USA Today, which set off a publishing nuke, the impact of which still reverberates across the industry 28 years later, is undertaking the most significant overhaul of its format and strategy in its history. The Gannett Flagship is the scrapping of its traditional four-part organization (News, Sports, Money, Life) in favor of a cluster of 13 “content rings” that will produce information for distribution in both print and digital format. The rings will include Your Life, Travel, Breaking News, Investigative, Washington/Economy, Tech, and Auto, among others, paidContent.org reported. The company said the new organization is designed to address the growing importance of smart phones and tablets as delivery vehicles and potential sources of subscription revenue. About 130 staffers, or 9% of the workforce, will lose their jobs in the reshuffling.

An executive reorganization puts former life section editor Susan Weiss in charge of content. According to a slide presentation obtained by the Associated Press, Weiss will have a “collaborative relationship” with the paper’s vice president of business development. The presentation said the restructuring will “usher in a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce.” The statement is already raising eyebrows by publishing pundits who fear that the deteriorating business situation in American newspapers will force editorial departments to become handmaidens of sales operations. Publisher Dave Hunke and editor Editor John Hillkirk said nothing will interfere with the paper’s commitment to independent journalism. However, as paidContent wryly put it, “While this doesn’t necessarily mean a complete demolition of the “Chinese Wall” that traditionally exists at established news organizations, it certainly sounds like it will be little more than a nylon curtain.”

Publishing executives would be wise to closely watch USA Today‘s moves. While the paper has long been derided as a journalism lightweight, it has a history of innovation in adapting to changing audience tastes. Many publishing veterans sniffed at USA Today in the early days, believing its formula of short stories without jumps, large infographics and generous use of color represented a dumbing down of news. A few years later, nearly all of them had adapted the same style. In the years since, USA Today has solidly established itself as a national institution with a readership of more than 1.8 million.

It’s particularly interesting that USA Today has made such a public commitment to harmonizing its editorial and advertising operations. This is a bitter pill for traditionalists to swallow, but a necessary one if professional news organizations are to thrive in the future. We believe that win-win solutions are possible when creative minds seek them. Few have done so to this point, and USA Today‘s strategy shift shouldn’t be dismissed until it’s had a chance to work.

Miscellany

Former Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner is among the candidates to take over the bankrupt Tribune Co. once it emerges from Chapter 11 reorganization. Eisner confirmed speculation that he is a candidate for the top job in a Variety interview this week. Jeff Shell, a former News Corp. cable executive who’s now with Comcast, is being considered for the CEO slot. Presumably, that means Eisner would be chairman. In the Variety interview, Eisner expressed support for paywalls. “The salvation of the newspaper is some kind of pay arrangement [online], which will evolve into something significant,” he said. The Tribune may actually be a bargain. Romenesko got hold of a memo stating that Tribune Co. has $1.6 billion in cash and generated $18 million more in cash flow in July than in the same month last year.

Newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in a decade, at least in Australia, digital media consultant Ross Dawson told the Australian Newspaper Publishers’ Association yesterday. Or at least that’s what he told Editor & Publisher he planned to say earlier in the week. Dawson, who is considered a media seer Down Under, said the publishing platform of the future will be iPads and their derivatives, which will fall in price so much that they’ll be given away free within a few years. By that time, news organizations will be earning serious revenue from subscriber dollars. But they’d better not get comfortable. Media revenues will soar, but “established media organizations will need to reinvent themselves to participate in that growth.”

Dawson is a big fan of tablets as a delivery medium and has several interesting posts on his blog about a topic. the chart below is one of the free takeaways (click to download).

The financially troubled Washington Times is reportedly being sold to News World Media Development, which is affiliated with the Unification Church, which owns the Times. The conservative daily, which claims a circulation of 40,000, has cut its staff by 40% in a desperate effort to stay afloat. Executive Editor Sam Dealey called the impending sale a “welcome development.”

