Let’s elevate, for a moment.

Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet.

The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global.

The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning.

As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:

• The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well.
• If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year.
• Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall.
• The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion,”), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S.product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India.

This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles.

For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:

• Google: 54 percent
• Apple: 54 percent
• Facebook: 38 percent
• Amazon: 46 percent

Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers.

Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.)

It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market.

There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies.

You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues.

News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live  (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature.

A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

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.

There’s an algorithm out there, we can be sure. It’s got all the components of business success for news-creating companies, each value carefully computed and relational to the others. Yet, approaching 2012, the algorithm hasn’t been found. We have but shreds of numbers, beacons of numerals that portend models, but can’t prove them out.

2011 has been a remarkable year. We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

• The transcendant transformative age of the tablet: The first real replacement device for print swept aside doubters, netbooks, and much conventional wisdom before its second birthday. More than one in 10 American adults owns one, with that number likely to more than double in the next two years. Those owners are readers, spending lots of time with news, single brands, and longer stories.  (“The Newsonomics of the Missing Link“)
• The dawn of digital circulation: Forget “paid content.” Forget “paywalls.” It’s the back-to-the future age of circulation: paying for news and magazines that we depend on, no matter how they are delivered to us. All-Access reinforces our relationship with news and magazine brands we like; ubiquitous access (print, online, tablet, smartphone, soon connected TV) allows us to justify paying for convenience as much as the content itself. Publishers are still experimenting with how to get the paid proposition right, but those that do now have a potent second digital revenue source — and that’s a business advantage digital-only competitors lack.
• Social curation joins editorial curation: We knew that Facebook, in particular, and “social” more generally — including Twitter, LinkedIn, most-emailed lists and our own individual sharings — were changing how we all decided what to read. Now, though, social curation is being built into the best publishing models. Why should each of our own personal quests be a virgin start-from-scratch idea when many consumers/searchers/researchers/shoppers (some of them people like us) have tread there before? So social intelligence, gleaned from mountains of data, is becoming a required part of the companies’ product development and consumer experience. Facebook is in the catbird’s seat as that world develops.

Those three game-changing phenomena offer major drivers of change — but not models. For publishers, the near-term is just getting harder and harder; witness Media General’s major cuts of this week in Tampa (16 percent workforce reduction) and elsewhere. Major cuts are happening this month and into January, as publishers gird for another 5-12 percent decline in ad revenues. Continuing profitability can only be achieved by cutting.

Publishers, publicly or not, are embracing the Digital First mantra of John Paton and Clark Gilbert, the industry’s dynamic duo, who put on another show at BIA/Kelsey this week. Everyone’s into the deconstruction/reconstruction of their companies; some are faster, more adroit, and more public about it.

As that reconstruction moves forward, the new magic formula may seem simple: reconfigure costs and revenues. Yet, working the in-between — most publishers still depend on print for 80 percent of their revenues — is hardly formulaic. Building the new cost structure and the new revenue structure, in tandem, with changing audiences and advertising spending habits, is the fixing-the-moving-car-at-65 MPH scenario publishers face.

With that speeding car in mind, let’s look at some of the numbers that will go into that magic formula, when it’s finally perfected. Mix, match, blend, and extrapolate:

5-15 percent: That’s the percentage of many news sites monthly unique visitors that drive half or more of their pageviews. That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that news companies are just beginning to acknowledge — privately. Why be quiet about it? Look at the annual reports and quarterly financial disclosures of the public companies; they trumpet uniques and pageviews. Yet in the age of news ubiquity, we’ve reached near-infinity in pageviews and of ad inventory. Is there much meaning left to one random web visitor hitting one random web page, courtesy of Google or Facebook, some time in any given month? Not much. Yet, that’s what most people still point to publicly. Privately, the question is the 5-15 percent. These are your customers. How much will they pay for access? How much more valuable are they to targeting advertisers, given you know much more about their reading and shopping habits? The metric needed: How much does a core customer yield annually, and in a lifetime? Then: How do I most efficiently find and convert more of them?

35 percent: That’s the percentage of print readers who will transition to tablet-only by 2014, believes one prominent news company, which is using that forecast in its business planning. High? Low? What’s your number?

$544 a year: That’s a Newspaper Association of America number (from 2009) for the revenue value per unit of Sunday circulation. What will a tablet customer be worth, combining subscriber and ad value? Get that answer right and you can try to accelerate, or slow down, your readers’ embrace of the tablet.

10-20 percent: That’s how much of national news company traffic now comes from mobile; Facebook already says that 35 percent of its use comes from mobile. Yet, in the U.S., only three percent of digital revenue comes from mobile. That’s a huge gap — the audience is way ahead of the money — and it will be closed over the next several years. In fact, in the age of expected anywhere access, “mobile” will disappear as a category. Big issues for publishers: dividing what kinds of revenues can be wrung from tablet (now lumped into “mobile”) and from the brain extensions in our pockets and pocketbooks, the smartphone.

One billion: That’s one estimate of how many smartphones will be shipped worldwide in 2016. It’s a continuing curve upward from the almost half-billion shipped this year. U.S. smartphone penetration is about a third of cellphone owners; so there is lots of headroom for growth. (Singapore’s the first to cross the 50 percent threshold.) Big challenge for news and magazine companies: coming to terms with how to make money on that little screen: advertising, sponsorship, All-Access subs, and more.

