Honk if you still love newsprint enough to pay $700 or more a year for a seven-day print subscription to The New York Times. Of course, you have many other choices.

You can try one of several print/bundled options for considerably less money. Or if you want to be parsimonious, you can get 10 free article views a month, or more if you want to work the social and search on-ramps to NYTimes.com. Maybe you want to be among those who pay Ongo $1.99 a month, and get 20 Times news stories a day, among lots of other news content.

Love the Guardian, and want to follow each tick of the U.K.’s Murdoch saga? If you’re in the U.S., you can subscribe to the lively iPad edition for $13.99 a month — or access it for free via the Safari browser on the tablet. In the U.S., its smartphone app is free, but in the U.K. and Europe, it requires a subscription. Of course, it’s quite successful Facebook app gives you access for free as well, anywhere.

If you’re shopping the Ongo news kiosk, look at wide spectrum of prices individual publishers are charging for access through that product: The Guardian is 99 cents a month, The Christian Science Monitor is $3.99, while the Chicago Tribune is $9.99 and The Boston Globe $14.99.

It’s not just newspaper companies that offer a patchwork of buying (or not buying) choices.

Are you a late-arriving fan of AMC’s series “Breaking Bad”? If you want to catch up and subscribe to Netflix streaming, you’ve got a good deal at the $7.99 a month rate. Cram in the first three seasons’ 37 episodes in a single month (where did that month go?), and you’ll pay just 21.5 cents per show, and anything else you have time to watch is gravy. Ah, but if we want to watch Season 4, which you can’t yet see on Netflix streaming, you have to upgrade to those red envelopes and get Season 4 DVDs — but it’ll cost you another $7.99 a month, and you’ll have to wait until the DVDs are released in June. (Ah, maybe that’s one of the reasons Netflix’s maladroit move to streaming is pushing it to a loss.)

Or you can turn to Amazon VOD and get the episodes for $1.99 each (or $2.99 in HD!), or $25.87 for the season. Or why stream when you own the DVD in a few weeks for $29.99 (or add an extra 10 bucks for added Blu-ray clarity). But wait — I’m an Amazon Prime customer. Can’t I watch it for free? It’s not part of the Prime free streaming offer, but I can watch a whole lot of other stuff as often as I want for nothing. Or maybe I can access “Breaking Bad” through Comcast’s Xfinity $100-a-month plus service. Nah, no deal — “Breaking Bad” isn’t available.

One more try: on the AMC site itself, there’s quite highlights, blogs, and more on the series, but no full episodes.

Let’s add in music.

Take Tristan Prettyman. It’s $9.99 (or 83 cents a song) for her last CD on iTunes. Through my $36 annual ad-free Pandora subscription, I can listen to dozens of her songs, her musical soundalikes, and thousands of other tunes in a year, bringing down the cost to pennies per song. Or there’s Spotify, where her songs are available for either zero, five, or ten bucks a month, depending on what devices I want to use and whether I can stand ads.

Magazines, of course, are offering their own split-screen experiments. The U.S. magazine industry (“The Newsonomics of Next Issue Media’s All-You-Can-Eat Kiosk“) is testing the all-you-can-eat, cross-title buffet, bringing some its titles down to as long as 37 cents a month (if you consumed all 27 “basic” titles) through the kiosk, but $39, or $59, or $79 a year if you buy a single title directly through a publisher.

How much to charge?

It’s a fool’s paradise of pricing out there in the digital world, right now, at least for wily consumers. The Department of Justice’s ebook suit and related settlements only complicate things. Five and ten years ago we were wondering whether people would ever pay for digital media — Newsweek’s Steven Levy took us into the terra incognita in “Meet the Napster Generation” back in 2000. But now the question isn’t whether people, young and old, will pay — it’s how the hell to figure out how much to charge them throughout what we politely like to call our multi-platform world.

Content no longer demands to be free. It wants a fee — but how much of one?

Consumer pricing is not a core competence of many media companies. For decades, media pricing was on automatic. Newspapers picked a quarter or fifty cents, and then re-programmed the coinboxes. Magazines kept prices low enough to build audiences to reap substantial ad rewards. Book publishers did some minor stratification. Music companies picked a couple of price points, and let the vinyl and CDs fly.

In the digital era, though, pricing is confronting — and confounding — media companies. Just what in the digital world of vanishing manufacturing costs is digital media worth? Now with those 20th-century costs — printing, manufacture, distribution, shipping — passing into the night, the question of price, and value, is making itself loudly heard.

We can certainly identify the wrong-headedness of the Department of Justice’s price-fixing suit against book publishers and/or point out how the DOJ had little choice in pursuing the case, neither of which is a surprise. The law has struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with business changes wrought by the Internet, from fair use to antitrust to media monopoly. Oft-earnest American regulators find themselves falling farther and farther behind, trying to track technology’s dominating nature and make new sense of it. Often, European Union regulators take a more forthright stab but end up retreating.

Create a new legal framework that better balances producers, distributors, and consumers? Forget about that in this age of politics where stalemate and status quo is the order of the day.

Publishers of all media are on their own, then, and they’d better make sense of pricing. It’s core to their survival and future sustainability. Sure, the Amazons of the world will try to monopolize book pricing, returning closer to its pre-”agency pricing” market share of 90 percent from its current paltry 60 percent. Yet, publishers — especially of news and feature media, news organizations and “magazine media” — have many pricing plays to try as customers discover content near and far from traditional outlets.

The magic of a good price point

I’ll call this the newsonomics of 99-cent media because that’s the world into which we have moved. Today let’s look at that 99-cent model, and next week we’ll delve into the early lessons that pricing’s practitioners have stumbled across as they’ve moved into paid content.

At first, it looks like a tyranny of 99-cent pricing (or the parallel expected tyranny of $9.99 Amazon book pricing). Will 99-cent pricing cause brand damage? Will it last? If the U.S. follows Canada and forsakes the penny, then the 99 cent pricing may fall into history. For now, though, it’s got a certain consumer magic.

“Ninety-nine-cent introductory offers have done wonders for take rates,” says applied economist Matt Lindsay, president of Mather Economics. His company has worked with more than 200 titles — about 75 percent of them newspapers — on pricing and related strategic issues. Take a look across media pricing, from The New York Times to Hulu Plus, and 99 cents (or its derivatives of $1.99 to $7.99 to $9.99) are everywhere.

Take rate is simple: What percentage of customers click yes — and provide precious credit card data — when confronted with an offer. Offer readers the ability to start a “trial” for 99 cents, and you’ll see results two to three times any other number, says Lindsey. At 99 cents, readers “take that as a signal. They understand that you want them to adopt this product. By setting the full price at a high number, you are basically saying, ‘This is the true value of the product.’”

