Daily Newspaper Companies

We can’t though dismiss what the Mormon Church, Rupert Murdoch and ad moguls are up to. We have to learn from it and help it power a journalism that matters.

As the much-ballyhooed “fight for livingroom” plays out, can national news companies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR, or local news companies, get a piece of the pie, whoever (Apple, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, Dish) slices it up?

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”. Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”. One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

From the Post, Gilbert takes the ability to be two things, simultaneously, a worldwide political news leader and a company plying in the waters of hyperlocal; he believes that in the digital age, you can difference faces for differing audiences. In this case, you can be both a worldwide Mormon vertical — serving a potential readership of six million — and the newspaper of Salt Lake’s and Utah’s smaller communities.

The UK moves have many parallels in the US, but the concentration of them in so short a time portends new waves of news industry transformation, and maybe some regression, across the Western World.

The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.

In the coming digital decade, news brand management will become more important than ever. Since the internet age dawned, news publishers have thought of the print product and the dot.com. Now in the age of the smartphone, iPad and TVs becoming monitors, those news brands that endure and prosper will be ones that master ubiquity. That means that those brands, merrily crossing and re-crossing platforms, become even more important identifiers, stamps of recognition — and one would hope, trust — as digital ubiquity both complicates and simplifies our information worlds.

Here’s another number that’s important, in this big scheme of things, in the where-the-world is going vs. where it’s been reckoning: Of digital advertising — not only soon to be #1, but also the fastest-growing kind of advertising — newspaper companies get maybe 10 or 12% of the total digital ad spend.

Today’s announcement that the USA Today is falling on its own grenade, blowing itself up, taking casualties (130 layoffs) and taking an increasingly familiar digital-first, print-last path makes historic sense.

News Corp.’s Avatar has taken in $2.75 billion. Compare that financial flexibility with the Times, and it’s night and day. The Times Co.’s total 2009 revenues: $2.4 billion, less than Avatar itself has produced.