Add the Waco Tribune-Herald to the growing list of metro dailies that are putting up paywalls. Beginning Sept. 15, non-print subscribes will have to pay $9.95 per month, or $1.99 for a 24-hour pass to WacoTrib.com. We had a chance to work with a couple of the top editors from WacoTrib last summer and we wish them all the luck in the world.

The former Philadelphia Newspapers continues to struggle toward viability. Newspaper Guild employees at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News voted for a package of wage cuts totaling about 6% in exchange for a year of job security for unionized reporters, editors and advertising staff. The company is also changing its name to the Philadelphia Media Network.  The Guild is the first of the paper’s14 unions to agree to terms with the new owners, who bought the paper in a wild and wooly auction in April. With 500 members, though, it’s considered the big cahuna of the negotiation process. The new owners have pledged to keep the Inquirer and Daily News editorial staffs separate and to manage the company for growth.

“Inc. magazine has released its annual list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the country. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, only 59 of them are media companies,” writes Lauren Kirchner on the Columbia Journalism Review website. True that, but Kirchner is choosing to take a glass-half-empty perspective. You can turn that statistic around and marvel at the fact that any media companies are on the list. Kirchner does go on to cite a number of interesting media startups that are actually growing and adding people. They aren’t media in the conventional sense, but they do appear to be onto something. This column Is worth reading for the examples alone.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism gave mainstream media a lukewarm but nonetheless positive endorsement for its coverage of the Gulf oil spill. Noting that the three-months-plus duration of the event challenged news organizations to explain and provide context for the event, Pew said media outlets rose to the challenge under trying conditions. “A news industry coping with depleted staffing, decreasing revenues and shrinking ambition was tested by the oil spill and seemed to pass,” Pew said.

And Finally…

Popular comic strip “Cathy” will end its 34-year run on Oct. 2. Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, 60, who started the strip as a series of autobiographical doodlings that she sent to her mother, said she wants to spend more time with her family and explore other creative avenues. Cathy was an instant hit in 1976. It struck a chord with the growing number of women who were entering the workforce and struggling to balance career and personal priorities. It currently runs in 1,400 newspapers. In recent years, the strip has been criticized for being dated and even anti-feminist. It’s still clipped to a lot of refrigerators, though.

Only 25% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either newspapers or TV news, according to a Gallup survey. That puts mainstream media on par with banks and slightly better than health maintenance organizations on the trust barometer. The stats are from Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions survey. At the top of the trust heap? The military. And at the bottom? Congress.

The results varied significantly by age. Nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 said they had confidence in newspapers. However, disillusionment evidently sets in early, as the confidence level dropped to 16% among 30- to 49-year-olds, making them the most cynical group. Even liberals, who have traditionally been a stronghold of support for mainstream media, expressed support to the tune of  only 35%. It’s important to keep the results in perspective, though. Gallup has been conducting this survey annually for the last 20 years, and confidence in newspapers has never exceeded 39% during that time. However, confidence dipped from the low 30s to the low 20s about four years ago and has been stuck there ever since.

Good News for Hyperlocals

Hot new DC news startup TBD “resembles a sleek, coolly designed, high-tech house with several unfurnished rooms — and a market value yet to be determined,” writes Howard Kurtz in a generally favorable review of the most ambitious hyperlocal launch of the year. The site, which has 15 reporters buttressed by an army of 127 local bloggers, “has a voice, a sense of fun and a knack for packaging short items that creates the appearance of flow and momentum,” Kurtz writes. It also has some good political reporting, although the staff seems to be more focused on local news than national or global politics. TBD has been closely watched as a potential model for hyperlocal startups because of its inclusive approach to community journalism and its backing by a major media company, Allbritton Communications, which also owns The Politico, as well as a collection of regional television stations
Also on the hyperlocal front, BringMeTheNews, an aggregation and podcasting venture founded by former Twin Cities news anchor Rick Kupchella (right), just raised $1 million from two local investors. The site has an interesting business model and has reportedly been profitable since day one. It aggregates headlines and summaries from “hundreds of online news and non-traditional sources” around Minnesota and publishes them on its website. It also produces audio news summaries that are picked up by Minnesota radio stations and broadcast to about 1.5 million listeners each day. At the moment, the site produces no original content.
The advertising model is also novel: The site carries no more than four paid sponsors, who buy contracts of at least six months’ duration. Sponsors are also expected to “provide informational advertising of interest to our audience.” According to MinnPost, “Sponsored copy is integrated into the links BringMeTheNews curates, and carries the sponsor’s logo. Theoretically, the copy is useful information for readers (Explore Minnesota tourist guides, OptumHealth wellness tips) while still advancing the sponsor’s interest.”
Despite having only one-eighth the traffic of MinnPost, BringMeTheNews has apparently hit upon a revenue model that works, even at low volume levels. Kupchella said the business would still be viable without the radio component.