Steve Jobs understood signaling in a parallel way. As Chris Anderson described well in Wired last November (“The Magic of 99 Cents”), one of Jobs’ great successes with iTunes and the iPod was that 99-cent pricing for songs. He could get the hardware and software right, but in the not-quite-post-piracy age, 99 cents was the third leg of the value equation. It worked as a signal: somewhere in between free and too much.

Start with 99 cents and you can conquer the world. As they set off on that quest, what are some of the pricing guideposts for publishers?

• 99 cents is a beginning and not an end. For newspapers used to being paid $200 or $400 a year, 99 cents seems like a declaration of cheapness. Put some round 0s on pricing; it just seems more honest. The oft-cited example of Louis CK’s $5 video is a case in point. Five bucks says authenticity. Yet media that answer thousands of reader questions every day aren’t comedians. Just because you set an intro price of 99 cents, the down-the-road price sends thatother important signal to value. Ultimately, says Lindsay, it’s true that “people take price as a signal to quality.”
• If you have lots more to sell, then 99 cents isn’t a price, it’s a price of admission. Responding to my recent column about ”small things” adding up, Rob Pegoraro asked, on Twitter, how The New York Times’ earnings results related to the notion. “I think NYT 454K dig subs become great market for ‘small things’ like ebooks, events+,” I responded. David Johnson then added, “You pay to be in a market. These business plans resemble theme parks and non-profit fundraising strategies.” That thought fits perfectly here: it’s not about the money, large or small, an even buck or 99 cents — it’s about establishing a new relationship. Or, to use the vernacular, 99 cents is gateway-drug pricing.
• Get ready to sell lots of stuff. So if you are Six Flags, or The New York Times or the L.A. Times, you’d better be able to leverage that new relationship by selling lots of stuff. Maybe not yet 100 products a year, but at least a half dozen to start. Ebooks, of course, fit perfectly here, as add-on products offered to members or subscribers. Sure, use some, as The Boston Globe is doing with Sunday Suppers, to reinforce subscriber/member value. But price others to match potential value. A guide to Boston-area colleges from, who else, the Globe, could be a $19.95 solid seller, given the $100,000-plus parental investment ahead. “Ebook,” though, is much too limited a name to put on it, and sounds like something not current. Wonderfactory founder and creative director David Link made this basic but hugely important point when we talked last week: There really isn’t a fundamental difference between an app and an ebook. “From an agency and a technology’s point of view, it’s only in how you create them. Talking about a recent product Wonderfactory worked on, “You go to the ebookstore, and it’s just text. You go into the app store and it’s got the text with 50 percent app-like sauce.” So, right now, publishers and their creative people are having to create multiple forms, but essentially the same product is both an app and an ebook. The technologies, and the costs, will clarify, as will the marketplaces for all the digital paraphernalia of our lives. The point for publishers selling more stuff is clear though: solve audience needs better than someone else, create products for the devices of the day, and price accordingly.
• It’s not just the content we’re paying for. That’s a tough, tough lesson for literal newsies. As with the music revolution Apple wrought, it was the combination of convenience, ease, presentation, pricing, and wonder that rationalized (for good and bad) the digital music industry. Today’s first batch of digital news subscriptions rely as much on convenience and mobility values as they do on the words and pictures.
• We’re all in the same business. Think of your own media purchases. A little music, more and more video, selective news and magazine subscriptions, increasing numbers of ebooks. Yes, the marketplaces for ebooks and apps, alongside this kiosk and that e-store, are confusing. Media, though, is media, and the pricing schemes are forming in a remarkably similar way across movies, music, newspapers, and magazines. We all like, for instance, the notion of All Access; we’ll pay once and get our stuff everywhere. So news and magazine publishers must look through the assorted lessons of the music and movie industries, those lessons still in much progress. News pricing is not an island.

Try this: Call up your local newspaper or online news organization. Tell them you want to buy something and ask them what they can sell you? Of course, at first, they’d be non-plussed: Sell you something? Then, after giving it some thought, they’d say you can buy a newspaper or a subscription or a membership — or, maybe, an ad? Would you like one of those?

Those days — mark it — are coming to an end. We’re on the brink of news companies producing hundreds of products for sale each year. While digital technology hath taketh (the easy ability to make money on news distribution), digital technology also giveth back, with the ability to create hundreds and thousands of newsy products at small incremental costs. The bonus: News organizations will be able to satisfy groups of readers and advertisers (often disguised thinly as sponsors) better than ever before. Double bonus: The let-a-hundred-products-bloom revolution fits neatly with the all-out embrace of all-access circulation initiatives, which news companies in North America, Europe, and Asia now can’t seem to implement quickly enough.

Can we call this the ebook revolution? Maybe, but that’s probably too narrow. Delivery of new products to new audiences can take several forms. A text-only ebook, a shinier iBooks-enabled product with video, or an app with all the glorious functionality apps offer. It’s not the form; it’s the content, content that satisfies niches rather than serves masses with one-size-fits-all newspaper or magazine products.

Call it the newsonomics of 100 products a year, or just one way to envision a much bigger future.

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model  (“The Newsonomics of Crossover“)  that I detailed here a few weeks ago. The big, hairy challenges of accelerating print ad loss and onerous legacy costs remain, but at least we’ve got a couple of building blocks we didn’t have two years ago. By we, I mean those of us who care about news and great professional content.

Is it a big moneymaker? We don’t know yet, though we can extrapolate some numbers below.

It’s directionally right, though, for at least a couple of strategic reasons. The notion of 100 smaller products reminds us that so much of the new world is based on volume. Google has built a monstrous advertising business on hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers, while daily newspapers reaped huge profits on relatively few bigger advertisers. Even as movie watching by streaming surpasses DVD watching, more money is still in the old medium. Streaming will monetize at a lower rate, but end up generating bigger dollars over time. The same thing is true in the digital music business. Selling lots of stuff to lots of people at smaller price points is something the Internet enables superbly.

Yes, there are definitely new winners and losers in movies and music, as there will be in news. Those who transition best and fastest will win.

Second, it’s in line with the strategic push to satisfy the hell out of core customers. As publishers have figured out that it’s the top 15 percent of site visitors who make the big difference in building the new digital business — perhaps paying for subscriptions, consuming many more pages than fly-by users sent by Google — core customer satisfaction is key. Ebooks deeper the relationship to that reader customer.

This 100-product-a-year model may fit as well with the new California Watch/Bay Citizen combo (“The Newsonomics of the Death and Life of California News“), finalized Tuesday, as its does with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, GQ, or Conde Nast Traveler.

