atmosphere and for paying its editors meager wages. In our brief conversation with Petroni (corporate policy dictated our interview request be directed to a regional editor), she said the flexible working conditions were one of the best parts of the job. Horn noted that while Patch editors are expected to produce content seven days a week, they have considerable latitude in how they do it.

Essential Truths

The jury is still out on whether Patch will succeed, but we believe the experiment is already proving some essential new truths:

The Internet rewrites the economics of news. Our town could never support a daily newspaper, but it can pay the salary of a single editor with no overhead other than a PC and a couple of cameras. Thanks to thousands of layoffs at newspapers nationwide, quality journalists can be found who will work for modest salaries in exchange for workplace flexibility.

Hyperlocal is instinctively appealing. We long ago stopped reading our regional newspaper because so little of its coverage related to our local community. In contrast, the daily Patch e-mail is packed with news that impacts our daily lives, mundane as some of those issues may be.

Empowerment is intoxicating. Patch is drawing lines that enable the community to participate in newsgathering while keeping a firm editorial hand on the tiller. As we waited for Internet service to return following the storm, we monitored the Patch Facebook page from the local library and found it to be a more timely source of information than the statements of utility officials.

In our town, and in hundreds of towns like it, Patch is filling a gap left by the collapse of traditional media. The question is whether its business model is sustainable, and a lot of people think it isn’t. We hope AOL will stick with this venture and innovate beyond the traditional advertising-funded model. Even if the Patch business fails, it has laid a foundation upon which others can build.

MediaNews Group, which has been on the ropes financially as it struggles with debt, will take drastic action in its Bay Area stronghold, consolidating 11 local newspapers in the East Bay into two regional newspapers and laying off 120 people, or 8% of its staff. About 40 editors and 80 production people are expected to be let go.

Beginning on November 2, the Oakland Tribune, Alameda Times-Star, Daily Review, The Argus and the West County Times will be consolidated under the name East Bay Tribune.

Six other titles – the Contra Costa Times, Valley Times, San Ramon Valley Times, Tri-Valley Herald, San Joaquin Herald and East County Times will be rebranded as simply the Times. The San Mateo County Times will be merged into the San Jose Mercury News. The Bay Area News Group, which is a subsidiary of MediaNews, will also start two weekly newspapers.

The most visible casualty of the cost-cutting move is the Oakland Tribune, a daily that has been published since 1874. The most recent circulation figures we could find listed its daily circulation at nearly 93,000 in 2009. It has been the only daily newspaper in Oakland since 1950. The Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1950 and 1989. The other major daily title to be closed is the Contra Costa Times, which was founded in 1947. It has a daily circulation of 168,000.

While the move might appear to be counter to the trend toward hyper local news coverage, MediaNews is maintaining some exclusive local content. All newspapers will have a standalone local news section daily.

The company’s press release puts a predictably cheery front on the news. The result of all the closures and layoffs will be “greater emphasis on providing high-impact, regional and local coverage.”

In contrast, the editor of the Oakland Tribune told Columbia Journalism Review, “We’ve already gotten pretty lean. It’s impossible to expect us to be doing all that we did before.”

Ken Doctor has a poignant and thoughtful obituary on Nieman Journalism Lab. He brings home the impact of a business decision on the community residents who had relied on their local newspapers for years to represent their interests.

More coverage on KQED.

The Helena (Mont.) Independent Record just introduced a subscription plan for digital customers. Here’s how the paper describes it:

We will not be charging to view the following content online: the front page, classifieds, all advertisements and advertising promotions, special sections, auctions, community calendar or customer service pages.

Webpages that will be charging for viewership – after 15 free views per month – are local, state, national and world news pages; local and regional sports; news accessed by Facebook and Twitter; opinion pages; obituaries; entertainment (except AP wire); health, outdoors, weddings, anniversaries; births, lottery; weather; archives; comments; photo galleries and videos.

A monthly online subscription is $4.99; if you have a print subscription, your online subscription is only $1.99 per month. An annual online subscription is $49.99 per year; or if you have a print subscription, it is only $19.99.

Got all that? Better keep a pen and paper handy, because once you get to those 15 views, get out the credit card. That is, unless you’re reading the front page or a “special section,” whatever that is. And forget about the kind of free pass from Twitter that The New York Times gives you. Social media referrals count toward the 15-ppm limit.

In Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser has joined the paywall parade. Here’s how PaidContent.org described its plan:

Existing print subscribers get free digital access. Non-print subscribers can either sign up for an “all-access” package for $19.95 per month, which includes digital access and a print subscription for one person, or purchase a digital-only subscription—the price of which varies based on location.  Oahu residents pay $9.99 per month or $50 per year; other Hawaii residents pay $4.95 per month or $25 per year, and those outside the state of Hawaii pay $1.95 per month or $10 per year. The site is also offering a $0.99 day pass, primarily aimed at tourists and former tourists who are interested in specific events.

