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

According to an account in Editor & Publisher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

Poynter’s always-insightful Rick Edmonds asks if he’s missing something: In Hyperlocal News, Where’s the Urgency?, He examines an assortment of hyperlocal news startups and comes away wanting more. “Sampling a host of aspiring online hyperlocal franchises — Examiner.com, Outside.in, OurTown.com and others — I’m consistently underwhelmed. One roundup of ‘news within a mile of me’ had crime stories a month old and many reports on the business travails of Outback Steakhouse’s parent company.”

Edmonds makes an important point about the distinction between “content” and quality. Basically, having a blog does no one any good if it’s used to publish crap. However, a lot of blogs (many hyperlocal publications are essentially blogs) put publishing ahead of reporting. Throw it up there and see if anyone reads it because – you know – you can. This is a natural result of the current fascination with social media as a shiny new object. People are publishing because it’s cool to publish. Five years from now, that novelty will have worn off and we’ll be figuring out what these new tools are really good for.

We expect that hyperlocal journalism ventures will consolidate into a small number of professional publishers who have the operational and sales skills to run profitably a lean organization of semi-professional journalists who contribute news about their immediate area. There will always be neighborhood bloggers – and some of them will be good enough to build significant followings – but readers won’t adopt the current cacophony of amateur local reporters as a replacement for major metro newspapers. Professional oversight will be needed.

There’s a land grab going on in this area right now, with aggregators like Patch, Everyblock (above) and the three organizations mentioned earlier each jockeying for position. They’re mostly using whatever low-cost sources of content they can find, and people like Rick Edmonds are astutely calling them on the shortcomings of that approach. We expect that as more ad dollars funnel down from dying dailies into hyperlocal ventures – and as the owners of these ventures become savvier about finding new sources of revenue – the quality will improve and jobs for professional journalists will emerge. They won’t be the cushy union gigs that the previous generation of scribes enjoyed, but they will be enough to bring some pros back into the business.

How to Manage a Blogger Network

Megan Garber speaks with Eric Berger about what it takes to build a good blogger network. Berger is the Houston Chronicle science reporter and blogger who created a network of science blogs at the newspaper back in 2008. The experiment was somewhat groundbreaking for a newspaper at the time, although ScienceBlogs and LexBlog were doing the same thing years earlier. Garber wants to know what makes a blog network successful and Berger shares advice that anyone can use to head down the same path:

Blogging requires passion – “If you’re writing about stuff that you’re interested in and enjoying what you’re doing, it’s going to come through in your writing.” Forcing people to blog never works. If they don’t catch the bug, they’ll simply mail in their entries until they can gracefully escape.

Blogging is a conversation – That includes responding to comments. A lot of folks think once they post an entry, they can walk away, but that isn’t so. The best bloggers want a dialog with their readers. Berger notes that it’s particularly difficult to find scientists who want to follow up on their original posts.

Don’t ignore the news hook – Key advice here: “People want stuff either that’s related to the news of what’s happening or that has some kind of popular hook.” Blogs are best at communicating timely information.

Good source = good blogger – This is a great point. “Experts who make good sources might also make good bloggers,” Berger notes. That’s because they have a natural inclination to explain.

Miscellany

Lauren Kirchner does what reporters do too rarely: Updates us on last year’s hot news. In this case, the subject is Kachingle, a tip-jar-style service that lets readers contribute micropayments to the Internet publishers they like without having to make a conscious effort to do so. The service was all the rage when announced in early 2009 (we gave it several paragraphs in February), but its star seems to have faded since.

Kachingle has signed up about 300 publishers, but none whose title begins with the word “The.” Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos said she’s been getting a great reception from news organizations, but the sales process seems to die at the executive level. Kirchner speculates that Kachingle’s transparency – visitors can see which sites inspire the most contributions – may be one barrier. But more likely it’s just bureaucratic intransigence: “Fitting a little Kachingle widget seamlessly onto a homepage isn’t actually as easy as it sounds, if the homepage you’re talking about is nytimes.com.”

Huffington Post has scored another big hire: Howard Fineman . The 61-year-old veteran Newsweek reporter and MSNBC news analyst will become HuffPo’s senior political editor. In an interview with MediaMatters, Fineman contributes some insight on why his new employer is having so much luck attracting senior journalists. Arianna Huffington is trying to bootstrap a professional news organization that stresses quality journalism and independent politics at a time when news is splintering into partisanship and theatrics. She apparently has the money to do it. “Bringing in the best of the old involved more money than we had when we launched. But now that our Web site is growing, we’re able to bring in the best of the old,” she told The New York Times. Journalists like Fineman don’t work 16-hour days and file stories every four hours. Huffington is doing something right to attract prominent people like him and veteran technology editor Jai Singh. We’d suggest that HuffPo is emerging as one of the first big winners in the race to supplant conventional news organizations.

And Finally…

“The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead, ” begins a wonderful essay by the Washington Post‘s Gene Weingarten. He proceed with a litany of recent butcherings of the language by some of the US’s most notable publications, including The New York Times, which has used the term “reach out to ” as a synonym for “attempt to contact ” at least 20 times this year. Other offenders: The Winston-Salem Journal‘s use of was “Alot ” to describe the number of locals Salemites who would be vacationing that month, the Miami Herald‘s report on someone who “eeks out a living ” and his own employer’s publication of a letter referring to the first couple the “Obama’s. ” We hope you’re socialize this article to others and reach out to Weingarten to complement him.

