"It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."

Re: the New York Times paywall pricing scheme. "For non-necessities, simplicity of pricing is key. Apple thrives at this. Their consumer products tend to follow a simple good/better/best pricing hierarchy, where the only difference is storage capacity."

"Increasingly, the motivations of writers and the motivations of the businesses they work for are at odds with each other. Journalists, enabled by the web, are increasingly defining success according to exposure, and news organizations are increasingly defining success according to the limitation of exposure."

"The journalism industry's traditional ethical "wall" dividing advertising and editorial has left some journalists so frightened by the idea of selling to potential advertisers that they choose not even to try launching their own news websites. Few of us wish to comprise our journalistic integrity by having to sell ads. But selling ads shouldn't comprise your integrity -- it's selling your editorial which does that."

"But there is hope. And it is just where you might expect it -- in our core business of news and on the backs of our reputation ..."

"Crunch all those numbers, and what’s the Globe worth? 'I would say no more than $120 million,' says Kamen. 'And I’m being very generous. I would say it’s worth, realistically, $75 million.' The extra $45 million, he says, is based on the assumption that whoever buys it must have an notion of how to make money from it ..."

"The pricing of the products is intriguing. First off, Sporting News Today is pitched as a 'dime a day' product, 30 issues for $2.99 through Zinio. So what was five cents an issue in 1886 is now a dime “an issue” a century-plus on. As of this week, you can now buy the bundled magazine (standalone: $14.97 for a year) and Sporting News Today apps/access for $39.95 a year."

It's not rational; it's emotional attachment. "In the online world of free, people need a damned good reason to fork over their money. It had better solve a problem, bring consistent delight, or otherwise earn devotion. A small but devoted audience can be worth more than a big, uncommitted one. How many people love their local newspaper?"

"Both apps are designed as 'value adds' for current subs. In addition to the magazine, the iPad app (see the video below) includes 'Other Stuff We Like' -- an exclusive collection of video, including interviews for the app, clips from the ABC Wide World of Sports archive, E:60 and Outside the Lines and photos combined with trivia, sports betting analysis and news from the sports gambling industry."

"A few reports over the past several days have noted that Apple is in talks with magazine and newspaper companies about creating a new store — a digital newsstand, as it were — similar to the store Apple created to sell books on their devices. Through this store, Apple would sell print publications by way of subscription (and, presumably, stand-along issues also)." Issues of file size, etc. would have to be worked out. See also: http://www.observer.com/2010/media/apple-and-publishers

"It's local and vertical." Recently looked at a business plan that stressed exactly this angle. Expect to see more.

"Regarding the future, I think the best way to say it is that we just want to be everywhere that the sports fan is. For us, it's less about traffic generation than it is about creating brands. We're not looking to exploit search engines, and we're instead investing in better capabilities and metrics in reporting for our advertisers."

A simple mnemonic for rapid development.

"With minimal additional investment and no extra hires, fan-based SB Nation is launching 20 new regional sports sites during the next few weeks." (New York: http://newyork.sbnation.com/)

"What's the Sports Guy worth to ESPN, anyway? In raw numbers, not as much as you might think -- which reflects that ESPN's primary business is still television, not the Web. It's TV that drives the bulk of ESPN's $1.53 billion in annual ad revenue, and Simmons's Web popularity has yet to translate to TV." Quick, sobering calculations on the value of a major web presence.

"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."

"Every syndication dollar earned is another dollar that doesn’t have to be wrung out of highly competitive advertising markets. Importantly, the syndication dollars derive from what journalism organizations do best: create high-quality content." So much more appealing a model.

Bright side: Less competition from the Rail during the Triple Crown season.

"There are three ways -- and only three ways -- that publishers can make money from their content." (Forget revenue models. Look for production models.)

The rise and fall and rise again of Manhattan media.

A list, with examples, from Jay Rosen.

The sports network continues its rise.

Subscription lit mag app takes advantage of new device features, including push notification and in-app purchasing. Smart.

"Of that, 36,000, or roughly 10% were watching on their iPhone or iPod Touch." Very interesting.

"Demand-side networks selling reach against target could challenge TV to the benefit of buyers and sellers alike."

"Rupert Murdoch is going to battle against the Internet, bent on making readers actually pay for online newspaper journalism -- beginning with his London Sunday Times. History suggests he won’t back down; the experts suggest he’s crazy. Is he also ignoring his industry’s biggest problem?"

"The data would seem to back this up."

"The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers.... We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers."

"How the cult of high profits triumphed at the expense of quality, staffing and the public trust." Jim Squires, AJR, 1992. Prescient about the media business, equally so about breeding and sales? [For background, Headless Horsemen review.]

"News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck. Each story stands on its own in a world of atomized content where readers can come from anywhere on the Web, not just the front page."

Reuters president: "I don’t believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If someone wants to create a business on the back of others’ original content, the parties should have a business relationship that benefits both."

Provocative: "Anderson: Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage."

"How hardcore policy reporting is paying the bills at a Seattle web startup (in 4 easy steps)." [I've never talked to Ray Paulick about his business plan, but three of the four steps outlined here strike me as similar to how he's built up PR, and as a very workable approach for others considering launching a certain style of web publication.]

Discussing the future of news. (A CUNY Journalism project.)

DRF profitable, says publisher.

