But are those readers, once again, ahead of publishers? Behind the scenes, I see increasing urgency among daily news publishers to get their products on the tablet, though the movement is less urgent and less creative than it needs to be. For the moment, though, put aside product and platform issues. Let’s consider something more basic: knowing customers.

After all this is the age that marketers are beginning to know everything instantly about us, their customers. Whether it is marketers tracking each breadcrumb of our digital lives (good, two-parter by Marketplace’s Stacey Vanek Smith) or giant vending machines looking at us (and determining age and gender) as we look at them, this is the age of customer identification, assessment, and, ultimately, satisfaction.

So against that backdrop, let me offer a cautionary tale about the newspaper industry’s readiness.

It’s just a little driveway story, but we can connect it directly to the digital age.

We recently moved to the Santa Cruz area, from San Jose. I may be print-to-digital news analyst, but I’m still a baby boomer, one eye on each world of print and online. So I wanted to get the local paper delivered.

I had called the Mercury News to cancel our San Jose subscription several months back and was surprised that no attempt was made to offer me the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the main daily in my new hometown, though both papers are owned by MediaNews. That was curious, but unsurprising from what I’d remembered of circulation operations back in the days when I was in the newsroom.

Then, one Sunday ago, I ran into a Sentinel booth at a local free jazz fair in the park. The retiree from North Carolina manning the booth wasn’t exactly doing a brisk business, so I sauntered over. We had a nice conversation; he gave me his Carolina-informed tout on who had the best BBQ at the adjacent food booths. I asked him for the best deal he could give me, exchanged a credit card, getting a little discount for two months.

“When will I get my first issue?” I asked.

“Around Wednesday.”

The “around” part would seem odd for most other purchases, but given what I knew about newspaper delivery, didn’t give me pause.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday came and went with no paper delivered. On Saturday, with no delivery, I called “Subscriber Services,” finding the number on the website, since the “Santa Cruz Sentinel Subscription Order Form,” I’d been given at the fair contained all my personal information, but none about the Sentinel.

I told the customer rep the problem.

“What’s your address?,” he asked, reminding me that newspapers have long identified customers by address rather than name. That may be okay if you’re in the UPS business, making occasional deliveries, but when your customer is an ongoing, daily one, that’s an odd way to i.d. them.

“You’re in the system,” the customer rep told me. I waited a couple of seconds expecting him to say what that meant and that I would be receiving what I paid for, but didn’t hear anything but dead air. I explained that being “in the system” wasn’t what I paid for, getting the newspaper delivered was.

“Well the carrier probably didn’t see it [the new subscription],” he said. “This happens quite often. The carrier has eight papers, and didn’t see it. When we do it a second time, it usually works. If you don’t get it tomorrow, call us.”

Sunday arrived and no paper.

I called back and got a rep who made the first seem almost sympathetic.

“I’ll send the message to the carrier’s manager, and see if that works,” he said tonelessly. “I’ll send it to them.” Ah, the elusive “them.”

Who is the carrier’s manager? Wasn’t I calling — and had paid — the Sentinel?

“It’s an outside distribution company. We don’t have any control of it. I’ll send another message.”

Neither rep offered a “sorry,” and I had to ask for a “credit” both times. Monday, my paper arrived, but on Tuesday, it didn’t. Wednesday, it did. I know the Detroit papers have gone to a three-day-a-week home delivery schedule, so maybe the Sentinel was innovating a new alternate-day strategy.

This little snafu, which isn’t unique to my new hometown daily, has new meaning for the world we’re entering.

In the old world, identifying customers by address didn’t work very well, given that something like 20% of the populace changes address every year. Many newspaper companies, to be sure, have been upgrading their circulation management systems over the years, though, from what I hear, that’s still a work in progress at some.

In this new era of tablet reading, consider the new importance of identifying and knowing customers. Publishers that are ahead of the curve — like the Financial Times — and those that are scurrying to get to the curve, including the New York Times (which will launch its paid metering system early next year) know that customer i.d. is a newly urgent business necessity.

Why? As consumers, we’re expecting that if we’re going to pay a publisher for the privilege of reading their content, we’d better not get nickel-and-dimed along the way. Charge me for the paper, and for the website, and for my iPhone, and for my iPad?