63 million: That’s the number of smart TVs that will be shipped in 2011, up from 43.6 million in 2010. 2016 forecast: 153 million. Smart TV is just the next screen, joining the tablet and the smartphone, providing us ubiquity. When WSJ Live (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) — the company’s model-breaking tablet product launched this fall — it included launch partners Samsung and Vizio, leading smart TV makers. This is the beginning of the next wave.

$2.75: That’s the average ad CPM, or cost-per-thousand rate gotten, at one top 15 news sites. Average rates have been going down and are likely to continue doing so. High-targeted and high-branded (combine the two, and you’ve got the best of both worlds) audiences continue to outpace average sites and average inventory. It’s less and less good to be average.

22 percent: That’s the third-quarter increase in U.S. digital ad revenue. Digital ad growth accelerates as print declines more rapidly; in the U.S., it is now surpassing newspapers to become second only to TV. Worldwide, expect the industry to hit $80 billion this year. Within that ad spend, publishers have access to less than half: Paid search continues to be about half the market, with publishers getting only a tiny slice of it. Display/banner ads — publishers’ strongest suit — account for 23 percent of the total. Video is growing 42 percent a year. Performance-based business models (as opposed to selling impressions) now command 64 percent of the market. (Most data from IAB.) So, in all the areas of growth, news and magazine publishers are weakest. Despite uneven digital ad results reported by newspaper and magazine companies, it’s not that the money isn’t there — they just haven’t transitioned their businesses enough to compete for it.

$13 billion: That’s the amount of retail ad revenue the newspaper industry in the U.S. took in for all of 2010, and it’s down this year. Retail makes up roughly half of all newspaper companies’ ad revenue. In a new, circle-the-wagons attempt to hold on to it, ShopCo, a consortium of eight of the large newspaper companies, is building out a new local shopping portal. FindnSave, tested first by McClatchy, should be up in 250 larger markets by the middle of next year. Will it be good enough and big enough, to satisfy both consumers and merchants? (“The Newsonomics of Google’s retail push“)

25 percent: So if a reader drops print and embraces the tablet, and digital access overall, how much savings can a news company achieve? It no longer has to print and deliver a paper, but it still has the costs of maintaining a staff, maintaining distribution, and maintaining a plant. So maybe it costs 25 percent less to fulfill that customer’s access? In this long interim with hybrid digital and print reading, how much of their production costs can companies cut out? The long-term question: At what point can the news industry make a major shift, as most reading becomes digital and a minority of it in print?

56.7 percent: That’s the percentage of downloaders of the Guardian’s new Facebook app who are under 24, with 16.7 percent 17 or younger. For a news industry decrying the lack of young readers and focused on aging baby boomers as the core audience, the Guardian’s early experience is phenomenal. It’s well and good to sell All-Access to long-time print readers; it’s essential to bring in new ones, and Facebook looks like a great bet.

7: Daily means seven days a week for newspapers, right? MediaNews is dropping Monday printing at some Northern California papers. Michigan remains the epicenter of the non-daily daily. Following the 2009 cuts in metro Detroit, Advance is now going digital-first with smaller papers there, with several becoming three- and four-day print “dailies.” The idea: keep 85 percent of print ad money and radically reduce print costs. Publishers take a very deep breath and hope they aren’t cutting the print cord too soon. Expect to see more of such day cuts in 2012 and beyond. It’s a hybrid strategy, and as we see its impacts — on print ad revenue and on digital reader and ad transition — we’ll have new numbers to plug into the model.

> 1 percent: Google now makes 54 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., as does Apple. Such international orientation is a major differentiator in the economy of the day, and not in the publishing and digital industries. Even The New York Times, with impressive global reach, gets only a percent or two of its revenue internationally. In the last year, we’ve seen The Independent (through Press+) selling U.S. access, PBS launching a British channel, and the Guardian relaunching an American foray. Digital media knows no national bounds, but monetizing outside home countries has been difficult. Breaking through this barrier could create significant upside for top publishers.

It looked like just more head-butting among the mammoths of our time: Google will match up with Amazon, said the Wall Street Journal last week: “The Web-search giant is in talks with major retailers and shippers about creating a service that would let consumers shop for goods online and receive their orders within a day for a low fee.”

Most of the stories played on that Goliath vs. Goliath theme, and of course that’s an increasingly familiar one as the businesses of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple overlap, intersect, and collide. Who is a bookseller? Well, Amazon, and Apple, and Google, kind of. Who is selling and renting media — well, who isn’t or preparing to do so? Who is in the hardware biz — all except Facebook? Who’s reaching for the digital ad riches, now generating $80 billion worldwide; Google, the king, and Facebook, the fast-threatening prince.

Yes, the Google/Amazon match-up over delivering goods is a good and real storyline. As big brains butt, it could be thunderous and landscape-changing. That landscape includes the news business, and you can almost feel the rumbles underfoot just with the word of Google’s move.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of Google’s would-be one-day-shipping program — let’s call it Google Tomorrow™© — and its wider impacts and strategic rationale. First, we’re talking about a lot of potential money. U.S. retail e-commerce is forecast to hit almost $200 billion this year, with the global total adding up to $700 billion. So there are many companies trying to get in the middle of it.