Miscellany

The Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette will begin charging up to $15/mo. for access to local news articles. Non-print subscribers will be able to read 10 stories for free before the paywall goes up. The T&G is owned by The New York Times Co., which plans to build a paywall at its flagship newspaper in January. The Worcester experiment may be a pricing trial balloon. If a lot of people will pay $15/mo. to read the T&G, it’s good news for the Times. We doubt it, though.

More good news: PaidContent.org is hiring reporters. If you are  “deep into areas like online video or digital advertising or gaming,” “can pick apart a media company’s balance sheet” and/or “are dogged and enterprising,” drop a line to jobs@paidcontent.org. You’d better have expertise in media, though. That’s a given.

Having driven Tribune Co. into the ground in record time, Sam Zell now wants his money back. The Chicago real estate mogul invested $315 million in Tribune Co. back in 2007, which was arguably the worst time in history to invest in a newspaper company. He then demonstrated near-total ignorance of the business challenges facing the $6 billion company that he designated himself to run, and succeeded at steering the company into bankruptcy in a little more than 18 months. Well, that was fun, but now it’s time to cash out and go home. Chicago Business sorts through all the legalese, if you’re interested.

And Finally…

As if to underline the shrinking attention span of the American news consumer, American Public Media’s Marketplace Radio devoted all of six sentences to summarizing the world financial situation last week. The idea came about during a daily news meeting, when staffers were boiling down the factors underlying the global financial crisis and thought it would be funny to express them as simply as possible. Megan Garber has the background on Nieman Journalism Lab. We snipped out the 90-second segment below for your listening pleasure.
[audio:/2010/08/marketplace_clip.mp3]

Only 25% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either newspapers or TV news, according to a Gallup survey. That puts mainstream media on par with banks and slightly better than health maintenance organizations on the trust barometer. The stats are from Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions survey. At the top of the trust heap? The military. And at the bottom? Congress.

The results varied significantly by age. Nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 said they had confidence in newspapers. However, disillusionment evidently sets in early, as the confidence level dropped to 16% among 30- to 49-year-olds, making them the most cynical group. Even liberals, who have traditionally been a stronghold of support for mainstream media, expressed support to the tune of  only 35%. It’s important to keep the results in perspective, though. Gallup has been conducting this survey annually for the last 20 years, and confidence in newspapers has never exceeded 39% during that time. However, confidence dipped from the low 30s to the low 20s about four years ago and has been stuck there ever since.

Good News for Hyperlocals

Hot new DC news startup TBD “resembles a sleek, coolly designed, high-tech house with several unfurnished rooms — and a market value yet to be determined,” writes Howard Kurtz in a generally favorable review of the most ambitious hyperlocal launch of the year. The site, which has 15 reporters buttressed by an army of 127 local bloggers, “has a voice, a sense of fun and a knack for packaging short items that creates the appearance of flow and momentum,” Kurtz writes. It also has some good political reporting, although the staff seems to be more focused on local news than national or global politics. TBD has been closely watched as a potential model for hyperlocal startups because of its inclusive approach to community journalism and its backing by a major media company, Allbritton Communications, which also owns The Politico, as well as a collection of regional television stations

Also on the hyperlocal front, BringMeTheNews, an aggregation and podcasting venture founded by former Twin Cities news anchor Rick Kupchella (right), just raised $1 million from two local investors. The site has an interesting business model and has reportedly been profitable since day one. It aggregates headlines and summaries from “hundreds of online news and non-traditional sources” around Minnesota and publishes them on its website. It also produces audio news summaries that are picked up by Minnesota radio stations and broadcast to about 1.5 million listeners each day. At the moment, the site produces no original content.

