It’s an emerging issue of our time and place. They know too much about us, and we know too little about what they know. We do know that what they know about us is increasingly determining what they choose to give us to read. We wonder: What are we missing? And just who is making those decisions?

Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?

Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and multiplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)

The “theys” here aren’t just the digital behemoths. Everyone in the media business — think Netflix and The New York Times as much as Pandora and People — wants to do this simple thing better: serve their customers more of what they are likely to consume so that they’ll consume more — perhaps buying digital subscriptions, services, or goods and providing very targetable eyes for advertisers. It’s not a bad goal in and of itself, but sometimes it feels like it is being done to us, rather than for us.

Our concern, and even paranoia, is growing. Take Eli Pariser’s well-viewed (500,000 times, just on YouTube) May 2011 TED presentation on “filter bubbles,” which preceded his June-published book of the same name. In the talk, Pariser talks about the fickle faces of Facebook and Google, making “invisible algorithmic editing of the web” an issue. He tells the story of how a good progressive like himself, a founder of MoveOn.org, likes to keep in touch with conservative voices and included a number in his early Facebook pages.

He then describes how Facebook, as it watched his actual reading patterns — he tended to read his progressive friends more than his conservative ones — began surfacing the conservative posts less and less over time, leaving his main choices (others, of course, are buried deeper down in his datastream, but not easily surfaced on that all-important first screen of his consciousness) those of like-minded people. Over time, he lost the diversity he’d sought.

Citing the 57 unseen filters Google uses to personalize its results for us, Pariser notes that it’s a personalization that doesn’t even seem personalized, or easily comparable: “You can’t see how different your search results are than your friends…We’re seeing a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.”

Pariser’s worries have been echoed by a motley crew we can call algorithmic and social skeptics. Slowly, Fear of Facebook has joined vague grumbles about Google and ruminations about Amazon’s all-knowing recommendations. Ping, we’ve got a new digital problem on our bands. Big Data — now well-advertised in every airport and every business magazine as the new business problem of the digital age to pay someone to solve — has gotten very personal. We are more than the sum of our data, we shout. And why does everyone else know more more about me that I do?

The That’s My Datamine Era has arrived.

So we see Personal.com, a capitalist solution to the uber-capitalist usage of our data. I’ve been waiting for a Personal.com (and the similar Singly.com) to come along. What’s more American than having the marketplace harness the havoc that the marketplace hath wrought? So Personal comes along with the bold-but-simple notion that we should individually decide who should see our own data, own preferences, and our own clickstreams — and be paid for the privilege of granting access (with Personal taking 10 percent of whatever bounty we take in from licensing our stuff).

It’s a big, and sensible, idea in and of itself. Skeptics believe the horse has left the barn, saying that so much data about us is already freely available out there to ad marketers as to make such personal databanks obsolete before they are born. They may be forgetting the power of politics. While the FCC, FTC, and others have flailed at the supposed excesses of digital behemoths, they’ve never figured out how to rein in those excesses. Granting consumers some rights over their own data — a Consumer Data Bill of Rights — would be a populist political issue, for either Republicans or Democrats or both. But, I digress.

I think there’s a way for us to reclaim our reading choices, and I’ll call it the News Dial-o-Matic, achievable with today’s technology.

While Personal.com gives us 121 “gem” lockers — from “Address” to “Women’s Shoes”, with data lockers for golf scores, beer lists, books, house sitters, and lock combinations along the way, we want to focus on news. News, after all, is the currency of democracy. What we read, what she reads, what they read, what I read all matter. We know we have more choice than any generation in history. In this age of plenty, how do we harness it for our own good?

Let’s make it easy, and let’s use technology to solve the problem technology has created. Let’s think of three simple news reading controls that could right the balance of choice, the social whirl and technology. We can even imagine them as three dials, nicely circular ones, that we can adjust with a flick of the finger or of the mouse, changing them at our whim, or time of day.

The three dials control the three converging factors that we’d like to to determine our news diet.

Dial #1: My Sources

This is the traditional title-by-title source list, deciding which titles from global news media to local blogs I want in my news flow.