The idea of website-facilitated buying — and shipping — from fairly local retailers isn’t a new one by a longshot. Storerunner plied this territory, too early, a decade ago. Webvan, the best funded of the grocery deliverers went from brilliance to punchline in about 30 seconds. Shoprunner is currently out there, pitching the same idea as Google Tomorrow. Newspaper companies have been more steadfast, more the tortoise in the race for perfection of our emerging online/offline commercial world.

Companies like the Gannett-owned ShopLocal and independent Travidia, with its FindnSave product used by McClatchy and other news chains, have been building the know-the-local-retail-inventory, compare-prices-and-buy terrain for years. Unlike what Google may do, they don’t deliver one-click buying and delivery. They offer product selection, availability and then click off to retailer’s own sites for buying and shipping or store pickup. The idea seems like a great one, a merger of the best of online and offline, yet it’s been slow to grow. Every time I’ve checked out the sites, I’ve found the promise smart, but the inventories too uneven or the hierarchy of results skewed to preferred shops — not mypreferences. Consumers have clearly opted for Amazon over these kinds of sites.

The impact on the ShopLocals and FindnSaves is not what should concern newspapers, though. The big issue: retail advertising.

While the web has greatly damaged newspapers’ classifieds and national ad businesses, retail has been a relatively stronger area. Worth about $13 billion last year — or half of daily newspapers’ ad revenue — it’s a lifeline at this point in the tough print-to-digital transition. Retail is being challenged on several fronts, with the Sunday preprint business a big concern. In fact, both Google and newspapers are pursuing e-circulars to counter the inevitable print downturn in that area.

Wait a minute, you may say — that $13 billion is advertising money and Google, like Amazon, wants to make money facilitating actual commerce. But the division between advertising and selling is an old one, fast blurring. Think about where we’ve come from the era of impression-based (newspaper, TV, radio, magazine) ads into the era of pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-acquisition, and more.

Retailers don’t want to advertise; they want to sell stuff.

Give them new routes to sell stuff, and deliver it more cheaply than they could before, and they’ll migrate their ad/marketing/lead generation dollars. So if Google can really make it easier to personalize, routinize and make more efficient the selling process, it will place itself between the seller and the buyer. As it does that, it replaces the newspaper as middleman, further reducing much of the revenue that is keeping newsrooms staffed, even if many of them are now half-staffed at best.

Is the replacement of newspaper as advertising-oriented middleman inevitable? Probably, but over a longer term. Since the dawn of the web, people have been chasing the perfection of commerce, and it’s been a tough slog with far more losers than winners. Amazon, of course, is the big winner, but with relatively small profits, a paltry $63 million in the last quarter on sales of $10.8 billion. While Amazon is perfecting commerce, it’s got a long way ago. Since it was born in 1994, four years before Google, it has built a one-of-a-kind business on customer obsession and brilliant analytics. Its recommendations engine is ready for the web hall of fame, and its latest foray with Prime membership (“The newsonomics of Amazon’s prime moves“) shows it knows how to build on its foundation.

Google lacks some of Amazon’s core strengths. It’s a mix-and-match technology company, famously trying lots of things and at times more quickly abandoninglosers. In commerce, Google is moving forward with a spate of moves. Google OnePass is a restyled content buying system, with some prominent publishers signing on. Add in Google Latitude, Google Local, Google Local Shopping, Google Shopper, Google Tags, and Google Places, all relating to local commerce.Google Offers is gaining steam and is working with publishers on syndicating local daily deals.

There’s an irony to such publisher partnerships, of course. On the one hand, Google is a “partner,” magnifying publisher businesses through its ad and search products. On the other, initiatives such as Google Tomorrow are a potential dagger to newspapers’ jugular. That’s the way of the web world. For Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or Facebook, any new initiative it takes on has its own internal logic. Should another industry — say newspapers — be wounded in the process, it’s just collateral damage. Given the size of these digital behemoths, as they decimate legacy industries, you can almost hear them say, “Sorry, did I sideswipe you? I didn’t feel anything.”

If everyone is a frenemy these days, and Google is taking on Amazon, media companies have to ask: Who is the frenemy of my frenemy?

One last point to ponder about Google Tomorrow. Consider it, in part, adefensive move.

If, in fact, selling and advertising are blurring, Google has to move more in the selling direction. Right now, it’s an ad company, pure and simple. About 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising (and you thought newspapers relied too much on that revenue source). It has brilliantly moved to expand its digital ad dominance (now taking in about 40 percent of the dollars in the U.S.) by merging its paid search foundation with big acquisitions in display advertising and mobile. Just last week, the feds let it buy AdMeld, an ad optimizer — and Google’s 57th acquisition so far this year. Now, the Doubleclick ad management system offers a singular approach, incorporating in one place display, search and mobile, to the delight — and terror — of publishers and others in and around the ad industry.

The dominance is a sight to behold. Yet as digital innovation continues to disrupt everything in its path, the ad business is vulnerable, with companies, led by Amazon trying to eliminate the cost and friction of finding buyers. So let’s look at the Google Tomorrow battle plan as one aimed at Amazon surely, but with ammo that may hit newspapers as well — and one that may allow Google to find that big, elusive second revenue stream.

So what do we make of the three recently announced sales? In each case, there’s a strong, willful buyer, bucking conventional business sense to bull ahead into 2012.