That’s not going to play. Sure, offer me the chance to buy access on one particular device, if that suits my lifestyle, but make sure I’ve got a chance to send you one billpay payment and get what I call “all-access.” In fact, beyond a single price, I’d like my news provider to know which articles I’ve read and shared (and with whom) across platforms (old, dumb print excepted, of course).

The Times and others are working on that system. That work, though, isn’t trivial, given newspapers’ legacy systems of delivering tree pulp to driveways. Though not trivial, it’s fundamental to a business strategy that migrates loyal print readers to paying, digital readers. It’s a problem that must be solved, and my recent run-in with the forces of circulation makes me wonder aloud: Are newspaper companies at all ready for prime-time of tablet news-reading world?

That’s the amount money that media companies — mainly the  entertainment giants — take in annually from cable and satellite carriers, according to SNL Kagan, according to the Journal. That’s a huge revenue stream and an increasingly important one as advertising remains sluggish and uncertain. It’s also a revenue stream largely not enjoyed by creators of news, other than CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. As the much-ballyhooed “fight for livingroom” plays out, can national news companies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR, or local news companies, get a piece of  the pie, whoever (Apple, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, Dish) slices it up?

It is a head-turner, which seems to be, at first, an only-in-Utah story. The Deseret Morning News, KSL TV, and KSL Radio, all owned by one company, the Deseret Management Co., a for-profit arm of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are combining operations.

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”.

Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”.

One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

Remove the religious subtext, for a moment, and I believe we see a model that will appear ordinary in many American cities, within a few years. Think about it. If we as readers, viewers and listeners want words, photographs, videos, and audio, and expect it to be served up in an easy-to-use, relevant-to-me way, then why would the companies that produce news in those various forms be separate?

They’re separate, of course, because those words/picture/audio used to be called newspapers/magazines, network and cable TV and radio broadcasters. Those words, though, describe the old world, those packages the content came wrapped in. In our digital world, we’re seeing delivery blur through the Internet. And, that inevitably, and now more quickly, means that single companies will produce words, pictures and sound — and they’ll find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently.

If you own the Salt Lake properties, or if you’re Tribune and own the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN radio, you practically have a fiduciary responsibility to rearrange assets that will make the company more efficient. If you own a broadcast station or a newspaper, you can more easily see the rationale in buying or combining with the other, to meet customer (reader/viewer and advertiser) demands of the coming age.

So the Salt Lake Experiment joins TBD’s (“10 Reasons to Watch TBD“) in putting together the text and video pieces. They are the next generation in this attempt to make convergence work. Call it News Convergence 2.0, with Tampa’s Tribune/WFLA experiment the best poster child for 1.0. How well the Deseret operation (or TBD) executes is, of course, the key. Journalism isn’t about white-board theories, in any era; it’s about getting the news gathered, analyzed, and distributed to readers, and doing it better than the competition.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of the Deseret decision, though. The numbers in play are curious ones, as Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert lays out a “less is more” theme in the major restructuring of his company. In fact, let’s use the more and less theme to gauge the moving pieces of the new business model.

• Less is More: Take that “43%” headline. The legacy news staff of the Deseret News has indeed been cut 43 percent — 85 jobs, including those of the editor and publisher of the paper. That number includes both full-time and part-time positions. So we’d expect a lot less coverage, right? With a bit of frustration in his voice, Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert tells me bluntly “That’s an Old Media world view. We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.” His point, and his plan: The combined operations of the remaining Deseret News staff and the sister news staffs at KSL TV and radio will operate smarter and more efficiently.“Say there’s a story on Capitol Hill [in Salt Lake City]. Right now, the paper sends a reporter and a photographer and KSL sends a reporter and videographer. That’s four people, and that story may end up on B3,” says Gilbert. “Now we’ll send one.”So, step one: “Reduce duplication.”

  So the news math changes dramatically. The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and “new employees expected to have those skills.” Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

  Step two: “Deepen coverage,” meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the “integrated newsroom,” with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. “You’re sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms],” explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite — so that’s going to be a busy staff.