Let’s take one example. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe launched “Sunday Supper & More.” It’s a cookbook. It’s New England. And it could be the beginning of a new franchise: Expect summer, fall and winter editions each year to join this spring debut. The Globe’s staff built it with Apple’s iBooks Author tool, so it offers video within it.

Want to buy it? Not so fast. Today, Sunday Supper & More is only available to Boston Globe print, all-access, and digital subscribers. So subscription — think “membership” (the recent riff of the L.A. Times new paywall intro) — is gaining new benefits. Surprise, says the Globe, you not only get our paper, our spiffy new replica-plus edition, if that’s what you want, and our mobile apps — you also get our cool cookbooks, with more to come.

The Globe will sell the book to non-subscribers — probably at $4.99 — but will decide the timing of that sale after next week’s Globe confab at which execs and editors will plot an ebook plan for the company.

“Events and ebooks will be the two biggest perks” of the new Globe subscription push, says Jeff Moriarty, the Globe’s VP of digital products. Beyond Sunday Suppers and a new spin on the Fenway 100 historical Red Sox book, we can picture the Globe soon mining its archives in both sports and features to provide new value for customers and a new leg of revenue. It experimented early with three books on its Whitey Bulger stories, and learned some lessons in pricing, distribution, and the technical creation process along the way.

The Globe has plenty of company in this push. We see Canada’s National Post committing to a couple of dozen ebooks in the coming year, again from hard news to features (“To learn what works (quickly), Canada’s National Post dives into ebooks”). Guardian Shorts is an early innovator; Politico is churning out four campaign ebooks this year.

Magazine publishers, faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet as the next-gen platform, are also ahead of most newspaper publishers in ebooks. Vanity Fair’s done more than a half dozen, and its parent Conde Nast is hosting an explosion of more single-purpose apps in the iTunes Store, some unrelated to Conde’s magazines. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan is embracing ebooks, and now partnering, along with ProPublica — an early tester of ebooks — with Open Road Integrated Media . Open Road Integrated Media?

Well, it’s a book company, an ebook company juiced on the possibilities of our age. Headed by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, the company is prototypical of a new group of middlemen. With book marketing savvy (cover design, marketing, distribution+), these companies are now feeding the emerging ebook marketplace. They are also partnering back for that old standby, print, as Open Road has done with book services company Ingram. In Canada, it was Harper Collins Canada that became the National Post’s partner in bringing news ebooks to market.

Just as the web has knocked many middlemen for a loop, it creates openings for new ones.

If you talk to publishers about ebooks, they are farther along in experimenting than they were a year ago. Yet some basic issues — producing the books, marrying them to commerce engines, placing them prominently in e-stores and more — are giving them headaches as they push forward. “How do we make the right offer to the right person at the right time?” one experienced exec asked.

The marketplace has been exploding (recall that Amazon announced last spring that its ebooks were now outselling its paper books), but those issues are setting the stage for a new group of companies, many staffed with graduates of the book industry, offering their help. Newspaper and magazine publishers are looking to the Open Roads for guidance.

Some are turning to their digital circulation partner, Press+. That company, which is powering more than 280 titles’ subscription commerce, says its system can handle the commerce and even help with identifying likely customers, based on tracked content usage, so its customers are just beginning to ply the ebook trade.

ProPublica general manager Dick Tofel opted for Open Road for the non-profit investigative publisher’s fifth and sixth books. He says the company will start producing a half dozen or more a year now and is now fielding calls from other publishers eager to get the benefit of his early ebook experience.

So far, ProPublica has put 90,000 ebooks into the market. The first couple were free downloads, but with the addition of new original introductions to work ProPublica had already published free online, Amazon and ProPublica agreed on test pricing of 99 cents and $1.99, and new revenue is rolling in. It’s small, but “pound for pound, it generates more than advertising,” notes Tofel, who is a Wall Street Journal veteran. And, of course, the incremental cost of creating ebooks is closer to zero, with most sales cost able to be a commissioned cost of sale.

As assistant publisher, Tofel oversaw the print books business that’s been a good Dow Jones sideline for a long time.

Those books — personal investing and more — are naturals for the ebook revolution now. Look for the Journal to experiment more with those titles, perhaps niching by life stage.

As news and magazine publishers look to this new revenue stream, here are six points to ponder:

It’s about product development: Yes, it’s editing, but fundamentally, it’s a mindset change for many publishers stuck in the one-size-fits-all world. Publishers either need staffers with new product chops or partners wanting to license publisher content and create the products for the marketplace.

Free the archives!: Digital archives have never been a big business for publishers, caught somewhere between Google and musty library connotations. Packaged archives — for specific audiences — can offer new life for older content.

Don’t think content; think problem solving: Publishers too often start with content. If we start with audience — college-planning students and parents, new mothers and fathers to be, bored cooks, and, big time, sports enthusiasts of all ages — we can see the motors of ebook publishing beginning to role. Think life stage, just for starters, and add the geo angle, and regional publishers can play.

Mining the database: As onesies and twosies, it’s fairly easy to pick content from publishers’ own databases. Think of bigger production cycle, going beyond the 100 a year, to a thousand, all niched products that could be semi-automated and templated over time. Better tagging of content for ebook usage then becomes a priority.

Ebook or app?: Early experimenters say let the content be your guide. The more multimedia, the better an app may work. Ebooks, though, can be sold through more distributors, while Apple continues to dominate the app business.

Pricing: What’s an ebook worth? If it solidifies a subscriber/member paying $300 or more a year, it’s worth a lot, even if it’s free. Think of the lifetime value of that subscriber.

To the right niche, some ebooks will be worth $1.99 and others — Retina perfect — will go for $19.99. Let’s take our 100 products a year. Let’s average 5,000 sales for each. Let’s price at $2.99 on average. That would be $1.5 million. Some books, though, could be blockbusters. We can play with this math and see where it goes.

For the ProPublicas, it’s a nice non-ad revenue stream. For other publishers, it’s at least a growing third leg of revenue (beyond ads and circulation) and one that may be nurtured into something significant. (Last fall, Will Sullivan offered a gaggle of reasons ebooks make sense for publishers.) As importantly, it can reinforce those two legs, pleasing subscribers/members with free (or discounted) perks and advertisers/sponsors who have new opportunities to represent themselves to niche audiences. That’s a pretty good combination, and one that publishers will soon embrace, just as they lately have all-access digital circulation.

Ask most publishers or editors about games, and they’ll tell you their business isn’t about fun and games. It’s about the serious, semi-Constitutional role of informing the public.

Game dynamics may change that thinking.