In Omaha, we’ve got Warren Buffett, the man who said just two years ago: “For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of nearly unending losses. … I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end.” Unfortunately, the owner of the Buffalo News, investor in and long-time (now retired) board member of the Washington Post Company, is right. The erosion was deepest — almost 20% in the depth of the recession — but the bleeding in higher single digits has continued since then and it will continue into 2012. The U.S. industry is literally half the size, in revenue, that it was five years ago.

So is the Oracle of Omaha’s vision now blurred? Doubt it.

Buffett is an American hero, generously giving away more than half his fortune through the Gates Foundation and making the common sense point that those Americans who are among our wealthiest can, and should, afford to help out their countrymen in the time of great distress (witness just today’s New York Times’ story on the intense, and long-lasting, pain of permanent unemployment). His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is buying out the employee-owned Omaha World-Herald for $200 million, including debt assumption. Why? Warren Buffett understands the link between news and democracy, especially in his home state of Nebraska, where the paper sets a lot of the agenda with its coverage. You’ve got to believe that the World-Herald’s management, facing the same dismal picture as all metro publishers, looked for the whitest knight around, and turned to Buffett.

In Chicago, a buyout group led by two business leaders,  Michael Ferro Jr.and  John Canning Jr., is in talks to buy the Sun-Times group, which bought the paper out of bankruptcy (alas, Chicago doesn’t win the prize for city with most bankrupt dailies; that goes to L.A., which has had three) two years ago.  The reported price: $11 million plus assumption of debt. Both Ferro and Canning have been deeply involved with the Chicago News Cooperative, former Trib and L.A. Times editor Jim O’Shea’s effort to provide independent, high-quality news in Chicago.

Meanwhile, last week, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s most recent sale (we need flow charts to follow the now-rapid movement of some properties) was announced. Local businessman and developer Doug Manchester are buying the paper, and its underlying real estate, for about $110 million from Platinum Equity (“San Diego’s Union Tribune: Out of the Private Equity Pot and Into Local Political Fire“). John Lynch, the CEO-to-be once the sale closes, wasted no time in laying out the paper’s quasi-journalistic instincts:

“Lynch said he wants the paper to be pro-business. The sports page to be pro-Chargers stadium. And reporters to become stars.

“It’s news information, but it’s also show biz,” Lynch said. “You get people to tune in and read your site or the paper when there’s an ‘Oh wow’ in the paper.”

He wants that sports page to be an advocate for a new football stadium “and call out those who don’t as obstructionists.”

“To my way of thinking,” Lynch said, “that’s a shovel-ready job for thousands…”

“We’d like to be a cheerleader for all that’s good about San Diego,” Lynch said. “Our motivation, both of us, was to do something good for San Diego.”

Expect the newest U-T to support the new owner’s business and (conservative) political interests, and do so with relative national impunity. When Sam Zell talked about bringing some pizzaz to the Tribune, he won lots of coverage. But that was the Tribune, with a half-dozen substantial metros. This is San Diego, though the second-largest city in our largest state, off in a corner of the country far away from media watchers.

Reporters with whom I’ve talked rightly ask if these three deals in the making are a trend. Yes, of sorts, we’d have to say.

First, let’s consider how little money is changing hands in these deals. We could say that Warren Buffett’s $200 million offer is generous; that’s almost twice what the San Diego quasi-monopoly daily is selling for. If someone had told you 10 years ago that the World-Herald would sell for twice the Union-Tribune, you would have laughed them out of the room. U-T owner Helen Copley was courted by the royalty of Old Guard ownership, from Knight-Ridder and Tribune among others, letting her know they were ready to open their wallets to the tune of well over $500 million when the will to sell struck her. It never did and when she died, her family sold, to pay taxes and in panic, in the depth of the recession to Platinum Equity, which swooped in and is now making some decent profit ($80 million+) on the deal.

Important to the trend/no-trend question is price. These are fire-sale prices, mere pocket change to the 1%. So for reasons of altruism, preserving local voice and journalism or bolstering one’s own personal or business agenda, the price is right.

Given that, will we see more sales to motivated, individual (yes, we know Berkshire Hathaway bought the World Herald, not Buffett, but we also know who made the decision) buyers? Probably.

If and when the squabbling Tribune debtholders and bondholders ever release the hostage company out of bankruptcy, several Tribune cities have would-be owners queued up, if management wants to sell. When will the new Digital First get its properties in sufficient financial order, so that owner Alden Global Capital can begin to make its exit? At what point do companies like Gannett, Gatehouse and CNHI start to let it be known that individual properties may be bought? That’s an unknowable question at this point, but with ad revenue headed further down next year, selling something to somebody — it is appears there are buyers here and there — becomes a more intriguing option.

Interestingly, we’ve heard little from would-be “community trust” buyer groups. There was much talk of community-oriented, non-profits, with some support from the Newspaper Guild, a couple of years ago. Maybe, it’s fatigue, felt by everyone in and around the business, save apparently a few bright-eyed businessmen. In the tumult of the last two years, the voices have gotten quiet. The intriguing start-up models of MinnPost, Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, CNC and Bay Citizen don’t seem to have ignited a wildfire of imitation across the country. Only AOL — with HuffPost city sites announcing rapidly and Patch outposts in place — seems to making a substantial local play.

It’s an odd environment out there, with all kinds of characters still to come out of the woodwork.