  The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

• More Costs Less: Borrowing basic notions of getting cheap and free content from the Huffington Post and Demand Media, Gilbert is putting into action what he has long preached in academic and consulting circles. I’ve called this emerging time the Age of Cheap Content. That principle means that the new Deseret operation will leverage bigger-name writers (especially those consistent with its Mormon roots and values, like former BYU football star and current Philadelphia sports anchor Vai Sikahema) for little financial compensation. That’s the HuffPo model. And they’ll leverage Salt Lake and Utah reporters to address both topical and hyperlocal coverage, through the new Deseret Connect. That’s the Demand side of the idea, bringing together a large database of qualified writers — “not random bloggers,” says Gilbert — and keeping their payments low or non-existent. “Some of the best don’t write for money.”Deseret Connect already has received more than 100 applications, and Gilbert says he can see it scaling to a thousand or more contributors within the year, using management system techniques developed outside the news industry for BYU/Idaho faculty.Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum — though he’s clear to point out that people doing the writing won’t be looking to the company “as their main source of income.”

  So, looking at cost per content unit — a Demand-like analytic — the new company will be able to house lots more content under its brand, at a far lower cost point.

• More Beats Less: The Deseret play aims to bring together text stories and blogs, video, and audio. That supposes that readers want all kinds of coverage brought together for them. It’s a bet that products that converge video and stories for readers will beat the competition, competition like MediaNews’ Salt Lake Tribune, the biggest non-church-owned news presence in the state. One big question here: How will the customer experience be converged? In Washington, two ongoing TV stations folded their websites into the new TBD at launch. How separate and how unified will the DeseretNews.com and KSL.com sites be?

• More is More: The new Deseret operation doesn’t just focus on geography — Utah’s more than 700,000 households. It’s taking a twin approach to being a general interest news site — and a new worldwide voice for the Mormon faithful of 13 million or so worldwide. In the company’s strategy, that’s described as a values-oriented approach, and you can already read that six-point values mantra widely. The six: “the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community.” They make for a strong philosophy, but in marketing, that’s quite a straddle — one that may be difficult to pull off, especially as Salt Lake City itself has become majority non-Mormon.

The economics of it are clear, though. Pay (or don’t) to get a story written or a video shot once, and then distribute it many times over. It’s basic Internet economics, with a nichy, religious angle, one of many variations we’ll soon be seeing on these increasingly popular themes.

Start with several cups full of daily newspaper and broadcast types. Take a teaspoon of the Christian Science Monitor. Add in a dash of HuffPo spice. Ladle a tablespoon of Demand Media into the mix. Borrow ingredients from two Washington D.C. news companies, the 143-year-old Washington Post and the one-month-old TBD.com. Now, into the hyperchange of late 2010, let it shred, dice, slice, puree, whir and, finally, blend.

That, in short, looks to be the new recipe in Salt Lake City. There, today, the Deseret News pulled together many of the innovations of the day in the news business and redefined the company, its workforce and its products in one sweeping move.

The immediate news that caught the attention of the news world: The Deseret News — one of two dailies in the market, in a joint operating agreement (shared business operations) with the MediaNews-owned Tribune — is cutting 43% of its newsroom, or 57 full-time and 28 part-time employees. That’s big news in and of itself, but in this case, only part of a much larger story.

We have to look at the Deseret News announcement in the context of another, USA Today’s (“It’s (About) Time for the Next Re-Invention“) last Friday. The news business is now blowing itself up, claiming radical reinvention, acknowledging that experimentation around the edges won’t get the job done.

Won’t the cuts mean lots less news coverage?

“That’s an Old Media world view,” Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert told me today. “We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.”

I first met Gilbert in the mid-’90s, when, as a Harvard prof, he talked to Knight Ridder editors and publishers about creative disruption, the then-vaguely academic-seeming phenomenon that would wreak havoc in the news business. Gilbert got the opportunity to apply his intellectual mettle to the pedal of news management when he assumed his job in Salt Lake City a year ago. Among advisors on his board is Clayton Christensen, the oft-quoted and but-too-little-applied author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and “The Innovator’s Description.” Newspaper company CEOs long discussed his work, but their companies have become textbook examples of what he preached, making moves that were too little, too late to meet the challenge of epochal disruption.