The advertising model is also novel: The site carries no more than four paid sponsors, who buy contracts of at least six months’ duration. Sponsors are also expected to “provide informational advertising of interest to our audience.” According to MinnPost, “Sponsored copy is integrated into the links BringMeTheNews curates, and carries the sponsor’s logo. Theoretically, the copy is useful information for readers (Explore Minnesota tourist guides, OptumHealth wellness tips) while still advancing the sponsor’s interest.”

Despite having only one-eighth the traffic of MinnPost, BringMeTheNews has apparently hit upon a revenue model that works, even at low volume levels. Kupchella said the business would still be viable without the radio component.

Miscellany

The Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette will begin charging up to $15/mo. for access to local news articles. Non-print subscribers will be able to read 10 stories for free before the paywall goes up. The T&G is owned by The New York Times Co., which plans to build a paywall at its flagship newspaper in January. The Worcester experiment may be a pricing trial balloon. If a lot of people will pay $15/mo. to read the T&G, it’s good news for the Times. We doubt it, though.

More good news: PaidContent.org is hiring reporters. If you are  “deep into areas like online video or digital advertising or gaming,” “can pick apart a media company’s balance sheet” and/or “are dogged and enterprising,” drop a line to jobs@paidcontent.org. You’d better have expertise in media, though. That’s a given.

Having driven Tribune Co. into the ground in record time, Sam Zell now wants his money back. The Chicago real estate mogul invested $315 million in Tribune Co. back in 2007, which was arguably the worst time in history to invest in a newspaper company. He then demonstrated near-total ignorance of the business challenges facing the $6 billion company that he designated himself to run, and succeeded at steering the company into bankruptcy in a little more than 18 months. Well, that was fun, but now it’s time to cash out and go home. Chicago Business sorts through all the legalese, if you’re interested.

And Finally…

As if to underline the shrinking attention span of the American news consumer, American Public Media’s Marketplace Radio devoted all of six sentences to summarizing the world financial situation last week. The idea came about during a daily news meeting, when staffers were boiling down the factors underlying the global financial crisis and thought it would be funny to express them as simply as possible. Megan Garber has the background on Nieman Journalism Lab. We snipped out the 90-second segment below for your listening pleasure.

Forbes likes blogs. In fact, the magazine that bills itself as the “Capitalist Tool” is now requiring its reporters to blog. The new rule is part of an effort to maximize the value of True/Slant, a blog-driven citizen journalism venture founded by Lewis Dvorkin, a veteran journalist who’s worked at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, AOL and – you guessed it – Forbes.
Forbes Media was an early investor in True/Slant and apparently liked what they saw enough to buy the company and hire Dvorkin. In its new skin, the True/Slant platform will include content not only from Forbes’ bloggers but also from selected experts in finance and investing. The Columbia Journalism Review story says the first few entries look promising, but questions whether Forbes will be able to maintain its quality standards if all reporters are now required to blog on the side. It contrasts the Forbes approach to The Economist, which rigorously enforces a consistent style and voice, regardless of author.
Dvorkin doesn’t seem too concerned. “Editorial command and control is a relic of the past and has no place in a Web world,” he wrote in a True/Slant anniversary post last year. “It will slow you down, cost you and stifle the upheaval you want to unleash.” And CJR’s Lauren Kirchner is inclined to give Dvorkin the benefit of the doubt. “One can argue that, given the state of the online news industry, upheaval is good, and the time for Hail Mary passes is upon us,” she writes.
Speaking of magazines, Jeff Jarvis suggests eight ways magazines can survive if they’re willing to turn the traditional model on its head. Survival is job one for the U.S. magazine industry, which has seen circulation of the top brands plummet by more than 60% this decade. Jarvis’ number one suggestion: “Ignore print. Enable community…Magazines still have tremendous, if very perishable, value if you know how to unlock it because their people care about the same stuff. Enable communities to build and meet and create value around their interests, especially those that are specialized.” Magazines are still nexus points for communities of readers, but their value derives not from producing content as much as enabling community members to create and manage their own. Curation, anyone? Some of his recommendations – specifically that magazines diversify their revenue models – sound a lot like the ones we proposed back in April.