The rise and potential fall of Rupert Murdoch is a hell of a story. It is, though, closer to the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins’ description Tuesday, “not a Berlin Wall moment, just daft hysteria.” Facing only the meager competition of the slow-as-molasses debt-ceiling story, the Murdoch story managed to hit during the summer doldrums. Plus it’s great theater.

Is it just imported theater, though? We have to wonder how much the cries of “media monopoly” will cross the Atlantic. Is there much resonance here in the States for the outrage about media power in the U.K.? Will the sins (its newspaper unit now being called to account by a Parliamentary committee for deliberately blocking the hacking investigation) of News International impact its cousin, Fox Television, the one part of its U.S. holdings regulated directly by government — or can it build a firewall between the different parts of News Corp.? (See “New News Corp. Strategy: Become Even More of an American Company.”)

Certainly, the tales of News International’s ability to strike fear in the London political class are chilling. Our issues in the U.S., though, are largely different. Both come down to who owns the media, and what we need in the diversity of news voices.

The question of media concentration here is tricky, complex, and a profoundly local question. Yes, there are national issues — but the forces of cheaper, digital publishing and promise of national and global markets easily reached by the Internet have spawned much more competition on a national level.

As to what kind of local reporting we get, we see powerful forces at work, shaping who owns what and how much. Likely, we’ll see some News Corp. fallout in FCC debates now re-igniting in and around Washington, D.C. — as the fire of regulating media burns more brightly here, even as Ofcom, the British regulator, grapples with similar issues.

That said, the question of media concentration, or what I will call the newsonomics of U.S. media concentration, will be fought out on two battlegrounds in the U.S. One is at the regulatory level, as the FCC looks at cross-ownership and the cap on local broadcast news holdings by a single national company, like News Corp., and may take into account its U.K. misdeeds. (Especially if the 9/11 victim wiretapping claims are borne out.) Second, and probably more important, sheer economic change is rapidly re-shaping who owns the news media on which we depend. The fast-eroding economics of the traditional print newspaper business are changing the face both of competition and of journalistic practice faster than any government policy can affect.

First, let’s look at the print trade, at mid-year. The numbers are awful, and getting no better. We’ve seen the 22nd consecutive quarter of no-ad-growth for U.S. dailies, the last positive sign registered back in 2006. Further staff reductions, albeit with less public announcement, continue at most major news companies. This week, Gannett — still the largest U.S. news company — reported a 7-percent ad revenue decline for the second quarter, typical among its peers. Its digital ad revenues were up 13 percent, a slowing of digital ad growth also being seen around the industry.

We see a strategy of continuing cost-cutting across the board, with a new phenomenon — roll-up (“The Newsonomics of Roll-Up“) — trying to play out.

Hedge funds — which bought into the industry through and after 14 newspaper company bankruptcies — are having their presence felt. Most recently, Alden Global Capital, the quietest major player in the American news industry, bought out its partners and now owns 100 percent of Journal Register Company. Alden, with interests in as many as 10 U.S. newspaper chains, apparently liked the moves of CEO John Paton. Paton’s digital-first strategies have more rapidly cut legacy costs than other publishers’ moves, and moved the needle more quickly in upping digital revenues.

No terms were announced, but Paton says “all its lenders were paid in full.” That would be a qualified success, given the bath everyone involved in the newspaper industry has taken in the last half-decade.

In JRC’s case, we’d have to say the push of hedge funds for faster change has been more positive than negative. Pre-bankruptcy, it was derided for its poor journalism and soul-crushing budgeting. Under Paton, who has brought in innovators like Arturo Duran, Jim Brady, and Steve Buttry, the company is trying to reinvent new, digital-first local, preserving local journalism jobs as much as possible. A work very much in early progress.

You can bet that Alden’s move is just one of its first. Sure, as a hedge fund, it may just be getting JRC ready to sell; hedge funds don’t want to be long-term operators. Before that happens, though, expect the next shoe to drop: consolidation.

JRC owns numerous properties around Philly, and a roll-up with Greg Osberg-led (and Alden part-owned) Philadelphia Media Network, has been talked about. Meld the same kind of synergies, and faster-moving print-to-digital strategies of Paton with Osberg’s new multi-point, Project Liberty plan, and you have a combined strategy. Further combine the operations into a single company — removing more overhead, more administration, more cost — and you have a better business to hold, or sell, or still further combine with still more regional entities.

It’s not just a Philly scenario.

In southern California, the question is how the three once-bankrupt operations — Freedom Communications, MediaNews’ Los Angeles News Group and Tribune’s L.A. Times (still not quite post-bankrupt, but acting like it is) — will mate. Over price, talks broke down about merging Freedom and MediaNews (both substantially owned by Alden; see Rick Edmonds’ Poynter piece for detail). Yet, everyone in the market believes consolidation will come. Now with Platinum Equity, another private equity owner, putting its San Diego Union-Tribune back on the market just two years after buying it for a song, we could see massive consolidation of newspaper companies in southern California.

Media concentration, perhaps in the works: Southern California, between L.A. and San Diego, contains at least 21 million people — or a third of the total population of the U.K. Philly and Southern California may among the first to consolidate, but the trends are the same everywhere.

So this is how our time may play out. Smart, digital-first roll-ups align with massive consolidation. It’s time to get our heads around that. That won’t necessarily mean that Alden, or other hyper-private owners, keep the new franchises. Their goal probably is to sell. But to whom, with what sense of public interest?

