9 Questions

Are we beginning to see the Last Man Standing strategy play out in the U.S.’s biggest cities? The New York Times is planning on building out 10-15 regional editions, on the model of its Chicago (partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative) and Bay Area (partnered with Bay Area Citizen) models. Now the Wall Street Journal is renewing its previously announced regional forays, into Chicago, L.A. and perhaps other places. WSJ CEO Les Hinton noted this week that “we’ve done focus groups and see a growing antipathy among high-end readers, towards what’s happened to their local newspapers.” One publisher’s nightmare is another’s opportunity.

It's a big bet. The New York Times, which has been thrashing about every possible kind of business model in the last six months, is making the bet on metering, meaning readers will get some number of free articles per month, then be told to pay up to get more. Nine quick questions as we [...]

How does the tablet blur own notion of what’s a book, what’s a magazine and what’s a newspaper? The web atomized everything, and the tablet is one form of reordering. Each device though — a Sony Reader, a Kindle, a Nook, a JooJoo, an Adam, an Ultra, whatever — will have a singular interface, regardless of the source of the content. That eliminates the historic difference in page size among newspapers, magazines and books, which is in fact one of the key ways we’ve long differentiated them. Another differentiator — paper stock — of course, becomes a dead (tree) issue.

It’s quite a cat-and-mouse game. The cat is Rupert Murdoch, a lion in the winter of his career. Astoundingly, he’s become the leading spokesman for American journalism. The mouse is the crafty Google, adjusting its algorithms and its tactics, faster than publishers can bemoan, “who moved my cheese!” It’s not just the dollars and cents at stake here — though, of course, that’s the fundamental issue. It’s the dollars and making sense of what is going on as 2009 closes.

So the newspaper industry is taking a page from indie film ("A Day Without a Mexican"), dailies are hiring execs from the alternative press, and we're seeing new, almost-daily, mating rituals between older and newer news media.
What's going on? Nine questions to start:

How about a week without the Chicago Tribune? Yes, I know the [...]

Charging for non-desktop/laptop access should be a new revenue stream for news publishers. The math, though, isn’t huge. Who is most likely to pay for Journal mobile? Presumably it’s online subscribers, of whom there are about a million. So $12 a year, if all of them signed up, would be $12 million. Not bad, but only about an 8% increase in reader revenue. I can’t see lots of non-subscribers shelling out $24 a year, but I may be wrong.
Better than charging just for mobile, I still think All-Access is the way to go: Get the Journal (or the Times or Guardian or ?) anyway we produce it, print, desktop, laptop, phone, e-reader, e-edition. And add a $5.95 per month charge for that. All-you-can-eat model that Americans seem to love, if if they don’t often sample the whole buffet.

What is Christine Varney taking from her newspaper industry talks? Obama’s new anti-trust chief has drawn a lot of attention for her interest in Google’s books deal, and beyond that, to Google’s great search dominance. Varney has also been meeting with news industry people, management and labor, getting a sense of what’s wrong in the news business. Publishers of course would love clarity about how much they can work together — on paid models, on negotiations with Google+ — without incurring anti-trust wrath. Varney and her people, of course, haven’t given them the bright line they’d like. Will Varney allow newspapers to get together, cartel-like? Will Google’s dominance in search, and leading role in news search, become part of reinvigorated anti-trust enforcement?

As I train down to D.C. for the Online News Association conference (moderating a panel hopefully titled, Optimize and Monetize, tomorrow; if you’re there, say hello), the dizzying news industry news of the last week raises more questions than answers. Here’s my top nine of the moment. Feel free to add to them:

As we keep [...]

So what do we make of the first half of 2008 in DailyLand? Bad and getting worse. I’ve listened to the CEO webcasts — so you don’t have to! — and must say that there were a couple of eerie echoes of my own suggested remarks, offered a couple of weeks ago ("Candidly, Frankly, Truthfully, [...]