Dial #2: My Networks

Social curation is one of the coolest ideas to come along. Why should I have to rely only on myself to find what I like (within or in addition to My Sources) when lots of people like me are seeking similar content? My Facebook friends, though, will give me a very different take than those I follow on Twitter. My Gmail contact list would provide another view entirely. In fact, as Google Circles has philosophized, “You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle.” The My Networks dial lets me tune my reading of different topics by different social groups. In addition, today’s announced NewsRight — the AP News Registry spin-off intended to market actionable intelligence about news reading in the U.S. — could even play a role here. (More on NewsRight: “Nine Questions for the Cusp of 2012“)

Dial #3: The Borg

The all-knowing, ever-smarter algorithm isn’t going away — and we don’t want it to. We just want to control it — dial it down sometimes. I like thinking of it in sci-fi terms, and The Borg from “Star Trek” well illustrates its potential maniacal drive. (I love the Wikipedia Borg definition: “The Borg manifest as cybernetically-enhanced humanoid drones of multiple species, organized as an interconnected collective, the decisions of which are made by a hive mind, linked by subspace radio frequencies. The Borg inhabit a vast region of space in the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, possessing millions of vessels and having conquered thousands of systems. They operate solely toward the fulfilling of one purpose: to “add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to [their] own” in pursuit of their view of perfection“.) The Borg knows more about our habits than we’d like and we can use it well, but let’s have us be the ones doing the dialing up and down.

Three simple round dials. They could harness the power of our minds, our relationships, and our technologies. They could utilize the smarts of human gatekeepers and of algorithmic ones. And they would return power to where it belongs, to us.

Where are the dials? Who powers them? Facebook, the new home page of our time, would love to, but so would Google, Amazon, and Apple, among a legion of others. Personal.com would love to be that center, as it would any major news site (The New York Times, Zite-powered CNN, Yahoo News). We’ll leave that question to the marketplace.

Lastly, what are the newsonomics of the News Dial-o-Matic? As we perfect what we want to read, the data capturing it becomes even more valuable to anyone wanting to sell us stuff. Whether that gets monetized by us directly (through the emerging Personals of the world), or a mix of publishers, aggregators, or ad networks would be a next battleground. And then: What about the fourth wheel, as we dial up and down what we’re in the marketplace to buy right now? Wouldn’t that be worth a tidy sum?

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.

Editor’s Picks is a new, prominent module on the right hand column of Google News. It showcases five links from two dozen of the biggest news brands — from MSNBC, to The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica to the Guardian, Marketwatch, Reuters and the L.A. Times (but alas, no Yahoo News) — and offers easy-to-use instructions on how other publishers can get their content, for free, in front of Google’s many eyeballs. Publishers simply pick the stories they want represented and send ‘em off; that’s the proxy part because no Google person need be involved in editorial decision-making.

It’s a simple idea, really, a box of links, as old as the web itself. What seems revolutionary about, as Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber points out is that it seems like a departure from the ancient (2002) Google News dogma: “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors…No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.”

It kind of seemed cute then, this algo approach to the world. In the subsequent era, though, in which human editorial judgment has been diminished in value, and its funding put in jeopardy, it now seems like an approach from another age.

Go back to 2002, briefly, and we can see this simplistic Machine vs. Man way of thinking. In Google’s approach, the purest taken around news aggregation, man (and woman) was seen as interloper, getting in the way of the ultimate wisdom of the crowd. Newspaper people, of course resented The Machine, its ascendance and its job-killing nature.

For at least a decade, we’ve lived in this rhetorical age of either/or. Machine, symbolized well by Google News, and Man, symbolized by The Man, making his editorial decisions the old-fashioned way, on whim, wit and the indefinable “news judgment,” without regard to what the reader data said.

Now, we’re emerging, slowly, from the silliness. Newsroom editors are starting to use reader data, some through the day ( “The Newsonomics of WaPo’s Reader Dashboard 1.0“) to check their instincts against what the crowd of readers is saying it wants to read. The new tools and metrics able to inform human editorial judgment are getting better everyday, and there’s a new round of companies offering their real-time metrics-creating products to news publishers. That’s one positive sign we’re emerging from Man or Machine Dark Ages thinking.

And, now, Google News has — ta-da! — allocated a box, separate and independent from (let the record show) its algo news results, never mind that the algorithms themselves have been created, and are constantly tweaked, by humans. (Calling Werner Heisbenberg.)

That’s a small indication that the Machine is responding. What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.

