The New York Times is slimming down to bulk up. It is no longer a newspaper company, with a strong national newspaper, a Boston cousin in the Globe and regional newspaper interests. It is a global news company whose future is mostly digital, and it will live or die on that adventure. It is a company that now sees 63% of its revenues (last from the third quarter) coming from the Times print and digital operations. Over the past several years, the Times — despite its many trials (selling its flagship building, participating in Carlos Slim usury, before paying back the 14% $250 million loan to the Mexican magnate) — has outperformed financially both the regional group and the Globe .

That only makes sense. Borrowing lessons from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others, the global Times is about scale. You can pay a Times reporter to write a story that can reach some of the Times ‘ 50 million global monthly unique visitors, three-fifths of them in the U.S. Or you can pay a Gainesville or Tuscaloosa reporter a little less to write a story that can reach a hundreth of that total. Do the math, and the future bet is on the company with the big global news brand and the reach.

The regional news companies, important as they are to their communities, have been but a business distraction. The Times has tried to sell them before, pulling back as market conditions forced it to do. Now Halifax Media Group seems set to complete its deal, which we’d have to believe is in final form given its inclusion of the NYTRNG papers on its website (courtesy of Romenesko), now taken down. Halifax is part of new generation of newspaper property buyers, believing they can make a go of these distressed properties, through more consolidation of jobs and other efficiencies. (“Now at Fire Sale Prices, a Few Newspapers…and Maybe More,” Newsonomics, Dec. 2, 2011)

For the Times now, and going forward, the competition is CNN, the BBC, News Corp, ABC, NBC, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Reuters and several others. Who indeed will be among the most trusted names in the (digital) news business?

The spasms of change at the Times come ironically after one of the most relatively successful years for the company. Yes, profits are still tough to come by — a measly $33 million in the last quarter — but the company pulled off a digital pay scheme that has established a modest beachhead. It begins to provide the Times a second digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising. Circulation revenues grew 3.4% for the last period, as the Times’ new digital All-Access push circulation had netted 324,000 “digital” subscribers of one kind or another and enabled the first Sunday home delivery print increase since 2006. It has positioned itself well with apps for emerging tablet and smartphone platforms, moving quickly into the Apple Newsstand, for instance. It is aiming for ubiquity and is in the lead of the newspaper pack, with the Journal nipping and biting along the way.

Yet, ominously, print advertising revenues decreased 10.4 percent and digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent in the last quarter. 2012 looks like another down year, in high single digits. In fact, there’s an array of numbers that offer a quite uneven path to success next year, as I described in the Newsonomics of 2012′s Magic Formula, last week.

Consequently, the company is barely keeping even, and will likely have to accelerate cuts next year to stay profitable. So the plow must be sped. With less than a quarter of its revenues now driven by digital, the Times has to move quicker. It may balance (smartly as its done with its Sunday print/digital pricing) package print and digital, but it is has to grab mind share and market share in all the emerging digital spaces, tablet, smartphone, connected TV and web.

Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world.

The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company, a company now seeing both CEO Robinson and digital head Martin Nisenholtz leaving at the same time, the latter by retirement. Famously balkanized, with numerous power centers, the company has been both innovative and plodding. That’s an odd combo, but one fitting its prudent-above-all news culture. With one distraction removed (and now we wonder about the Boston Globe, its own pay scheme innovation underway, and how long it will remain a Times Company property), the new CEO aces a tough terrain. Given that the company, even post NYTRNG sale, is 90%+ newspaper-based, it suffers in its ability to grow. News Corp, CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg all are part of large, diversified companies that can buffer them from the permanent print ad downturn. As Janet Robinson found, the path forward is an extremely narrow one.

Important Details: Newsy is an unusual project. It’s a for-profit enterprise, housed at a university. It’s an aggregation product in the largely single-title environment of the tablet.  And it’s a digital product that is tablet first, smartphone second and, the web, a distant third.

Newsy now produces 25 to 30 video stories each day, seven days a week, on an 18-hour cycle. Its stories are unusual. They run two and a half to four minutes in length, anchored by a staffers. Newsy benefits from the its partnership with the UniEssentially, they are summaries of the day’s news, drawing from both video (NBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC and more) and text (newspapers) sources. The sources are prominently featured, in short video clips and paragraphs displayed behind the speaking anchor.

