2. Didn’t CNN’s coverage of the Iowa Caucuses illustrate our screens future? John King has been the King of the Screens, and we can remember when his magic-touch screen seemed wildly innovative. Now in the touch-screen era, it was all screens all night — save Wolf Blitzer’s classic utterance of “OMG” in seeing Romney go up by a single vote — and CNN newbie Erin Burnett brought the right slapstick spirit to the uncertain screencraft. She whooshed one image off one screen on to the next one, sometimes successfully. CNN’s use of data, even as limited as it was for this election, showed how much we’ve moved beyond the world of still print infographics. The marriage of analytics and screens from tablets to livingroom monitors is forever changing how we take in information.

3. If AOL crumbles in one direction or another, what’s the future for smart cookie Arianna Huffington, who has parlayed personality and business model into an enviable perch in American journalism? Who might pick up HuffPo, one of the easiest-to-define business lines in journalism? How much will its relatively low rate of ad return (“The Newsonomics of ARPU” deter buyers? With the emergence of a broad international strategy (10 new editions) – “We’re now re-expanding back into a list of countries”, said CEO Tim Armstrong Tuesday – it becomes a more interesting play.

4. With Alibaba hot on the Yahoo tail, how much should we wonder about the future of big aggregators stocking up on a professional journalists? AJR estimated that Yahoo has hired about 200 journalists and AOL 250 (not counting the Patchers). Those hundreds have produced some pretty good journalism, particularly with sports scoops, and have proven that the term “as first reported by Yahoo,” isn’t a joke. The question of Chinese ownership is a knotty one (interesting Fortune take on American hypocrisy, here), but we have to ask questions about how free a journalistic corps would be under Jack Ma leadership. It might be well and good to uncover U.S. football corruption, and that’s a growth sport itself, but what about wider public policy coverage? For AOL journalists, the questions are even gauzier. With AOL’s deepening financial questions and investor pressure to cut back on non-profit-producing business lines, how long will there jobs be maintained, under current or potential new management/ownership?

5. Won’t be 2012 be the age of All-Access perfecting? Time Inc is among those getting its tablet act together well, with Time Magazine a fairly slick tablet app. In December, the company made a foray at convincing print subscribers that connecting the print sub with digital access is a good idea. The sign-on process is fairly straightforward, and seems to hold session to session, unlike some others. Yet, subscribing to more than one Time Inc. product — Time Magazine and Sunset, for instance — has to be done twice. Expect that kind of obstacle to be eliminated going forward. All-Access will be real all access, made easier for consumers. And All-Access is even trickling down very local as the Monterey (Ca.) County Weekly heralds its all-access availability through public radio sponsorship. Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

6. How could a single person be empowered to send a message on behalf of the New York Times to eight million people? The Times’ your subscription-is-ending embarrassment email showed the company at its worst in detecting and handling a crisis. My larger question is how, in any scenario, a single person has the unchecked power to send a message to eight million people on behalf of a big brand? The culture of checking and doublechecking (yes, the sorry Judith Miller tragedy aside) is so deeply ingrained in Times’ DNA. Why isn’t it part of the wider culture, especially in the one-click age?

7. What’s more local than language? The Times profiled Wordnik Sunday. It’s an innovative modern language company making the most of digital technology to surface new and real meaning of our living language in this fast-changing age. Noted in the story is that the Times and News Corp’s Smart Money are using Wordnik for glossaries? As local media look for ways to really be more local, knowing and presenting more about place is essential. So what about using something like Wordnik to create local language guides? It’s a small idea, perhaps, but one showing how even local media need to make more use of digital tools if they are to make future claims of relevance to local audiences.

8.Hasn’t Gail Collins turned out to be a just-right-for-the-times replacement for Frank Rich? Rich’s rich prose and panoramic view often left us breathless in its sweep, and well deserved a Pulitzer. Yet Collins — a New Yorker who recently pointed out that “John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block” – has brought a Hee-Haw sensibility perfectly suited to the Wonderlandia of the Republican primary scene.

9. With a call-out to Ken Kesey, isn’t 2012 the year when you’re either on the cloud … of off it?

1. Won’t digital news subscriptions be short-term….and long-term? I’ve been baffled that the New York Times omitted a one-year (and easily expensable) option in its digital subscription offers, unlike the Wall Street Journal. Now comes this data point from German news publisher Axel Springer, the largest newspaper publisher in Europe. It has been selling digital subscription to non-print subscribers since November of 2009. It has offered multiple options — monthly, quarterly, annual and bi-annual (24 months)  — and the two most popular are monthly and two-year. That’s right, about a third of its digital subscribers in Hamburg and Berlin opt for 24 months. Now that’s a new customer relationship. After a slow start, digital subscriber growth is now moving more briskly up and is now in four figures, on the metered model.

2. Is Patch Inside a new strategy for the local network seeking lots more traffic? The Patch Widget makes it easy for any site to put a module of Patch headlines on its local site. Initiated in January, the offering is now available at each of the 800+ sites. That could be a great stealth strategy for AOL’s local play; it’s free marketing and distribution, if other local sites — think arts, sports, campus and local business sites — want to add some currency to their offerings. Though the widget is up, no Facebook connection is yet offered and the company says one won’t be coming soon. The local news module widget is hardly a new idea, but it’s one that few local newspaper companies have made work, despite the economy of its potential costs and benefits. Will Patch leapfrog newspaper sites with this old-is-new innovation?

3. Wasn’t Jon Stewart’s imitation-is-the-best-revenge departure tribute to Glenn Beck the best “analysis” of the quirky, quarky Beck? It was a deconstruction of the Beck act — bizarre, zooming camera angles, faux tonal intonations and the donning of the serious “now I’m telling you the truth” horn-rimmed glasses — that linked the Fox bloviator to the great tradition of American hucksters from P.T. Barnum to Elmer Gantry to the many false prophets of the age of of TV evangelism. Both Groucho and Chaplin would have been proud.

4. With “engagement” the new talking point of the 2011 news business, who will make the hire that makes the most sense, signing up Steve Buttry? Now that Jim Brady, TBD’s impresario, has landed thunderously in the new Journal Register lair, TBD (what I had optimistically called the start-up news website to most watch in 2010) retains only a few of its builders, as it fades into the history of “what-ifs” that has long dogged digital news innovation. Buttry gets engagement deep in his bones. The son of a preacherman, he’s been advocating community engagement, and more importantly, perfecting the practice of it over the last several years. No one better understands the art and science of community engagement, interaction and the mutually beneficial working relationships with local bloggers.

5. Doesn’t real estate bottom-feeding offer a good metaphor for what’s happening as private capital re-engineers the newspaper business? Who is speeding the recovery of real estate; well, bottom-feeding speculators, looking for downtrodden properties, spiffing them up a bit and selling them, as a recent NYT story on Florida reports. That’s not unlike what we’re seeing as private capital’s pushing companies from Freedom to Media News to Philadelphia Media Network to Journal Register to get on with the fundamental re-shaping of the business — and getting its ducks in a row to sell spiffed-up properties, come 2012 and 2013? (“The Newsonomics of Roll-Up“).