So, chalk up Google’s move as a marketplace move. Yes, it acknowledges that The Machine is not all we need, and that some nexus of Man and Machine, the algo of that combination still being written, will be a new order of the day.

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.

He’s now poking the edges of publishing. After 13 bestsellers, manufactured and sold through the traditional industry, he’s causing quite a stir in the book world, publishing his new book — “Poke the Box” — through The Domino Project. If you haven’t heard much about Domino yet, you soon will. Domino marries Godin’s marketing star power (76,000 followers of his blog just through Twitter) with the book marketing heft of a little company called Amazon. The Domino Project is powered by Amazon, as it moves deeper into the world of becoming a publisher itself, building on its CreateSpace do-it-yourself publishing initiative and its two imprints launched last year, Amazon Encore (reprints of previously self-published books) and Amazon Crossing (translations).

Domino is, aspirationally, higher profile. Snagging a bestseller author like Godin to head the project signals that Amazon is no longer just working the edges of new publishing, but aiming to turn old business models on their heads. The Domino Pitch: Publish quickly (in as little as six weeks) in multiple (e-book, hardcover, audio) forms, pricing the books in bulk (from five-packs and up), spreading word of their arrival virally — and use Amazon’s vast digital book presence with possible exposure of up to 75 million monthly uniques (the ultimate digital endcap) to promote and market. There are lots of individual newer ideas there, and Godin’s push is to bring them together in one initiative, saying goodbye to the old publishing houses. It’s author direct-to-customer marketing — one to one — multiplied exponentially by Amazon’s reach. (His list of Domino’s principles is noteworthy, and worth studying.)

The Domino Project is also a good distillation of the challenges faced by the legacy book industry. As long-form writing, call it narrative, call it journalism, call it whatever you want, morphs and redefines itself in the flexible digital age, the digital handwriting is on the wall for the book industry. That scrawl can be read as easily as a challenge — and opportunity — for legacy news publishers. Much of what Domino is doing in upending models of traditional manufacturing, marketing, distribution and sales bears directly on how news publishers and news creators reach their own audiences.

I caught up with Godin this week, talking to him for my Nieman Lab post, “The Newsonomics of the Digital Cafeteria,” about how news publishers are moving into e-books and tablet products of all kinds. Out of the conversation, here’s my second installment of Six Lessons for News Publishers (the first: “Six Lessons for the Newspaper Industry from Reed Hastings“).

The six:

Sell silver, not paper: Godin remembers when the Annenbergs owned the failing paper in Philadelphia. “Then they offered sterling silver teaspoons,” as a premium, targeting female subscribers. “That made them the #1 paper.” The lesson: what you do and what you sell may be two different. My sense is that we’re newly into that era as paid content plans sell convenience and delight — all access wherever you are are — rather than “content.”

Treat News ADD: In a world of plenty, really infinities of news, opinion and information, it’s not how much content you can push to the market, it’s how much reader attention you can earn and depend on. In describing Domino, Godin says, “The only asset we care about is attention.” You’ve got to ask, he says, “What are you doing with the attention you have?” That’s a highly relevant question. In print, news publishers used to engage lots of reader attention, gaining four hours or more per month of attention (reading time) of 40%-plus of the households in their markets. Online, most news sites have gotten 10-15 minutes per month of reader engagement, reader attention. The tablet, and e-readers, offer new opportunities in treating this attention deficit disorder, with the early signs showing more attention spent. Innovative approaches to publishing — what you offer, how you offer, how you package, how you engage readers — can be the best medicine. “It’s a huge opportunity for journalists. They can be the “concierge of attention,” he says, as editors point to the best, most useful content, their own or others.

Turn strangers into friends: “I paid Time Inc. $2 to read about the causes of the Civil War,” says Godin. “There was no invitation to join a community or join a discussion. I’m a stranger again.” Godin’s point is that each reading experience is a potential beginning of a relationship, of engagement, of asking for — and sometimes getting — more attention. Ironically, Time, Inc. and other publishers have been highly vocal about getting customer data and retaining the customer relationship, as they create sellable products for Apple’s iPads. Yet, gaining data on subscribers is one thing, but one thing only; there are many ways to engage readers, developing and nurturing relationships that could mean lots of sales in months and years ahead.