Usage of clips is covered by Fair Use law, just as text aggregators, such as Google, built their businesses, says Spencer.

President Jim Spencer, a veteran of MSNBC and AskJeeves, moved his fledgling operation to Columbia, Mo, home of the University of Missouri, receiving economic development incentives from the City of Columbia (REDI) and substantial tax credits from the Missouri State Department of Economic Development.  Newsy benefits from its partnership with the literally across-the-street University of Missouri, providing hands-on instruction to students and then hiring the cream of each year’s crop. He credits the lower-cost location and enthusiasm of the student/University community with helping to rapid growing the business.

“They [the students] intrinsically get it,” Spencer told Outsell, talking about their grasping of the new product form. “They’ll stay up two days in a row working on an initiative.” On the development path: personalization in various forms, and new Mandarin- and Spanish-language versions.

Key to Newsy’s strategy is the engagement mobile news providers are finding with delivery to the new tablet devices. On its iPad product, Newsy has found that more than 45% of sessions are greater than three minutes in length, with 15% of all sessions being greater than 10 minutes. Shorter sessions are conducted on the iPhone, consistent with most publisher experiences: Newsy is finding users generally spend one to three minutes, and watch fewer videos (2.3 videos “initialized” compared to 3.4 for the iPad user). Median session length on the iPhone app is around 150 seconds, says Spencer. All those numbers compare favorably with industry online usage.

The two-and-a-half-year-old Newsy now employs 18 full-time and 12-15 part-time staffers. It is expanding its advertising presence, using 15-second pre-rolls and bottom of the page banners as  its main business model, with others in the offing.

Implications: Outsell believes the Newsy model in and of itself is of great consequence to news creators. It’s an intriguing tablet native product that manages to grab a hold of much of what makes the new platform such a mind-boggling reader and advertising opportunity.

It’s a plus product, as in: Mobile + Video + Social + Curation, all on the foundation of News. On the tablet, these factors aren’t separate from each other; in fact, the confluence of them is, in part, what gives the tablet platform its game-changing power. It’s not just news publishers, or broadcasters, who can take note. All producers of information can learn lots from taking a look at the Newsy product and business model.

As Spencer notes, it’s the tablet that is the center of his business, because of its unique capabilities; mobile accounts for 70-80% of the traffic. The web, meaning desktop and laptop? “I publish to the the web as the platform of last resort.” That’s a mind-turning idea, and one that legacy companies can think through, tossing print into that “what’s your best platform for this product?” question.

The whole question of aggregation products for the tablet is a work-in-progress. While Google, Yahoo!, AOLand MSN have dominated the online space, the single brand-encouraging interface of the iPad has transformed the picture — for now. We see services such as Flipboard and Pulse out early with curation/aggregation products, but the big guys aren’t yet well represented. At the same time, both newspaper and magazine publishers (think Next Issue Media) are trying to figure out if industry aggregation plays, long discarded for online, may be resuscitated. Newsy, then, gives those companies and industries something to think about, and in its get-it-done, get-into-the-market-cheaply momentum, a model from which to learn.

The Economist is running a major series on the global news industry, well-worth checking into, excerpts available for non-subscribers. As part of that effort, I’ve been asked to contribute, among a half-dozen others (among them, Dan Gillmor, David Levy, Ying Chan, Larry Kilman), weekly thoughts. For week 4, the question, “Is transparency the new objectivity?”

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

LET us think of news reporting like a window. If a journalist is inside the window, creating news, she should always have a few core principles firmly fixed. Getting it right. Making it clear. Providing understanding. Doing the right thing, without fear or favour. These are boring concepts, and ones we have not been able to communicate well to our readers. Civics are not sexy.

Those kinds of qualities, the complex of them, are far more essential than simplistic objectivity. Objectivity did not make sense when it was taught to me in an otherwise fine University of Oregon School of Journalism graduate program in the 1970s, and it does not make sense now.

Werner Heisenberg proved scientifically what has nagged at most of us as endless arguments of objectivity and “subjectivity” erupted in newsrooms, public forums and now in the blogosphere: an observer watching an event necessarily changes the “objective” reality of the event. In other words, there is no single objective truth waiting to be discovered, like a chunk of real estate such as The New World. There are many interwoven truths that need to be pulled apart, examined and rewoven endlessly. That’s what we do as journalists—unknot and re-weave.