6. Will Bloomberg Views get lost in the echo chamber? It’s an intriguing, centrist, forget-ideology-let’s-on-with-real-problem solving idea. Editors David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, are shaping their new product with hires from the Atlantic and The Week, among others.  In an era when we hear so much advocacy and so little injection of fact-based innovation, Bloomberg Views could emerge through the noise, but I don’t think it will do it in the model of a newspaper Op-Ed section. Even if Bloombergian centrist, it needs to find its passion, though centrist passion starts out sounding like chaste sex. With increasing competition in the Seriousphere from the National Journal, the new Atlantic, the new AOL HuffPo, the new NewsweekBeast, among others, it will have to find its way in the social universe to help distinguish itself.

7. Am I the only one who doesn’t get Gannett’s branding campaign? Yes, the Gannett math — $33 million saved in furloughs, as much as $27 million potentially to be granted in exec bonuses — seems sadly clueless, but what about the money the company has spent on its branding campaign. New logo and then, in the TV ads, I’ve seen, ticking off the diverse Gannett  brands — from newspapers to broadcast stations to recruitment site Career Builder, rich media ad player PointRoll, elevator ad play Captivate, the MomsLikeMe network. Narrates CEO Craig Dubow, “What you may not know is that they are brought to you by one company.” I’ve seen the ad on local TV (which makes no sense), though it seems mainly targeted to media buyers through Advertising Age, Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek. Why would ad buyers increase ad buying at any of the individual properties because of the corporate ties? Maybe, it’s also a reinforcement of the brand and the company for Wall Street, as financial analysts question future performance. Overall, though, it reminds me of Knight Ridder’s big investment in green-and-blue re-branding, not too long before its demise, money, then, as now, that could be better spent on innovation itself.

8. Is Sunday, Bloody, Sunday the new refrain of the daily newspaper industry in the U.S.? As the New York Times rolled out its pricing, I wrote about how the Sunday paper/daily digital (especially tablet) world seemed to be in early formation. In the weeks since, at both NAA (the Newspaper Association of America) and ASNE (America Society of News Editors) conferences, and in other talks, the notion seems to be gaining strength. In fact, I’ve heard that a number of papers, in their internal strategic discussions are newly focusing on Sunday. That’s the day that generates the most money — highlighted by preprints, now the subject of a new industry task force, as it hopes to hold on to them in the wake of digital competition — and may resonate with readers, as their busy weekdays increasingly go digital. Watch the Sunday circulation numbers over the next 18 months, and more direct (than the Times’) efforts to bundle Sunday print and daily digital.

9. Is it true that 24-month-old California Watch just produced the most-run investigative project in state history? “On Shaky Ground” — pointing out poor earthquake readiness in the state schools — rolled out this weekend in all the state’s major papers, save the L.A. Times, in addition to the ethnic (Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean) press, public radio and TV — and Patch, among other outlets. More on the how and why this week, but worth immediately noting how such a start-up can have such a huge impact so quickly.

The Daily, I think, is getting rapt attention simply because it’s been wrapped in a great storyline by that wizardly storyteller Rupert Murdoch. It’s doubly cool. It’s the cool, first native general news (!) product for the coolest must-have device of our time, the iPad. That makes it a hot property and builds the legend of Murdoch, much as he’d like us all distracted from his MySpace miseries and the nasty News of the World imbroglio that’s enveloped his UK businesses, and put at risk his BSkyB acquisition.

It is, to Murdoch’s credit, an act of imagination, in a news world thoroughly disposed to repurposing, and one that is an early 2011 test of whether enough digital news readers will open their wallets — and for what (“The Newsonomics of Mr. Murdoch’s Daily“). Therein will lie its success or failure. In anticipation of the launch, here are nine questions on “The Daily” and its impact:

1) What’s it read like? The biggest challenge for The Daily isn’t money — though we are all focused on the “paid” model — but time. Our time is lots more valuable than 99 cents a week and reading The Daily means adding a new daily habit, replacing some other news reading, we’d think, or some other activity to be sure. To displace other habits, newsy and otherwise, it must compel our attention. Great columnists do that as can cool must-check-daily interactive tricks (the USA Today cover fact boxes updated for 2011?). A passionate take on the news can do that. A great original mix of original content and smart aggregation can do that. All are easier said than done.

2) What will The Daily do with Cairo’s Time? Egypt is the story of the week. With The Daily planning on being a daily, not an instant, news product, its thinking and philosophy will be tested literally Day One. If it has yesterday’s Egypt news, as the revolution goes down, it will read like yesterday’s paper, while CNN excels live from the street. That’s the advantage, the Journal, the Times and every newspaper has, a print compilation still valuable as a package to tens of millions — and the ability to do continually updated news. If The Daily does stay updated, using wires, the content may look like much of what others’ have, so that’s another challenge as well.

3) Is 99-cents the new news price? Behind the scenes, news publishers preparing pay models are looking both at subscriptions (monthly and annually) and at day passes. Some say 99 cents a day or a week is the ticket for web readers, and we’ll see tests using that model. The Daily, priced at 99 cents a week, is one early test, seeking a ratification of the notion that the iTunes music pricing model may be the way to go for news. It’s much less a commitment than a “subscription” and may upend those attempts to impose that print-like model.

4) How much can I sample; how much can I snack? The Daily, as the first digital general news native, invites a look. How easy will “the paper” (we need a new word, here) make it for me to try it out, tool around it, without committing to payment? What kind of metered system might it be on, to invite in readers, let the look around, even without pushing the magic iTunes’ 99-cent button? That could be critical to its early success, and, at the same time, a test of how flexible Apple is with its new digital subscription systems.

5) How much will The Daily crowd out other soon-to-launch paid news products, most specifically the new New York Times tablet app, set to launch when the Times goes paid? We believe Times print subscribers will get access to a digital bundle, including the iPad version, for free, but the Times needs at least several hundred thousand non-print readers to pay for the bundle as well. How tough will it be for news publishers to convince news readers to buy several online newspapers? What kind of first-mover advantage will The Daily have?

6) How much will The Daily leverage the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones video networks? They’ve been big successes, continuing to harvest way-above-text ad rates, and now produce more than 10 million video page views a month. Yes, The Daily needs to be independent, but smartly using Dow Jones content (Journal, AllThingsD and Marketwatch, especially) gives it leg up at a relatively low cost.

7) Will The Daily carry any Press+ branding? News Corp bought into Journalism Online in June, as a minority investor, helping that company more quickly build up its tech staff towards 2011 implementations. Since The Daily doesn’t have a substantial web analog (or a print one), we think it has to use Apple e-commerce. Making The Daily a part of the Press+ network, somehow, would give Journalism Online a substantial network effect boost.

After its first blush of exposure subsides, how will it find new readers? It could be a lonely island of a product. It’s tablet-only, and it’s paid, two paths leading to lonesomeness in an increasingly connected news world. Those limitations means it will be challenged by limited search engine optimization — and we’ll have to see how it plays the social whirl traffic referral game, as Facebook and Twitter tablet users try to make comments and connections (how exactly?) to The Daily. Since search and social search are the leading ways to gain traffic, and cheaply, we’ll have to see what moves The Daily makes here. For instance, what might it do with a Flipboard, a native news aggregator, an early sensation of the tablet, which could push it some customers?

