2. Didn’t CNN’s coverage of the Iowa Caucuses illustrate our screens future? John King has been the King of the Screens, and we can remember when his magic-touch screen seemed wildly innovative. Now in the touch-screen era, it was all screens all night — save Wolf Blitzer’s classic utterance of “OMG” in seeing Romney go up by a single vote — and CNN newbie Erin Burnett brought the right slapstick spirit to the uncertain screencraft. She whooshed one image off one screen on to the next one, sometimes successfully. CNN’s use of data, even as limited as it was for this election, showed how much we’ve moved beyond the world of still print infographics. The marriage of analytics and screens from tablets to livingroom monitors is forever changing how we take in information.

3. If AOL crumbles in one direction or another, what’s the future for smart cookie Arianna Huffington, who has parlayed personality and business model into an enviable perch in American journalism? Who might pick up HuffPo, one of the easiest-to-define business lines in journalism? How much will its relatively low rate of ad return (“The Newsonomics of ARPU” deter buyers? With the emergence of a broad international strategy (10 new editions) – “We’re now re-expanding back into a list of countries”, said CEO Tim Armstrong Tuesday – it becomes a more interesting play.

4. With Alibaba hot on the Yahoo tail, how much should we wonder about the future of big aggregators stocking up on a professional journalists? AJR estimated that Yahoo has hired about 200 journalists and AOL 250 (not counting the Patchers). Those hundreds have produced some pretty good journalism, particularly with sports scoops, and have proven that the term “as first reported by Yahoo,” isn’t a joke. The question of Chinese ownership is a knotty one (interesting Fortune take on American hypocrisy, here), but we have to ask questions about how free a journalistic corps would be under Jack Ma leadership. It might be well and good to uncover U.S. football corruption, and that’s a growth sport itself, but what about wider public policy coverage? For AOL journalists, the questions are even gauzier. With AOL’s deepening financial questions and investor pressure to cut back on non-profit-producing business lines, how long will there jobs be maintained, under current or potential new management/ownership?

5. Won’t be 2012 be the age of All-Access perfecting? Time Inc is among those getting its tablet act together well, with Time Magazine a fairly slick tablet app. In December, the company made a foray at convincing print subscribers that connecting the print sub with digital access is a good idea. The sign-on process is fairly straightforward, and seems to hold session to session, unlike some others. Yet, subscribing to more than one Time Inc. product — Time Magazine and Sunset, for instance — has to be done twice. Expect that kind of obstacle to be eliminated going forward. All-Access will be real all access, made easier for consumers. And All-Access is even trickling down very local as the Monterey (Ca.) County Weekly heralds its all-access availability through public radio sponsorship. Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

6. How could a single person be empowered to send a message on behalf of the New York Times to eight million people? The Times’ your subscription-is-ending embarrassment email showed the company at its worst in detecting and handling a crisis. My larger question is how, in any scenario, a single person has the unchecked power to send a message to eight million people on behalf of a big brand? The culture of checking and doublechecking (yes, the sorry Judith Miller tragedy aside) is so deeply ingrained in Times’ DNA. Why isn’t it part of the wider culture, especially in the one-click age?

7. What’s more local than language? The Times profiled Wordnik Sunday. It’s an innovative modern language company making the most of digital technology to surface new and real meaning of our living language in this fast-changing age. Noted in the story is that the Times and News Corp’s Smart Money are using Wordnik for glossaries? As local media look for ways to really be more local, knowing and presenting more about place is essential. So what about using something like Wordnik to create local language guides? It’s a small idea, perhaps, but one showing how even local media need to make more use of digital tools if they are to make future claims of relevance to local audiences.

8.Hasn’t Gail Collins turned out to be a just-right-for-the-times replacement for Frank Rich? Rich’s rich prose and panoramic view often left us breathless in its sweep, and well deserved a Pulitzer. Yet Collins — a New Yorker who recently pointed out that “John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block” – has brought a Hee-Haw sensibility perfectly suited to the Wonderlandia of the Republican primary scene.

9. With a call-out to Ken Kesey, isn’t 2012 the year when you’re either on the cloud … of off it?

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.

News quiz: Which company can claim the largest journalistic workforce in the world?