Let others bring good things to life: Domino’s second book is “Do the Work,” by Steven Pressfield. The price to readers: free. The book is sponsored by GE, in a new twist on an old sponsorship model. GE gets its brand associated with the work, and the work gets paid for a different way. In the iPad/Kindle era, we’re seeing sponsorship re-emerge as a potent source of funding. There’s something about whole products — as opposed to website bits and pieces — that attracts sponsorship. What does sponsorship mean as to what the content actually says?; that’s an ancient conundrum to worked out anew, with reasonable boundaries to be set, especially for journalistic works.

Don’t let the trucks drive you into oblivion: “The reason why the Inquirer is in Philadelphia is the trucks.” That’s a reminder that while the “death of distance” is over-heralded — reporting and sales feet on the street still retain lots of value — trucks no longer define the business. Distribution by truck and by carrier used to be a formidable barrier to entry, and indeed the daily “monopolies and oligopolies,” as described by Godin, were as much defined by distribution as by local content. Swapping out the focus on trucks for a focus on attention is easier said than done, an abstraction that makes sense, but has proven incredibly hard for legacy businesses.

There’s no whining in publishing: “Journalists need to stop whining. There is a new economy, and you have to recognize this and move on.” Fifteen years into the digital news revolution, the lamentations are receding, but I still heard some of them — more wistful than mournful — in the halls of both the Newspaper Association of America publishers’ conference and the American Society of News Editors top daily editors’ conference. Frankly, in a time of such change — and such opportunity — there’s no time for whining.

Conventional wisdoms are odd things. Who have thought, for instance, that the Social Network movie would propel Mark Zuckerberg to new heights of respect, given his Wonkenstein portrayal?

To that point, here are 11 conventional wisdoms, heard in various quarters, as we approach 2011. How they pan out will tell us a lot about the shape of the new year:

1) Readers won’t pay for non-business content. Yes, we know that readers will pay for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and that Consumer Reports, which helps us save money, counts more digital subs than anyone else. While some smaller dailies have begun to poke around the edges of digital reader content, Exhibit A will be the New York Times, with its new metered payment system to launch early in the year. If the Times can claim one to two percent of 30 million or so uniques (its internal count) — or 300,000 to 600,000 paying customers — that’ll be a major milestone.

2) Without Google Juice, newspaper sites will die of thirst. Google sends many newspaper sites a third or more of their traffic. It’s been a friendly flow (circa 2000) that fast turned addictive. While it is still the main source of traffic, the Juice is being devalued in two ways. First, social media, mainly Facebook and Twitters, is the number one growth driver for news traffic, amounting to about 10% for most sites as we end 2010. As importantly, social traffic, publishers will tell you, converts better — in usage, registration and wallet-opening for subscriptions. Second, publishers have assigned lesser value to search traffic — fly-by, some sniff — as they aim to really satisfy their top 10% of regular visitors.

3) The newspaper business is coming back. Well, those hopes are ebbing, even in the exec suites. The newspaper business is the only media business still down in 2010, year over year, about 8%. Print advertising continues to flag; most companies are budgeting flattish for 2011. This week digital advertising passed newspaper print in the U.S., as it had in Japan last year and will probably do in Europe soon. The future, simply, if there is one for these companies, is digital. So we’re seeing lots more movement to online-only (not bundled) ad sales and lots of digital reader revenue plans. For a business that took in only 12.9% of its revenue from digital sources in 2009, the new business will look far different — the question is of what scale and size  – in 2014.

4) Brand advertising is just as important as ever. Yes, brand advertising is spurring nice tablet sales — sponsorships on the tab are still au courant — and make up the bulk of newspaper company revenues, in print and online. Yet pay for performance, trackable advertising, is about half of all the digital ad spend, and will increase over the next several years in share. So, here’s the big question to be tested: how will the lines between brand (image) advertising and pay-for-performance blur in 2011, as advertisers and agencies demand more accountability from their spend?

5) Tablets are just another device. There’s a we’ve-seen-it-all-before-sense here for some content producers. Aren’t tablets just another device, like phones, which cost a lot of money to format for, but don’t produce game-changing revenue results? My sense: the tablet is the post-print reading device. Any publisher who doesn’t plan for tablets to hasten the print to tablet demise will be left out of the future.