Now, let’s look at the view from outside the window. Some windows are opaque; many need cleaning from time to time. The newsroom windows that many of us have inherited come from a milky tradition; the public can kind of see through them, but only with great effort.

Transparency—aided and abetted by openness, interactivity and ability to instantly respond, correct and make better—is a gift (which sometimes seems like a curse) from the innovation of the web.

For journalists today it is a two-way window. On the creation end, no matter how much they crowdsource, use Twitter and engage with communities, core journalistic principles of fairness remain fundamental. On the viewing end, the new transparency helps us get it more correct, we would hope. Window washing, then, becomes the new order of the day

It has seen a huge jump in people visiting its website. On Monday, a peak, in this amazing, still-unwinding tale, the Guardian saw nearly 4M uniques.  That compares with 2.8 million average day visitors in May, and that was an above-average month for the Guardian, when it landed 51 million uniques overall. (That larger worldwide unique reach is consistent of what we’re seeing among most big news brands: the ubiquity of access ushered in by the smartphone, and now the tablet, has exposed evern more people to the power of major national/global news producers in the UK and U.S.)

The spike is an almost 30% increase.

Normally, the Guardian divides its traffic into thirds, consistent with several other major UK news brands (“The newsonomics of the British invasion“). That’s a third in the UK, a third in the US (with five times the population) and a third in what we’d call ROW — rest of the world. This story, though, changed those dynamics, with 50% coming from UK, as national readers were rapt, following the developments, with 20% U.S. and 25%  ROW. Given the overall increase in visits, I’d read that more as intense UK interest than lesser U.S. interest.

It wasn’t just the blow-by-coverage, the live blog and running analysis that brought in readers. With such social tools as the Twitter monitor, watching comment as the Murdochs were grilled Tuesday in Parliament, the Guardian reinforced its central, ongoing role in the story. That feature alone, with a timeline and tag cloud, generated more than 1000 re-tweets and almost 500 Facebook shares, all helping contribute to that traffic spike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CALL IT Journalist Spring. A wild-eyed optimist just arriving for this stage of the news revolution might be overwhelmed by the unexpected flowering of journalism, news-gathering and news-writing, increasingly un-tethered from traditional ties.

Okay, our just-arrived optimist would have to have somehow missed Journalist Winter, an unprecedented winnowing of the news herd, with more than 10,000 jobs lost in newspapers in the U.S. and thousands more in the UK and Europe. That winter aside (for a moment) we’ve never seen such potential for the news reader, and, I believe, the global news business.

As in any revolution, what we have seen first is great disruption. Disruption inevitably means destruction, bad and good. For this exercise in optimism, let’s look at four surpassing positive impacts of this great news disruption:

The local newspaper editor is no longer the supreme arbiter of what his readers read. In the old print days, many regional newspaper editors (and in America, that has meant all the 1500+ newspapers, save three national ones) decided what their readers would read, defined what their readers would think was news. We were gatekeepers, holding all the keys. The internet took those keys away, defeated distance and opened hundreds of millions of readers’ eyes to other news organisations – from great to god-awful. So the rough justice of an evolving meritocracy has replaced the old print walled garden.

News is being broken out of its old, calcified molds. You could buy news one way, in a single package, a daily newspaper or a magazine. The container (newsprint largely) defined the news. Now, we’re at the beginning of the change. Kindle Singles first gave us the radical notion that a book didn’t need to be book-length; “50,000 words,” as my publisher told me with Newsonomics, not 40,000 or 60,000. Such innovations as tiny Atavist are helping redefine longer-form and investigative journalism into the length that stories or series need. Longer than a traditional newspaper story, shorter than a book, more flexible than a magazine feature, we’re starting to see various kinds of breakouts from the old form. The iPad itself will soon spawn many new news “products” as publishers figure out how to create niche news and feature content to fit the lives, and life stages, of their readers.

Storytelling can be mixed and matched: Journalism schools used to force students to choose: news/editorial (meaning print/newspapers), magazines or broadcast. That channeling meant that news and feature journalists learned one craft, some well. Today’s journalism students face radically new curricula emphasising multimedia storytelling, teaching the next generation of students to use all the tools available, picking the best to tell the particular story. Readers (especially those entering the 4G era through iPads) are the beneficiaries when the craft is done well, using the new techniques atop old-fashioned shoe leather reporting and taxing analysis.

