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

Nielsen: 362K Paying for London Times

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

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

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

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

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

A Case for Editorial Accountability

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

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

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

AP: Newspapers Are Now Loss Leaders

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

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

We got an invitation to speak to the founder of the Sacramento Press a couple of weeks ago, and since few hyper-local publishers have the desire or financial means to do any PR these days, we were curious to hear what Ben Ilfeld (right) had to say.

Ilfeld is a 29-year-old entrepreneur who has created a different approach to community journalism. He has no journalism background, and that’s probably a virtue, because Sacramento Press is unencumbered by preconceptions about how publishing should be done. It is also experimenting with a diversified business model in which advertising is only a piece of the revenue picture. That’s an idea we’ve been advocating for some time.

Anybody can contribute to Sacramento Press and about 1,200 people have. About 65% of the content is generated by the community and managed by a full-time editorial staff of five people. The underlying principle, though, is what is sometimes called a “Folksonomy.” In other words, the community organizes the site.

Ilfeld and co-founder Geoff Samek created Sacramento Press’ content management system from scratch in Java. It incorporates a new navigation concept called a “story line.” Everyone who registers is asked to create one.

A story line links together all the work an author has done on a particular topic, providing a sort of background narrative. The site also relies heavily upon tags to give members the means to self-organize its content. “You can create a tag like ‘Marshall School Park’ and apply that tag to any other content,” Ilfeld said. “We then give you a URL and that creates your own front page.” The site also employs a traditional section taxonomy and its default front pages are laid out by human editors.

Merit Rewards

Members are urged along through a system of merit badges that rewards them for accomplishments like covering the fire department beat or participating in one of the many free workshops the company offers on topics like “writing for readers” and “interviewing techniques.” Basically, the more you contribute, the more recognition you get. This rewards system is a staple of user-generated content sites like Yelp and Kaboodle.

Sacramento Press’ greatest innovation, however, may be its business model. The company created a local vertical advertising network called the Sacramento Local Online Advertising Network (SLOAN) that gives advertisers and independent online publishers a chance to participate in national and regional ad campaigns. SLOAN takes care of negotiating deals and each publisher shares in the revenue. The network now represents over 50 sites and brings in over $10,000 a month.

But it goes beyond advertising. “The number one thing we do as an organization is provide marketing services,” Ilfeld says. “If building a Flickr account will help a client’s business, we’ll do that for them.” Advertising now comprises less than 50% of revenue. “Most of our sales are coming from social media work, events and services,” he says.

Sacramento Press isn’t profitable yet, but that doesn’t worry its founder. “Every time we approach profitability, we reinvest in the business,” Ilfeld says. With 90,000 unique monthly visitors and a 10% to 15% monthly growth rate, Sacramento Press is quickly becoming a significant force in the local media scene. Its ad network is also raising a barrier to entry for others.

Sacramento Press is demonstrating that a hyperlocal news model can work if publishers discard assumptions and think of new ways to generate revenue. Local media organizations are ideally positioned to provide marketing services to small businesses that lack the resources to manage their own campaigns. By diversifying their businesses, publishers can insulate themselves from disasters like the current collapse in advertising rates and position themselves as essential partners to local businesses.

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

And Finally…

From The Onion:

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

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

Read more…

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

According to an account in Editor & Publisher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

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.

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.

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.”

Adapted from an earlier post on paulgillin.com.

All of a sudden, “curation” is one of the hottest words in the Web 2.0 world. That’s because it’s an idea that addresses a problem humans have never confronted before: too much information. In the process, it’s creating some compelling new ways to derive value from content.

Amount of data published in 2010 depicted as iPads stacked on the playing field of Wembley Stadium

Content curation is about filtering the stuff that people really need from out of all the noise around it. In the same way that museum curators choose which items from a collection to put on display, content curators select and publish information that’s of interest to a particular audience.

This function is becoming more and more critical as the volume of information on the Internet explodes. It’s projected that the amount of digital information that will be created in 2010 could fill 75 billion 16 GB Apple iPads (fun infographic here). Yet, as influencer relations expert Katie Paine points out, 90% of it is crap. As more and more crappy content pervades the Internet, the value of curation should grow.

The problem is that curation is labor-intensive. Someone has to sift through all that source information to decide what to keep and what to throw away, and human decision-making isn’t easy to automate. Keyword filtering has all kinds of shortcomings and RSS feeds, while useful in many contexts, are basically headline services.

We’ve recently been working with a startup that’s developed an innovative technology that vastly improves the speed and quality of content curation. CIThread has spent the last 15 months building an inference engine that uses artificial intelligence principles to give curators a kind of intelligent assistant. The company is attacking the labor problem by making curators (or you can call them “editors”) more productive rather than trying to replace them.

Full disclosure: We have received a small equity stake and a referral incentive from CIThread as compensation for our advice. Other than that, the pay has amounted to a couple of free lunches. We make no money unless this idea is as good as we think it is.

CIThread (the name stands for “Collective Intelligence Threading” and yeah, they know they have to change it) essentially learns from choices that an editor or curator makes and applies that learning to delivering better source material.

The curator starts by presenting the engine with a basic set of keywords. CIThread scours the Web for relevant content, much like a search engine does. Then the curator combs through the results to make decisions about what to publish, what to promote and what to throw away.

As those decisions are made, the engine analyzes the content to identify patterns. It then applies that insight to delivering a better quality of source content. In effect, it learns to “think” like the curator. CIThread can be linked to popular content management systems to make it possible to automatically publish content to a website and even syndicate to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the curation dashboard.

That’s what happens on the back end, but there’s intelligence on the audience side, too. CIThread can also tie in to Web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. For example, the curator can set the engine to overweight content that generates a lot of views or clicks into its decisions and to deliver more source material just like it to the curator. All of these factors can be controlled via a dashboard.

Shhhhh!

CIThread is still pretty early stage. It has some  test customers, but none can yet be identified. Here’s a general description of what one of them is doing, though.

This company owns a portfolio of properties throughout the US and uses localized websites as both a marketing and customer service tool. Each site contains frequently updated news about the region, but the portfolio is administered centrally for cost and quality reasons.

Using CIThread, individual editors can now maintain literally dozens of these websites at once. The more the engine learns about their preferences, the more sites they can support. That’s one of the coolest features of inference engines: they get smarter the more they’re used.

The technical brain behind CIThread is Mike Matchett, an MIT-educated developer with a background in computational linguistics and machine learning. The CEO is Tom Riddle (no relation to Lord Voldemort), a serial entrepreneur with a background in data communications, storage and enterprise software.

The two founders started out targeting professional publishers, and that’s a pretty safe bet. But we think the opportunity is much bigger. Nearly any company or organization today can develop unique value for its constituents by delivering curated content. Using tools like CIThread, they can do it more quickly and productively than by training humans. They can also capture the knowledge of their editors so that experience doesn’t walk out the door due to resignation or layoff.

If you want to hear more, e-mail curious@cithread.com or visit the website.

Since we first wrote this, a couple of other tools have come to our attention that attack this same curation task. Curata has an engine that scours the Web for content and auto-posts it to blogs and social network sites. The company has a shipping product and real customers. Curata is positioning its service as more of a lead generation tool than an editorial productivity aid. See the two-minute video below.

CurationStation looks a lot like Curata. It’s a low-cost service that filters content based upon keywords and publishes automatically to multiple destinations. The $2.99 signup incentive is attractive, but set a reminder on your calendar, because it turns into a $279 monthly fee after the first 30 days. If anyone has experience with either of these products, or is aware of other solutions, please comment.