6) The aggregation model is over. Google won the first round of web, raking in unbelievable revenues and profits, with fellow players Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft. That proved aggregation was king, and money would flow to those doing the aggregating, not those aggregated. With the tablet, we’re at the beginning of a new round. Almost all the first products are single title, though Flipboard, Pulse and Newsy have stood out as early, non-Googley aggregators. Soon, we’ll see what Ongo — the consortium of New York Times, the Washington Post and Gannett — is up to in aggregating paid content. We’ll also see what the Apple iNewsstand looks like.  And where is Google in this game?

7) News wires are an essential for doing business. The Reuters America product is a shot across AP’s bow, as it struggles to set a new direction. Clay Shirky has brought up some more good questions about how the current digital wave is changing syndication. In fact, disaggregation and re-aggregation, practically on-the-fly, are increasingly possible, and anyhow, most of the digital plays are niches, local or topical, and have less need for a wide net of “wire” content. The bets of Reuters and AP, as well as all the features syndicates and wires, is that pre-packaged, bound-by-labels, certified-by-brand content still is valuable. My sense: It’s the blend that works, as Reuters is beginning to test by bringing third-party content into the mix, or as a new class of content integrators — backed by analytics engines — enter the market.

8.0) Patch will tank; Rupert’s Daily will flourish. Or is that Patch will flourish, The Daily will tank? It’s a bettor’s paradise. Patch is a loser, according to all the conventional wisdom, an old media model ( paying journalists!? ) in new media AOL clothes. On the face of it, it does look like AOL is trying to make up its start-up losses on the 500+ sites by …. creating more sites. (Make it up on margin.) Yet, there may be a bigger game here, as geo-located shopping begins to grab market share and AOL integrates Patch traffic into its larger family of sites. The Daily could be the USA Today of its era; first out of the block — a new newspaper for the tablet. Or it could be a dead-end, a once-a-day cycle in an continuously updated world. My sense: It’ll depend on the product’s voice and sensibility. Does it give me a great, new outlook on the day’s happenings, or not; tablet news reading may re-emphasize those traditional editorial qualities.

9) Public Media is different from Private Media. Yes, and no. In general, non-profit organization journalism has broadly set a new standard in 2010. Certainly, there’s public radio, with its myriad new initiatives and big plans for the years ahead. Then, there’s the rocket launches of Bay Citizen and Texas Tribune, joining MinnPost and Voice of San Diego. They all show that high-quality (sometimes higher quality) journalism can be as well done in non-profit redoubts as in struggling-for-profit downtown office complexes. Then, there’s TBD.com, a for-profit start-up that looks a lot like the non-profits. One lesson: The old labels won’t stick.

10) Brand is everything. Certainly, we see the re-ascendance of Big Brands, from Comcast, Netflix and HBO to Amazon, Apple and News Corp. Given the economic cycle, that’s entirely predictable: big companies usually have the cushion, if they act smartly, to sustain recession damage, and grab market and mind share. In fact, I think we are seeing greater value of big brands, for instance in tablet news product innovation. Who’s there early on? The big guys: Reuters, BBC, WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, Guardian and more, while the little guys are largely sitting on the sidelines “assessing the market.” Counterpoint: Flipboard, small and VC-funded, has broken through noise, based mainly on good thinking and real innovation — and now has its brand certified by Apple, which picked it App o’ the year. 

11) Bigger is better. For a decade and a half, news publishers have been chasing big numbers — page views and uniques — as their businesses have struggled. We’re now moving into a smaller-can-be-beautiful era, as news companies and media brands of all kinds focus more intently on core their core audiences, those who really identify with and use their brands. The idea: get those customers to pay, satisfy the hell out of them…and make secondary money on all the fly-by traffic that Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter send your way.

Facebook isn’t trying to replace Gmail or Yahoo Mail — it’s just trying to bring a little order to our world, right? This week’s Facebook Messages announcement is stunningly simple, and in line with the next phase of the web, both overall and for news.

Take MSNBC’s description of Facebook Messages:

Instead of dealing with the dilemma of reaching people via e-mail or direct message or SMS, all of these will be combined, so that you’ll be able to reach someone the way they prefer to be reached, without you having to think about it. ‘All you need is a person and a message,’ said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering for Facebook.