We continue to be amazed at the willingness of news organizations to employ the same tactics of obfuscation and doublespeak that their reporters spend their days combatting. Witness this press release from last week:

The Deseret News today announced a bold new direction to provide innovation and leadership at a time when daily newspapers throughout America are struggling to define a course for the future….New initiatives, includ[e] the creation of Deseret Connect, a broad and uniquely qualified group of story contributors, a new Editorial Advisory Board and the expansion of the news reporter base…These initiatives will increase the depth and quality of the Deseret News’ daily newspaper. As part of these changes, the organization also announced a reduction in workforce.

But this is no ordinary reduction in workforce. This is a 43% reduction in workforce, or 57 full-time and 28 part-time employees, according to Editor & Publisher. Among the victims are Editor Joe Cannon and Publisher Jim Wall. In the worst spinmeister fashion, the publisher doesn’t even touch upon the layoffs until 700 words deep in the release. That news is preceded by five bullet-pointed items peppered with words like “expansion,” “more,” “launch” and “new.” In other words, this is a major cutback spun as an expansion.

We actually see nothing wrong with what Deseret is doing. It’s combining editorial staffs with affiliated broadcast subsidiaries and shifting its focus toward digital delivery. Makes sense to us. It also makes sense that a large layoff may be needed to get costs in line with the new revenue reality. But why bury the lead so deep in the story? Why not come out and admit that tough times demand tough action?

In any case, other news outlets took care of asking the hard questions, including Huffington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Salt Lake Tribune. Charles Apple says he hears the layoffs include the entire design staff.

Salty Words for USA Today Reorg

“It is odd that the best-read print newspaper in the country would walk away from that pre-eminence and embrace technologies in which it lags the field,” writes John K. Hartman, journalism educator and author of two books about USA Today, in an opinion piece in Editor & Publisher. He’s referring to the Gannett flagship’s bold announcement two weeks ago that it would restructure itself around online delivery to mobile devices, lay off 9% of its staff and de-emphasize print.

In a commentary bluntly titled “USA Today Setting Itself Up For Failure,” Hartman argues that not only is USA Today’s strength in print, but that is the only area in which it has innovated. He points to the decline in the national daily’s once market-leading sports coverage at the hands of ESPN and chides publisher David Hunke for betting on online delivery when USA Today isn’t even in the top 10 news sites in the world (It’s actually #21, according to Alexa, placing it behind such competitors as Drudge Report and the Times of India). In the professor’s view, a media company with such little online visibility is crazy to place such a big bet on a digital strategy.

He’s right, but what else is USA Today going to do? It’s already an also-ran on the Web and its print business is declining like everybody else’s. Mobile seems to be an open field at this point, so Gannett is making a play for the only opportunity it has to establish market leadership. There’s also a possibility that a genuine reader-funded subscription model could evolve in the mobile category. That has failed to happen online. USA Today is playing the only hand it’s got.

Part of the problem of analyzing strategic moves like Gannett’s is framing them in the context of a publication’s previous success. Will USA Today dominate the mobile market? Of course not. No one will. The barriers to entry are too low. But can mobile delivery become a growing revenue source to complement a modestly successful Web presence and a profitable print product? Sure it can.

Hartman is critical of USA Today for fumbling away its leadership in sports coverage to ESPN.com, but the reality is that broad-based media will always lose out to narrow, targeted media. The best strategy for a comprehensive news site is to be everywhere but expect to lead nowhere. In this age of hyper-focused media, that’s not a very comfortable position, but it’s about the only hope a brand like USA Today has got.

Miscellany

Also in the realm of church-owned newspapers, the price for the floundering Washington Times is $1.00. At least that’s what a Unification Church-affiliated buyer could pay, according to a memo released to the media. The selling price probably reflects a bit of a family discount, since the buyer is Doug Joo, an ally of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church owns the paper. It’s not like the one-buck price is a bargain; the buyer has to assume all the paper’s unspecified financial obligations. The Washington Times has cut 40% of its staff this year.

Journalism schools are teaching more bells and whistles and less journalism, or at least that’s what some journalists and educators think. About.com’s Tony Rogers cites of some trends that make traditionalists uncomfortable, including the University of Colorado at Boulder’s recent announcement that it is considering dismantling its 700-student journalism school in favor of an interdisciplinary communication program. Roger spoke to several journalism educators who said schools are increasingly stressing video cameras and Photoshop over the  essential tools of good reporting. As a result, there are jobs for journalists with good public affairs reporting skills sitting open. While not denying that multimedia skills are critical, educators say the balance is getting out of whack, and we’re producing less capable journalists as a result.

Newspaper publishers probably welcome any help they can get these days, even if it’s from the company that perpetuated the largest oil spill in history. BP bought newspaper ads in 126 markets in 17 states in the three months after the spill, according to the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce.  BP dropped over $93 million in advertising during the three months after the spill began. That’s about three times what it spent in a comparable period a year ago. Most of the newspaper ads were targeted at the states most affected by the spill.