Miscellany

Publish2 announced the launch of News Exchange Co-ops, which make it “easier than ever for news organizations to share content with each other.” The new service is based on News Exchange, a service the fledgling company announced in May as “a new efficient supply and distribution chain for high quality content brands.” In its earlier announcement, Publish2 positioned itself squarely against the Associated Press, the wire service that angered some of its largest members with price increases as their businesses entered a free-fall two years ago. Unlike the AP, Publish2 isn’t set up as a source of original content, but rather as a way for news organizations to create content-sharing networks organized around topics, regions or anything else. If this sounds a lot like RSS feeds, there’s a little more to it than that. Publishers can “Set limits on which newsorgs have access to your content. You can exclude specific newsorgs, include specific newsorgs, or open your content up to everyone,” says a tutorial on the home page. Copy editing is apparently extra. Megan Garber has an excellent analysis of News Exchange on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog that looks at its rivalry with AP.
Publish2 describes as co-op as “a group of news organizations that all give each other permission to republish the content from one or more of their newswires.” The concept is similar to informal cooperatives that have been established in New York and Ohio. “You can create a co-op, invite your sharing partners to join, and then each of you adds a ‘Local News’ newswire to the co-op to share with the group,” wrote Ryan Sholin, Director of News Innovation, in an e-mail. “All newspapers contribute via their newswires, automatically importing stories from their print publishing systems. All  newspapers can then automatically export co-op content to their print publishing systems using AP standard formats.” There’s that AP again.

National Newspaper Association (NNA) representatives are opposing the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) proposal to drop Saturday service, saying it will hurt rural communities that have few alternatives to weekly newspapers for local information. NNA postal expert Max Heath said the loss will be felt most acutely in coverage of high school sports, which “form the nucleus of community gatherings. If the Postal Service’s mission is still to bind the nation together, it must use the bindings that the community chooses,” Heath told the Postal Regulatory Commission. In fact, the cost savings that are achieved from axing Saturday service will be more than offset by competition from private delivery services, which will step in to serve local newspapers, Heath said. Newspaper delivery has been the only growth item in the USPS’s revenue line over the last year. The USPS says it’s on track to lose $7 billion this year and that eliminating Saturday service could save $3 billion. Lawmakers are trying to block the plan.

Forbes likes blogs. In fact, the magazine that bills itself as the “Capitalist Tool” is now requiring its reporters to blog. The new rule is part of an effort to maximize the value of True/Slant, a blog-driven citizen journalism venture founded by Lewis Dvorkin, a veteran journalist who’s worked at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, AOL and – you guessed it – Forbes.

Forbes Media was an early investor in True/Slant and apparently liked what they saw enough to buy the company and hire Dvorkin. In its new skin, the True/Slant platform will include content not only from Forbes’ bloggers but also from selected experts in finance and investing. The Columbia Journalism Review story says the first few entries look promising, but questions whether Forbes will be able to maintain its quality standards if all reporters are now required to blog on the side. It contrasts the Forbes approach to The Economist, which rigorously enforces a consistent style and voice, regardless of author.

Dvorkin doesn’t seem too concerned. “Editorial command and control is a relic of the past and has no place in a Web world,” he wrote in a True/Slant anniversary post last year. “It will slow you down, cost you and stifle the upheaval you want to unleash.” And CJR’s Lauren Kirchner is inclined to give Dvorkin the benefit of the doubt. “One can argue that, given the state of the online news industry, upheaval is good, and the time for Hail Mary passes is upon us,” she writes.