That’s the next web (r)evolution in a nutshell. It’s a unified theory of messaging. And it can be easily extended into the unified theories of TV, movies, shopping — and news.

Make a few substitutions, and you’ve got “All you need is a person and a movie,” or “All you need is a person and a shopping list” or “All you need is a person and the news.” For news creators, and aggregators, it’s a big thought that will be play out more dramatically in the tablet-inflected world of 2011. Only those who grok its meaning and execute properly may make digital reader revenue a reality.

In short, it’s about simplification, about interconnection, about consolidation, and it’s a principle that is beginning to — and should — form the foundation of the much of the next-generation thinking about the news business.

Though we’ll continue to see a panorama of new digital services and products, much of the early digital vision has been built out. We may live in a find-anything-anytime-anywhere world, but it’s also a digital fumbleathon, as we bounce from mobile apps of three distinct platforms, mail and preference settings, interminable demands for passwords, multiple hard-to-combine “friend” and contact lists, Twitter decks, Facebook walls, RSS feeds, preference popups, security hiccups — not to mention TV remotes and cable guides that seem like visitors from a distant analog planet.

Facebook Messages says: We get it. We’ll make it easier for you to keep in touch with those you want to stay in touch with. We’ll see how well Facebook delivers on that promise, but it’s the right one for our age. We can see its echoes multiplying.

On Wednesday, HBO announced that its HBO Go initiative will make HBO available through digital devices for its cable channels subscribers by year’s end. That initiative is part of parent Time Warner’s TV Everywhere push, which likewise says: You paid us once. Now get what you paid for wherever you want it. It’s the unification of the premium TV business, as cable companies are starting to see unprecedented churn, given piecemeal availability of programming through the Internet, legally or illegally.

Comcast is making a similar promise, as it newly announced app promises to connect up its customers’ experience. The app’s functionality is rolling out over time, but will ultimately allow viewing of all Comcast’s Xfinity content via devices, plus provide programming services, such as remote DVR taping, and let an iPhone replace that dreaded remote — borrowing a little bit from Tivo, a little bit from Sonos.

Netflix, of course, grasped the concept earlier, as CEO Reed Hastings has noted (“Six Lessons for the News Industry from Reed Hastings“): “We knew that the DVD business was temporary when we founded the company. That’s why we named it Netflix and not DVD by mail. We wanted to become Netflix.” Netflix’s current promise: “Unlimited TV.” You guessed it: one relationship with the brand, and you get what you paid for however you want it.

Where are the news promises? Well, the first generation has been Yahoo News. Remember your first time seeing all those wondrous headline links from the BBC, the Post, the Hindu, and CNET all in one place? First-generation aggregation was cool, but we haven’t really progressed much beyond it, though we’ve seen nuances, with personality added to aggregation (HuffPo) and some regional aggregation (Seattle Times, TBD.com). We’ve seen some good smartphone apps and a few new iPad apps. Come 2011, we’ll begin to see more News Everywhere experiences.

The first big one in the U.S. should be The New York Times. The Times will launch its metered pay system early in the year. If tech issues can be solved, expect paying customers to get access — aiming toward seamless, but likely with a few wrinkles — across devices, an intending-to-be-unified reader experience. The Times’ Martin Nisenholtz explained recently: “It’s not just about the website anymore. It’s about all of the brands where you can read the Times…it’s about the website, smartphones, the slates, iPad…it’s a hugely different world than it was five years ago.” So, the Times will say give us a single price, and we’ll let you read about you want of the Times where you want, recognizing you across digital experiences and — nirvana — allowing you to keep track of what you’ve shared and read, and with whom, without you having to recall whether you sent that story to your best buddy on your iPhone.

I’ve called that approach All-Access, and I think it’s the news industry version of TV Everywhere. So far, the best example of all-access pricing is the Financial Times, upon whose experience the Times’ model is built. Its “newspaper + online” top-of-the-line subscription allows full digital access plus the paper for one price.

The Everywhere notions seem friendly — and they have to be consumer friendly to be successful — but they’re actually quite darwinian. How many entertainment and news brands will we pay for? Only a handful, probably, especially at premium rates. So in the news business, that battle means only a few brands win the reader revenue sweepstakes, unless a Hulu-for-news proposition (AP’s digital rights clearinghouse expanded; a second life for Rupert Murdoch’s Alesia?) succeeds big-time.