Which brings us back to broadcast, to which newspaper people give much too little shrift.

Both those in the old declining newspaper trade and those in the mature and largely flat broadcast trade (as an indication, Gannett’s broadcast division revenues grew to $184.4 million from $184 million in the second quarter) are beginning to figure the future this way: there may only be enough ad revenue in mid-metro markets (and smaller) to maintain one substantial journalistic operation. Not one newspaper and one local broadcaster. But, one, presumably combined text and video, paper and air, increasingly digital operation.

So, finally, let’s turn back to the FCC. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals just returned cross-ownership regulations back to the FCC, largely on procedural (“hey, you forgot the public input part”) grounds. In addition, it will likely soon take up the national cap on local broadcast ownership. (Good sum-up of FCC-related action by Josh Smith at the National Journal.)

Which brings us back to the News Corp story. The national cap — how much of the U.S. any one national company can serve with local broadcast — is 39 percent. Fox comes close to that with 27 stations, and, of course, has lobbied for more reach. So, the media concentration issue may play out as the cap is further debated, and as cross-ownership — a News Corp. issue in and around New York/New Jersey — returns as well. Will Hackgate’s winds blow westward, as local broadcast news concentration comes up again?

Though it may be shocking to many newspaper people, though, local TV news is a major source of how people get the news. Some 25 to 28 million viewers watch local early-evening or late-evening TV news, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. That compares to about a 42-million weekday newspaper circulation, so those numbers aren’t quite apples to apples. In my research for Outsell, I noted that local survey data indicated that reliance on TV news equaledthat of newspapers.

As Steve Waldman’s strong report for the FCC pointed out, local TV news is “more important than ever” — but thin on accountability reporting.

So while much of the media concentration questions centers on print, local broadcast ownership, and direction of news coverage, matters a lot.

Combine that local concentration — 39 percent or more — with the sense that the market may only support single journalistic entitities and we’re back to the theme of media concentration, perhaps on a scale hitherto unseen.

A declining local press, with signs of impending roll-up. Stronger local TV news, weaker in accountability reporting, and pushing for more roll-up. Winds of outrage wafting over the Atlantic. Regulatory breezes gaining strength.

These are powerful forces colliding, and in the balance, the news of the day won’t be quite the same.

This week brought us the long-worked-on new counting metrics for American daily newspaper journalism.

ABC, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, has long provided The Number.

The Number — really The Numbers, a daily number and a Sunday number — have been the reader numbers dailies measured themselves by, twice a year, spring and fall. Who’s up, who’s down, who’s number one — it’s really a horse-race number, simple to report by the publishers and simple to report by those covering the industry. Of course, The Number has been in horrific decline. Take a look at the State of the News Media circulation chart (a third of the way down a long page) and you can see 15 straight reporting periods in single-digit decline, tracked since 2003. Clearly, circulation is still dropping, though it will take the next six-month comparisons, using these new metrics, to establish new benchmarking.

That’s one of the reasons The Number is gone — optics do count — but more importantly the nature of ad buying has changed dramatically in that same period. Newspaper ad revenues have been halved while online ad revenues will approximate newspaper ad revenues this year or next. While halved to $25 billion annually or so, newspapers, with the new ABCs, have made a directional shift to satisfying those advertisers; recall that even the New York Times, the digital leader with 25 percent of its ad revenues being digital, still depends on the print for three-quarters of its dollars.

So The Number is all but gone. Sure, there’s still “Total Circulation,” and that’s led some to do apples-to-apples comparison to the last set of numbers from last fall. It’s not a fruitful exercise, given the magnitude of the changes.

“ABC and the industry never intended that ‘total circulation’ to be a metric of success,” John Murray, the Newspaper Association of America’s vice president of audience development told me this week.

That’s because there is a now a whole raft of numbers, a new set collected by publishers, verified by ABC and used, over time, quite differently by advertisers. Trying to understand the difference between the old report and the new report is best done either dead sober or after a six-pack; anywhere in between may leave you wanting. I appreciate Poynter’s Rick Edmonds thorough picking through the changes, the new lexicon and taxonomy, and I won’t repeat his observations.

What’s significant to me about the changes are two big things, one theoretical and one practical, and therein, I think, lie the newsonomics of the new ABC report.

The big picture recognition here, as publishers and major advertisers have wrestled the new system to the ground, is that the age of simple mass is gone. Counting is increasingly about niche. How many of the readers are paid readers of print? How many read e-editions, and, of those, how many read replicas and how many read dynamic products? How many readers get free, but requested, packets of news and ads, and how many readers get the packets because they’ve been targeted (affluent households) just because of where they live? And there’s more nuance than that.

Just as the digital marketing world has increasingly provided agencies and advertisers with a trove of audience data, the print world is slowly responding. While advertisers can only track these differing print niches with differing coupon codes, or a spectrum of differing 1-800 call-in numbers, print at least can be niched in some ways, even though it doesn’t offer the intensive harvesting of data that digital does. Of course, the various e-alternatives, from “online” to tablet to smartphone, are offering advertisers the ability to say “I’ll take this, but not that” and to mix and match print and digital buying as never before. While advertisers could do some picking and choosing before, they were often flying blind and these new categories of circulation counting — verified circulation and branded editions to “requested” or “targeted” delivery — give them better data on which to make those choices. Consider the data advertisers get with this first report just the beginning of new sets of metrics to come.

