"... industry problems are so intractable, and the chance for making a successful business is so slim, that it simply doesn't make sense to target it."

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."

"One minute, twenty seconds.... At that point, it’s already a lost cause. There’s nothing the actual content or interface of the app can do to make up for the fact that it takes way too long to see anything at all. Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who. And I suspect that’s who’s going to read The Daily, unless they fix this, and soon."

"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 ..."

"Cue the newspaper. In its 20th-century heyday, it was the ultimate mass-market product, a cheap, daily commodity that was obsolete in a matter of hours. Exclusivity was the last thing a newspaper aspired to. The more people who bought them, the better they became. Printing costs went down, which kept the finished product remarkably affordable. Advertising rates rose, which meant publishers could set up foreign bureaus in dozens of cities around the world, pay book reviewers a livable wage, underwrite in-depth investigations, and make Dear Abby rich. Mass-production -- and the mass-dissemination of news it enabled -- turned papers into powerful forces for the civic good. Thus, their future as premium-priced, limited-edition totems of refinement seems poignantly ironic."

"So I'd like to suggest that, however you feel about newspapers, it's important that we generate ideas for replacing the local watchdog functions discussed in this post. Are there any readers who've observed viable replacements for the beat reporter in your community? Does anyone have ideas that are as yet untried?"

Ha! "The print people have been in charge of this transformation for more than a decade and they are NO GOOD at it."

"The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves."

Annual Pew report.

Newspaper page searches (goes through 1922).

"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 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."

DRF profitable, says publisher.

"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."

"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 ..."

Daily Kos looks at a week's worth of sources, finds newspapers make up no more than 20%.

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

Detailed Twitter landing page. Very thorough.

"... there's a reason the traditional newsroom model has lasted 150 years, that professional journalism is still considered so vital to a healthy democracy, that it's still a profession requiring years of training and education, and not just a casual hobby you engage in when you're a little drunk and you've read a few McLuhan books ..."

Time for a new line.

"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.

"So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered." Complements Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."

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."

"It’s a beautiful dream, enough to make one hope that these experiments will kick-start -- unlike so many online renaissances -- a sustainable new model, giving journalism itself an opportunity to spark back to life. What is a front page, after all, other than an aggregator? Why does an article read the way it does -- lede, nut graf, quotes? If that pyramid structure was designed for the physical facts of print production, what new structures will match the new technologies?" And the right-on response: http://spiers.tumblr.com/post/69979490/sigh

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.

On recently announced changes to Pulitzer Prize criteria, and how the prize committee could have gone further.

"So I'm calling bullshit on the Rosenbaum thesis, because no one has been 'caught up in this great upheaval.' Caught up? That makes it sound like a tornado. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move."

"Worry about solving the problem of keeping communities informed about themselves as what used to be the easiest way to do so becomes economically unwise."

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

CEO in the API conf on the meeting.

"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.

Front pages of newspapers from around the world.

"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.

Declines, sky is falling, the usual.

... won't reinvent news. "5. Newspapers don't 'own' enough creative technological expertise (programmers, database/mashup designers, XHTML/CSS coders, video editors, Flash animators, graphic communicators, etc) to constitute a viable tech infrastructure." Racing suffers from a similar competitive disadvantage.

Redesigned, revamped, now an online magazine.

What I've been doing for five years.

"The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet."

"It’s only a matter of time before the disruptive forces affecting consumer media will affect the business side."

"The job of every print publication is to add value to the web."