Speaking of magazines, Jeff Jarvis suggests eight ways magazines can survive if they’re willing to turn the traditional model on its head. Survival is job one for the U.S. magazine industry, which has seen circulation of the top brands plummet by more than 60% this decade. Jarvis’ number one suggestion: “Ignore print. Enable community…Magazines still have tremendous, if very perishable, value if you know how to unlock it because their people care about the same stuff. Enable communities to build and meet and create value around their interests, especially those that are specialized.” Magazines are still nexus points for communities of readers, but their value derives not from producing content as much as enabling community members to create and manage their own. Curation, anyone? Some of his recommendations – specifically that magazines diversify their revenue models – sound a lot like the ones we proposed back in April.

Miscellany

Publish2 announced the launch of News Exchange Co-ops, which make it “easier than ever for news organizations to share content with each other.” The new service is based on News Exchange, a service the fledgling company announced in May as “a new efficient supply and distribution chain for high quality content brands.” In its earlier announcement, Publish2 positioned itself squarely against the Associated Press, the wire service that angered some of its largest members with price increases as their businesses entered a free-fall two years ago. Unlike the AP, Publish2 isn’t set up as a source of original content, but rather as a way for news organizations to create content-sharing networks organized around topics, regions or anything else. If this sounds a lot like RSS feeds, there’s a little more to it than that. Publishers can “Set limits on which newsorgs have access to your content. You can exclude specific newsorgs, include specific newsorgs, or open your content up to everyone,” says a tutorial on the home page. Copy editing is apparently extra. Megan Garber has an excellent analysis of News Exchange on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog that looks at its rivalry with AP.

Publish2 describes as co-op as “a group of news organizations that all give each other permission to republish the content from one or more of their newswires.” The concept is similar to informal cooperatives that have been established in New York and Ohio. “You can create a co-op, invite your sharing partners to join, and then each of you adds a ‘Local News’ newswire to the co-op to share with the group,” wrote Ryan Sholin, Director of News Innovation, in an e-mail. “All newspapers contribute via their newswires, automatically importing stories from their print publishing systems. All  newspapers can then automatically export co-op content to their print publishing systems using AP standard formats.” There’s that AP again.

National Newspaper Association (NNA) representatives are opposing the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) proposal to drop Saturday service, saying it will hurt rural communities that have few alternatives to weekly newspapers for local information. NNA postal expert Max Heath said the loss will be felt most acutely in coverage of high school sports, which “form the nucleus of community gatherings. If the Postal Service’s mission is still to bind the nation together, it must use the bindings that the community chooses,” Heath told the Postal Regulatory Commission. In fact, the cost savings that are achieved from axing Saturday service will be more than offset by competition from private delivery services, which will step in to serve local newspapers, Heath said. Newspaper delivery has been the only growth item in the USPS’s revenue line over the last year. The USPS says it’s on track to lose $7 billion this year and that eliminating Saturday service could save $3 billion. Lawmakers are trying to block the plan.

Keep an eye on the launch of TBD.com this week, because it could presage a new format for hyperlocal journalism. Launching initially in the Washington, D.C. market, the venture combines a staff of professional reporters with a network of 127 local bloggers. All in all, parent Allbritton Communications has put about 100 people on the project. The DCist provides the details:

TBD.com will feature 12 full-time reporters, including one editor focusing solely on the neighborhood beats of population centers in the District, Virginia and Maryland…The website will also feature original reporting on sports…entertainment, transportation and a big focus on weather. But the real highlight of TBD’s Web presence is its inclusionary ethos: TBD’s blog affiliate network, which currently boasts an impressive 127 well-thought-of blogs covering everything from small businesses to allergies in Montgomery County, will drive content. The affiliate network is designed to plug in the gaps that the reporters…cannot reach.”