On a practical level, we can see a couple of fundamental ways the new ABCs will impact the marketplace:

• Sunday and preprints: Sunday Select is the flavor of the age, as companies from Gannett to McClatchy to Belo eagerly make up for declining paid Sunday circulation with packets of news and ads delivered to non-payers. “Paid is no longer the determinant of value,” says Murray — and that’s a huge change for an industry that long differentiated its ad appeal on the basis of payingcustomers. If readers opt in (“requested”), that’s a big plus for advertisers. Why? That shows “engagement,” that magic word all online publishers seek. Opt-out (or “targeted”) denotes a little lesser value, but since those being targeted are higher-demographic households, advertisers still like to reach them. In the new stats, though, they’ll be able to see how many paid, how many requested and how many targeted editions got distributed on Sunday. Some will try to differentiate results among the three. I asked John Murray where advertisers are at in tracking the differing results among paid, requested, and targeted, on a scale from one to ten. “I’d put them at 2s and9s,” he told me, explaining with a couple of numbers how much in transition we are. Some — think Best Buy, for instance — are 9s, trying to track and compare everything, including differing print deliveries. Others are 2s, still essentially buying mass, but planning on doing more tracking over time.

Sunday is huge for newspapers, as a third or more of their revenue is driven by that one day. And preprints, or the Sunday circulars — all those glossy colorful ad inserts from the big box stores — are now make or break for that Sunday take. “Media [reading] habits are changing faster than ad habits,” says Randy Novak, a Gatehouse veteran and now vice president of industry research and relations for Geomentum, a local focused ad agency. “People like to touch those preprints.”

Let’s complete the value circle here. Who loves those preprints? Twenty-five to 44-year-old women, says Murray, and they are coveted consumers. Consider Sunday and its preprints to be the biggest raison d’etre of the new ABCs.

Further, add in a Wednesday or a Thursday midweek market day, says Novak, and you’ve got a newer, winning formula. We begin to see further definition of a strategy that is emerging at daily newspaper companies. That strategy: Sunday print/daily digital, especially tablet, as a coming subscription/ad satisfying program coming to a city near you by 2013-14 (“The Newsonomics of Sunday Paper/Daily Tablet Subscriptions“). Or Sunday/Wednesday print, and the rest digital. We’re headed there, I believe, as the economics of advertising and the emerging reading habits of news readers merge to forge new revenue and cost-saving plans. (One thing to watch closely in the next sets of ABC reports: How well Sunday print paid is doing.)

• Proving — and disproving — e-edition value: E-replica editions have been used by some papers to artificially pump up those sagging circulation numbers (“How much can we trust e-edition numbers?“). Publishers have told me privately that while they packaged — and counted — those replica products, only a small percentage of readers actively used them. Starting with the ABC fall report, there will be some effort to count usage — a nod to advertisers who figured out the scheme. In addition, we’re already seeing “replica” and “non-replica” parsed out, which should help separate out the e-chaff. More interestingly, as we see increasingly nuanced reporting of specific tablet and smartphone usage, we’ll be getting an emerging picture both of how news is really being read and how marketers can effectively read readers via these new platforms.

Just as we’re moving away from the One Number for print, we’re emerging from a time of counting those rudimentary uniques and pageviews online, with time spent digitally the big issue of the day for all publishers, but especially for those trying to sell those digital subscriptions. Where we may be headed: Time on Brand, as the biggest — and/or best — news brands try to satisfy readers, and bring along marketers to serve them — on a changing-through-day array of devices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, how long do newspapers have?

Two years ago, that question was on the lips of many as newspapers cut back deeply — in staff, in number of pages, in the size of the page, and in selling their very headquarters and flagship buildings — in the depth of Deep Recession. We hear it less now. In part, that’s because many publishers and editors decided writing their own obituaries — talking about the sorry state of their enterprises and detailing the cutbacks for the public — wasn’t smart. In part, like any tired story, we’ve moved on and now occupy ourselves with digital reader payment strategems and with the discussions of how tablets and smartphones are, and aren’t, forever changing journalism.

Yet the question looms in the dark corners, in private conversations, and occasionally bursts into public view: “How long do newspapers have?”

Saturday, in Dallas, I moderatedan on-stage conversation between two immoderate forces in daily journalism: The Deseret News‘ Clark Gilbert, aka “the baby-faced dean of disruption,” as his alternative rival, the Salt Lake City Weekly, has called him; and John Paton, the Digital First, bomb-throwing CEO of the post-bankrupt (and up from cardboard desks and leaky newsroom pipes) Journal Register Company, not long ago the bottom feeder of the industry.

Paton had tossed aside his usual JRC change presentation. Instead, he went with 10 tweets, each, in turn, well-retweeted.

The first and second: “The newspaper model is broken & can’t be fixed” and “Newspapers will disappear in less than 10 years unless their biz model is changed now.”

His point: Piecemeal change is a dead-end, given the converging downward spirals of the business. Only massive, digital-first strategies and re-organizations that scrap old structures, budgets, job descriptions — and, massively, costs — have any hope of porting today’s newspaper companies to that other side of a mainly digital news age.

He’s right, of course. No, not necessarily about the 10-year prediction. It could be five or fifteen, but that makes little difference to the notion. Today’s daily newspaper companies have little chance of surviving in anything resembling tomorrow’s form very far in the future.