So let’s take a quick tour of the new Deseret recipe:

• Start with several cups full of daily newspaper and broadcast types. The newspaper had about 200 staff positions. Now, the newspaper staff and the news staffs of KSL TV and KSL Radio, all owned by Deseret Management Co., a for-profit business arm of the Mormon Church, are part of a single, combined media company. Gilbert says the new size of the combined staff is “north of 200,” but doesn’t want to disclose the actual number, given competitive concerns. Also tossed into the mixer is the company’s digital team, which has been working across print and broadcast for the past year.
• Take a teaspoon of the Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor has long served as a example of a religiously based journalistic organization, one that applied its otherworldly beliefs to the here and now. The new Deseret plan takes that idea, and intends to feed it the rocket juice of digital age, allowing its “values-based” journalism to carry to every corner of the earth, via the Internet. In fact, Gilbert lays out six values — the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community –  that the journalism the company will now focus on, and the word “values” pops up repeatedly both as “mission” and strategy. People in Salt Lake — now a majority non-LDS community — will tell you (KUER’s “The Future of Utah Journalism,”) that the Deseret News has long had one foot in the church camp and one foot in traditional daily journalism, tilting one way or the other, depending on the story, the editor and the pressures of the day. Now, it appears, the company is unambiguously grasping its faith, injecting into the very fiber of its news operations. Mark Willes (yes, the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, of the pre-Zell, Staples Center ad debacle period), has headed the parent Deseret Management Company since February, 2009, bringing in the values-based media strategy. Willes brought in Gilbert, the intellectual yin to Willes yang. Gilbert has brought in Christensen, among other national advisors. All three — Willes, Gilbert and Christensen — share the Mormon faith.
  
• Add in a dash of HuffPo spice. Vai Sikahema, sports director and anchor for NBC10 Philadelphia, host of the “Vai & Gonzo Show” on ESPN Philadelphia Radio and “Tongan Warrior”, is prototypical of the kind of high-profile writer that is an increasingly part of the new Deseret mix. That’s a page borrowed from the Huffington Post: get high-profile celebrities, who will write for nothing and bring their fans with them. Gilbert says you can expect many more Sikahemas, drawn from around the world.
• Ladle a tablespoon of Demand Media into the mix. Deseret Connect is the new take on Demand’s Pro-Am business model. Already, Gilbert says the company has received more than 100 applications for the new user-gen service. “It won’t be their main source of income,” says Gilbert. The company is seeking “high-quality people, who fit the values and will be edited,” to write about its key topics. How many?: Maybe as many as a thousand within a year.
  
• Borrow ingredients from two Washington D.C. news companies, the 143-year-old Washington Post and the one-month-old TBD.com. From the Post, Gilbert takes the ability to be two things, simultaneously, a worldwide political news leader and a company plying the waters of hyperlocal; he believes that in the digital age, you can difference faces for differing audiences. In this case, you can be both a worldwide Mormon vertical — serving a potential readership among 13 million co-religionists — and the newspaper of Salt Lake’s and Utah’s smaller communities.

Deseret clearly is following the same path as the brand-new TBD, as well, pooling text, video and audio skills. In reorganizing those skills sets, Gilbert is injecting a newly named staff of Rewrite/First Responders. That group, maybe a third of the new “integrated newsroom” of about 100, will work on both sides of the “field reporters.” The Rewrite/First Responders staff comes from a diverse digital/broadcast/wire background, and they form the hub expected to produce the kind of content in the best form (story, post, video segment, podcast) through the news day. In the moving arithmetic, it’s important to note that only about half of the combined newspaper and broadcast staffs move into the “integrated” operation. The others — roughly another 100 or so — stay in more traditional (“enterprise, investigative”) roles. Out of these moves, and through greater use of cross-trained (video-shooting reporters, text-writing photographers), Gilbert aims to reduce duplication of staff and focus more resources — Pro and Am — on stories deserving greater coverage.

The overall new math: “Our net news coverage goes up.”

• Shred, dice, slice, puree, whir and, finally, blend. And it’s all something of a blur, especially the view from outside the unique culture of Utah.  The deep talk of values and mission is enough to give an old newsie hives, and we’ll all have to watch to see how much “news” coverage is skewed by religious beliefs. In addition, though, the Deseret media company is a creation that immediately emerges as a new multi-media, multi-platform, Pro-Am- hugging, cost-cutting model. New NAA chairman Mark Contreras, a Scripps senior vice-president, was quick to laud it as one to watch: “The Deseret News team has showed courageous leadership, not just to make the difficult decisions around costs, but to define a broader and more digitally-focused future”. With the USA Today and Deseret announcements of the past five days, expect 2011 to be a year of fire-breathing change.