9) What’s Rupert’s number? He’s got one; we just don’t what it is. The Daily will be a splendid learning experiment for News Corp, but how much investment, additional to the initial $30 million, may he make? That, of course, depends on revenue. Get 100,000 paid subscribers, and the net (after Apple’s share) would be $3.5 million a year in reader revenue, less than five percent of the Journal’s, and nowhere near enough to break even with a staff of 150. Get 300,000 paid subscribers, and that’s $10.5 million and highly profitable, as advertising starts to hum. We’ll be looking for two numbers: overall subscriptions sold (annually and monthly) and churn, though the latter probably won’t be reported. Depending on sampling/money-back offers, we could see a bubble of sales and then quicksand. Murdoch’s made many investments, bad and good, and is showing a quicker hand now at going quickly with what works, and letting the others move quickly into the archives.

What’s your question?

1)     Is 100 the new 10? Until recently, valiant start-ups from Voice of San Diego to Minn Post to California Watch birthed themselves with two handfuls of people, more or less. A couple of million in raised money, and a couple of years of running room, and these start-ups started to define a new era of online-only metro journalism. Now, though ambitions have quickly grown. Just in recent works, “100” seems to be the new rallying cry. The National Journal has re-launched, hiring 100 new staffers, while Bloomberg Government’s done the same, on its way toward 300. Not to be outdone, NPR launched its Impact of Government state coverage project, announcing 100 staff positions, though its funding for sustaining those positions hasn’t yet been arranged. “Public media” advocate Bill Kling has called for 100 news staffers in each of four cities (“Public Media $100 Million Plan: 100 Journalists Per City,”), with funding targeted for mid-next year.

Why the 100? Given the scale of reporting loss of 6000-plus daily newsroom reporting positions within the last three years, there’s a quickening acknowledgment that onesie-twosie additions may be like spit in the ocean. Overall, it’s a scale argument, and for Bloomberg, National Journal and others, the wider notion is that you have to create a substantial product to have a sustainable long-term business model.

2)     Doesn’t the Juan Williams contretremps emphasize how much NPR  has become a news player? National Public Radio has been around for 40 years, but only recently has it been considered a player, a national player mentioned along with the Big Four commercial broadcasters, the Times, the Post and the Journal? Its journalism has merited inclusion for longer, but it’s the higher public profile it has taken on that has made the difference. That’s due to pushes both at NPR itself, since Vivian Schiller took over as CEO two years ago, and at the bigger metro stations that are rapidly assuming a digital news role, from San Francisco to Chicago to Boston. NPR’s iPad and other digital plays also display which league it intends to play in.

So when NPR offered itself as giant piñata for the eager right with its mishandling of the Juan Williams episode, it was far bigger news than it would have been even three or five years ago.

NPR (and New York Times) contributor David Brooks put it well last week: “…the damaging thing to me is, NPR has really worked hard over the past 10, 20 years to become a straight-down-the-middle network. I’m not sure they always were decades ago. But now they really are. And now, because of this unfortunate episode, they begin to get some ideological baggage again. And that is damaging.”

3)     Hasn’t the recent Tribune saga seemed like a vintage Western? You know,  horrible things happen to a little hamlet. The bad guys pillage and plunder.  Then, somehow, it’s morning, and the bullies are gone. The village people come slowly out into the sunlight, first unbelieving that the yoke has been lifted. Then they celebrate and gradually become more vocal, loudly celebrating the end of villainy. That’s what’s happened as we see the specter of Chicago Tribune editor Gerry Kern filing a workplace harassment complaint after Lee Abrams’ racy e-mail antics, then following up with editorials condemning the former owners for what they’ve done to the Trib.  Throughout the Sam Zell melodrama, we’ve tended to forget that the Tribune company still houses many decent folk, good journalists yearning to breathe free. The last week was a reminder of that; let’s hope it’s not Prague spring. How long will it take for Sam Zell’s clown car to empty out?

4) Isn’t the Seattle Times/KING TV newly announced ad network a smart, regional ad play?

The Times has built out a good local, blog network, but hasn’t monetized it — for itself or its blog partners — well. The intention of the new Times/KING-TV network is to do that, and more. At best, it combines the best of ad selling smarts know-how, print, TV and online, and recognizes how community blogs are additive, both to audience development and to revenue. The keys, in Seattle and elsewhere: connect up the bigger network to state-of-the art targeting tools and analytics.

The fruits of these networks may be small pickins’ at the beginning, but over time, they offer newfound abilities to geo-target on a massive scale, and to sell a range of marketing services, not just space or time.

5) Is there a new 10% for engagement philosophy emerging? Steve Buttry’s TBD engagement staff numbers four five, more than 10% of its staff. California Watch, the one-year investigative start-up, counts two among its more than a dozen staffers. The big notion: look for ways to actively engage readers — California Watch’s recent lead-in-toys testing clinic is a good example — and not as an after-thought, but as part of the journalism. It’s an old concept — the seeds of Jay Rosen’s “public journalism” of the ’90s made digitally new. Dailies have been many engagement forays, here and there. The interesting thing is whether an engagement tithing ratio emerges in the new world.

6) With the latest circulation reports showing another 5% drop in daily, isn’t the next shoe to drop the impact of the iPad and its Android cousins on those numbers in 2011? There will be lots of tablets under the Christmas tree this season. Expect to see further flight from print among those tablet news readers. News publishers would love to sell readers subscriptions for tablet access, and we see the national players like the Journal and the Times positioning themselves well to do that. Yet, there are a couple of big obstacles. The first is how and how well Apple and other players will let publishers interact directly with those print customers — commerce, data, pricing and more. The word in the industry: Apple’s announcement of its terms of engagement is imminent. The second, big issue for non-national daily publishers; creating and sustaining a tablet product that’s worthy of the medium and one that readers will feel is fair to pay for.

Those circ reports point to a new issue; circulation revenue is headed south, down in single digits across the industry. It had been headed north, unevenly, over the last couple of year. That’s because the pricing up of print subscriptions and single copies more than made up for the loss in numbers of copies sold. That’s no longer true, marking the year as one in which both circulation revenue and advertising revenue are in decline.

7) Will the cats of newspaper industry be successfully herded? After pouring millions into his Alesia project, Rupert Murdoch gave the retreat order to his would-be Roman warriors, killing the tablet-oriented paid news portal initiative. Though his News Corp is the biggest news company in the world, it still a little less than six percent of the business, by revenue. News is among the most splintered of industries, and that makes getting a critical mass of news suppliers agreed on anything quite difficult. Next up in the effort is the AP-led “rights consortium.” As much as it is an assertion of rights, it is as much about a new drive to capture significant sums of new revenue through smarter application of content-tracking technology. Expect the consortium or new company to go forward by December with double-digit funding in the millions. Of course, News Corp is unlikely to play, while the New York Times and Gannett may chart their own separate paths. Finally, NAA (Newspaper Association of America) task forces have been meeting to try to get industry consensus in two areas:  1) mobile formatting and ad standards; and 2) e-preprints, trying to transition that Sunday circular revenue online.

8.0) Speaking of Apple, and Amazon, where will the feds surface as the new news marketplaces take shape? While publishers wait for the white smoke to waft from Cupertino on Apple’s “offer” for news subscriptions, we’ve got to wonder if and how the “we-want-to-help,” newly activist federal agencies will act. The FTC, the FCC and the Department of Justice all have shown concerns about concentrations of power around commerce and news, and about the lessening supply line of news itself.  In that both Apple and Amazon, each with a huge installed customer base, can exercise a new chokehold over news commerce, we may see new inquiries.