When we think of games these days, our minds move to enraged birds or fortune-seeking farmers. We think of the little games now app’d onto our smartphones, a diversion, something trivial. But think of the playable game — the fun — as the hood ornament. The business of game dynamics — or gamification — is what happens under the hood.

Game dynamics isn’t about time-wasting. Au contraire: it’s about a seductive, powerful drawing-in of human habit. It’s about changing those habits, leading us to do new things (over and over again). This being America, those habits increasingly have a lot to do with selling stuff, with commerce. On the Internet, they increasingly help companies chase greater engagement with customers, be they buyers, readers, or both.

Silas Lyons is a pioneer among newspaper people in understanding the potential value of game dynamics to the news business. “It’s basic human psychology,” says Silas Lyons, editor of the Record Searchlight in Redding, Calif., VP of new media content and a co-chair of one of the Scripps’ task forces that pushed forward with the game dynamics idea. “We’re not trying to solve an audience problem — we’re trying to solve an engagement problem. The reader is being rewarded for consuming, sharing, commenting, and finding insight.”

Lyons explained the new notions to readers, in a column, entitled “Civilization comes to Redding.com.”

The goal here isn’t simply to build core customers. It’s to bring greater civility and perspective — what Lyons calls “insight” — to the site. Readers now can mark others’ comments as “insightful,” resulting, over time, in higher ranking of commenters the community seems to value. You gotta love it, at this time and place in America: Let’s play civilization.

The Redding Record Searchlight (circulation of 25,000 on Sunday, 22,500 daily, and more than a half million unique visitors monthly) is an E.W. Scripps newspaper located in northern California, about 200 miles north of San Francisco. It’s far from big media markets and a paper of record for its far-flung geography. In print, it’s long been a little center of civilization, a community center. Online, it hasn’t, like most newspaper websites. The new initiative, partnered with gamification pioneer Bunchball, is an effort to apply old values on the new medium.

Take a look at the two-week-old new features page on Redding.com. Readers are invited to check it out with an invitation at the top of the home page: “Redding.com now recognizes users who contribute to the community. Explore the new features“.

It is prize- and recognition-based. “Badges recognize you for being a valued member of our local news community”. They can earn points a number of ways, including viewing stories or photos, sharing news on Facebook or Twitter, or commenting on a story. The more you participate, the more points you earn. Your points build on your profile page — your own place on the site, your “trophy case” — and allow you to compete for placement on Redding.com’s leaderboard.

Overall, the two- to three-week-old metrics are promising. Registration is up 35 percent and comments are up 19 percent. 7,600 users are in the game. (Redding.com’s top user has toted up 8,800 points already; profile here.) 16,200 comments have been rated “insightful.”

“We’re seeing some very strong movement in engagement — users commenting, marking other comments insightful, sharing our content, registering, opting in to email products and news alerts,” Lyons told me this week. “If these trends hold up, they give us a very strong foundation on which to build. The key to making this work so far, and potentially to building it out in the future, has been the Scripps development and user experience teams. They’ve been working deep in the code and templates so that the game dynamics are tightly intertwined with the full experience on the site, and they’ve created something that relies on our technology partner, but is really unique. It doesn’t feel bolted on, because it’s not. Strategically, that’s where we want to be.”

In addition to the civilizing effort, what are the newsonomics of game dynamics? More page views and greater audience data-for-targeting for advertisers, for starters. Engaged core customers who really make Redding.com a starting point, a center of their digital lives will be a great market to serve anything from daily deals to special services to new products, and possibly to charge for digital access (as Redding watches Scripps’ digital circulation initiative soon to be tested in Memphis.)

The Redding experiment is an intriguing one and good start. It forces us all to think about what community, community engagement and civil behavior should be in this digital age. Redding.com is emphasizing commenting out of the chute. That may be worthwhile — it’s high-minded to hope that insight can be rewarded — and we’ll watch eagerly to see how it succeeds.

But commenting, I think, is at best the tip of iceberg here. We really want to greatly re-engage local readers in community, engagement far beyond what was ever possible in print. That print newspaper was a wonderful community water cooler — with 50-percent-plus household penetration — but it was tough for readers to go beyond discussion.

Now we have the tools to do that. So let’s start to think about the kinds of additional engagement that game dynamics could incent, re-enforce and help build. We’re five years into thinking of readers (courtesy of Jay Rosen) as the people formerly known as the audience. Readers are a lot more than audience these days, but can we use habit-forming incentives to create new pro-news behaviors? For instance, what if news companies provided a wider array of incentives for help in:

• Crowdsourcing: Occasional news tips are great. What if community tipsters got points?
• City guide population: MediaNews’ new TapIn Bay Area tablet product is big into points as well, as it seeks to have readers help it build its next-generation city guide product. Newspapers have something of value to offer those who help populate city guides that Yelp doesn’t: digital (and/or print) subscription discounts, better daily deals and ad discounts for merchant contributors.
• Blog writing: Gamification can support pro-am community blogger outreach. “Pay” ongoing contributors with points.
• Buying stuff: Why not earn points by buying stuff from advertisers? It’s co-op, game-inflected capitalism for the 21st Century.
• Data crunching, visualizations: The Guardian and The New York Times, among others, are open-sourcing more of their code, inviting wider collaboration. Why not incent this behavior as well?
• Design: Build a better site section, a better app or a cool new product. Give major points — major benefits — to those who make major contributions.

For one great example of applying incentive techniques to business building, check out WSJ’s Andy Jordan’s Tech Journal video segment, “From Web Surfer to Successful Inventor.” It tells the story of New York invention start-up Quirky, “a social product development company,” a great tale unto itself. But catch this quote from Quirky’s 24-year-old CEO Ben Kaufman: “For literally centuries, it’s been really, really hard to make stuff. You needed access to capital. You needed to know the right people. You needed to be multi-disciplinary between design, engineering, manufacturing and retail, and you needed all these things to push one new product out into the world. We’re just not okay with that.”

So Quirky uses its widening community to refine dozens of products in invention. It incents contributors with something we all understand — money — and shows their small, but growing, receipts (based on the value they add to the products) in real-time on a website.

Creating new physical goods is in many ways harder, and different, than new digital news goods, but the thinking is immediately applicable. Are the rewards points, or badges, or money, or community standing? We don’t know yet, but there’s clearly a new ability to value readers — and for readers to value news/community centers.

That belief is increasingly shared. Scripps, along with MediaNews’ TapIn, is one of the leading-edge experiments here. Hearst and Morris are testing out gamification. Even The Economist tells me it is looking at testing game dynamics over the next year.