Clear enough? If you really want to know what’s going on in Hawaii, you’re best off moving out of state. God forbid you’re unlucky enough to live in the newspaper’s home city.

One more example, from the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle:

Digital-only subscribers get unfettered access to our site for $6.95 per month. This subscription fee will include the iPad app as well. Current print subscribers pay a reduced rate of only $2.95 to add these services…Passers-by and casual readers still will have access to breaking news, video, photos and blogs. We also will allow all users access to 25 premium pages monthly as a sample.

With 46% of small newspapers already charging for some online content, and another 39% planning to do so, the online news world will soon be pockmarked with digital toll booths, each charging different fees. Even the major metros can’t agree on a plan. PaidContent.org assembled a comparison chart of what the big papers are doing earlier this year. If you can find any patterns there, let us  know.

We’re not saying variety is a bad thing – lots of businesses compete on price – but when the product is already perceived as a commodity, then confusion tends to drive customers away. Small publishers evidently don’t see it that way, given the large number that are settling in the paywall camp these days. But are they growing their businesses or just trying to protect what’s left of them?

Mathew Ingram said it well in a recent piece in BusinessWeek:

The biggest flaw in a paywall isn’t that the math is questionable, or even that a wall is inherently a backward-facing strategy, aimed at stacking sandbags around a paper’s content…The biggest flaw…is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors…to come and take away your readers.

One of the major reasons the newspaper industry is in such dire straits right now is because barrriers to entry have collapsed. Paywalls are an invitation to competitors to take away all but the most loyal (i.e., oldest) readers. AOL’s Patch has recently opened an outpost in our home town, and we admire the work its tiny staff is doing to bring us news from around the corner that our regional daily doesn’t cover. Despite allegations of sweatshop-like working conditions at Patch, we believe AOL will have no trouble finding journalists to staff its local offices. Between Patch, labor-of-love sites like this one and an assortment of listservs and Facebook pages, we’re more aware of what’s going on in our community than we ever were when we subscribed to a daily.

We believe that paywalls can work if they are simple, transparent and perceived by the customer to be reasonably priced. There is room in the market for services that could federate many small publishers under a single subscription plan, and we expect some cohesion to emerge from the current mess.

Ultimately, though, paywalls will only work if the publishers who deploy them can deliver value their readers can’t get anywhere else. Can the newspaper owners holding the sandbags today honestly say they are doing that?

Miscellany

We’ve noted before the irony that editors who are so committed to hacking through everyone else’s hype roll over when the spin doctor is their own employer. The Orange (TX) Leader upholds that proud tradition in an un-bylined story announcing a reduction in its publishing schedule and the end of home delivery by news carriers.

Combining the Saturday and Sunday editions isn’t a cutback in frequency, but a reader service, said publisher Eric Bauer. “It will be available in the Saturday mail, so people will have more time to enjoy it,” he said. And editor Gabriel Pruitt is almost giddy about cutting frequency to thrice-weekly: “I could not be more proud and excited about how we will better serve this community…Readers can expect more in-depth stories, insightful information, photos and videos.”

The words “reduction,” “cutback” or “cost-cutting” don’t appear anywhere in the story. In fact, there’s no indication that the changes are anything but a reader service. We suspect that if the announcement was coming from the local public works department, it would be handled quite differently.

Print stalwarts will be relieved to hear that at least one major professional group is still committed to the supremacy of ink on dead trees: America’s school administrators. A recent survey conducted by The Haselton Group found that administrators prefer print editions of top trade magazines rather than online editions or e-newsletters from the same publications. Administrators get 45% of their industry-related information from printed trade magazines, “far outweighing the combined total of next three greatest sources: blogs, national newspapers and local newspapers.”

Administrators are joined in their loyalty by the many college journalism programs that are still teaching inverted pyramid style and how their students can find their first job on a daily.

Publishers send us a lot of books to review, and we wish we could get to them all more quickly. It took us 18 months to finally read Ken Doctor’s Newsonomics, but we’re glad we did. Doctor’s perspectives on the future of news are as fresh today as they were in early 2010. We were surprised and encouraged by his optimism.

Many journalists view the economics of their profession as bitter medicine. Doctor makes it clear that survival in the new world will mean understanding the business, but those journalists who know how to package and market their work will thrive. And they won’t have to sell their souls or lower their standards to do it. Here’s our review on Amazon:

Journalists hate to talk about the economics of their profession, which is why this is such a valuable book. Doctor proceeds from the assumption that the newspaper industry as we have known it is an irreversible decline and that only a handful of national dailies will exist in a few years. There’s no reason to belabor that point, and he doesn’t.