9) Won’t we recall the New York Times local news partnerships as one of the most noteworthy initiatives of 2010? The Times finally inked its deal with Texas Tribune, and that gives it new marketing in the biggest cities of America’s second biggest state. Add in the Bay Area (Bay Citizen) and Chicago (Chicago News Cooperative), with plans to sign more deals in 2011, and you can see the big city, big brother strategy assuming a significant footprint. At its current output – three+ pages of print news a week in each market – it offers only a patina of regional coverage. It’s foundational, though, setting into motion a business that boosts print advertising and circulation revenue, digital potential and feeds regional journalists and journalism.

Imagine tablet products, for instance, that are both national and local (the New York Times’ Press Engine tablet platform should enable that) and imagine new partners from local daily papers to public radio stations to new start-ups. The Times isn’t the only one in this game: Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and even Comcast Sports and are all moving forward with various local partnership products, as the new national/local news business gets re-knit together.

So, it looks like we may finally see “iTunes for News” in 2011, if not just before year’s end.

Today, we’ve got a news break on Apple’s new storefront for news companies, out of the Mercury News.  As genuine news, conjecture and a share of misinformation slips into public awareness, we’ll all await Apple’s formal announcement. Until then, let me pose Nine Questions on Apple’s “iTunes for News”:

1) Will news companies let another new middleman get in between them and their readers? They did it once, as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, became the great aggregators of the web age (1995-2010?), reaping the greatest share of the ad revenue benefit. They’ve half-vowed, “Never again!,” but have mounted insufficient efforts to prevent a second coming.

2) Does the Apple’s music store metaphor work for news? Well, maybe, the music store now dominates music sales, with almost 30% of the market, but music selling and news selling may not have a lot in common. The value of news is mainly singular, one-time-usage, with not much reason to “replay” it. At the same time, a continuing relationship to certain news providers — a trusted local source or the Times or Journal — is valuable, while few music buyers have any kind of relationship with a label. So news companies have long valued relationships — subscriptions — and increasingly in the digital age, want to broaden and deepen those relationships, the better to upsell and to target for advertising. As these issues began to arise with smartphone news app offerings, publishers were amazed by how clueless Apple execs seemed; they were in a business world they didn’t understand and didn’t feel a great need to adjust to. Over the months, there have been numerous discussions about customer relationships and customer data, but Apple’s yet to prove it can play, and play fairly, in this new arena.

3) Are those Android footsteps we hear? Android-enabled smartphones are outselling Apple-enabled ones in the U.S. In addition, Android-powered tablets, many offered at a lower price point than the iPad, will soon flood the market. Finally, the Android store has grown to 80,000 apps. Add all that up, and Android — I mean Google — is a powerful competitor to Apple and its store. So whatever decisions Apple makes in the deal it offers news publishers — or the prohibitions it could try to put into effect — won’t happen in a vacuum. Google already has lots of relationships with newspaper companies, through advertising partnerships, and can zag with its apps relationships if Apple zigs. That competition should be good for newspaper companies — if well-played against.

4) Is Alesia an alternative and/or a partner for Apple’s new news storefront? “Yes” may be the best answer. The News Corp paid content portal (code-named Alesia, while execs test a couple of consumer names) tuned to the tablet, but oriented to other platforms as well, is aimed at the same idea: a one-stop shop for digital news content bundles. It could fold into an Apple news store, a prime top-of-the-shelf brand within the store, or live outside the store. One way or the other, the News Corp notion is that it, and fellow publishers, should keep the revenue derived from their content, and if they share, share but a little. Given the absence of any other news consortium negotiator with Apple (and Google), News Corp, which has signed up partners already, may have a strong role in talks.

5) Why worry about 30% of $1.99? Okay, so a publisher sells an app for $1.99 or $4.99 and gives Apple 60 cents or a $1.50? No big deal, right? Certainly, one-time app pricing revenue doesn’t add up to much. That’s why the Guardian giving Apple a third of its well-selling one-time $3.99 app or the Washington Post giving Apple 66 cents of its annual $1.99 app is no big deal.

But real subscription revenue will add up. We see the Wall Street Journal doing nicely with its $17.29 monthly iPad subscription, and it doesn’t have to share any of that revenue with Apple. It offers its app for “free” in the Apple store, and then does its own authentication and e-commerce.

Can you imagine the Journal sharing 30% — or $5 — of its $17.29 with Apple? So far, the Journal and the FT, which is offering mobile access as part of its subscription packages, have been able to keep both their revenue and their direct customer relationships, offering “free” apps in the store and powering subscriptions through their own handling of customers. The New York Times plans to do the same when it launches its paid iPad app later this fall. It will then link up that product with its broader all-access subscription plan, when it goes “metered” early next year.

The key here is not only financial, though that’s big. The Times, Journal and FT highly prize keeping a direct relationship to customers, and maintaining direct access to all the increasing data generated. That’s another kind of gold in the digital age.

So Apple’s new offer may be directed to smaller newspapers and news organizations, those without the capabilities to do their customer commerce and management. Here, though, we see companies as diverse as Journalism Online and Mediaspectrum, a newly announced entrant in the tablet game, offering to power newspapers’ digital ventures. Where might they fit into Apple’s store? And how much will Apple’s coming opt-in, out-out options for buyers prevent publishers from getting vital information about readers and their preferences?

6) Won’t transition economics make this a big business? The stakes get even higher. The tablet threatens (promises) to be a replacement product for newspapers, in fact hastening the decline of print, as the tablet becomes the first pleasurable substitute for wood pulp. That will take several years, at least, to begin in earnest, but as it does, newspaper companies will want to transition over their print subscribers’ payments to the tablet (anticipating that transition, numerous pricing schemes, are in motion, behind the scenes). So if tablets become a major source of reader revenue, the last thing news companies want to do is share that income — in perpetuity — with Apple or anyone else.

7) Will Apple allow the Journal, Times, FT and other big publishers to continue to offer “free apps” and keep subscription revenues for themselves — or will they demand a cut? Those companies haven’t yet heard any demands — and Google’s Android competition makes the likelihood less likely — but it’s a possibility.

8.0) What’s the value of being included in the Apple store? So how will news readers get exposed to and make buying decisions on news apps/digital subscriptions? If digital subscribers are current reader/subscribers just moving to another platform, publishers believe their own marketing and communication will do the trick. If, as some magazine publishers have found with their fledgling iPad single issue apps, fresh-to-the-pub readers “discover” their brand within the increasingly packed news category, then Apple’s got a more powerful case to to make about its role in the value chain and why it’s deserving of a cut. Undoubtedly, readers will be found in both places, which would argue for Apple (or any other source of new subscribers) getting a one-time referral fee, but just for those new customers, not for anyone who buys a subscription.

Bonus theoretical app store value question: How much indeed is it becoming an Apptastic world, as Steve Jobs tells us? Steve has said that apps are leaving search and even web browsing in the rear-view mirror. Yet publishers tell me they’re surprised how much browser-based traffic they’re getting via the iPad. In addition, as HTML5 kicks in, the browser experience will become more app-like, further confusing things.