These game techniques are beginning to pervade our lives. They are used by media more widely, and by merchants of all kinds. Mike Earhart is vice president for marketing at Silicon Valley-based Bunchball, Scripps’ technology partner. The 40-employee company was into games “too early,” he says, before mobile ignited casual gaming. So it turned to helping established companies use game techniques. It counts 125 million unique visitors through its products, with those visitors executing 2.3 million “actions” a month.

Bunchball has worked with NBC (“The Office”), Bravo (“Top Chef”), Meredith National Media Group, and Wendy’s among others. Using game dynamics to jumpstart new business strategies may seem like a stretch — initially — for both marketers and media. Yet, says Earhart, it boils down to using the new techniques to answer an age-old question: “What are you trying to get your users to do?”

The Bay Area News Group’s announcement Tuesday caused a few ripples, and some head-scratching. “About 120 lose jobs in Bay Area News Group re-branding, streamlining,” read Poynter.

Hadn’t we read that story before? Didn’t MediaNews already reorganize its Bay Area papers? Hadn’t it cut lots of jobs? Didn’t it change its circulation reporting methodology to get one big number for readership — and ad sales? Yes, yes, and yes, plus a litany of other related re-orgs that may have confused us.

In short, Bay Area News Group (BANG), which has had 15 separate titles,announced it was combining 10 of those titles into two new ones (the East Bay Tribune and the Times), closing a printing plant and gaining other production efficiencies. Gone into history will be such titles as the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and Contra Costa Times, along with another 8 percent of the overall workforce — or another 120 or so jobs, 48 in newsrooms.

It’s one sad tale of decline, further decline, and then more. MediaNews’ experience isn’t unlike that of many of its brethren; it just offers a breathtaking vista of newspaper loss — and reader loss. I, too, was inured when I first saw the news break, and a bit confused about what was new news and what was old news. Then, yesterday, Bay Area public radio station KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny did an hour on the massive new changes, and asked me to participate, along with David Weir (associated with Salon, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and now 7×7), and Newsosaur analyst Alan Mutter.

We heard from a number of callers. A few shared concerns about the news emergency. Some were willing to pay for news; others were devout advocates of the church of free news. One call, though, stayed with me.

A woman named Laurie called, saying she was court-appointed conservator. She talked about elder abuse.

Two colleagues and I have been working for 15 years on a very elaborate scam by a couple of individuals, and they’ve taken hundreds of thousands of dollars, homes and cars; it’s very complex…The news is our last great hope for justice for these elders. The Adult Protective Services has been cut. The two detectives we’ve worked with are being laid off. The DA’s office is too strapped. We’ve been working with a reporter, to get in front of people to show the outrage. The crime just goes on and to see the newspapers get cut back is really hard.

This is loss.

It’s a breakdown in which the press is both cause, given its weakness and lesser ability to call attention to such outrage, and a victim of collateral tech-driven damage. We live in a society that knows how to measure lots of things financially, but less and less non-financially. Sophisticated metrics tell us how well we’re doing with hard value and throw up their hands at things that can’t be measured but are deeply felt.

It isn’t simply the sad loss of middle-class journalism jobs, as lamentable as that is, just as so many other good jobs that have disappeared in recent years. It’s a community loss, and points to the wider impact of news cuts on the society in which we live. That’s often forgotten as we focus too narrow on industry loss.

The Bay Area News Group cutback, in fact, reflects much of what we are coming to miss. So let’s look briefly at this newsonomics of loss, a function of our times, even as much is being rebuilt — and gained — at the same time:

• Identity: The soon-to-departed (in November) Oakland Tribune is 137 years old. It will be subsumed under the East Bay Tribune nameplate. The East Bay Tribune will stretch from Oakland south to Fremont, a stretch of 27 miles and at least 1.5 million people, many of whom don’t feel connected to the geography Media News now asserts. Newspapers are all about community identity; they have both reflected it and provided rallying symbols of it. Business efficiencies may argue for “East Bay,” but readers’ senses of what’s local are something else again. With this decision, Oakland, for one, has lost something of itself.Dori Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute, and daughter of Robert Maynard, who revived the Oakland Tribune before selling it in 1992 to MediaNews, summed it well this week: “It was a newspaper that you had to read and people took pride in reading….My father died knowing that Oakland had a newspaper and that was really important to him……[Former MediaNews CEO Dean] Singleton kept it going for a long time.” (For a contrarian view of how MediaNews damaged the Maynard legacy, check out Zennie Abraham’s SFGate post.)
• Reporting: Most of the jobs cut in this re-org are on the production and printing side of the business as BANG closes one of its four regional printing plants. However, 48 jobs are being cut from the East Bay newsrooms, about a quarter of the unionized editorial workforce, and that’s got to affect news-gathering. The company has already moved regional production from San Jose to Walnut Creek, to take advantage of a lower-cost union contract. Like most companies, Gannett and Tribune among them, MediaNews is templatizing as many sections (common business and tech sections, for instance) and pages as it can, cutting out production and design, while trying to preserve reporting. Yet, the reporting loss already has been huge, with the best estimates saying that newsroom size of the Bay Area papers overall has been cut in half over the last 10 years. That’s hundreds of reporting jobs, with the once-Top 10 Mercury News now operating in a semi-empty building.How much of the reporting that does see the light of day will be “local”? Each of the new consolidated titles — the East Bay Tribune and the Times — will have single metro sections. That means what’s local to reader won’t really be local to another. Regional, while valuable, isn’t local, and in fact, has seemed to be a hindrance to metro papers as they try to find some footing in the increasingly digital news reading world. Is MediaNews’ move here a smart one, or one that makes its new titles even less vital of a read for its audience?How many elder abuse-like stories never see the light of day? How many corruptions, large and small, are unfound? We don’t know; we don’t know what we don’t know.
• Community leadership: Many chains are cutting their executive costs by combining publisher and ad director positions, with the actual duties concentrated on the ad (revenue-producing) side. Both business and editorial oversight of newspapers increasingly happens at the corporate level. BANG appears going down that road as well, though I couldn’t verify how much. Clearly, though, further homogenizing newspaper titles and operations furthers this trend. As community publishers disappear, community groups — from chambers of commerce to Rotaries to library boards — lose a key connection to the paper. A publisher is often the business face, sometimes more popular than other times, but serves as a connection to an important civic institution. Neither editors nor ad directors, no matter how well they perform, can fulfill that role.

While putting a semi-optimistic face on the changes, with talk of rebranding, there is little mistaking what’s behind MediaNews’ moves. Like all newspaper chains, it is struggling with year-over-year ad revenue losses. It is tentatively trying to find some small, new digital circulation revenue. It is experimenting with new tablet products, like its TapIn launch. It is hoping and praying a double-dip recession (“The Newsonomics of the Next Recession“) doesn’t blow it off the financial tightrope it is already walking. Without a permanent CEO (Dean Singleton moved aside in January and has only been replaced by interim Gordon Paris), this company heavily directed by Alden Global Equity is doing everything it can to operate in the black, preventing financial loss, even as all the other losses mount.