Executive changes are sweeping the quality press in the UK, portending a time of greater change and disruption.

Important Details: The drama of the UK’s first coalition government in 70 years unfolded smartly on cable news, an especially intriguing quick change-over of power for American audiences, used to long interregnums and much pomp between Presidencies. Less covered has been the galloping change underway at many of the nation’s top newspaper companies, the “quality” papers, as distinguished from tabloid publications.

In recent weeks and months, consider the events:

• The Guardian has seen three significant changes in its executive ranks. At the top of the company, Carolyn McCall, CEO of the parent Guardian Media Group (GMG), is leaving to become CEO of airline EasyJet, after 24 years with the company.  Simon Waldman, long the director of digital strategy and development at GMG, has left to head group product direction for the DVD rental subscription service, LoveFilm, as that Netflix-like company moves increasingly digital. Emily Bell, who directed digital content for Guardian News & Media and led much of the growth of the site that now reaches 36 million unique visitors worldwide, is leaving the company to lead the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at New York’s  Columbia University.
• The Telegraph Editor-in-Chief Will Lewis is leaving the Telegraph Media Group, whose Daily Telegraph had just won newspaper of the year honors. Lewis’ unexpected departure apparently derived from his want to concentrate on and re-structure the Telegraph’s digital business.
• The  daily Independent and weekly Independent on Sunday, a spirited part of the quality press, changed ownership, owing to the financial woes of its parent company, Independent News and Media. INM retains ownership of its flagship Irish Independent. The new owner is Independent Print Limited (IPL), the company run by Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch (and among top 400 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes) who first made news when he bought the London Evening Standard in January 2009. Lebedev has turned the Evening Standard into a more widely read, 600,00-circulation free daily, winning a strong place in the evening commuter newspaper business. Now, having paid £1 and gained £9.25 million from INM towards operating costs, IPL is assessing the Independent’s future. Will the money-losing operation be taken free, as was the Evening Standard, or will it try hybrid free/paid strategies? One key question: How will IPL embrace the digital future? The Evening Standard’s web play has been a minor one, but the Independent, though small-staffed, has built a path forward for the company. Will IPL recognize digital as an essential part of a going-forward strategy?
• News Corp’s key quality papers — the Times of London and the Sunday Times — will begin charging for web access in June. The plan, part of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s much-talked-about efforts to get readers to pay for more of the freight in the news business, includes free web access for print subscribers. Non-subscribers can get a digital subscription for £2, or a day’s access for £1, to two new sites, www.thetimes.co.uk and www.sundaytimes.co.uk. International pricing — key because more than half  of the sites’ traffic has come from outside the UK — has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week.

These changes are set against a background of fast-declining print circulation. While the The Independent on Sunday showed a 1.88% gain in the most recent ABC tally, other quality papers –  The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian,  the Observer (also owned by GMG) — all reported double-digit declines, year-over-year.

Implications: Newspaper people come and go — but not usually so many in such a short period of time. It’s clear that the unsettled, post-recession, early-recovery period is not one of going back to old times, but of finding new footing in still-moving sand.

All the familiar questions are at play here, including:

• paid and free, as moves by the Times and the Independent may bring chaos and understanding to what it is consumers will and won’t pay for;
• digital integration/separation, as newsprint-legacy companies struggle with what it means to become digital-first publishers;
• how to keep innovators employed in the old industries, as new “green-field” digital companies offer less complicated, more direct routes to digital business success.

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

This next-generation aggregated video-forward product provides a new model both for business news journalism — and for content producers across many sectors.

Important Details: Anchored in New York, London and Hong Kong, Thomson Reuters has just launched its Reuters Insider product. It’s a next generation video-on-the-desktop product, one that seeks to redefine news delivery for the broadband age.

Reuters Insider is designed to deliver “exclusive content for a finite, exclusive audience,” Mike Stepanovich, the product’s managing editor, told Outsell. That audience is the core Thomson Reuters enterprise market, the 500,000 customers worldwide whose access to Thomson Reuters news and data is paid for by the seat. The bullseye within the core: those in the financial services trades, those with “four screens open in front of them at one time.” Reuters Insider aims to become one of those four screens, a through-the-day-and-after moving picture of the business day.