National boundaries no longer define news: I recently chronicled (in time for American Independence Day from you-know-who) the British news invasion of America. The internet has not just taken down walls between cities, counties, regions, provinces, cantons and states. It has removed them from between countries. Most quality London dailies see only a third of their web visitors coming from Britain, an equal number (or more) from America and the other third from the rest of the world. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal see a quarter to a third of visitors coming from overseas. BBC.com has planted a strong flag in America, even as it is assailed at home. Language now defines what we can read more than nationality, and auto-translate programs will further obliterate national bounds in the next five years. That means more choice, more perspective—and maybe less provincialism for all of us.

It’s a week to celebrate great investigative work. ProPublica made some history with its Pulitzer for online-only work about the financial meltdown, and the Los Angeles Times crowned its success with the larger-than-life Bell corruption tale, winning its own top prize. Both well deserved.

Meanwhile, as journalists sat around their terminals awaiting the Pulitzer bulletin, an investigative series broke across California, perhaps reaching more audience more quickly than any previous investigative piece. There were no bodies to count, nor billions or millions of ill-gotten gains to uncover.

Rather, California Watch’s “On Shaky Ground” series is aimed at preventing disaster, getting ahead of the Grim Reaper. The series took a big look at the likely safety issues in the state’s schools when (not if, right?) The Big One hits. It found, not surprisingly, that although state law mandated seismic preparations, all kinds of bureaucratic nonsense has contravened that intent. It found that about 1,100 schools had been red-flagged as in need of repair, with no work done, while tens of thousands of others were in questionable and possibly illegal shape. The so-what: Some of the very institutions providing for the kids of California have a certain likelihood of actually falling on top of them and killing them.

It’s old-fashioned, shoe-leather, box-opening, follow-the-string journalism, and it is well done.

While it’s fun to celebrate great journalism, anytime, it’s vital to look at the newsonomics of this kind of investigative journalism. What did it take to get it done? How much did it cost and who paid for it? And, to look at the plainly fundamental question: How do we get lots more of it done in the future?

The series took more than 20 months to complete. The interactive timeline, “On Shaky Ground: The story behind the story,” tells that tale with tongue in cheek; it’s a great primer for any beginning journalism class. Corey G. Johnson, freshly hired from North Carolina and part of a young reporting contingent that has been mixed and mentored well by veterans like editorial director Mark Katches, stumbles on a list of 7,500 “unsafe schools” as he’s doing a routine story on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Along the way, the story grows in import and paperwork. California Watch, the less-than-two-year-old offshoot of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Journalism (CIR), adds other staff to the effort, including reporter Erica Perez, public engagement manager Ashley Alvarado, distribution manager Meghann Farnsworth, and director of technology Chase Davis, among other reporters.

In the end, the series rolled out in three parts — with maps, databases, historical photos, its own Twitter hashtag, a “My Quake” iPhone app — and a coloring book (“California Watch finds a new consumer group, kids“), intended to reach kids, the most important subject and object of the reporting. Already, the state legislature has scheduled hearings for April 27.

The reach of the roll-out is one of the new lessons here. Six major dailies ran at least some part of the series. ABC-affiliate broadcasters took the story statewide. Public radio news leaders KQED, in the Bay Area, and KPCC, in L.A. ran with it. KQED-TV. The ethnic press signed on: La Opinion ran two seismic stories Sunday and Monday, while at least two Korean papers, one Chinese paper, and one Chinese TV station included coverage as well. More than 125 Patch sites in the state (California is major Patch turf) participated.

A number of the distributors did more than distribute. They localized, using data from California Watch, and reporting on their local schools’ shape. KQED-TV produced a 30-minute special that is scheduled to air on at least 12 PBS affiliates in the state.

San Francisco Chronicle managing editor Steve Proctor is frank about how priorities and resource use have changed in the age of downsizing. When Proctor came to the paper in 2003, he says, the paper had five to seven people assigned to a full-time investigative team. Now there’s no team per se, with the Chronicle investing investigative resources in an “investigate and publish” strategy, getting stories out to the public more quickly and then following up on public-generated leads they create. It’s an adjustment in strategy and in resource allocation — and the California Watch relationship makes it even more workable. “We’ve been pretty sympatico with them from the beginning,” he said. “We’ve used the majority of what they’ve produced.”