9) Isn’t Apple wanting 30% of fees for apps a little like [Sony CEO] “Howard Stringer demanding 30% of the revenue produced by TV shows running on Sony TV sets”? That’s how a friend put it to me when we talked today. It’s a confusing world, no doubt, but still Apple is fundamentally a manufacturer, with one great (music) store idea so far. Why should it insinuate itself permanently into the value chain?

1) With Clay Shirky and Nick Carr duking it out (“Does the Internet Make Your Smarter or Dumber“) in the Wall Street Journal, isn’t it the right thing for both of them to do to donate their brains to science? Not immediately, of course, but down the digital road.

2) Are print newspapers better understanding the aging niche they serve? Breaking news today from L.A. Times publicity: “L.A. Times to Bring Back its TV Guide.” Back from the dead of 2007, one of many TV tabs to meet its demise, the new one will be punched up, up to 44 pages from 28, and replete with 24-hour daily grid listings, puzzles galore, and a dedicated sports programming page. Hard to imagine anyone under 30 (40?) using a TV tab instead of the cable guide. Next up: LARGE print TV tabs — and obits.

3) Who will be first through door #3? We’ve now seen a return to small profitability at newspaper companies, while YOY revenues continue to disappoint. Yes, the rate of loss is slowing, but they are still losing revenue, unlike other media. So the cutting isn’t yet over. And these companies, which must remain profitable to satisfy new owners and more-vigilant lenders, have three choices of what to do with any positive cash flowing. #1 Pay down debt. Big issue for those (other than Belo and Scripps, which emerged debtless as their companies divided) companies who know that the tough road ahead simply won’t sustain much debt service. #2 Increase profit. Yes, no one’s really happy to be in single digits. #3 Invest in product. That’s a tough one, given the pressures of debt and profit. One big question here: Will they invest in the next generation of mobile products, and the different skill sets necessary to create and produce them?

4) How patient will the Angelo Gordons, the new lords of publishing, be? They like the return to profitability, but are deeply concerned about those bad 2009 comparisons. (Newspaper overall advertising was down 9.7%, with online advertising showing growth of 4.9%, a little less than overall online ad growth.) Question they are asking: Is there a sustainable, profitable future here, future meaning 2-5 years, and, so far, they are unsure of the answer.

5) 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.

I call this the Last Man Standing strategy, with the Times and the Journal parsing out national/local, print/digital editions — and learning how to sell targeted local ads better. We may well be headed into a world where those with the newsprint habit will maintain their habit, but like a smoker, cut down on it. So, get one print edition delivered, which at least seems to cover national and local, rather than two. Greener solution, and one that the iPad Era will probably hasten. That new world could include some print at the top — Journal and Times — and at the bottom, my smaller community daily or weekly.

6) When will most dailies create reasonable iPad editions? The big guys have jumped ahead — once again (my piece over at Nieman explores the topic more thoroughly, “The Newsonomics of tablet ad readiness,”) , but regional newspaper companies may get into the fray before the end of year. Verve Wireless has been the main go-to company for dailies going up on the smartphone. Verve tells me that it’s recently added the Blackberry to its iPhone application, and is now moving on to Android. Then: iPad. So, with the ability to save on centralized tech development, some companies may be waiting on Verve. Big question: How good will the Verve product be?

7) How much of your news site’s traffic is coming from social media? At Netgain, 2010, Scribd’s Tammy Nam said that the site was now deriving 50% of its traffic from social network sites. Now that’s a lot higher than news sites, which tell me they’ve seen anywhere from five to 20% of their traffic coming from Facebook, Twitter and others. Social Media Optimization is something all sites now need to focus on.

In the crazy-quilt world of new syndication, might we see the Los Angeles Times re-join its erstwhile partner the Washington Post in a new combo with surging Bloomberg, East Coast, West Coast, and all around the business world? The Times has never been comfortable, pre- or post-Zell as part of the Tribune empire, and bankruptcy (if ever resolved) may lead to its exit.

9) Won’t iPad revenue be an unexpected growth line for some publishers in 2010? A handful of news companies got out of the starting gate quickly, including Reuters with three beginning apps. Reuters’ Alisa Bowen, senior vice president and head of consumer publishing, tells me that she expects “that advertising on the iPad will grow to 50% of our total mobile ad revenue before the end of the year.  This is 50% based on dollar value, not number of campaigns or impressions, obviously, so we are seeing not only a rapid growth, but an impressive yield for the premium user experience.” Curiously, Reuters is also seeing good traffic from iPad browsers, not just its apps: “We’ve seen some very stunning analysis in recent days about the web browsing traffic on iPads, which is ramping at a substantial pace.”

• Why now? The Times is making one, maybe penultimate, bid to save its cost structure. It still employs something more than 1100 journalists, at high wages. Those wages have been well-earned by dint of skill and accomplishment in most cases, the the internet economy and the advance of low-cost, "good-enough" content (make sure to read James Rainey's great piece, "Freelance Writing's Unfortunate New Model") is doing further damage to professional journalism economics. The Times metering plan is intended to provide a strong second leg, after advertising, to support that plan.
• Won't metering kill the golden goose of mass advertising? First, let's note that Denise Warren, who runs advertising at the Times generally, is in charge of NYTimes.com. That provides a keen tie between the new experiment and the Times' main source of funding. As Warren has recently said, "If we move in this direction, we want to make sure that we're not
  dipping into the advertising bucket to get money out of the subscriber
  bucket." Of course, that's easier said than done; the Times thought TimesSelect would be more controllable than it was. One curious potential upside here: those who do subscribe via metering may become among the most lucrative ad targets. Look at it this way: the Times will know the most about these customers — more frequency of usage; more clickstream data; more declared preference data — and that's highly useful in targeting advertising.
• Where else might the Times find new revenue soon? Think the other Big Apple. As Apple releases the tablet, it needs content friends. It can "pay" the Times in prominence; the two could also figure all manner of interesting revenue shares. Apple is already offering payments to companies like Disney and CBS, as its next-gen Apple TV plans take on the cable giants. Why not pay for premium news content?
  
• What does "frictionless experience across multiple platforms," in the Times release this morning, mean? I think this is one major move, if the Times can pull it off well and quickly. In the age of the smartphone, the coming tablet, and (coming a bit after that) the Internet-mediated livingroom TV monitor, readers are already coming to expect easy, and smart, access to the their content wherever, whenever. They also will come to expect — we're seeing it in some iPhone apps already — the stories they save on one device to be known by another; ditto email sharing lists, stock portfolios, favorite sports team preferenes. If the Times can provide such synchronicity, then readers who are asked to pay can understand the charge as, in part, an access charge. We, Americans, love to pay for access — think massive cable and wireless bills — we just have thought digital news content should be free. At a panel I moderated yesterday in New York, Dow Jones consumer chief Todd Larsen, indicated a similar philosophy about universal access. One rub here to watch: who owns the customer relationship with the emerging tablet. Amazon has stubbornly clung to the position that it will "own" the customer (hey, wait a minute, that's me), while news companies — getting a glimmer of an all-device-access future — have pushed back, and are negotiating with Amazon's Kindle competitors, to keep their customer touch.
  