The home page houses news of the day, and rows of video choices, sectioned by “research and analysis,” CNBC (a prime content provider) and lifestyles and offers other series and channel choices.  Video programming is offered on both a scheduled basis, like TV, and on-demand. Currently, Reuters itself is producing 350 video segments a week, many of those segments already in usage at its various properties, but now brought together in Reuters Insider. In addition, it launches with 150 content partners — from Forbes and the Economist Intelligence Unit to JP Morgan, T Rowe Price, Nomura and Africa Investor. These partners aren’t paid for their content; they get brand exposure and distribution links to their content in exchange and in addition can restrict viewing of their content to their clients.

Among the features that suit the busy information customer:

• A small video window (which is expandable) at the upper right of the home page, allowing customers to listen to (and watch if they wish) the three-to-five minute video segments. One notion here: while it is video, the news value is largely gleaned from the audio of interviews, stand-ups and explainers, allowing a customer to keep listening to the patter while reading other content on the page.
• Contextual text content, demarcated between Reuters-produced content and other content. The text content is largely driven by the metadata tags associated with the video. Key amid the preparatory work done for the product’s launch was the speech-to-text applications that seek out business-oriented keywords, thus enabling the video/text links. The translations also produce transcripts, available as a tab along with the video; within the transcripts, users can jump to relevant points in the video by clicking on words within, a popular feature at launch.
• The ability to customize content several ways, a recommendation engine that will tailor content per user over time and social features for sharing.
• A corps of analysts and columnists, built in part by the Breakingviews operation, acquired in 2009. That acquisition added about 30 staffers; now more than 50 columnists and analysts help feed the product, as the company increases  in interpretation of business. Three anchor studios, plus smaller satellite ones worldwide, enable video participation by Reuters’ far-flung workforce.

The product is currently open for free trial to professionals for non-Thomson Reuters customers who apply.

At this point, the company has not announced plans for how it may apply Reuters Insider, or its parts, to its newly redesigned Reuters.com public websites or to its agency syndication business.

Implications: The Reuters Insider product is impressive, a model of what can be done by companies recognizing changing digital habits, and the technologies that support them. What’s most impressive about the product is its aggregation, the sheer amount of content that it brings together in an intutive interface. Key here is the willingness to bring in non-Reuters content. While Reuters may have the largest news staff — 2900 — in the world, it acted on the realization that no news service is an island. It has been able to aggregate 150 content contributors — at no license cost — due in part to its first-mover advantage here. That move — smart aggregation of like content — is one that applies in many industries, from regional news to B2B to education.

Most fundamentally, of course, it recognizes that video is now mainstream, especially among its key markets, and a faster way of delivering market-making analysis, with the added benefit of enabling warp speed multi-tasking.

It will be intriguing to watch how Reuters applies the thinking of Reuters Insider to its consumer and agency businesses. In the short term, the B2B product is an in-your-face challenge to Bloomberg, Dow Jones and the Financial Times, all of which have been arming themselves for the expanding business news wars. In the longer term, the push toward video-first (scheduled and on-demand, and associated with text) and of meaningful-to-the-market aggregation is a model that many news companies must follow.

This week, we see a notable project, harnessing the power of a local network to do — journalism.

With the deep recession making homelessness a widespread and enduring phenomenon, the Seattle Times, worked with seven local blogs (West Seattle Blog http://westseattleblog.com/blog/, Beacon Hill Blog http://beaconhill.seattle.wa.us, My Edmonds News http://myedmondsnews.com/, Seattle Local Health Guide http://localhealthguideonline.com/, Rainier Valley Post http://www.rainiervalleypost.com/, Mercer Island – Surrounded By Water http://mercerislandblogger.wordpress.com/ and Aurora | Seattle http://www.auroraseattle.com/).

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

• Most importantly, it focused on audience. An audience not attached to any particular local geography, but one found, yet on the move, across the broad USA geography. I remember hearing the number: about two million Americans traveling each day. Now, that’s an un-served audience (recall that this was not only pre-Internet, but pre-wide-scale availability of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in print in many cities). And an under-served market for advertisers.
• It recognized that the reading needs of that audience — quick out the door, on to the next appointment — were differing ones. Born: quick-read, no-jump daily journalism.
• It announced its areas of focus — News, Sports, Money, Life — boldly and colorfully, in a sense, creating sub-brands.
  