So let’s get deeper into some numbers, informed by this series, and see where this kind of work can go:

• “On Shaky Ground” cost about $550,000 to produce, most of that in staff time, as the project mushroomed. That’s now a huge sum of money to a newsroom, even a metro-sized one. Ask a publisher whether he or she is willing to spend a half a million on a story, and you know the answer you’ll usually get. It’s a sum few newsrooms can or will invest. Consequently, the economics of getting a well edited, well packaged series for a hundreth of that price is an offer few newsrooms can (or probably should) refuse.
• California Watch, not yet two years old, runs on a budget of about $2.7 million a year. That budget supports 14 journalists, whose funding takes up about 70 percent of that $2.7 million number. That’s an intriguing percentage in and of itself; most daily newspaper newsrooms make up of 20 percent or less of their company’s overall expenses. So, disproportionately, the money spent on California Watch is spent on journalists — and journalism.

The project is about midway through its funding cycles. The ubiquitous Knight Foundation (which has contributed about $15 million to a number of investigative projects nationwide through its Investigative Reporting Initiative), the Irvine Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation, all of which have provided million-dollar-plus grants, are reviewing new proposals.

The key word, going forward here, is “sustaining.” Will foundations provide ongoing support of the “public good” of such journalism? There’s lots of talk among foundations, but no clear consensus among journalism-facing ones. “There really isn’t a foundation community that thinks with a common brain — same situation as in the news community,” Knight’s Eric Newton told me this week. “Each foundation makes its own decisions using different criteria. Some foundations see their role as launching new things and letting nature take its course.” CIR executive director Robert Rosenthal is among those trying to find a new course. Although he’s a highly experienced editor, he finds that most of his time is found fund- and friend-raising.

• California Watch is building a syndication business, feeling its way along. Already, six larger dailies — the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Orange County Register, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Fresno Bee, and the Bakersfield California — are becoming clients, paying a single price for the all-you-can-eat flow of daily and enterprise stories California Watch produces. They, a number of ABC affiliates (L.A.’s KABC, the Bay Area’s KGO, 10 News San Diego, 10 News Sacramento, KSFN in Fresno), and KQED public radio and TV in the Bay Area are also annual clients pay between $3,000 and $15,000 a year each. A la carte pricing for individual projects can run from $300 to $1000 [Note, the a la carte pricing was wrong when this post first went up]. The California Watch media network, just launched in January, is an important building block of the evolving business model. It is clear that while syndication can be a good support, at those rates, it’s a secondary support.
• So, if California Watch were to be totally supported by foundation money, it would take an endowment of $54 million to throw off $2.7 million a year, at a five percent spend rate. Now $54 million raised one time isn’t an impossible sum. Consider just one gift: Joan Kroc left NPR more than $200 million eight years ago. Consider that the billionaires’ club started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett (encouraging their peers to give away half of their wealths) is talking about newly raising a half a trillion dollars for the public good. Last summer, I suggested the group tithe a single percentage point of the club’s treasury for news-as-a-public-good. It seems to me that stories like “On Shaky Ground” make that pivotal education/health/journalism connection; send “Shaky Ground” to your favorite billionaire and urge him to sign on.
• Let’s do some cost-benefit analysis. How much is a single child’s life worth? How about a school of 250? We could consult a liability lawyer, who undoubtedly would put assign a six- and seven-figure number per life, and then tie up the courts, post-disaster, making the math work. So if California, bereft as it is of capital, were to invest in the infrastructure, per its own laws, wouldn’t it be ultimately cost-effective? Of course it would be, and in this case we see in microcosm, the question of American infrastructure writ large. Are we a country that will let more bridges fall into mighty rivers, more schools fall onto our children and more poor roads cause preventable injury and death? You don’t need my political rant here. Rather, let us just make the point that journalism — old-fashioned journalism, newly digitally enhanced — is a key part of forcing America to face its own issues, whatever the solutions.