As you ponder the globe’s premier news organizations — from the Times, the Journal, the Post, and the Guardian, to the BBCs, NBCs, ABCs, and NPRs, to the Bloombergs, AFPs, and APs — you’re getting closer to the right answer.

It’s Reuters, with a stable of more than 2,900 journalists at last count, and still growing. That’s right: No single company now tops 3,000 journalists, though AP, at 2,300 — and Japan’s Yomiuri — are closer to Reuters’ total. Most of the other companies are closer to a third to a half of Reuters’ size.

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: First Stop, Chicago and Tribune”), and by the rapidly moving effort to make over Reuters News itself.

That U.S. initiative, where it fancies itself an insurgent, is ironic, given how big a company of which it’s part. Thomson Reuters took in $13.1 billion last year, only a one percent gain, but showing $1.4 billion in profit. More than 95 percent of that revenue comes from financial, business, and legal clients, who pay top dollar for industry news and analysis that feeds their decision-making. So, with Reuters Media less than 3 percent of TR’s revenue (at $324 million in 2010), the news operation’s own profit pressure is lessened. Unlike The New York Times, for instance, for which the new digital circulation play is practically a bet-the-company move, Reuters Media has the running room to get it right, to innovate with products and to invest in new markets.

Steve Adler, a veteran of BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal and American Lawyer, as well as Reuters itself (which he joined in January 2010 as senior vice president and editorial director of the company’s Professional Division), is the first U.S.-based editor-in-chief of Reuters News, taking on that job in February. In rat-a-tat-tat fashion, he’s made a slew of high-level appointments. Those choices tell us a lot about the new direction of Reuters and how it is likely to become much more of a well known brand, both within the trade and in the greater business/consumer reader world.

I talked with Adler this week to get a greater insight into the changing world of Reuters Media. In his mandate and in his vision, we can see powerful newsonomics in motion, that complex play of money and journalism that is reshaping what is written and what’s read.

Adler’s big push is to add stories of context and deeper understanding to its century-old craft of cranking out “fast, accurate, and fair” pieces. “The business itself drives us to do both,” he told me. “It’s also a move against commodification. You want to write the smartest story on the earnings report.”

He’s clear, though, that the move is huge one for a company whose very DNA is in those fast pieces. Reuters’ 2009 acquisition of Breakingviews, commentary on business news, was an early indication of doing both. The shift Adler and team are leading, though, is remodeling the news organization, top to bottom, not just adding on a new window here or there.

While Reuters.com still features vestigial “update 1″ and “update 2″ stories, in recent months it’s begun to showcase in-depth pieces, ranging from “The Hunt for Mladic” to major academic disclosure questions, indications of the intended balance.

His news exec appointments reinforce the notion that Reuters News is intending to step out from its get-it-first, get-it-fast, say-it-in-less-than-900-words legacy. Among those appointments:

• Paul Ingrassia, a former president of Dow Jones Newswires, is the new deputy editor-in-chief, responsible for news content creation;
• Jim Impoco, ex of the New York Times, Conde Nast, Fortune and more, is now executive editor;
• Reginald Chua, former editor-in-chief of The South China Morning Post, is now the data editor, emphasizing the increased emphasis in connecting Thomson Reuters’ deep data assets to its journalism;
• Jim Gaines, former Time Inc. magazine editor, will focus on ethics, standards and innovation;
• Harold Evans, legendary Sunday Times editor, joins as editor-at-large, making a big splash this week in his Henry Kissinger/Jon Huntsman, China-oriented event, which Huntsman chose to announce his presidential run;
• Stuart Karle, former general counsel to The Wall Street Journal, has become the chief operating officer, responsible for all support functions for news;
• Mike Williams, former Page One editor of the Wall Street Journal, is now global enterprise editor;
• Jim Ledbetter, ex of Slate’s the Big Money, CNN Money, and the Industry Standard, has just become op-ed editor, moving from the Reuters.com editorship that he took on last year.

And in the digital operation:

• Chrystia Freeland, ex of the FT, is now editor, Thomson Reuters Digital, focused on showcasing content across the company’s digital news platforms globally;
• Ken Li, a former FT staffer who returned to Reuters last year, moves up to online global editor of Reuters.com, from editor of tech and media. Ryan McCarthy, ex of HuffPo as business editor, becomes Li’s deputy.