TBD has been blogging about its prelaunch activities, underlining its commitment to inclusive journalism. For example, staffers will hold office hours in public locations and invite locals to stop by to brainstorm, critique and just chat. Editors are also asking readers to be an active part of the reporting process by correcting errors, adding facts and suggesting new dimensions for a story. They say that linking to original source material will be standard operating procedure and that they won’t even try to compete with local bloggers when the bloggers provide superior coverage. In fact, the blogger network appears to be essential to TBD’s value proposition.
Laura McGann thinks this venture will be worth watching, and she lists six reasons why on Nieman Journalism Lab. Among them is TBD’s almost obsessive attitude toward making the entire news reporting process transparent, social and interactive. She also likes the site’s commenting policy, which assigns the highest visibility to those commenters who have contributed the most value in the past. That approach should reduce comment spam and create an informal hierarchy of community contributors.

Also on the hyperlocal front, AOL’s Patch network has grown to 99 locations in nine states, and now employs 48 people in Massachusetts. Each Patch site focuses on a local community of between 15,000 and 50,000 people. Each region is covered by one full-time editor who writes and shoots video. Massachusetts has emerged as a kind of Petri dish for hyperlocal reporting, with new ventures from the Boston Globe and Gatehouse Media. AOL has reportedly poured $50 million into Patch.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis sums up a new reality of the media world that has big implications: “Once-abundant privacy is now scarce. Once-scarce publicness is now abundant.” Jarvis goes on to riff about what this means to media organizations. Having control of public awareness used to be the source of significant value, but now that it’s easy for anyone to go public with anything, the essential value of traditional media is lost, he says. “They are being beat by those who break up their control and hand it out for free,” he writes.

The flip side of this dynamic is that new value is now being created from “publicness.” Sites like Yelp.com and TripAdvisor.com deliver value by harvesting public comments and selling advertising against them. A couple of HP scientists claim they can now predict the success of a movie based upon anticipatory chatter on Twitter. Looks like that could be the basis of another profit-making venture. Of course, there are still nasty unresolved issues, like who owns public information and how should the creators of that information be compensated? Jarvis doesn’t suggest solutions, but his fundamental point – that ownership of information is no longer a valuable asset – is well-argued. It’s also anathema to how media have traditionally operated. “Being public is about giving up control, which is the exact opposite of how media used to make their businesses,” he comments.

Cablevision Systems Corp. reported a sharp drop in second-quarter profit as debt service offset growth in its core video, Internet and phone services. The news was pretty positive overall, except for Newsday, which saw revenue fall 9.7% to $80.1 million on a 12.6% drop in ad revenue. Reports from the Washington Post Co. were more encouraging, however. Newspaper publishing revenue increased 2% in the second quarter of the year to $172.7 million, even though print advertising revenue at the Washington Post newspaper fell 6%. The big winner was display online advertising revenue, which grew 20%, and online classified revenue, which increased 5%.

Public Policy Matters, an information resource for journalists who cover public policy issues, is eliminating its subscription fee for journalists. The service, which delivers a daily summary of news, press releases and reports culled from more than 2,300 government and public policy-related websites, is converting from a for-profit enterprise to a tax-exempt organization. “It could take four months or more for the IRS to act,” wrote Editor Edward Zuckerman. “We are providing free subscriptions without waiting for the IRS to act, and we hope 1,000 or more journalists will have signed up by the time our tax-exempt status is confirmed. We believe that a foundation is more likely to give us favorable attention if we can claim,” a larger audience. Here’s the subscription link.
And Finally…

From the Associated Press:

KEY WEST, Fla. — A white-bearded 64-year-old Florida man won this year’s Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, an event in Key West’s annual Hemingway Days festival that ended Sunday.

Charles Bicht, of Vero Beach, triumphed over 123 other entrants in the late Saturday night competition, a highlight of the annual celebration that honors the literary giant who lived and wrote in Key West throughout the 1930s.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for 12 years,” said Bicht, who credited his win to perseverance after 11 unsuccessful attempts. “Nothing can compare to it.”