To win, news companies will have work on the principle of the Field Theory. No, not the unified field theory, though unification of message and of service is fundamental. It’s the Sally Field Theory, which you remember the 1984 Oscars speech: “I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” Well who wants renewed respect than newsies? Who keeps talking about the trusted brand relationship that newspapers have long had with readers?

If news companies want to “own” the news customer (and be able to mine his data deeply), then they, large or small, newly minted or history-encrusted, have to bring their games to a new level. For the Times (or the Journal), the current breadth of content may be sufficient, if the execution manages to bring a little delight of ubiquity to paying subscribers.

For local news companies, the bar is probably a different one. Yes, they’ll have to put their tech development in high gear (many are woefully behind on tablet apps, just as the devices explode under this year’s Christmas trees), but they’ll also have to up their local value proposition. That means not just repurposing their own staff’s local news output, but really reaching out to community blog aggregation, broadcast partnership, working Yelp-like guide magic (probably through partnership) and/or creating a new level of digitally enhanced local shopping experiences. It’s unclear how much limited local news across devices is worth to news consumers.

News Anywhere, or unified news, or All-Access, whatever we want to call it, demands the singular focus, product development and messaging that Netflix, HBO, Comcast, and Facebook are bringing to it. Those are all skills that have been problematic in the news industry. Yet, here we are, in a new age, in a mobile news age about to unfold, giving the journalism, and journalists, another chance to get it right.

Maybe the newspaper is like the old LP — you know, as in “Long Play.” It may be a 33 1/3, though it seems like it came out of the age of 78s sometimes, a relic of the post-Victorian Victrola age. It is what it is, a wonderful compendium of one day in the life (of a nation, a city, a village), a one-size-fits-all product, the same singular product delivered to mass volumes of readers.

In the short history of Internet disintermediation and disruption of the traditional news business, we’ve heard endless debate of the “the content and the container,” as people have tried to peel back the difference between the physical form of the newspaper — its container — and what it had in it. It’s a been a tough mindset change, and the many disruptors of the world — the Googles, the Newsers, and the Huffington Posts, for instance — have expertly picked apart the confusions and the potentials new technologies have made possible. The news business has been atomized, not by Large Hadron Colliders, but by simple digital technology that has blown up the container and treats each article as a digestible unit. Aggregate those digestible units with some scheme that makes sense to readers (Google: news search; Newser: smart selection and précis; HuffPo: aggregation, personality and passion), and you’ve got a new business, and one with a very low cost basis.

None of this is a revelation. What is new, and why I re-think that context is the advent of Kindle Singles. The Lab covered Amazon’s announcement of less-than-a-book, more-than-as-story Kindle Singles out of the chute a couple of weeks ago. Josh Benton described how the new form could well serve as a new package, a new container, for longer, high-quality investigative pieces, those now being well produced in quantity by ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting (and its California Watch), and the Center for Public Integrity. That’s a great potential usage, I think.

In fact, Kindle Singles may open the door even further to wider news business application, for news companies — old and new, publicly funded and profit-seeking, text-based and video-oriented. It takes the old 78s and 33 1/3s, and opens a world of 45s, mixes, and infinite remixes. It says: You know what a book is, right? Think again. It can also say: You know what a newspaper is, right? Think again. While the Kindle Singles notion itself seems to have its limits — it’s text and fixed in time, not updatable on the fly — it springs loose the wider idea of publishing all kinds of new news and newsy content in new containers. Amazon is trying to define this strange new middle, with the Kindle Singles nomenclature, while some have used the term “chapbook” to describe it. We’ve got to wonder what Apple is thinking in response — what’s an app in Kindle Singles world? What’s a Kindle Single in an apps world? It’s not a book, an article, a newspaper, or a magazine, but something new. We now get to define that something new, both in name, but most importantly in content possibility.

What it may be for news organizations is a variety of news-on-demand. Today, we could be reading tailored and segmented sections on the election, from red and blue perspectives, from historical perspectives, from numerical perspectives. Today, we in the Bay Area could get not just a single triumphant San Francisco Giants celebratory section, but our choice of several, one providing San Francisco Giants history, one providing New York Giants history, one looking at the players themselves; the list goes on and on. More mundane, and more evergreen commercial topics? Job-hunting, job-finding, job-prep guides, tailored to skills, ages, and wants? Neighborhood profile sections for those seeking new housing (pick one or several neighborhoods, some with data, some with resident views, others tapping into neighborhood blogs). It’s endless special sections, on demand, some ad-supported, some not; a marketer’s dream. Some are priced high; some are priced low; some are free and become great lead generators for other digital reader products.

