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.
  

1. Is one foot better than two? Newspaper companies are feeling a new vim and vigor, and their share prices reflect that. The last 12 months have felt as if someone was standing on their chests with both legs, one leg's is the challenge of the web for readers and advertisers. The other's been the recession. Now the recession leg is applying less pressure, and may be removed completely soon. In other words: Back to the challenges of 2007.

2. Doesn't Mediaspectrum's announced partnership with Tribune offer significant potential to the news industry? Saving money on ad pre-press (ad order-taking, ad design, etc.) is hardly sexy stuff, but Mediaspectrum's customers report savings of 25-50% in ad pre-press costs. That's huge, especially applied over an industry still beleaguered by cost structure issues. (We can see that news companies have cut 25-40% of their costs over the last three years in staff, paper and everything else, but more is needed as online-only rivals come at them.)

A little sexier — and to the point of where news companies can find growth going forward — is Mediaspectrum's self-service ad platform. I wrote recently about Advance's partnership with Microsoft around local sales, further ratification of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium notion that it's all about enlarging local sales going forward.

"How you get more of your local businesses that we haven't gotten to before," is the big goal of the self-service platform, says vp/operations Mike Sacks. Sacks tells me that Tribune has gone live with the self-service ad platform in six of eight Tribune markets and has already brought in hundreds of new, smaller advertisers, ones that could never afford print and may not have been touched by the company previously.

So where does self-service fit for Tribune. "We're not firing salespeople; we're redeploying them to [sell] larger businesses." The system may allow the company to re-allocate as many as a fifth of its sales staff. 

Now Tribune and Mediaspectrum, which also has made a believer of UK-based Trinity Mirror, are teaming up to sell the newspaper industry on ad self-service, launching a joint initiative today.

3. If Journalism Online takes off, will we see a pitched battle between Paypal and Google Checkout in the news world? Google has recently renewed its pitch to publishers, urging them to use Checkout to power their paid content strategies. Checkout has been aimed at micropayment initiatives, but it hasn't caught fire.

On the other hand, Journalism Online, which this week announced 1000 "affiliates" willing to keep talking — and provide some potentially highly useful reader data — about paid content, will probably focus on Financial Times-like "metering" approaches. That means subscriptions, rather than micropayments. And don't be surprised if you hear that JO's partners, as it goes operational with pay offers, will include Paypal and Zuora. Paypal, owned by eBay, of course has become an online payment standard. Zuora is a Paypal-partnered start-up with a good lineage (funded by Benchmark Capital and by Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff). It focuses on subscription marketing. Zuora's role: working with JO and news publishers to craft subscription products that readers might actually pay for. (Thoughts from Zuora founder K. V. Rao on subscriptions and the web, here.)

4. Isn't California Watch one of the models to really watch? The model is simple, fits the economics of the day and produces…..above-average journalism. What's not to like and apply? The 11-person California Watch unit — funded by foundations and run by the OaklandBerkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting — hit a home run with its first project. That project focused on wasteful Homeland Security spending. It ran in 25 papers across California, from big metros to the small dailies, on indie VoiceofSanDiego.com and caught play on KGO-TV in San Francisco.

So: an independent, non-profit news operation produced well-done enterprise journalism and found a ready and eager audience of editors and readers. How tough was it to get daily editors to accept this journalism?

"It was incredibly uncomplicated," says CIR's Exec Director Robert Rosenthal, the prime driver behind California Watch. Learnings: "Our customers were the publishers. The easier you can make it for the publisher, the better." California Watch charged fees in the low hundreds and has found publishers and TV outlets asking, "What's next?"

That's the good question Rosenthal and his new merry band now get to answer, as they think through the kinds of reporting, the amount of cooperation and customizaton useful and the business models that will work as this new form of distributed journalism.

Among the principles being proven out: When established daily journalists leave big metro dailies, they take their cred with them — and it looks like it is instantly transferred to their new enterprises.

5. Is Rupert Murdoch replacing Henny Youngman? Is it the
one-liners he is tossing out or is the press just starved for received
wisdom. Now Rupert, leader of the Free World's News Media, says he is going to charge a buck a month for WSJ mobile to
subscribers and two bucks for non-subscribers. I think that's a step in
the right direction.

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.