• Isn't it suicide to charge your best digital customers for content, while allowing others to get some for free? Not really. In fact, that's what the Wall Street Journal has been doing for years. Remember the numbers: about a million paying online subscribers…..and another 19 million uniques, who get to Journal content through search engines and all manner of side doors for free.
  
• What can we learn from the FT experience? It's all about propensity modeling — learning patterns of user behavior, how many articles of what kind readers read within certain periods of time. It's about tweaking the dials, up and down, to capture the payments of truly loyal readers who find continuing value in the brand, while not losing a critical number of occasional visitors. It's about learning how to convert key parts of miscellaneous search engine traffic — and understanding that most of it will never be converted. The FT offers several tiers of access: a few free articles without registration, 10 with registration and then access through subscription. The big eye-catching FT recent announcement: Content revenues are surpassing its print advertising take.
  
• Is the FT experience relevant to the Times? Yes, no and we don't know. That's in part, what makes it a fascinating experiment to watch. FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw has told me how much the company continues to learn about customers, based on its work. One major key: getting real smart about data. The FT has hired data whizzes, gotten outside news industry thinking working with the ideas of companies like eLoyalty and people like Jonathan Mendez, to expand its knowledge base — and then has worked the knowledge.  Yes, we know business/financial content has been the leading edge of paid content, so far, but the modeling under the FT model may be the most instructive here.  
• What's the downside? Other than major blogosphere blowback — winds developing tweet by tweet — the Times runs the risk of TimesSelect 2. If readers, and lots of them run into paywalls and decide to quickly move on to still-free sources — sources as top-notch as the BBC, Reuters, NBC, NPR and many more — then the model could fall apart: the Times would lose its mojo as top digital (non-aggregator) news site and retard its digital ad potential. That's what makes it a big bet. 
• What happened to the membership scenario? One strategy the Times considered and is now apparently letting go of is membership. That would have been staying all free, but, NPR-like, asking those readers who really value "the service" to pay up. MinnPost has surpassed 1500 members in the Twin Cities, while GlobalPost has signed up about 500. Membership is promising, but tough, and ultimately, it appears the Times believes metering will pull in far more money.
  

Not since a guy named Moses received a tablet have we seen such enthusiasm for the form.

The tablet dream — with its inevitable Apple intrigue and drumbeat of Amazon/Apple war — has rekindled interest in digital publishing, providing hope for magazine and news industries pummeled mercilessly over the last decade.  Already Forrester's Sarah Epps is estimating 10 million tablets to be sold within a year, which may be an ambitious number given inevitable customer BluRay/HD-DVD, VHS/Betamax confusion.

Next Issue Media, the new magazine consortium of Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc., News Corp and Conde Nast, could be a serious player to come. It could become a leader in the business and product development for tablets, or it could be just another industry gabfest, advocating for open standards and common ad formats.  Lots of questions here as we approach the year and decade, as news and features suss out whether out the tablet really enables a a fresh start (Content Bridges "Digital Do-Over Time," Dec. 8, 2009) . Here are my first Nine Questions. What's yours?

1. How does the tablet blur our 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.  

2. If Apple is willing to pay video/TV production companies like Disney and CBS per channel/program to break into the TV business, is it willing to pay news content providers of any size or scale in a similar way? TV is starting to experience the same break-down that newspapers have endured, being consumed piecemeal (segment by segment, program by program) just as whole newspaper products have been sliced and diced by the web search engines and aggregators. Now, sensing an opportunity to take chunks of Comcast's and other cable providers' business, Apple is moving on to the next generation of Apple TV. And it paying providers for programming.

Is news content, in text or video or tabletized form, of sufficient value to Apple that it might pay for it, on a per subscriber per month basis, opening up a potential new revenue stream for content creators?

3) Of course, each of the early tablet notions — Sports Illustrated, Conde Nast's Wired, Hearst's Skiff – apparently focuses only on a single title, but what about the ability of the tablet to become a new aggregated wonder? While the tablet offers lots of new audience-pleasing abilities, we needn't think of them only in that old Twentieth Century way of cozying up in an armchair, timelessly enjoyed the just-delivered issue of our favorite periodical. In fact, everything that the tablet can do for a single title, it can do for an aggregated product — allowing advertisers and readers to tap into multi-title wonders. Are publishers planning for this multi-title tablet world, or just focusing anachronistically on title-by-title publishing? If they're not planning a twin (single title + aggregator) strategy, just think of the list of companies who may be: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, for starters.

4) Doesn't the tablet given whole new meaning to the Illustrated in SI? An old term, digitally remastered.

5) How much of a disadvantage are newspaper publishers at as the visual-forward tablet goes mainstream? It's no accident that it's the magazine arms — Advance's Conde Nast, Hearst's magazine division — of the print companies that have dived into the tablet pond. It's cultural for magazine editors (and ad sellers) to think visually, and they've seen what the tablet dream might mean for what they do well and best. Newspaper people — from editors and reporters to ad salespeople selling price-and-item space — think text. Certainly, they have long used photos, but not as well as magazine people. Here's a skills gap that newspaper publishers would have to solve quickly to take full advantage of what the tablet does best.

6) What about archives? In the demos, we can see what the tablet does visually and in terms of relationship, neatly allowing us to use touch and cover flow to connect up current parts of the publication. How about moving in time — a forte of newspaper and magazine companies — as archival content is related to current news and features?

7) How ready is publisher technology to take advantage of the tablet? Next Issue's John Squires has noted that one of the four principles of the magazine consortium is "open standards." There is a lot in those two words. There's the question of how well, how easily and how dynamically publishers can pull diverse content types (text, photo, graphics, video, audio) from their content management systems and relate them appropriately. Then there's the question of how much formatting will have to be done for each of the separate devices. Will they grab content in the same way; render it in the same way? Look at how slow many publishers have been in going mobile, in part because of formatting issues.

8)  Isn't the coming battle for sports on the tablet a battle of multi-platform titans, more than individual companies? Yes, Sports Illustrated may find a nice niche with the tablet, but I look to ESPN, MLB and rising cable regional sports providers — Comcast and Fox — going digital to make big moves with the device.

9) Is the Apple iSlate or iReader a name for things to come? It's funny how we've struggled to name digital things. It took the iPhone to create a new class of little computers, though the name is oxymoronic to what it does best, computer stuff, and what it does worst, phoning. Tablets have started as "e-readers," book readers really. Amazon hoped for iPhone status with its megapromotion of the Kindle, christened by Michael Cronan. Will this coming decade be the time of the personalized digital, i-Readers following iMacs and iPhones, or will we be introduced to a new vision?

They are all living with the
consequences of unintended Googling, as their own sites have become secondary
players to the search aggregators, Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

In a week that
saw the Tiger Woods Affair look like a Sopranos’ Episode Gone Mild and the
Sheila Dixon gift card conviction look like a David Simon outtake, we saw more
skirmishes between Rupert Murdoch and Google. Rupert led off the FTC save-journalism
workshop with a well-covered
anti-Google benediction, and Google followed with a couple of blog posts
tweaking its news search protocols. The conversation, as usual wasn’t in the
(FTC) room, but conducted on and through the web. That should tell us something.
 

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.