In this project and in California Watch generally, we see the reconfiguring of local media. An owner — whether AOL, Hearst, or private equity — can hardly reject the offer of paying one-hundreth of the cost for space-filling, audience-interesting content. Welcome to a new kind of content farm, to use that perjorative for a moment. Yes, California Watch operates on the same Demand Media-like principle of create-once-distribute-many, realizing the digital cost of the second copy is nil. Let’s consider it the organic, cage-free content farm. It makes sense for a state the size of a country (California = Canada); smaller versions of it make equal sense for Ohio, North Carolina, or Illinois.

Older media outsources journalism and in-sources (affordable) passion. There are lots of lessons here (“3 Reasons to Watch California Watch“), but that fundamental rejiggering of who does the work and how it is distributed and customized is a key one. As Mark Katches points out, “They [distributing partners] put their voices on our story.” That’s a new system in the making.

Old(er) editors can learn new tricks. For a good show-and-tell of that principle, check out Rosenthal’s talk to TEDxPresidio two weeks ago. I first saw him give the talk at NewsFoo in Phoenix in December. Amid more tech-oriented talks, his stood out and was much applauded. It’s a clarifying call for real journalism, perfected for the digital age. Share it.

It’s as old as organized humanity itself: the mercado, the bazaar, the marketplace. We love to visit Old World marketplaces as we travel abroad. At home, our own shopping is now a mish-mash of malls, big box stores, neighborhood shops, and online commerce. Amazon, itself, is now a $34 billion business, and its Prime delivery program can deliver just about anything (my favorite buy: an electric mower) right to your door, seeming so local.

We can research almost any purchase. We can compare prices. We can get advice and reviews from hordes we’ll never meet.

Yet it’s far from nirvana. Navigating the byways of web commerce, other than great walled gardens like Amazon, can be frustrating. Numerous culs-de-sac interrupt us. Price-comparison sites like Price Grabber, Google Product Search, Shopzilla, and UK’s Kelkoo only seem to give us a partial view of what’s available. It’s tough to know when reviews may be gamed. Sites like preprint-digitizer Shop Local (“Your Local Weekly Ads, All in One Place”), owned by Gannett, seem curiously backwards, like replica E-Edition newspaper products for reading. Trying to compare model numbers, on sites like CNET or Best Buy, can give us digital nervous breakdowns.

Within the infinity of shopping choice, a lot of us would like some order.

That’s what the new Find n Save product aims to provide, and for the benefit of newspaper companies. Find n Save is the latest effort from newspaper companies to reclaim what they consider to be their birthright, maybe a third generation of such marketplaces following the ShopLocals and the earlier Storerunners.

Find ‘n Save focuses us on a decade-old-plus newspaper company problem.

While the daily newspaper — with its display and classified ads, its Sunday circulars, and its Wednesday food coupon – used to be the leading local marketplace, it now is just part of the pack. One number — print ad revenue halved in 10 years to $24.8 billion in 2009 (no final tally is yet in for 2010, which was still lower in single-digit decline) in the U.S. — gives real meaning to this splintering of commerce.

Digital media, with its search-led research/price comparison abilities and, now, with the new couponing craze, has wrought havoc with the newspaper business model.  All of that digital commerce has been disruptive and disintermediating. Yet there’s been more disintermediation (of traditional publisher/merchant relationships) than remediation.

We turn to lots of digital media to research and shop, but we have few go-to places of habit, again with Amazon making the greatest inroads into our shopping lives so far.

From a customer-centric perspective, it’s never been more confusing to find good deals. Yes, they seem to come from every quarter — print circulars, the web overall, direct mail, eBay alerts, Amazon “notifications” — but they’re disordered.

A recent study by the BIA/Kelsey group puts a number on the proliferation of marketplace choice. The annual study points to consumers using an average of 7.9 different media to make buying decisions in 2010, compared to only 5.6 in 2007. Buying’s gotten more complex.

The flipside, of course, is that merchants’ own choices about how to market have gotten more complex (“The Newsonomics of Eight Per Cent Reach,” ), with small- and medium-sized businesses using 4.6 media to reach customers in 2010, as compared to 3 in 2007.

So taking a look at Find n Save, let’s look at the Newsonomics of the would-be new mercado, and what it will take to make these new marketplaces bigger business for local media.