So $52 a year (my mistake: Murdoch is proposing a weekly charge of $2, not a monthly charge of $2), if all of them signed up. So, yes, if all of them went for the deal, that's a 50% increase in reader revenues. If News Corp gets half of them, that's $25 million or so a year, a 25% increase in reader revenues. I can't see many non-subscribers shelling out for the app.

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, even if they
don't often sample the whole buffet.

6. Is News Core the right bite of the apple? Lost in the flurry of news was News Corp's News Core announcement. Another unsexy one about bringing together all the company's news content — think Journal, Barrons, Marketwatch, Times of London, Australian, Fox, etc. — in one place. That's essential (core) to taking advantage of the scale News Corp has built. In digital publishing, it's all about content management, control and measurement.

If News Core can successfully harness its internal content, to multiply value of its individual content units (yes, new language for new times), it's got a leg up for its own destination sites, and for syndication out. This is one answer to the two-year-old question of how much Murdoch "overpaid" for Dow Jones in December, 2007. Yes, he "overpaid," but multiplying the value of those DJ assets through News Corp's worldwide pipes of distribution — satellite, cable + print and web — helps us all to see the value that can be unlocked. 

In concept, News Core parallels Gannett's ContentOne, that company's attempt to reinvent an internal wire for the digital age. 

Big question for these companies: How much of this activity is truly integrating content management on single platforms (Dow Jones is moving that way with Eidos Media) and how much is simply better sharing of old-fashioned budgets. It's the former that will pay huge dividends.

7. How much will the New York Times digital news operation miss Jon Landman? Landman gets it, a Timesman with commonsense. I've talked with him about staff blogging, for instance, and he is one of the too few people at the top of journalism who get that blogging is just another useful new tool in the journalist's bag. We can see that in the Times' growing comfort with blogging and multimedia, done to Times standards. Yes, it still seems too slow sometimes to many of us, but it's been directionally right. That said, let's see what he can do as Culture Editor online, where such innovations as NPR's Culturetopia podcast (often helmed by the capable Neda Ulaby) and Linda Holmes' MonkeySee blog are bringing the right sensibilities and selectivities to online culture journalism.

8. Is the NYT about to make a pay content decision? The ghosts of Times Select roam the new hallways. Membership notions abound. An ad rebound gives punch to those who say keep it free. Rupert's mobile upcharge offers another path. Word is that the Times may soon decide what it will — and won't do — with paid content in 2010.

9. Couldn't Walter Hussman have chosen better words? The Arkansas Democrat owner has proclaimed that his merger
with Stephens Media would create "a permanent solution" to both
companies' cost issues in northwest Arkansas operations.. The phrase
gives some of us the willies, in its finality. Besides, isn't it quite
clear that given the fast-changing landscape, there is little permanence
and everything is in long-term transition?

Midsummer brings us a surprising amount of news and innovation. Isn't anyone on vacation? Here's Nine Questions on what I'm seeing and hearing:

1. How desperate is a paper in bankruptcy? Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer crime reporter George Anastasia does great short videos on the site, called "Mob Scene". Current advertiser: "Club Risque," whose cuties pitch the upscale gentlemen's club briskly in 15 seconds. "Text us at Risque to stay updated on special promotions. Come down here and meet us. It's a real mob scene." Now that's product placement that seems to cross several lines. The advertiser that rotates with Club Risque: Applebee's.
2. Is MissionLocal a model of the future? Supported by the Ford Foundation, among others, and staffed in part by the UC Berkeley Journalism School, it's a vibrant, bilingual, multimedia site, focusing on a diverse and energetic San Francisco neighborhood. Good piece about it on KQED's California Report.
3. Can you get me the Greatest Generation niche? Check out the Mercury News' new Sunday Extra print section. The idea: there's an (old) niche that still likes the Sunday TV book, but it's way too expensive to print for everyone. So the Merc is packaging TV Week with a six-page wraparound Sunday Extra (Steve Yelvington has made the good point that any newspaper naming a section "Extra" should think again) — and then charging subscribers an extra 50 cents a week for it. Or as it says, "a fraction of the cost of a magazine."  Sunday Extra's article tell us the target demographic, with pieces on a 72-year-old "yoga pioneer", a "Seniors" column, "Wanda Jackson still rocking at 71," and a feature on the 72-old prince of sibling revelry, Tommy Smothers. Journalism Online has talked about lots of niching, but I don't know they've come up with this one.
4. Is the newspaper industry serious about a craigslist killer? No, not the Philip Markoff case, the alleged serious killer now indicted in Boston, after a craigslist-assisted meet-up apparent gone deadly. The NAA, in its renewed vigor to find new solutions to the industry's revenue woes, has been strategizing a "craigslist killer". That's right, a new industry-wide solution to beat back Craig Newmark's homegrown largely free classified product that has made much of a multi-billion dollar classified business obsolescent. Of the initiatives NAA is comparing — among them CircLabs, Journalism Online, Attributor, ViewPass — this could be the best one of them …. if it were 1999 instead of 2009. Classifieds are so last century.
5. Will the run-up in newspaper share prices grease the skids for property sales? Wall Street had decided newspapers have a future, as downsized, increasingly cost-effective, hybrid news companies. Share prices have doubled and tripled in some cases. So we can almost hear the pitches would-be buyers (the Pagliuca/Connors group in Boston, Meisrow Financial in Chicago) must be getting. "You're buying at the bottom. The worse is behind us." So are the Globe and the Sun-Times, among others, good deals? Is this a real bottom of newspaper revenue? Remember, Sam Zell, Brian Tierney and Chris Harte all thought they were buying at a bottom, too.
6. Will the Globe follow the Portland newspaper model? The Portland (Maine) Guild showed great stamina and flexibility in partnering with new private equity owners, qualities that the Boston Guild hasn't shared. Yet, an emerging model of private or angel investors, foundation support and labor participation in ownership may prevail. It's a shaky assemblage that may play to the uncertainty of the times. Can newspapers really sustain  robust newsrooms and traditional for-profit business models or are hybrid models a better hedge against the unknowns?
7. 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. Unsurprisingly, Varney and her people 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 (providing 25%+ of news site traffic), become part of reinvigorated anti-trust enforcement?
8. Aren't newspapers missing the importance of the new content factories? TechCrunch brought attention to AOL's big content push — 500 full-time writers and editors, plus another 1,500 freelancers. Consider also that Demand Media is producing 3000 stories a day and has built an archive of 650,000 stories and 150,000 videos. Yes, they are more feature-like than news, but then again, that's where much of the ad interest is in journalism. The Demands and AOLs are applying a bit of science, a bit of algorithm, to content production, and publishers ignore this approach at their further peril.
9. Is GrowthSpur the right local tonic? Mark Potts' new tools-and-networking company aimed at aiding local media start-ups may find fertile ground.  We see lots of start-ups — the Pocantico group and far beyond. At the same time, local is getting so much more competitive. Take my former journalistic stomping grounds of the Twin Cities. MPRNews now looks like a direct competitor to the StarTribune and Pioneer Press sites, and then there's burgeoning MinnPost, and early web pioneer WCCO, among numerous others. So GrowthSpur is on to something, aiming to bring order, sense and scale to local markets. We'll have to see how wide it is aiming, and who else will soon be entering local markets, seeing fresh business opportunity in growing chaos.