A few recent initiatives in the news business news lend themselves to Singles thinking. Take Politico’s newly announced topical e-newsletters. Take Rupert Murdoch’s notion of a paid-content portal, Alesia, which had within the idea of mixing and matching content differently, until its plug was recently pulled. Take AP’s new rights consortium, a venture that could build on this approach. Again, endless permutations are possible.

Who is going to come up with the ideas for the content? Well, editors themselves should have their shot, though one-size-fits-all thinking has circumscribed the imagination of too many. Still, there are hundreds of editors (and reporters and designers and copy editors) still in traditional ranks and now employed outside of it capable of creating new audience-pleasing packages. Some will work; some won’t. Experiment, and fail quickly. The biggest potential, though? Letting readers take open-sourced news content and create packages themselves, giving them a small revenue share, on sales. (Both the Guardian and the New York Times, among others, have opened themselves up for such potential usage.) Tapping audiences to serve audiences, to mix and match content, makes a lot of sense.

Why might this work when various little experiments have failed to produce much revenue for news companies, thinking of Scribd and HP’s MagCloud? Well, it’s the installed bases and paid-content channels established by the Amazons (and the Apples). They’ve got the customers and the credit cards, and they’ve tapped the willingness to pay. They need stuff to sell.

For newspaper companies, it’s another chance to rewrite the economics of the business. The newsonomics of Kindle Singles may mean that publishers can worry less about cost of content production, for a minute, and more about its supply. Maybe the problem hasn’t been the cost of professional content, but its old-school one-size-fits-all distribution package. That sports story or neighborhood profile could bring in lots more money per unit, if Singles notion takes off.

One big caution here: Singles thinking leads us into a more Darwinian world than ever. In my Newsonomics book, I chose as Law #1: “In the age of Darwinian content, we’re becoming our own and each other’s editors.” Great, useful content will sell; mediocre content will die faster. Repackaging content pushes the new content meritocracy to greater heights. As we approach 2011, news publishers are hoping to hit home runs with new paid content models. Maybe the future is as much small ball, hitting a lot of one-base hits, of striking out as often — and of Singles.

One problem: the human brain. While we can all churn out the content 24/7, our brains’ evolution progress seems to be, at the minimum, multi-generational. Yes, we can multi-task at better speeds, but the toll – eulogized by Nick Carr and others — is unknown. We still like sum-ups and intelligent pointers.

So against that backdrop, let’s point out two recent additions to the web that help us followers of the news industry make sense of the new news. Irony: they are both weekly; helping us catch up on what seems to be a duration of time that still makes some atavistic sense to us.

Mark Coddington at the Nieman Journalism Lab does an admirable job with his aptly named “This Week in Review.” And Matt Creamer‘s “Best Media Writing of the Week” on AdAge does the same. Note the catchy names of both, and that both are packages of well- and thoughtfully recommended links.

Sid Harman, dial home.

Young Otis Chandler — generation six of the family that built the Times into one of America’s great papers — talked about his four-year-old Goodreads, a social book review site that has grown to 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago. What Goodreads does is embrace the web and book reading, “hosts reading clubs, gives away books, sponsors author chats, offers literature quizzes and generally dissects and celebrates writing”. The website has 3.5 million members. In short, it does the kind of things that the Times flagship, or any of the companies owing papers like the Times could have/should have done, some time over the last 15 years. After all, newspapers used to be go-to places for weekly book reviews, and as editors we fought like hell to preserve book review space, even though ad departments couldn’t sell ads on those pages.

But, once again proven, it takes fresh eyes to do it.

Rainey asked Chandler how he thinks his grandfather Otis, who built the modern Times and died in 2006, would have thought about Goodreads. Noting that Chandler didn’t even own a computer, he said.  “I think he would think that I am going in the right direction.” Indeed.

So if young Otis has modernized the book section, what other traditional newspaper sections are still ripe for digital modernization?