It can seem like a simple toggle. Turn the news free or lock it up. There are, though, many sharp edges here. To that point, let me try Nine Questions about this confusing landscape of threats and promise:

1. If Rupert Murdoch is now the Really Bad
Cop, does that leave Tom Curley as just the Bad Cop?

Both have
called for a reordering of the news-search landscape, but now AP CEO Tom Curley
is starting to appear as the reasonable alternative to The Rupert, who keeps
raising the temp, especially, on Google.

The News
Corp/Microsoft dance and Murdoch’s cries of “Pirate!” have won headlines, but
AP’s re-negotiation of its licensing deals with the search aggregators have the potential to have
more impact. AP's license deal with Google is up at the end of the year. In the
throes of unprecedented change itself, AP's re-negotiation tries to put the new
Digital Coop at the center. The idea: rich, universally tagged,
delivered-on-the-fly indexes of news content add extra value to news content
itself. AP hopes its negotiation will both increase its own take from search
engine licensing — and provide a model for individual newspaper
companies.  How much a “model” would
be adopted by an increasingly cantankerous, go-your-own-way industry is highly
problematic.

Still, AP, with its own voluminous content and newspaper relationships may be
more of trend-setter than the publisher of two American dailies, News Corp’s
Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

2. If Alicia calls, will you pick up? Sure, in public, Rupert is throwing grenades. His complaints
about Amazon and Google, some valid, others just good theater, draw attention
and soften the battleground. Behind the scenes, though, he's moving forward
with project “Alicia.” News
Corp has apparently allocated several million dollars to starting up the news
portal, a Hulu-for-news site. Perhaps a free/paid hybrid portal, perhaps a paid
one, the notion is to divert traffic from the search engines to a news
company-controlled site. News Corp has pitched the idea of joining in to at
least a handful or two of publishers, in both the U.S. and U.K.  Critical mass of news – compared to the
several thousand news sources indexed by Google – is, of course fundamental to
giving any such play a prayer at success. Big question: could Alicia ever gain
sufficient breadth to really compete — and charge? Is Alicia really a
bargaining chip with the search engines, or are the search engine wars a chip
for Alicia? Or both?

3.  Isn't it better to “negotiate” with
Microsoft than against yourself? For several years now, publishers
have tried to get Google to negotiate better terms, the acceptance of a new
content handling protocol (ACAP) and, more recently, the adoption of an
Attributor-based anti-piracy system. They haven't gotten far. In essence,
newspaper companies have been negotiating against themselves.

Google has repeatedly said: If you don't want us to
index your content, just tell us, and we'll be happy to stop. Just use our
on/off switch. End of discussion. End of “negotiation.” In fact, its twin moves
this week – allowing publishers more
flexibility in news search rules and in its Five Clicks Free program – are the
latest expressions of that public pose. It knows that the publishers’ current
addiction to search traffic makes the on/off choice (even with this week’s
nuances) not much of a choice at all. So in part, Murdoch (and more quietly,
AP’s) move to bring the anti-Google, Microsoft, to the table creates a sense of
real negotiation, competition for perhaps
scarce assets.  

4.   What is Google's (and search engine traffic) worth)?  Most
news publishers will tell you that about 25-35% of their traffic is driven by
Google and that more than 50% of it is driven by search engines generally.
They'll also say that about a quarter to a third comes directly to their sites
– and that these are the regular customers they care about. They'll tell you
that it is the number of monthly sessions and the number of these page views that
these customers generate that should
make the most sense in building a real, digital business.

We can look at
this view in a couple of ways.

It may be
simply old-fashioned, an outgrowth of the old way of looking at media
businesses in terms of stable, "owned" readerships. In this view, digital
news readers are happy free agents, flitting about the web, picking and
choosing what they want, without being tied down. The only thing that counts is
a single view — and what marketers can do with it, getting the reader to take
notice of a product, service or brand, or seducing them into an interactive
experience. There is lots of technology trying to make that match of reader and
product, watching readers' clickstreams and delivering appropriate ads. Consider
the marketer's mantra of the day: We buy audiences, not media. Through that
lens, publishers may be fighting an old war. The new atomized (content unit by
content unit; ad unit by ad unit) world gives considerably less value to the
reader's relationship with the publisher's brand.

The
alternative view is that news publishers have been hopelessly seduced by
first-generation web measures. Those metrics all said: more is more. Those
counts first focused on uniques and page views. Then time-on- site followed,
but, of course, that's an averaged number, of all uniques. Now Nielsen has introduced average
number of sessions per month, but of course, that's an average of sessions for all those uniques as well.

Publishers are
telling me they are increasingly focusing on those uniques visiting for two or
more sessions within a month, essentially those that are their ongoing
customers. These are the people that Journalism Online is targeting as it works
with publishers, trying to figure which of these more loyal customers will pay
for content. These are the users that sites as small as MinnPost talk about
when they sell non-CPM-based sponsorships.

So in this
view, it's a matter of establishing a new, fairly loyal digital readership
(online + mobile) and then figuring out how best to monetize it widely –
through ad and subscription products.

It's an
alluring argument, but it looks like though it may be swimming against the currents of
modern marketing. Still, if publishers believe it, it leads them to discount
much of that traffic they get from search engines, and that's informing the new
round of aggregator angst. 

5.  So are we into the age of Junk Traffic? In 2009, news publishers figured out that the Internet is
indeed infinite. It's not the scarce world of print publishing or broadcasting;
it's an expanding universe that by its nature has no bounds. Did anyone ever
try to measure human conversation itself — or more to the point, monetize it?
So in this infinity — treasured by readers and abhorred by people who make
their money selling space or time in a finite world — more is no longer more.

Don't tell me
more page views are better, they say. Don't tell me more unique visitors are
better. Tell me why 50% or more of my ad inventory goes unsold (and how do I
get a decent chunk of that every-page-is-useful paid search business, anyhow?). If, in fact, these
visits and odd once-in-a-month, once-in-a-year page views happen on my site,
does it really matter? If a one-page reader falls on my site, can my finance
department hear even a peep?

At least,
that's one evolving viewpoint explaining search engine angina.

It’s based on the growing assumption that some of the search
engine traffic isn't, at this point, valuable.  It's akin to newspaper
publishers cutting "junk circulation" — outstate circ, free State
Fair copies and the like — similarly disdained by advertisers.

Yes, it’s easy to say news publishers should better convert
some of those odd visitors to real customers (and they should), but the sense
of Junk Traffic is getting more pervasive.

6. What kind of match would Microsoft and News
Corp really make? As Michael Wolff points out,
we've been there before, as the two have tried the mating game before. So, post
approval of joint Microsoft/Yahoo search business, Microsoft would be the
smaller half of the Google/Microsoft duopoly, with about 30% of search. News
Corp's got a diverse bag of the New York Post, Fox News and the Wall Street
Journal to bring to the game. A deal is the start of some kind, but not a game
changer for either. 

7. What would a Bing/News Corp deal do to the Journal's freemium
model? Freemium has been a
core principle of Journalism Online, as it makes its case to publishers. Have
your cake — keep 90% or more of your traffic — and eat the icing (new online
subscription revenue), too. The math for the Journal goes something like this:
get about one million customers (and uniques) to pay a subscription price.
Capture another 19 million uniques or so via various free web openings, opening
and closing gates, moats, and bridges into the paywall and make money off those
via advertising.