That’s just the top of it, as reorganization starts to impact many reporting teams. (Good coverage of the Reuters news changes at TalkingBizNews.com.) Even in an age of much high-talent hiring and raiding, it’s a most impressive list, and represents the diverse lineage that Adler intends to draw on to create the new Reuters.

One big key to Reuters’ news future: the United States. It’s admittedly weak here, in number of clients, in consumer share of mind, and in revenue. In that weakness, we see Reuters’ paradox — why isn’t the world’s largest news organization the clear news leader? — displayed.

Reuters has an American problem. Reuters has an American opportunity.

“We don’t want to be seen as a foreign posting of a global operation,” says Adler. “We want to be more global by being stronger in the U.S.” While global competitors talk about Brazil, Asia, or the Middle East as top growth markets, Reuters says its number one target market news market is the U.S.

That means that the its bullseye is squarely on AP, whose own 2010 revenues were $630 million, a seven percent decline. Reuters America is aimed at breaking apart AP’s historical relationship — a must-have relationship — with U.S. newspapers.

The December 2010 Tribune deal broke that ice, as Tribune cut its AP spending by half, and bought Reuters services. Chris Ahearn, who as president of Reuters Media runs its online business, says Reuters America now has more than a dozen U.S. daily or weekly newspaper clients, with additional tests in the field. Reuters presents itself as the unbundled alternative to the traditional all-you-can-eat wire, as it offers more discrete packages in attempting to take market share from AP. In its unbundling, it’s not alone. Change agent John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, has also been peeling back his wire buys, signing a business news deal with TheStreet.com, and is in the midst of signing similar deals in other topical areas (“The Newsonomics of the New News Cost Pyramid.”)

Reuters has added some reporting resources in the U.S., but won’t specify how much. My sense is that the new staff commitment has been minimal and still pales against AP — but that it will grow under Adler. The company has made a point of adding third-party content modules, the latest from the 52-member-strong Investigative News Network (see “INN’s First Big Deal: The Reuters Test“); that’s a smart, cheaper way to offer more content at less cost, a wire twist in the curation era.

Competition is all around, as other companies morph to meet similar challenges. There’s Bloomberg, whose hot breath Reuters can feel as the company aims to eat some of TR’s core business, with the Financial Times and News Corp’s Dow Jones taking more targeted aim, and The Economist, the Times, and AP all competing for differing parts of the business. In each of its verticals, it’s got specific competition, as well. In that big consumer news war, the competition is all the English-language global news competitors, those Digital Dozen companies that only get stronger each year compared to more regionally focused companies. Global news dominance — a new quest sometimes cited — can’t be achieved if it remains a middle-of-the-mind U.S. brand.

To win that consumer battle, Reuters must wrestle with this fundamental question: Who is the reader?

Reuters veterans will tell you the company can be so focused on the B2B market, that it’s hard to make big progress in the B2C market. It’s training to be sure — and Gaines’ appointment there signals strong re-training intent. It’s also culture, and that’s tougher to change.

Journalists at Reuters are now being called upon to balance, and balance differently. There’s the balance between being first, with breaking news — still a core value, especially for key markets served — and the kind of thoughtful, context-rich analysis Adler’s new team is emphasizing. There’s also the balance of serving core professional markets, from by-the-second financial ones to the wider corporate ones, looking for news edges of all kinds, and the broader consumer markets.

Reuters would like to be a big, U.S.-recognized news brand, but it wants to emphasize serving professionals’ news reading habits. That’s a niche within a consumer niche, increasingly cloudy as the business and leisure reading worlds merge, in time and device.

All that balancing and nuance is at least a double challenge. It’s the internal challenge Adler’s execs face in aiming to transform the newsroom. It’s an external challenge, a branding challenge. It’s been tough for Reuters — since its early-web forays into the U.S. in the mid-’90s — to (re-)present itself clearly to its publics. It clearly has the assets of time and money on its side, as it tries to get those balances right, and Adler is clear in noting that’s been a big help in recruiting. Though its challenges are clear, for editors and writers, Reuters seems like a better long-term bet than numerous other news companies.