McClatchy’s newspapers are the first big clients for Find n Save, a product ofTravidia, a long-time player in the print-to-digital ad conversion business. Find n Save replaces Marketplace 360, the company’s former regional marketplace product.

Two big McClatchy papers — its hometown Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star — launched Find n Save in November. The company’s other big sites, from the Miami Herald to its North Carolina properties (Charlotte and Raleigh) and the Fort Worth Star Telegram, should feature it by July 1, with the rest of the company’s 30 markets putting Find n Save in place by year’s end. MediaNews’ flagship Denver Post will also launch it soon.

It’s not the only new effort at a regional marketplace.

Find n Save will soon by joined by another regional commerce portal. FYI Philly will launch this spring, in the greater Philadelphia region, two of its principals tell me. It’s conceived as a commerce portal, details to come. Significantly, it’s the result of unprecedented cooperation among four newspaper competitors in that region: Philadelphia Media Network (the new parent of the Inquirer and Daily News), the Journal Register company, Gannett, and Calkins Newspapers.

For Chris Hendricks, McClatchy’s VP/interactive, the Find n Save push is about a grand goal: reclaiming retail advertising. While the destruction of print classifieds has been well chronicled, the steady decline of local retail has been less so. You can figure that retail advertising has declined about $7 billion annually since its 2001 height. Yes, online display advertising has yielded some retail revenue, but doesn’t come close to recreating the lost revenue — or the lost sense of marketplace. 

So Hendricks talks about “blowing up retail” — and reordering it with Find n Save. “People are searching more and more for local services and products,” he says. “And they’re getting more and more confused.”

Find n Save aims to bring some simplicity to that confusion. Take a look at it, and you can see it’s a work in progress. What we notice about it — very prominently — is the deal of the day. Yes, Find n Save aims to take advantage of the Groupon revolution. Some Find n Save sites are partnered with Groupon, while others offer their own deals of the day. The idea is that the deal of the day isn’t just a new ad play, a new revenue source, for news sites; it’s also a new gateway to local commerce. The rest of Find n Save shows its ambitions:

• It gives prominence to other local couponing, deals without the social must-buy incentives of the daily deal. Subway sandwiches, vacuum cleaners, lots of restaurants, and car care — but all in one place.
• It incorporates product search, as have previous versions of the product. Consumers can search by product, brand, and store, among other attributes, narrowing or expanding search as they wish, and see where that product is available locally. The big allure, here, is the ability to check whether a product is in stock, at multiple, close-by locations. Search for lamps or shoes or spas, and you’ll find a motley assortment of offers.

So far, the November-launched sites have seen their marketplace traffic “quintuple,” says James Green, chief marketing officer of Travidia and an alum of Raleigh’s pioneering Nando Media. He says that’s due mainly due to “product-centric search engine optimization,” providing a new level of prominence in Google search results.  If that base can keep growing, Chris Hendricks sees the sites becoming commercial magnets. Possible new, related streams can include display ads, offering prominence and placement, charging local retailers for ingestion of their inventories and conversion of their print material generally and topical directories, he says.

“Deals are the content,” says Hendricks. He notes, for instance, that news sites’ attempts to connect up editorial content with restaurant directories — using newspapers’ unique and core strengths — hasn’t produced the dividends many of us thought they would. Forget the packaging of feature content with ads; just focus on the ads.

So what can we make of this step forward?

Well, it’s a step, but probably many more are needed. Fronting a site with coupons makes some sense, and will pull in additional audience. Yet the overall research and shopping experience will have to be fuller if these are to become go-to sites with masses of local buyers.

It’s hard to know how many years we are away from the perfection of commerce — you know, getting each of us the kinds of timely and meaningful shopping offers that bring order out of the digital shopping chaos. Certainly, though, here is some of what will be needed:

• Broader, deeper databases of products: That’s simple to say, and hard to achieve. I asked James Green whether Find n Save is a breakthrough product. Not yet, he said, saying that there’s not yet “enough conversion.” That translates as product search being too spotty; provision of retailers’ real-time inventories is still a work-in-progress. If we as consumers run into more dead-ends than usable deals, we’ll stop coming back.
• Reviews and recommendations: Find n Save contains none. In a world of imperfect knowledge, we love seeing what dozens of others think of products and services, just like in the early mercados. What’s new, good, and fresh? Throw out the reviews that are outliers, and we’ve got a better-than-even shot of making a better buying decision. Sites without them lack the critical component found in sites from Amazon to Best Buy to Yelp.
• Preferences and customer knowledge: While some of us are highly concerned about privacy, many others say, ‘Just use your tracking to give me what I want — including deals — and stop spamming me with useless ads.’ So the ability to state preferences and to have my digital behavior intelligently watched — for my benefit — will be a big differentiator.
• A great tablet product. James Green says Find n Save’s mobile app will be ready soon. Apps are, of course, becoming a price of admission for mobile customers. More importantly, the winning local marketplace will figure out how to combine deep, broad shopping info, social reviews, deals — and to fully embrace the interactive and visual capabilities of the tablet. Just as the iPad — and its newer cousins — are the big do-over opportunity for news companies’ reader business models, they’re also literally a blank slate for the new mercado.

Who will build it? It could be a Travidia, or an Amazon or a Google or a Facebook or a Flipboard-for-commerce so far unborn. There are billions of dollars baiting the hook.

On Friday, with the action hot and heavy in Cairo, I tried to say up to date.

I went to the gym for a noon workout, plugged in as usual. No Onion News or the combo of iPhone music playlists combined with catching up with Romanesko, AllThingsD and PaidContent. MSNBC, on one of the silent TV monitors on the wall, told me that President Obama would be talking Mubarak and taking questions “any moment.”

Ah, but how to get to it? The TV says “88.3″ below, which is great if you have a radio tuner, but I’ve an iPhone4, so that doesn’t seem to work (iPhone5 maybe, or is there a way I’m missing?).

So I went to one of my public radio apps — still confused about what’s best there — and surveyed my pre-selected favorite stations. I’ve taken to listening to Boston’s WBUR All Things Considered feed in the middle of my Pacific Time afternoon, and have started sampling the one-hour interview programs — from BUR’s Here & Now, hosted by Robin Young to KPCC’s newer Madeleine Brand shows, both lively and learning hours. They’re available by podcast, but it’s fun to listen live and to be able to pick the public radio station I want to listen to, not being constrained by geography. (Echoes of the death of distance for newspapers, that we’ve talked about for years.)

I started with KAZU, my local Central California Coast station. Science Friday, Talk of the Nation’s Friday edition, played as usual, as it did on KQED, the bigger Northern California station.  I tried WBUR. Regular programming.

I turned to MPR, Minnesota Public Radio, and presto, the announcer came on almost immediately, saying, “We’re going to interrupt this program to join a live Presidential news conference on Egypt.” Just what I expected. MPR handled it well, as a few moments later Obama took to the screen.

It was complicated to cover, though. This wasn’t a press conference on Egypt. It was a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Harper, concluding a day of joint talks. What followed were comments by Obama on cooperation with Canadian (love you, northern neighbors) and then finally Egypt. As Harper then spoke, we inexplicably got the French-language stream via NPR, with MPR apparently unable to access anything else. Then, MPR drifted away, back to its BBC NewsHour regular programming, though it did helpfully tell me that it would resume the Obama conference when he went to questions.

Through this time, I could see Obama and Harper on TV, though the disjointed lipsynch was enough to make you uneasy. MSNBC brought us the comments, presumably in English, and the went to its analysts when the French translation picked up.

A few minutes later, MPR brought back the Q and A, really the most informative part of the conference. MSNBC, for some reason, stayed with its analysts, as I heard Obama talking with reporters via NPR and MPR.

That’s just a snapshot, a moment in Internet news time, and one that shows how jumbled things are, circa 2011. Things aren’t aligned and consumers have to do lots of work-arounds to get what’s kind-of, almost there. There are two fixes ahead. One’s technological as programmers’ abilities to offer us what we want how we want it and get better and easier to access.

The other comes down to something old-fashioned: News judgment. MPR had the same access to NPR’s feed of the press conference as other stations, I’d presume. Yet, it was the only one I found (perhaps there were others) that handled the news best and largely smoothly (I even enjoyed the French lessons for a few moments) in the interests of its listeners. That took some planning, thinking and moving on the fly — and isn’t that what we in the news business are supposed to excel at? It’s a challenge and an opportunity for everyone, TV, radio and print people laying plans for the next round of the all-access news revolution.