In short, it is hunkering down, while it tests some digital initiatives. This MediaNews restructuring, with all its implicit and explicit loss, seems less a strategy than a new phase of a holding pattern, as the old newspaper industry hangs suspended in disbelief and disorder.

At the end of the KQED hour, Oakland Tribune editor Martin Reynolds called in, plaintively responding to several callers’ statements that the quality of local journalism had declined. He acknowledged that much had been cut (the Tribune’s newsroom in 1995 had 40-plus people, and that’s down to a mere dozen today), but talked about the dedication of the current staff and the good journalism they produce.

It was a good coda.

It’s important to mark the multiple losses, and let what has been lost sink in for a short time. Then, it’s important for all the journalists still employed — those remaining at MediaNews’ Bay Area properties, those at the financially reeling Chronicle, those at national model start-ups Bay Citizen and California Watch and those at news staff-building KQED, among others — to do what journalists need to do: Forget the uncertain business around them and report the news as best they can.

Nothing (witness Jim Romenesko passing into semi-retirement this week) lasts forever. But there’s always news that needs reporting.

We’d all like to know what comes next. That can be a spiritual quest, a political one, or in the case of news publishers, one that would help them know what it is readers who land on their site would like to read next.

A new batch of news-oriented tech companies are hitting the marketplace, claiming to better understand — and help news publishers act on — what readers are more likely to read next. Know that, and publishers can better satisfy those readers, getting them to click on more pages, providing more ad-targetable data, and growing their businesses on the relative cheap.

It’s another riff on publishers’ renewed concentration on core readers, satisfying them more deeply and getting them to spend more time on site and maybe even pay for a digital subscription. It’s another way of saying we need more revenue per customer (“The newsonomics of ARPU“). New customers aren’t being minted overnight (most news sites’ unique visitor growth has stalled), so it’s time to improve the experience of current customers. In general, this is all part of  movement to better understand the news business, by the numbers.

In macro terms, if the U.S. newspaper industry could use these newer technologies to improve revenue by 10 percent, that would be worth about $300 million a year, collectively. That’s a big number in the new no- to low-growth era we’re in.

Three companies — YieldBot, Jumptime, and Outbrain — are among those who offer news and media companies differing approaches to better reader engagement. Each has its own story to tell, and each is emblematic of a wider trend in the industry: mastering how the digital business is oh-so-different than print.

They have a common belief in the limitation of human intelligence, especially that of the common editor.

The human reader brain, goes the theory, is far more unpredictable than editors ever believed. (And most editors I’ve known have a low, low regard for readers’ brains.) Online, editors and designers have long packaged stories, placing whatever stories seemed relevant to the story being read, either manually or by simple algorithm. Of course, that’s worked — to some degree.

To how great a degree now is increasingly measurable. And these would-be tech partners are telling publishers: you are leaving stories (and money) on the table. We’ll show the real, provable relationships between stories and by adjusting your presentation, you’ll bump up your pageviews — especially among valuable core readers — and make more money.

It’s an evolution of thinking beyond a single edition of a newspaper, read from front page to back, in an orderly fashion. Few people actually read papers in that orderly a fashion, but that’s how publishers and editors thought about it. Then they constructed their online sites the same way, with disproportionate attention to the hallowed home page, some attention to the section “fronts” and less to the “article” pages.

Now as sideways traffic — greatly multiplied by Google, Facebook, and Twitter links, mentions and touts — has become recognized as the way things really are, publishers need new understanding. There are real, discernible patterns of behavior, if you crunch a lot of data, and these companies can show it to you on graphs, scatter charts, clusters and more. Let your online presentation people link stories or sections they wouldn’t have otherwise linked. Let your audience management people make longer-term decisions about how valuable that Facebook traffic was compared to that Google traffic. Let your ad staff have the ammo it needs to prove out the kind of visitors who are attracted to certain site sections.

“Sure, we’ll show you where your readers come from and where they go off to, but the real question is what they do when they get to your site. What’s happening at this moment,” says Jonathan Mendez, CEO of New York-based start-up YieldBot. Mendez, a self-described “crusader for relevance,” was a principal at ad optimizer Offermatica before it was sold to Omniture in 2007.

L.A.-based Jumptime paints itself as an “optimizer.” It, too, is focused on what happens once someone hits a news site. Jumptime is all about better routing. Using its “Flo-Power” metrics, the company assigns value to different pages not just on the basis of its individual usage, but largely on how well that page performs in redirecting traffic elsewhere on the site. Some pages are freeway cloverleafs, others not so much. “Why would you send someone to a cul de sac?” asks Michele DiLorenzo, Jumptime’s CEO, an MTV business development veteran.

Both Jumptime and YieldBot give you real-time info on which pages are creating high bounce (exit to other sites) rates, for instance. “A page,” says DiLorenzo, “is a determinant of what happens next.” And wouldn’t we all like to know that?

Outbrain takes a different approach to the same issue. It produces seemingly simple modules of what appear to be “content recommendation” links. Aggregate Knowledge, Inform Technologies, and Sphere (first bought by AOL, rebranded and then sold to Outbrain this year), among others, have plowed similar territory, but never got much traction with news publishers. Outbrain says it produces links that are “things of interest, not just related.” It’s another complexity-reducer, applying its algorithms to individual and group reading behavior, maybe offering a Spanish debt story or a how-exercise-will-save-your-life article to someone reading a Jihadists-target-Letterman piece. Counter-intuitive, but customers say it works to juice traffic.

Outbrain is a five-year-old New York-based company, which just launched its mobile product. It enables publishers to optimize site usage, like YieldBot and Jumptime, and also offers several networking features, recirculating both traffic and small revenues among its numerous member publishers. It has the most established base of customers.

Both Jumptime and YieldBot are newer entries, now testing their products in beta with a few major publishers, looking for an edge. Each site offers consoles and tools to manage data, draw intelligence from it and make real-time or over-time decisions from it. Jumptime works a on fee-for-service models, while YieldBot and Outbrain focus on revenue shares.

The mantra of these companies: Counting traffic with Omniture, Chartbeat, and Google Analytics is oh-so-first-generation. They will tell you how people got to your site and where they are going, but it’s tougher to get real, actionable intelligence about what they are doing on your site, and what they might do, given different content choices.

“Publishers don’t know the [relative] value of their assets,” says Jumptime co-founder Anke Audenaert. “Can you imagine operating a business and not understanding the value of your assets?”