• As we keep one eye out for the WSJ.com re-launch Sept. 16, I’m wondering why there’s no WSJ — or Marketwatch or Barrons — app in the iPhone App Store. It’s the place to be and be seen, show the flag and at least seem au courant. So far AP is there, with deep local, NYT has a strong, if straightforward presence, Internet Broadcasting has put together a decent aggregation product and Express is porting over its useful Palm/Blackberry product. But news company participation beyond that is weak, and not well-niched.  Will a mobile iPhone app be part of the 9/16 re-do?
• How much more prominent will video be on the WSJ site? It’s halfway down now on the home page now, though still a bit higher than NYT’s video display. Both text-based companies are starting to master video, but their sites seem to say: text and photos. And, though, we know the Washington Post is doing massive video training, led by Chet Rhodes, here, too, we see little front-and-center placement. News customers are getting beyond a world of  "content types" — text, story, photo, audio, video, bar chart, etc. — and just expect to get all the relevant info delivered on a single page, with best coverage (regardless of type) highlighted.
• New York’s tabloids had a field day with the lipstick-on-a-pig nonsense (Post: "Boar War"; Daily News: "Lipstick Bungle". Will the Post be right with its data box head,  "Slim pickins"? Indeed, did one of globe’s top three rich guys buy at a suitably low-price, considering? Considering among other things that the New York Times is still the top newspaper brand in the world, and that it has barely tapped markets around the world. there are about 900 million English speakers here and there, and yet the Times today derives only about 4% of its revenues from outside the US (mainly International Herald Tribune-related.) That’s a big potential upside. Slim’s confidence in the Times also underscores the difference in value in national/global brands (like the Times and Dow Jones, as compared to local and regional papers. The big question here is how much the buy is a strategic, long-term one, with hands largely off, and how much a Harbinger-like one, pushing for greater short-term change and divestment of non-Times brand properties?
• As newspaper market caps plummet, how great a percentage of those valuations are now built on real estate? Sam Zell’s people probably know more about the land under his holdings in L.A., Chicago, Baltimore and Florida, than they do about what’s going on top of the land. NYT has taken criticism for its airy new HQ, which has been valued for as much as $1B. For the industry as a whole, with goodwill being discounted daily and future revenues highly uncertain, these real estate holdings are getting to be a prominent piece of newspaper valuations.
• If Gary Pruitt’s not setting the table today, then how soon will tomorrow come? The McClatchy CEO issued a statement to tamp down journalists’ and analysts’ saying his stepping apart from four family trusts may signify financial restructuring and/or going private. Maybe that’s so — and the move is long-planned and coincidental to the company’s current stress. Pruitt had to know that the trustee change would be found by journalists, and that would start speculation. So why not get out ahead of it, with a statement? Yes, the means of restructuring are tough, but something is going to give somewhere at McClatchy, and it’s hard not to see this move as one part of setting the table for it.
• Isn’t Dow Jones’ touting of the "Heard on the Street" expansion just another volley in the budding all-out war between WSJ and NYT over business news? WSJ made some news, gleefully talking staff expansion and iconic Heard on the Street expansion as the Times has had to mainly talk about cutbacks. Heard’s expansion, and the folding in of the WSJ’s "The Skeptic" blog, makes sense. It’s a strategic journalism, taking a well-known column, turning it into a brand, turning loose staffers to follow the business sun around the globe and expanding its presence in print and digitally. Online, Heard still seems more newspaper-like than blog-like (how will it be handled in the redesign?). We don’t get the sense of constant updating by its newly assigned staff of 12. NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook is the growing competing brand — and it may get a boost as the Times moves forward with a business and tech news upgrade of its own the end of this month.
• As the long-awaited, much-planned-for and much-trained-for Yahoo ad platform rolls out later this month with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Mercury News, how much will the platform separate the growers from the shrinkers? Many consortium companies — more than 40% of US circulation — have invested in sales training and re-training. Some have hired anew, all for the purpose of making the most out of the behavior-tracking Yahoo platform. They believe its power will up their local rates and gain them substantial revenue streams from selling Yahoo inventory. The rub, though, is, as is often the case, execution. Case in point: in phase one of the Yahoo/newspaper ad deals, in which buys have been enabled more manually, a few newspaper titles have gone to town, well into deep six figures, while others have practically no new revenue to show. As consortium members look at consortium benchmarks over time — the rollout of news sites on the platform won’t be completed until the end of 2009, they’ll see how well, or poorly, they’re performing compared to peers. As we see quarterly earnings from 2Q, 2009 on, we’ll all see who’s making most of the Yahoo Bump. 
• How soon before Yahoo-owned video service Maven is integrated into the consortium ad play, at least as an option? Just as readers are getting more content-type agnostic, ad buyers increasingly want more centralized ways to buy audience, whether behavioral-targeted display or pre-roll?
• How COOL is that? Could that be the budget regimen for 2009. COOL, as in expense reduction through: Clustering (having close-by properties share services), Outsourcing (you name it!), Offshoring (ad production plus) and plain old Letting Go, as in people, buildings, distribution trucks, etc. More on COOL soon.

