5Spot

Most significantly, I think, is the passion you can hear from those practicing the new, non-profit journalism. Freed from the visegrip of industry worry, they are doing the journalism, and you can hear the optimism in their voices. My issue here can still be summed up in one word: scale. That’s the issue before us, even as journalism re-invents itself intriguingly.

We could say that news companies — from Slate to the Journal and Times — have figured out that playing the ad game by someone else’s rules didn’t make a lot of sense. In the game of gross numbers, they couldn’t win.

Stated simply: I am the new home page.

The small town press, online and off, looks to have a far different trajectory than the metros. Re-creating the Roxy, in news, may be as good a guideline as any to chart the future.

Type “San Ramon shooting” into Google, and on both web and news search, Patch comes up first. In addition, Patch’s story elicited nine comments by late Thursday evening; Contra Costa’s none.

A small sample, but therein may lay this emerging tale of newspaper vs. Patch competition. The story quality is one thing; the ability to SEO and draw community comment may be another. That’s an emerging gulf worth paying attention to.

For the streamed product, ESPN could apparently find two major advertisers: Samsung and the U.S. Army. Worse, the same ads (actually slight variations of two) ran over and over and over, often back to back. Incredibly, they were more repetitive than Joe Morgan, the long-maligned partner of Miller’s.

In an age of hot and loud debate, amplified by cable TV and the web, Newsweek’s cool demeanor may simply be out of time and out of place. If it gets sold, it’s hard to believe that much other than the brand will long survive, as the economics under it are badly wounded. Look for it, unfortunately, to join the hallowed ranks of Colliers, Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post.

With the overall economy in upturn, and many of the non-bankrupt companies having restructured — and pushed out — debt with their lenders, we’d expect the list of banko newspaper companies wouldn’t grow much more. Then, again, getting rid of lots of debt when you can’t see a way to paying it down and operating profitably has become a more attractive option.

Scott Heekin-Canady, president of the New York Times Media Group, told the FT that the Times may take its local edition push into 10-15 cities relatively soon. “We’re in active discussions for five markets now,” he said. Why? Heekin-Canady “cited depressed local economics.”

In my community, I’d have great local news reporting, great community discussion — and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie’s List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like functionality (aka The New Classifieds!). Maybe, that’s a wrinkle up Civic Beat’s sleeve. I hope so.