Of course, publishers thought they knew that. They thought, though, of value created by whole editions, circulation value and ad value. Now as readers flit from one story/video/blog on one site to another on another site, all of these tech companies are saying, essentially, value has been atomized. Each article or page has a value, and that value grows or diminishes in context to other articles and pages. And you need our algorithm to figure it all out.

Of course, any good algorithm produces a better yield. Outbrain will tell you its algorithm provides a 6-to-8 percent lift in pageviews for sites that properly deploy its boxes of linked stories; some of its customers tell me they’ve gotten that and more. Jumptime will tell you it can improve revenue by 20 percent by maximizing that secret sauce of FloPower, creating that much more engagement.

These companies, and others like them, are in the business of modern divining rods. Divining rods for the digital age.

Mendez says it is all about intent, determining a web users’ intent better — and then satisfying it. “People have a goal-oriented state of mind,” he says Mendez. “Something is motivating them. That intent makes the medium good at demand capture.” He says big publishers, especially, have enough data to help advertisers better target readers; they just need to use it much better. “Media is worth much more than they are getting.”

Editor’s Picks is a new, prominent module on the right hand column of Google News. It showcases five links from two dozen of the biggest news brands — from MSNBC, to The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica to the Guardian, Marketwatch, Reuters and the L.A. Times (but alas, no Yahoo News) — and offers easy-to-use instructions on how other publishers can get their content, for free, in front of Google’s many eyeballs. Publishers simply pick the stories they want represented and send ‘em off; that’s the proxy part because no Google person need be involved in editorial decision-making.

It’s a simple idea, really, a box of links, as old as the web itself. What seems revolutionary about, as Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber points out is that it seems like a departure from the ancient (2002) Google News dogma: “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors…No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.”

It kind of seemed cute then, this algo approach to the world. In the subsequent era, though, in which human editorial judgment has been diminished in value, and its funding put in jeopardy, it now seems like an approach from another age.

Go back to 2002, briefly, and we can see this simplistic Machine vs. Man way of thinking. In Google’s approach, the purest taken around news aggregation, man (and woman) was seen as interloper, getting in the way of the ultimate wisdom of the crowd. Newspaper people, of course resented The Machine, its ascendance and its job-killing nature.

For at least a decade, we’ve lived in this rhetorical age of either/or. Machine, symbolized well by Google News, and Man, symbolized by The Man, making his editorial decisions the old-fashioned way, on whim, wit and the indefinable “news judgment,” without regard to what the reader data said.

Now, we’re emerging, slowly, from the silliness. Newsroom editors are starting to use reader data, some through the day ( “The Newsonomics of WaPo’s Reader Dashboard 1.0“) to check their instincts against what the crowd of readers is saying it wants to read. The new tools and metrics able to inform human editorial judgment are getting better everyday, and there’s a new round of companies offering their real-time metrics-creating products to news publishers. That’s one positive sign we’re emerging from Man or Machine Dark Ages thinking.

And, now, Google News has — ta-da! — allocated a box, separate and independent from (let the record show) its algo news results, never mind that the algorithms themselves have been created, and are constantly tweaked, by humans. (Calling Werner Heisbenberg.)

That’s a small indication that the Machine is responding. What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.

So, chalk up Google’s move as a marketplace move. Yes, it acknowledges that The Machine is not all we need, and that some nexus of Man and Machine, the algo of that combination still being written, will be a new order of the day.

We’ve seen lots of consternation over numbers recently. Take Groupon’s foggy (more opaque than fuzzy) math now being dissected by the SEC. Dissatisfied with all the usual metrics-for-investors the business world has produced, it decided to create its own: ”adjusted consolidated segment operating income,” or adjusted CSOI.

The excellent WSJ piece, by Shayndi Raice and Nick Wingfield, lays it out well, though it’s a pinch-yourself, “Is-this-The-Onion?” kind of story. As one portfolio manager said, ”In essence, Groupon is asking investors to look at their profit before any expenses.”

In June, we read the Triumph of Charts over commonsense, with the Huffington Post surpassing The New York Times in unique visitors and the UK’s Mail Online now the secondmost-read site in the galaxy. I remember the good old days when it was hard to put up a chart on the web. Now, it’s so easy, anyone and everyone is doing it. Too often, it’s form before facts of consequence. Too often, charts feed delicious, SEO’able headlines that drive incredible traffic…that put some sites high up on the charts. It’s quite a circle, though lacking virtue.

Others (check out Steve Myers’ smart Poynter piece) have pointed out fallacies in the NYT/HuffPo comparisons. Let’s add to them with a look at the newsonomics of ARPU, or average revenue per unique visitor. It’s a great benchmarking metric, long used by telcos and in the cable TV industry, and one being increasingly used, though not publicly, in the digital news industry. In addition, it’s a revealing number when we look at such players as HuffPo, the Daily Mail, and NYTimes.com.

ARPU basically says: Don’t tell me how many customers you have; tell me how much money you are making on each of them. While it’s not the only number anyone wants to use to run a digital business, it’s a big piece of the puzzle — especially as we compare like companies to each other.

Let’s look at the ARPU of traffic. I’ve used full-year 2010 data, the cleanest available, and extrapolated where necessary.

For NYTimes.com, I’m estimating digital ad revenues of $170M in 2010. That’s 80 percent of total reported digital revenues for the Times News Media group overall. The Times represents just under 70 percent of total company revenues, and, clearly, the Times itself is driving more digital revenue, proportionally, than the smaller papers in the company. So 80 percent should be close.

In December 2010, comScore reported 48 million global uniques for the Times. So each unique would be worth $3.54 for the Times for the year. (Of course, uniques vary by month, and domestic uniques — 32 million or so — are worth more than non-domestic.)

For the same month, comScore reported 31 million global uniques for the Huffington Post. Most 2010 revenue estimates for HuffPo come in at about $30 million. So, in 2010, each HuffPo unique would be worth 96 cents.

Let’s take two supposed competitors in the UK, both in the news business, both selling advertising but attracting quite different audiences.

The Guardian took in £37.5 million in digital revenue in 2010. Using the December ABCe number of 39 million uniques, each unique was worth about £.96, or $1.53 at today’s exchange rates.

For the Mail, I extrapolate, from its reports, about £16 million in digital revenue for last year. Using the March (aligning with its reporting period) ABCe unique number of 66 million, I figure each unique visitor is worth about £.24, or 38 American cents to the Mail.