1. Where are the unprofitable properties? In June, Dean Singleton told the World Association of Newspapers that 19 of the top 50 US dailies were unprofitable. We didn’t hear a whisper of unprofitability in the comments. Of course, only the public companies reported, which leaves a number of the top 50 unpublicized. Think MediaNews, Advance, Copley, Hearst. We knew that the San Francisco Chronicle was first to make the list, losing a million or so a week for about five years now. Who are the other 18?
2. Does McClatchy’s announcement that it has almost reached the point that 50% of online revenues are online-only provide a new foundation of hope? Newspaper companies’ reliance on the print/online upsell has been like heroin. Euphoric (25-35% on the way up) and paralyzing lethargy on the way down. Now online growth struggles to reach double digits at most companies, even as online ad spending continues to boom ahead at 18%+ growth rate. The smartest companies have profoundly shifted sales resources and sales training toward online-only, seeing their growth futures in the online ad economy. If McClatchy is a good way’s along on licking its upsell habit, that may provide a good foundation for growth, especially as its participation in the Yahoo AMP network rolls out later this year.  Two more online revenue growth questions: a) Wouldn’t it be great if each quarterly earnings report broke out online-only sales, by revenue in dollars and by percentage of overall online revenue? That would provide the market a new benchmark to gauge how much companies are building a future, not just cutting a past. b) What’s going on with Lee’s online growth number? Coming in at a negative 9.1%, it’s a head-scratcher. We know that newspaper companies each bring their own unique accounting to print/online revenue allocations, and that could be an issue here. Or could be the upsell addiction, though Lee has put a lot of energy into transforming its sales as well. The next quarter’s number will be fascinating to hear.
3. So you think current cuts are tough? Lee told us they cut 2.3% in expenses, this quarter 2008 compared this quarter 2007. But CEO Mary Junck added she plans additional expense cuts of 5-7% in the coming year. That could be lots of newsprint and jobs. McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt pegged further non-newsprint expense cutting at more than 10%. Other CEOs tell a similar story.
4. Does the June Swoon portend a worse second half? Check out the New York Times Co. June numbers compared to its 2Q numbers. For the quarter, the company was down 10.6% in ad revenue. For June, it was down 17.8%. The Times said entertainment advertising was the prime culprit for June’s further turndown, but then said it could be ’til the end of the third quarter before things "loosen up." Gannett’s numbers, 2Q (13.5%) vs June (down 16.3%) show the same trend.
5. When do we acknowledge that the classified economy model is broken? What we saw in the 2Q numbers was a 20%+ downturn from 2007. Recall the 2007/2006 2Q comparisons. Those were down 16.4% (that’s a print-only number) for McClatchy, for instance. It’s not just the fact that the economy/subprime mess has wreaked havoc in real estate, recruitment and auto. It’s also the fact that reliance on the internet and its interactivity — at many sites other than newspaper-owned ones — increases by the month. Consider Media General’s big dive — 29.5% in a quarter. 
6. Are dividends the next to go? Pruitt made a point of saying the company would be reviewing its dividend payout at its next meeting; last year, the company didn’t increase its dividend for the first time in years. That’s only prudent, as Wachovia analyst Jon Janedis has pointed out. Companies in survival mode — and that’s where they’re at — are better off reducing debt and otherwise trying to hold their operations together — if they can family members and other investors to take lesser or no payouts. Other companies have followed Gatehouse’s rich dividend approach, with Gannett upping its payout by 30% less October.
7. How much of the new circ pricing strategy will stick? The New York Times has been raising prices since mid-last year and plans more increases in August, reporting success — 2.5% increase in circ revenue. The Journal recently announced a whopping 33% increase from $1.50 to 2 for single copy, and papers as diverse as Toledo Blade, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have joined in increasing print prices. Pricing comes against the numbers of continued circ revenue reduction for most companies: Gannett at -2.1% and McClatchy at -5.2%.  My guess: the big national papers find more success here than the metros, who are cutting their products back and asking for a more payment.
8. How long will Americans luxuriate themselves? Luxury goods have been a key growth line for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as both target luxury buyers with niche publications and sections. Janet Robinson noted that watches and fashion have continued big for the Times. The Journal itself just wrote about the phenomenon of Americans keeping up their lux purchases, despite the downturn. But investors sense this trend may not last — pushing down luxury stocks 13% just since the end of May.
9. And of course, the biggest question: So how much of this lost advertising comes back when the economy recovers? That’s the 64 million pixel question. Of course, some of it will, but it’s dreaming to believe it will all come back as it has after previous downturns.  You can’t blame them from hoping, but that hope may be beyond audacious.

Content Bridges: More 9 Questions