Instead, he devotes the rest of the book to the much more important discussion of how journalism can be reinvented and deliver value in an economically sustainable model. His perspective is both optimistic and uplifting. Doctor sees the end of the vertically integrated news organization as creating opportunities for focused and nimble ventures to emerge that can indeed deliver quality journalism and pay their reporters a living wage. Competition will raise quality standards and ultimately deliver a better product. We have to go through an ugly deconstruction process in order to get there, but Doctor sees bright light at the end of the tunnel.

A lot of journalists are uncomfortable with Doctor’s views because they fear the loss of the comfortable salaries and modest output demands they have long enjoyed. Well, welcome to the new world. Jobs are going away and journalism is becoming a business of self-employed contractors. Journalists with initiative, innovation and skill will be able to make a better living working for multiple masters than they could have made working for media companies. News organizations will be under pressure to be more responsive to their readers’ demands, but Doctor does not believe this will result in the “dumbing down” of news. Tiered models will emerge that deliver high-quality journalism to those who are willing to pay a modest amount for it.

Newsonomics was published 18 months ago, but its lessons and predictions are just as valid today as they were then. This is a clear, concise and ultimately hopeful look at the economics of $45 billion industry in the middle of wholesale reinvention.

Phone Hacking Scandal Engulfs More British Newspapers

“In a dramatic turn to the scandal, former journalists at the Mirror group said they witnessed phone hacking at their newspapers and that the practice was ‘endemic’. So far, the allegations had clouded newspapers of the News International group, the largely affected being the now closed News of the World.

“In fresh developments, James Hipwell, a former journalist of the Daily Mirror told The Independent that he would be willing to testify in front of a public inquiry into the episode headed by Justice Brian Leveson.”

Leesville (La.) Daily Leader Moving To Three Days A Week For Print Edition

“The change [to three days a week from five] is to move the newspaper in a new direction, and will allow the news staff to produce an even stronger product on those three days — allowing more time and focus to cover the news you want to read.
‘This is an opportunity for all of us to strengthen our newspaper,’ Leader Publisher Beaux Victor said. ‘Times are changing all around us and we’re choosing to leap ahead progressively. Our editorial staff, as always, will dedicate their efforts in bringing the news to you. With extra time, the staff will be able to compose more in-depth stories and gather more local content.’”

Chicago Tribune To Print The Sun-Times And Seven Suburban Papers

“The Sun-Times, which has seen its circulation drop in step with the industry, will close its 12-year-old printing plant and lay off more than 400 employees, saving the company more than $10 million annually. The Chicago Tribune Media Group will print the Sun-Times and seven of its suburban dailies.”

BBC Social Media Policy Insists ‘Second Pair Of Eyes’ Review News Updates For Twitter Or Facebook

“The BBC’s new ‘social media guidance’ strictly requires a ‘second pair of eyes’ to review any staff social media updates related to news reporting. The policy is far more relaxed when it comes to staffers using personal social media accounts for personal things. For those cases, it simply lists some ‘considerations,’ which it summarizes as ‘don’t do anything stupid.’”

Newspaper Websites Post Consecutive Quarterly Traffic Increase (NAA Press Release)

“Newspaper publishers continue to grow their share of the Internet audience, attracting an average monthly audience of 110.8 million unique visitors age 18+ to their websites in the second quarter – nearly two-thirds (64.6 percent) of all adult Internet users. That quarterly average represents a 2 percent increase in visitors over the first quarter average. The analysis, performed by comScore for the Newspaper Association of America, indicates that this is the third consecutive quarter of increased traffic for newspaper websites since comScore began tracking web audience data for NAA, in the fourth quarter of 2010.”

Bancroft Family Members Express Regrets at Selling WSJ to Murdoch Because of Scandal

“A number of key members of the family which controlled The Wall Street Journal say they would not have agreed to sell the prestigious daily to Rupert Murdoch if they had been aware of News International’s conduct in the phone-hacking scandal at the time of the deal.

“‘If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against’ the Murdoch bid, said Christopher Bancroft, a member of the family which controlled Dow Jones & Company, publishers of The Wall Street Journal.”

San Diego Union-Tribune Owner Explores Options for Newspaper

“Platinum Equity, which acquired the paper two years ago from the Copley family, hired Evercore Partners to ‘evaluate strategic alternatives,’ said Mark Barnhill, a principal at Platinum.” Such a move is usually seen as a precursor to a sale. Platinum acquired the U-T in May, 2009 and shortly thereafter hacked 30% of the workforce. The owners also sold off property they acquired in the sale, prompting analyst Ken Doctor to suggest that Platinum bought the paper primarily for the asset value.