Soccer writers start network, find most competition comes club press offices. "So clearly the rules of the game have changed fundamentally the minute the sports clubs opened their own websites. It's just a matter of realigning ourselves in terms of content and analysis, using your brand and your experience to provide the kind of sticky content that a football fan wants."

"I can understand that news publishers -- the owners and stockholders and managers -- will do everything they can to cling to a failing model, because that is the way of the business world. A revenue stream is a revenue stream; it’s hard to give it up today, even when you know it’s going away tomorrow. But the journalists who care about their own craft’s values and traditions should think twice before applauding the intransigence of their business colleagues. In the long run, it will do nothing to save their jobs. And it will make it that much harder for all of us to rebuild a vibrant and sound news tradition online."

Site adds a subscription research service. “What the blogs were to traditional media, we hope this will be to the research firms.”

The key point, expanded: "When Gawker started, there was a surfeit of information and not nearly enough context -- so we provided that, in the form of links and occasionally snarky commentary. But now the balance has shifted.... If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much. That should be reassuring to people. The content market is finding its new balance."

"But there should be a constant, intensive search for new types of weapons. As long as newspapers are playing defense and falling back on predictable solutions, things are only going to get much bleaker." Mobile distribution, aggregation-curation, expanding ad base all get mentioned.

Collapse print and web departments into one; focus on content, not medium. "If the question 'Is this for print or online?' keeps coming up in your organization, you’re doing it wrong."

Three weeks into the 2009 baseball season, subscription sales are up 45%, iPhone At Bat app sales total $1.3 million gross. [Subtract 30% Apple share, that's $910,000 net for a mobile app that delivers mostly repurposed content and data. Nice revenue stream if you can build it.]

"Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality."

"Simple, pragmatic advice on the business of creativity." My model! "DBR is a quick-to-market publication, with a focus on speed and agility over high production value or glossy spreads. This means our blog is a rapidly-deployed version of Wordpress, our layout is fast-and-dirty, and there are no pictures. As our revenues increase, so will the publication grow both in substance and in style; there are plenty of publications that deal with the art side ... it’s time we got down to the business side."

"Maybe, rather than paying for news, [people will] pay for smart packages of it." I don't doubt it.

"The whole idea is lots of publications are going to do this at the same time. They're going to charge different prices, they're going to have different methods, they're going to have different amounts of stuff. But I think what you're going to see is a sea change back to an old tradition, and an old business model ..."

"Sports-blog network SB Nation is now officially sanctioned by the NHL. Posts from its 29 hockey blogs now appear as linked headlines on the homepage of NHL.com." [Shades of the NTRA online task force marketing plan.]

Sharp analysis of AP's campaign against aggregators and search indexes.

"At $1 a month, with viewer retention of 70 percent, subscription revenue would be $566 million. But ad revenue would drop by 30 percent, or $933 million, for a net loss of $367 million ..." And so on, at $2, 50% drop; $5, 70%; $10, 90%.

"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." Clay Shirky cuts through the noise about saving newspapers, puts the focus on saving journalism.

Makes two pragmatic points: Strategy must be rooted in the premise that journalism is "OF the Internet, not merely ON it," and that no one business model will work for all newspapers, publishers.

"Here's the biggest drawback I see in Brill's proposal: it would end blogging, as valuable a journalistic form as has been developed since the inverted pyramid."

"This is not just about peace, love, and harmony. Trust creates value. Value gets monetized. Money pays journalists. Journalists save the world." Leveraging social networks to pay for news.

A twist on the argument.

"This round is over. Journalists lost. But lucky for journalists, there are plenty more rounds to come."

"[Newspapers] don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed."

In a post-print NYT world, "Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication." Off on some of the numbers but larger point about future of news holds.

"Context is as important today as content. It may, in fact, be the new king on the throne. That’s because the world is evolving into niche communities, organized around individual interests and passions. Keeping your audience deeply engaged in the journalism you do is necessary to induce loyalty to your brand."

"A community-centered news enterprise that exploits the power of social networking will tend to generate 'friends' rather than 'eyeballs,' and friends—customers with loyalty—are what advertisers are looking for." Insights from a surprising source.

Rupert Murdoch on the future of newspapers (we'll follow news brands, to start).

CEO in the API conf on the meeting.

"While advertisers are increasingly interested in online platforms, an Internet-ad dollar is still not the same as a print-ad dollar. The price of advertising is measured in CPM, or cost per thousand readers; one media expert estimates that online CPM is worth between one-seventh and one-tenth of a print CPM. This means that swapping out online-for-print publication right now literally amounts to trading in dollars for pennies—which is hardly an alluring prospect for publishing companies used to commanding lavish ad revenues. 'No one has figured out how to make real money from online content,' says Glynnis MacNichol, editor of Mediabistro.com's FishbowlNY. 'The print ad structure can't keep up with the technology.'" And that's the problem, this assumption that the print ad structure must be translated. A new model has to be be created, publishers have to get away from thinking in CPMs.

"Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever." And they'll get that info from news *brands* not papers.

"At this point, people usually ask: But who’s going to *fund* these experiments? Answer: The experiments are already happening. Everywhere."

Also, who's going to pay for the news? Includes video of the speech.

Nick Denton's pessimistic, but persuasive, ad market analysis for the year ahead.

"Newspapers haven't even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue, and that's partly because they're still focused on print." And not only focused on print, but on carrying the print ad model over to online pubs, ignoring/negating rules of web interaction.