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

Why the differential? Reasons run a wide course. Take your pick from:

• “Premium” brands get higher rates than non-premium ones.
• Legacy sales forces are better at leveraging bigger buys than newer sales forces.
• Advertisers believe they get better results from the Times and the Guardian.
• The Guardian and The New York Times are driving more pageviews per unique visitor than the Huffington Post and Mail Online — both of which may have mastered search engine optimization and search engine marketing to tilt the unique numbers in their favor. The more pageviews, the more chance for monetization, and, thus, more revenue. Fly-bys are a huge part of everyone’s traffic (probably 60-70 percent of New York Times and Guardian traffic); they may be an even huger part of HuffPo’s and Mail Online’s.

(As another comparison to our news calculations, it’s intriguing to run the numbers for Groupon and Twitter. Twitter has about 139 million uniques (May, 2011) and maybe revenues of $150 million this year, or $1.07 ARPU. Groupon, with $460 million in U.S. revenue in 2010, estimated by Techcrunch, and about 10.7 million unique visitors in December, would have an ARPU of $42.90. That’s off the charts — and why it has attracted its valuation, despite its “profits” accounting.)

Whatever deeper analysis will show, the ad revenue numbers are real. Would you rather have the Times’ $170 million in digital revenues or HuffPo’s $30 million? (I know Tim Armstrong’s answer, and you AOL shareholders can sit down now.) Of course, it’s true, HuffPo/AOL traffic may continue to ramp up (or not), on a much-smaller cost base. It’s also true that the Times, still profitable, owns a huge brand equity — now being leveraged in digital circulation money as well — and has lots of upside, as it is challenged by its own legacy cost burdens.

Whatever kind of battle this is, it’s not a battle of equals, and it’s not a battle that can be understood by charting unique visitors.

Unique visitors are a great dumb count. As I’ve noted, it’s as if in the print world we counted the everyday subscriber — consuming 5 hours a month of a news publication — the same as someone who, standing on a Midtown corner on a windy day, happened to catch a sheet of flying newsprint as she held up her hand to hail a cab. Hardly equal, yet that’s what unique counts level.

Unique counts play to the wonder of Google search and, now, by Facebook and Twitter touts, but they are increasingly meaningless in a world that still seems to operate on a single currency: currency. Expect the bounce rates (hit one page and then leave the site) of the fly-bys only to increase in our new age of ubiquity, with mobile devices providing everywhere-and-anywhere access. It is hard not to run into big brands: Add to the Times, the HuffPo, the Guardian, and Mail Online such top-of-Google sites as Examiner.com and eHow.

Counting unique visitors — increasingly — is like counting air.

ARPU itself is just a beginning at better counting. Some will say it’s too general, the “A” as in average, just too broad to be useful. So companies can segment it, especially as they value core customers — say, the RPU of readers who read 50 pages a month compared to those who don’t.

Consider, in addition, how ARPU can be stretched and fine-tuned: mobile ARPU, smartphone ARPU, iPad ARPU, video-consuming visitor ARPU. Into the future, as each digital reader is offered an array of niche (sports, travel, health) products, increasing the ARPU of core readers becomes even more important. Much easier to upsell a customer, in any trade, than get a new one.

In addition, increasing ARPU is a better investment, says Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan, than either increasing sales volume or decreasing sales expense.

Some execs told me that ARPU is getting more important in the age of paid reader digital access, as, this week, Time Inc. ratifies that new age with its all-access provisioning for all 21 of its consumer magazine titles. While eCPM (the effective cost-per-thousand rate publishers get for their advertising, taking into account sponsorships and several sales types) is the preferred metric for ad efficiency, the emerging ARPU number can combine both how much a unique visitor provides in subscription (or pay per view, day, week) revenue and how much advertising revenue, on average, that unique enables.

Bonus question of 2011: What does the cross-platform (weekend print/daily digital, for instance) ARPU look like?

This isn’t an idea that’s alien to the legacy newspaper and magazine business — we’d have to combine a few legacy numbers to get an Average Revenue Per PrintSubscriber number — but the twists and turns, and added data, of the digital business give ARPU and its offspring increasing relevance.

It is all coming down to the same two revenue sources — circulation and advertising — just moved to the new digital business, gradually. (Lee Enterprises this week accepted Journalism Online’s advice and is up-charging print subscribers as it rolls out six tests.) As everyone toys with reader pricing, bundling, and add-ons, add up circulation and advertising, and we’ve got those increasingly familiar economics of transition.

Here’s my take, below, and a link to others’ takes:

PICTURE the journalist in the new social era. She is twitching, nervous system all lit up by the pings and arrows of outrageous (and occasionally insightful) comment traversing across her screen every waking moment. After being forbidden to participate in the social universe only a few years ago, her employers have now made getting involved part of the job description. Tweet, make new friends, “link in”, for godsakes.

At this early point in the socialisation of news, our nervous systems are most affected. Evolution is only beginning to change our brains and our hearts, and to build new muscle. We’re learning how to crowdsource, how to use audiences to find stories and angles, how to detect trending topics that really help us decide what to report.

We are learning that we are not islands of wisdom and knowledge. As the old gates rust, the old gate-keeping mentality is disintegrating with it. We were arbiters of what our readers could read. A monopoly metro was not just commercial (and why do you think those high ad rates are so hard to match online?), it operated as a community monopoly mindset. Editorial page writers called it agenda-setting, but it was really deciding what was best for everyone.

Now that world is fast fading into history. I think the best metaphor for what is replacing it is this notion of circles, most lately appropriated by Google. Digital life works best when it augments our long-honed human habits in positive ways. We’re used to consulting circles of close buddies, some associates, a few family members and sometimes a wide group. We know what to share with whom and what we’re likely to get back. We’re now trying to recreate that in the digital world. Technology is helping, but is still clumsy; witness the unending invitations we all get to join this or that group.

Inevitably, journalism is getting socialised. It is really a model of shared governance, borrowed from other professional cultures. Power is not as absolute, and can be better informed. Yes, readers are becoming their own editors, as I pointed out in the first law of Newsonomics. But the role of the editor and the passionate journalist, in leading (whatever the popular trend of the day) remains just as vital a part of this new sharing. The Guardian’s steadfast leadership in the News Corp scandal is one great reminder of that.

Sure, there are some publishers who recognise the business value of cheap user-generated content, and are ready to dispatch professional journalists to their earlier and earlier retirement. I think that is a losing play. I believe that readers expect us to lead, and listen, and lead.

As important as how journalism is changed by socialisation is how socialisation is changing the business of newspapers. We already know, in talking to numerous publishers, that the social/news link is valuable. Those who track incoming links (Google vs Facebook vs Twitter) will tell you that social links convert better. More registrations. More pages read. More likelihood of becoming a new reader of the site. That’s testament to the power of social recommendation—ancient, village-spawned word of mouth exponentially multiplied in our time. Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.