Don’t expect Reuters to be in the thick of the paid content debate. The company has launched a number of tablet and smartphone products, but Adler is quick to note that getting consumers to pay for digital content is a minor priority; the big payoff for TR is goosing that enterprise business. For a company that grew revenues only one percentage point in 2010, if revitalized news could push sales up just another percentage point overall, that would mean another mean another $130 million annually. Like Bloomberg, it can play a game of takeaway compared to pure play consumer news companies gasping for revenue.

So it’s a game of takeaway and breaking through news noise and reader habit, especially in the U.S.

How will we know how much Reuters is making U.S. headway? Over the next year, and in the run-up to the election, let’s see how much we hear, or see quoted, “as reported by Reuters” or links to Reuters.com. Let’s see how many Twitter links point back to Reuters stories. Let’s see how often we hear Reuters reporters interviewed on NPR or Marketplace. Let’s see how often the Reuters banner appears in the background when cable news brings on subject experts. All those — as much as unique visitor and pageview counts — will tell us how much venerable Reuters is really penetrating American culture.

Fifteen years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education put up its first paywall. Since then, the wall’s developed lots of cracks — most of them intentional ones, as the U.S.’ most trusted voice on university and college coverage evolves its digital offerings, who it charges, and how it charges. For all the change it’s seen in those 15 years, what’s been tried seems like prologue as the company moves into the iPad and mobile age — and as it tries to figure out how best to drive up revenue in the confusing push-pull of the digital world.

“It’s like the ESPN model,” says editor Jeff Selingo. “We connect the content to what people are actually willing to pay for.” Selingo came to the Chronicle 14 years ago, starting as a reporter, and now oversees an editorial staff of 75. He knows the daily newspaper world, having worked at two before moving into the world of education journalism.

The Chronicle’s approach, while distinctive, isn’t unique. Talk to execs at the Financial Times, Consumer Reports, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, or ESPN, and you hear the fruits of experience. They talk nuance and flexibility, not all-or-nothing paywalls.

How useful is the Chronicle’s experience to daily newspapers? Yes, the privately owned, 45-year-old Chronicle is something quite different, a high-end trade publication. (Though I do like newspaperman Pete Hamill’s description of the news business as “permanent grad school,” in his recent, highly recommended Fresh Air interview).

The trade, of course, is higher education. These are discerning readers, about half administrators and half faculty, who can be hard to please. As a must-read publication, with little direct competition (although seven-year-old online-only Inside Higher Ed is making a play for its audience and ads), the Chronicle has a market position many dailies would envy. Still a must-use for academic recruitment, from which it derives lots of ad revenue, it depends on circulation dollars for only about 20 percent of its overall income.

That said, it faces the same issues as everyone else in the print business. Three years ago, it had a circulation of more than 76,000, with 71,135 print and 5,157 digital subs. Its most recent count shows 66,000 total subscribers, but 16,020 of those are digital subs. (The Chronicle doesn’t do single-copy sales, but has expanded its site license program to colleges — so some of the “lost” subscribers now get delivery through their institution, but are uncounted.)

The Chronicle, too, is struggling with the increasingly familiar economics of transition, and with the irony is front of everyone in the business: It is reaching more readers than ever, courtesy of the web, but its business is struggling to grow.

So while trade publishing can differ from general news, the questions of how to make that digital transition, how to find workable hybrid models, and what kind of content to make free are fairly similar. The Chronicle has faced many of the same questions on pricing and access that newspapers are now knee-high into. Therein lie most of the lessons to be learned and applied in mid-2011.

It’s not a matter simply of to charge or not to charge, of allowing access to all proprietary (usually local) content or none of it. Or of setting the meter, and leaving it at a 20- or 25-article-per month level. Some of the early tests of paid digital access are stuck in a rut, as conservative experiments have retained large audiences but resulted in too little new revenue to be meaningful. The Chronicle’s nuances give publishers some new tools as some move on to Stage 2, and others are about to begin tests.

In talking with Selingo, who served on a recent ASNE panel I moderated on pay plans, I’ve picked out six key lessons from the Chronicle’s experience, collectively suggesting the newsonomics of the old dipsy-doo.

Why dipsy-doo? It’s a delightfully old-fashioned term, taking us back when people did what they could do to sell stuff. A dipsy-doo is a kind of twist, a zigzag take on getting something done. Starbucks doesn’t sell cooked coffee beans and Coke doesn’t sell brown, sugar water. They sell comfort, a piece of the good life, a good place to be.