• It saw that distribution was king. The ability to get your paper to travelers, at hotels, airports and the like, innovated a new approach to newspaper sales.

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

In the reinvention language used by USA Today publisher Dave Hunke, we hear echoes of that first invention. “Audience” is repeated over and over again. Taking content to readers wherever they are, on mobile platforms (ironic for the first travelin’ newspaper, right?), “content rings” that will presumably be organized around sub-brands, and, of course, a distribution strategy that is updated for 2011 — access everywhere on any device, but mobile being the most prominent.

It would be easy to cynically say that if ever there was a newspaper that should have seen how to reinvent itself, it should have been USA Today. But that’s too simplistic. USA Today, like all dailies, has been a victim of its own success. Forsaking the past — slowly over time, milking revenue from print as long as it lasts — is tough for any incumbent business, as Clayton Christensen‘s landmark writings pointed out it seems an eon ago.

Better to mark another day in which a publisher is acting on the plain truths of the marketplace and of the audiences, and trying to reinvent itself. We’ve heard the Journal Register’s new CEO John Paton and TBD’s Steve Buttry talk digital-first; now what’s been the largest print paper in the USA is taking the plunge. That’s newsy and symbolic of how fast things are now beginning to change.

In business, it’s a strong recognition — finally — that the print business will never come back and is in fact dwindling faster, and that audience and revenue growth is there to be had, but it’s almost entirely digital.

Gannett’s been testing many of the concepts in the USA re-do since 2006, when it first announced its Seven Desks initiative throughout the company (though, USA Today, as a division separate from the community dailies, always followed its own drumbeat). Crowdsourcing. Community engagement. Mobile. All catchwords used and unevenly implemented across the Gannett landscape.

For USA Today, it’s of course about execution now, but also about competition. My sense is that it will build out the topics it is most know for and best excels at: Sports, Travel, Health, Personal Finance, Personal Technology. In each of those “verticals,” though it will face fierce competition for top-of-mind recognition, and ad dollars. From ESPN to Engadget, there are many digital source that are better known to enthusiasts.

It’s uphill, but it will be a new adventure. Wonder what Al Neuharth is thinking today?

Bewkes, both with HBO and Time Inc plans, is on to something all savvy media execs should get. The customer wants the technology — and the platform of delivery — to be transparent. We want what we want, and we don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed along the way. One-number pricing, what I’ve called ”all-access pricing” across all platforms, depending on product, print, broadcast, cablecast, mobile and computer will be a winner with consumers — if the product itself is high-quality.

Of course, consumers will be able to buy a la carte as well. For those loyal and habituated to the brand, though, all-access will make the most sense.

The FT is offering all-access pricing, and expect the New York Times to offer it when it launches metering next year as well. Big question for the Wall Street Journal — and Dow Jones: Will it drop its per platform charges (now separate for iPad and mobile) and allow a single (and higher) rate for all-access? I’m betting yes.

“It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

If you’re among the majority reading this that has never bought one of my books in a bookstore, not much will change. But I thought I’d share with you this fork in the road. Thanks for reading, in whatever form you choose”.

Godin talks about his largely positive relationship with the book industry, while noting that “the architecture of [the] industry is fundamentally broken.”

Well, worth a read by journalists and those that pay them, as we face fundamental questions like how much do journalists need publishers, and how much do publishers need journalists?

In the old days, publishers were a taken-for-granted necessity. Of course, publishers owned the presses, and the presses printed journalism. Or the station owners held the station licenses and the technology needed to create programs. Now the Internet is the press and the station and so much else, a pipeline of universal and always-on distribution. Many obstacles still loom, like getting readers and viewers to know your stuff is out there on the web, yet new writers and groups of journalists are finding ways to get to audiences.

For publishers, outsourcing — to Demand Media for niche content, to bloggers for local content, to India for copyediting — is increasingly a way to cut costs while increasing the amount of content under their brands.

Make no mistake: Big news brands — like big book publishers — still have many advantages, but in a Facebook-sharing, Twitter-spread world, direct-to-consumer sales of book, and journalism, offers new promise.

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