In fact, as I talk, privately, to those running the companies, they, too, are largely in agreement. While they talk little publicly these days, the fact remains: You can’t find anyone who says he yet has a proven, sustainable business model for moving forward.

That’s the reason we’re seeing such significant embrace of digital reader walls and fences. The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the Augusta Chronicle all share a goal: get off the road to oblivion and somehow find a new route, a life-saving detour, in uncharted territory. Fear of oblivion is becoming, finally and for more publishers, a motivator for more systematic change. If it works, a new digital reader revenue line could be one important building block of a stable new business model, though it won’t be enough by itself.

Oblivion like the once-famous “revolution” in Gil Scott-Heron’s song won’t be advertised. No one’s going to send out a press release or hold a news conference to say, “It’s over.” Newspapers have numerous fellow travelers among legacy media on the road. As we heard this week, CBS News’ ratings have been in decline since 1992. Somehow we will finally pull the plug on that format, but in the meantime, it’s a long winding-down, marked by lesser and lesser capacity to both do the work of journalism and to see its impacts.

Let’s look at several data points as we explore this notion of the newsonomics of oblivion.

How can we measure the threat of disappearance, of slipping away into history?

Let’s start with this number: 20 quarters. It has been 20 quarters since the U.S. newspaper industry experienced a quarter’s performance that was better than that same quarter a year earlier. It was way back in the second quarter of 2006 that the industry last experienced growth.

Things just keep getting worse, in deep recession, in lesser recession, in timid recovery, and now in a wider economic recovery that has lifted into positive (year-over-year, actual dollar growth) territory all other media that depend on advertising for much of their income. Broadcast and cable TV, radio and magazines have all regained a positive revenue path, as online media’s growth has shot out in the growth lead, the recession itself accelerating the movement of dollars to it.

Gannett’s recent public report, saying publishing division revenues will be down between 6 and 7 percent for the quarter now concluding, is indicative of the continuing deep malaise.

While first quarter industry numbers won’t be publicly reported ’til mid-April, look for them to be down 6 to 10 percent in ad revenue. Print advertising just isn’t recovering. Even good growth rates of 15 to 30 percent in digital — helped by more “online-only,” and fewer bundled-with-print, ad products — can’t come close to making up for print decline. “We’re now growing digital at almost 30 percent,” one CEO recently told me. “But we’d have to grow it at 80 percent or more to make up the [print] losses.”

The numbers suggest that only more cost-cutting retains profitability, which is running 5 to 10 percent currently, the black maintained only by the ongoing staff and other reductions of the past several years. (Witness the recent cuts at Gannett and McClatchy.)

The story is the same throughout the industry, with similar trends in Japan, continental Europe, and the UK; only one of London’s half-dozen quality dailies is even turning a profit these days.

We can look at the models built by Axel Springer. Not well known to Americans, the German publisher is the largest newspaper publisher in Europe, with huge reach overall in 36 countries, including 170 newspapers and magazines, over 60 online offerings for different target groups, and TV and radio properties. In print, it’s the leader in Germany, in both ad revenue and market reach, touching 53 percent of the German population annually. It says it is second only to innovatorSchibsted in digital (as percentage of total) revenues.

And yet: Its own forecast future is highly problematic.

By 2020, those extended lines paint a blurry picture, says Gregor Waller, who has just left Axel Springer as vice president for strategy and innovation to start a new digital venture. Waller’s presentation at a recent World Association of Newspapers/IFRA conference is among the best I’ve seen among news publishers. It looks honestly at what’s happening now — and what’s likely to happen — and draws logical, if heart-stopping, conclusions.

Citing the familiar trends of increased advertiser choice, mobile reader migration, the social web revolution, and print decline, Waller’s “conservative” projection forecasts that, by 2020:

• Print circulation revenue will drop by 50 percent;
• Classifieds revenue will drop by 90 percent;
• Display revenue will drop by 30 percent;
• With online ad revenue, growing at a compounded maximum 11 percent rate, there will be “no way to close the revenue gap with online advertising.”

All of which results in a “huge revenue gap.”

Waller’s conclusion: “Digital advertising will play an important role, but without paid content, publishing houses with a big editorial infrastructure for daily quality news will not survive.”

Which is another way to describe oblivion for the industry as we now know it.

Axel Springer is aggressively testing paid metered models at its Berliner Morgenpost and Hamburger Abendblatt, paralleling The New York Times’ major move this week, and that of more than two dozen U.S. dailies — which have, or soon will, paid schemes.

Waller would be the first to tell you that digital reader revenue isn’t the panacea, but one important piece to creating a sustainable new business model.

John Paton will tell you that digital reader revenue is a distraction, and that the radical restructuring of newspaper companies is their own possibility of finding that future.

They’re both right.

In 2011, it’s a Rubik’s Cube that can’t be solved, with one of Hollywood’s looming, time-ticking-down deadlines. A big twist here, a little one there, and then lots more, we can only hope, will provide a solution. We can be agnostic as to whether that model comes out of the legacy companies, out of cable and broadcast, out of public media, out of for-profit start-ups, or, likely, some combination of those. But we need solutions that provide stable funding for, as Waller puts it, “big editorial infrastructure for daily quality news.”

The threat of oblivion should be a powerful motivator, and we now see — finally — after a decade of decline, its specter moving us away from incremental, “experimental” tests to a fundamental restructuring of the business of news.