Law 5 – Mastering the Fine Art of Using OPC

Key to Newsy’s strategy is the engagement mobile news providers are finding with delivery to the new tablet devices. On its iPad product, Newsy has found that more than 45% of sessions are greater than three minutes in length, with 15% of all sessions being greater than 10 minutes. Shorter sessions are conducted on the iPhone, consistent with most publisher experiences: Newsy is finding users generally spend one to three minutes, and watch fewer videos (2.3 videos “initialized” compared to 3.4 for the iPad user). Median session length on the iPhone app is around 150 seconds, says Spencer. All those numbers compare favorably with industry online usage.

That’s the dream that the MediaNews’ new made-for-the tablet, TapIn taps into. Potentially — and I cannot emphasize that word too much — it may become a prototypical product for the news industry, pointing a new way out of the hollowing-out landscape into which the news industry has meandered. TapIn, which launched today, is parent company MediaNews Group’s big play for the iPad, “a better version of Patch,” says MediaNews exec Steve Rossi.

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: First Stop, Chicago and Tribune”), and by the rapidly moving effort to make over Reuters News itself.

For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization”). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers the three promises INN members, and Davis, are banking on to propel them forward, and importantly establish a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.

Still, those numbers are bound to chill many a journalist. You think posting reader metrics in newsrooms is still a point of contention — wait ’til story cost accounting becomes mainstream. And it will. It’s just simple manufacturing, and like it or not, that’s what the news business has long been. Manufacturing, with lots (New York Times, Wall Street Journal) of quality added or with (insert your favorite rag here) just enough to draw ads. News creation used to be a sunk cost, with headcount a small and usually polite battle between editors and publishers. That was in stable times. In these times, knowing business drivers, down to the dollar, is going to be part of the new world.