We don't know
how any Microsoft/News Corp deal might affect that balance. Would more Journal
content be able for free through Bing?; what might that do to subscription business?
Would a Bing deal focus a spotlight on just how much WSJ content you can get
to, without a subscription? Alternatively, if WSJ content wouldn't be
prominently free on Bing, then what kind of advantage might that really give
Bing, left with just New York Post, Fox News and, maybe, Murdoch's
international paper content (though he's busy erecting pay walls there, as
well.) New wild card: how might Google’s new Five Clicks Free program affect the Journal’s strategy?

8. If Microsoft really wants to amp up its newspaper
partnership, how much sense might an investment in or acquisition of Journalism
Online make? We'll see some tests
in the first or second quarter next year, as JO figures tests markets with
publishers. The freemium notion will get a real test — does it have legs
beyond the WSJ and FT models? — and Microsoft, as it newly befriends
publishers as the anti-Google, might be able to use JO's relationships.

9. Can the newspaper industry negotiate in 2009, as if it
were 1999? As newspaper
publishers debate various schemes, they are valuing their news output as if it
were 1999. Back in 1999, they were quite dominant, largely daily print
monopolies across the USA. In addition, they produced great quantities of news
content —with at least 12,000 more newsroom staff — and had little
competition in their marketplaces.

Today, the new local/regional startups –
think Politico's DC operation, Texas Tribune, Chicago News Cooperative, Warren
Hellman's Bay Area site — join a rich group of smaller sites from New Haven to
the Twin Cities to Dallas to Seattle to San Diego. Public radio's jumping into
the game. Local TV broadcasters are trying to find their way. In short,
dailies' daily output is no longer as dominating as it was — and their threats
to withhold it may a bluff that Google can call. Curiously, in this call to
have news content better compensated by the search engines, daily publishers
usually leave out the rest of the developing and developed press. That's a mistake,
I think, for them, and their own negotiating clout.

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 idea is a week without the AP, but isn't the idea a bit behind the public's curve? The latest circ numbers showed that more than 40,000 readers have recently decided to go a week without the paper , down -9.72% to 465,892. It's telling that the Tribune company papers are going AP-less, but their websites aren't. That tells us that precious, and costly, newsprint will be used mainly for local news, but pixel-based newsreading will include the wider world. Which, of course, makes the formerly mass market newspaper a niche — what happened locally yesterday — and the web mass. Sam Zell's still on the AP board, which got some good news this week as 50 papers withdrew their "cancellations".  (Back in my newsroom days, I always loved "advisory cancellations.") Here's guessing AP will be around in the news business lots longer than Sam Zell.

• How do you put a new gloss on the Chron? It seems counterintuitive, but you improve the paper stock here and there, moving in some semi-gloss super-calendared paper. Sure, monthly high-gloss magazines are the only pubs failing faster than the daily press, but the San Francisco Chronicle's move seems a simple, and hardly earth-shaking, one. Christmas, I have on good authority, is still coming. Get some higher-profile advertisers, charge them a bit more than the cost of the better paper, and you have a few more profits. Pre-recession, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – now both new entrants for targeted Bay Area advertising, competing against the Chronicle — were doing quite well with luxury ads. Luxe ads will make a comeback, and maybe the Chronicle's new offering will help. Besides, with daily circ down 25.8%, to 251,782, a little better paper costs a lot less than cheaper paper the Chronicle used when it had 525,00 daily circulation, back not long ago, in 2002.

• Will alternative weeklies become yet another local competitor to the dailies? The alternatives have survived the recession better than the dailies, but curiously, they've not become big online players. Instead, the Yelps, Craigslists, AngiesLists and OpenTables — among many others — have moved into city markets. Now Village Voice Media — the biggest chain in the country, with 10 bigger-city weeklies — has launched the Voice Media Group, aggregating its own and other sites. As worlds blend together, the head of the alternatives' trade group, AAN, has just succeeded Scott Bosley as the head of the American Society of News Editors. Rich Karpel starts Dec. 1.
  

• You think Pox News is bad, have you tried Headline News? So Sesame Street is taking a hit for taking on grouchy cable news. But Fox seems high like opera compared to the bad melodrama of CNN's Headline News (HLN). It's hard to believe anyone would pick the station, but many of us are subjected to it, me at the gym. Soundless, I watch its crawls with mouth agape. Yesterday, in just a few minutes: "Pregnant Woman Found Dead," and "This Just In — Body at Rapist's Home Identified," repeated countless times. It ran with the Garrido case (kidnapper/child molester in Northern California) for weeks, with a headline about bones on adjacent property being checked to see whether they were animal or human, and whose. (Animal, of course.) Macabre, ghoulish, and I think far more hurtful to the watching psyche than the freak shows that talk cable has become. Recall that HLN (Headless News?) surpassed its big sister — CNN — in the last ratings cycle, where CNN , the nicest if least watched cable net, finished last.

• How well will Dow Jones do with the upsell dance? Much "paid content" strategy at Dow Jones seems to smartly understand that it's easiest — and cheapest — to sell new stuff to the customers you already have, especially when many of those can charge it to the company store. So we have the upsell on WSJ Mobile, just launched, and now WSJ Pro. Pro is first being sold to enterprise users — a new mix of two Dow Jones products, the WSJ.com and Factiva, a rich aggregation of news sources — and in January, it will begin be offered to individuals.

• Aren't we seeing new digital news versions of The Dating Game? You can't turn around without hearing about new combos. ProPublica and Marketplace on an investigation into University of Phoenix. The Center for Investigative Reporting and Frontline on a Carbon Watch initiative, led by the well-decorated Mark Schapiro. CBS and Global Post, tying up around global coverage generally. As the old arteries of high-quality content creation and distribution shrivel, new ones are being forged seemingly every day.

• Will public radio grab the regional aggregation opportunity? Readers love aggregation — from journos' daily check-in of Romenesko to everyone's use of the big news collections of Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google. Newspaper and local broadcast companies, though, have been slow to make themselves regional aggregators. Now Minnesota Public Radio, beginning to make a move to assert itself as a major online news players, has picked up NewsBobber. Bob Ingrassia, a 15-year veteran of newspapers who is now leaving Internet Broadcasting as he takes NewsBobber to MPR, says it's a quite simple proposition: "How do people sort through it all?" He tells me he manages the impressive, month-old site in the morning and evening and has harnessed all kinds of cool, free tools to rank Minnesota sites and blogs. So think about it: once again, a guy does in his spare time what better-staffed media can't figure out.

• Will the Chico experiment be the new chic?
  It makes a lot more sense to try charging people in a non-metropolitan
  market with far less competitive news media. So MediaNews' announced
  pay walls in Chico and York, Pa will be worth watching. MediaNews'
  Howard Saltz makes this point: "But we are
  not giving away our premium content for free." The big question for the
  Chicos, the Yorks and others: What will readers in fact consider
  premium, and worth paying for? I've long thought that the smaller the
  paper — think weekly out in the hinterlands — the greater chance to get
  readers to kick in a few bucks extra for online access.

• Is that Awl the news that's left to print? Sometimes a spreadsheet's worth more than a thousand words. Check out The Awl's circ charting, something that you won't see coming out of an industry association. But, take your vertigo pills first. Check out top newspapers — from the Journal and Times to L.A. Times and Washington Post, and see what conclusions you draw.