News companies have always taken their selling too literally. They thought they were selling news, when in fact they’re selling currency, shopping deals, and packaged convenience. So, in this wannabe golden age of new digital content sales, we need to look for lots of examples of how and what newsy companies are selling. It’s not simply a matter of selling the stuff (staff-written local content) that cost you the most to produce; you sell the stuff for which people are most likely to pay you.

So, with that in mind, six learnings, down that road, from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Check out the Chronicle’s subscription page and you see two choices. One’s a print subscription ($82.50/year) and one’s a “digital” subscription ($72.50/year). Ah, the web’s cheaper than print, you say. Well, no. The digital sub is actually a replica e-edition, complete with the same advertising as the weekly print edition. You get online access to the Chronicle’s impressive site, with either sub. You have to take either the e-edition or the paper one to get the access, though.

You can see the same kind of print/digital hybrid thinking/pricing in The New York Times’ recent digital access pay scheme. By telling readers to pay up for digital access, the Times is leading its most loyal online customers back — the old dipsy-doo — to print. Readers have quickly figured out it’s better to order some print edition and get “included” digital access than to just pay for digital access. Lead customers one way — and then do a quick turn on them.

The Chronicle, with less competition than the Times, doesn’t even feel the need to offer “online-only” subs, though it will begin offering iPad-only subs through Apple’s App Store in June, testing that new market; it has already seen 14,000 downloads of its free app.

Selingo says that deciding what will premium (paid) and what free is more art than science. “We’re deciding on a day-to-day basis what’s distinctive.” The distinctive — more than mundane work that readers are unlikely to find elsewhere — may include any kind of story, investigative piece, or data. There is a lot of free content — 40 percent of the site, estimates the editor.

The Chronicle’s front-and-center Facts and Figures section offers lots of in-depth databases (“What Professors Make,” “Who Are the Undergraduates”) and these spur lots of readership. “The power is in data,” says Selingo. “The story [often the lead-in, sum-up] is the promotional piece.” That’s a lesson we’ve heard often from Everyblock to the Sacramento Bee to Dallas’ Pegasus News to California Watch (“The newsonomics of a single, investigative story,“), but one too little implemented at dailies.

“The differentiating factor is how we visualize, how we present,” says Selingo, giving credit to Ron Coddington, a veteran of USA Today and Knight Ridder Tribune, who now serves as the Chronicle’s assistant managing editor for visuals.

It’s not just what you put where, but what you make free when. Selingo says the Chronicle will sometimes put up a big data-impressive project, making it free for a week or two, knowing that its utility will entice readers to come back over time and read it. If they come back, and it’s now premium (or paid), then they’re more likely to pay up. Conversely, some content may be paid at the outset and then become free. The bigger notion: Get readers to use — and come to rely — on the site. Usefulness precedes ability to pay. Sampling is key.

Even as it has tested, twisted, and turned its techniques, Selingo believes that a lot more nuance should be tried. He talks about pricing “pieces of content” — packages here and there, some data products, maybe niche internationally oriented modules. The challenges there: deciding what to package, how to package it and how to price it — and doing that without a major investment in time or staff. This is the mastery of the medium- and long-tail to come, probably abetted by dynamic technologies. Why not, I wonder, let readers make their own packages, and enable algorithms to price them?

The Chronicle of Higher Education, courtesy of the Internet, has an impressive funnel to work, like every other good news company. With Google, Facebook, and the rest of the relationship web feeding news sites traffic at an incomprehensible (literally) pace, it’s a matter of learning how to work that funnel on traffic. At the top end: 1.7 million monthly unique and 14.3 million page views that the Chronicle gets, according to Selingo. At the bottom end: those 66,000 subscribers.

On the one hand, that seems like an awfully small number, not quite four percent. On the other, it represents the huge opportunity of free web access, providing a constant stream of would-be customers — all monetizable to some degree by advertising, and a tiny percentage of whom who will become core paying customers.

It’s no coincidence that The New York Times’ math is similar: Get three percent of its monthly uniques to pay for digital access, one way or another, and the Times would get as many as 900,000 new subscribers.

It’s the new new math — more students needed.

Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers.

You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, so why shouldn’t it fit you?

If newspapers were in the restaurant business, they’d be out of business quite quickly. That’s not much of a menu. There’s practically no à la carte, other than single copy, which is again the whole thing, but just once. It’s prix fixe, with early-bird specials for introductory signups.

That longstanding (with the prices going up as the product largely declines) menu is about to change. We’re moving — maybe smoothly, but my guess is fitfully, just like the newspaper industry does everything else — to a cafeteria approach. It’s a digital cafeteria, of course, making use of the infinite flexibility of digital production and marketing.

In early 2011, we see the first moves into supplying the new news and information cafeteria. These have been largely propelled by the Kindle (“The Newsonomics of Kindle Singles“), but soon we’ll see a cascade of iPad products as well, resplendent with links, photos, and videos that the Kindle products largely lack.

Though we’ve seen new works trickle into the marketplace so far, I’ve heard of a number more in the pipeline. They will redefine once again the nature of digital journalism and, I strongly believe, of pay models overall. While we focus on the huge question of the day — will digital news subscriptions succeed or fail as a business model? — my guess is that by 2015, more than 20 percent of news companies’ “digital circulation” income will derive from one-off products. We’re talking tens, and then hundreds, of millions of dollars. It’s time to start thinking about the newsonomics of this digital cafeteria, the obstacles to its grand opening and how they’ll be surmounted.

The early action has been on the Kindle, mostly through a compilation approach, repurposing content with some added narrative. The New York Times, which assembled its WikiLeaks coverage into ebook form, selling thousands, got the Times thinking and it’s now “actively exploring” more ebook projects, says the Times’ Jim Schachter. Expect more one-offs from the Times, especially as it figures out how to make the Kindle model workable for the iPad (more on that below).

As ProPublica has published three ebooks, it’s learning how to anticipate what makes a distinct ebook product — and increasingly thinks earlier about e-book potentials as it churns out high-quality investigative work. Its latest stats: 6,000 copies sold of its 99-cent-a-copy “Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story,” which as ProPublica’s Dick Tofel rightly notes, “in book terms, 6,000 copies is pretty good.” Two other projects, both made free due to Amazon’s evolving if-free-on-the-web-free-as-an-eBook policy, have generated impressive downloads, 30,000 in total.

Newsweek and Time are among others getting into the business as well, as The Cutline’s Joe Pompeo points out in his good ebook overview.

While ebooks are the early rage, other early innovators are reviving the art of that old newspaper staple, the special section, reinvented and spiffed up for the glory of the iPad.

The Austrian Press Association, or APA — that country’s AP — is known as a leading wire service innovator worldwide, supporting its 16 daily newspaper clients with advanced technologies and products, as it moves away from its dependence on the old content feed business. So it’s not surprising that APA is in early in figuring out new mobile-friendly journalistic products.

Its first one is an eye-opener. Opera Ball 2011 captures, in full interactive and video detail the social event of the Vienna social season. APA spent about 10,000 euro ($14,400) to produce its Opera Ball “special,” says APA editor-in-chief Michael Lang. It’s a kind of demo project of how new technologies can alter the way we produce and consume journalism. Nineteen videos take readers (watchers, listeners?) behind the scenes, through such useful topics as to how the event is catered, where to find the sausage stands around the opera house, and how to get in (and out) of a tuxedo. Interactive elements include floorplans, area maps, menus and — vitally — dancing classes, as Lang notes, “Viennese waltz left and right)”.

Seven Austrian newspaper companies used the initial product, four on their new iPad products (the iPad launched in Austria last summer; maybe as many as 30,000 have been sold) and three on their websites. With that first prototype done, APA’s cracked a new code and is planning roughly monthly, HTML5-based tablet specials to be offered to members, who will largely sell their own advertising.

Among the topics: sports events (especially skiing in Austria), leisure, travel, health, and other social events. In other words: the range of what newspapers traditionally cover in feature sections, but with the content and presentation thought out with a magazine approach. That’s why iPad specials or singles should be big, whether produced by newspaper or magazine companies. Some American publishers are already thinking about home and garden, sports commemoratives, personal finance, and travel.

Which brings us back to the edge here. What will the newsonomics of this new category of products look like, and how will it get jumpstarted? Let’s look at four factors, to start:

Content: Yes, these are topics that newspapers and magazines cover. We’re not talking about single articles though, but packages assembled with key target readers — by interest, of course, but also by age, gender, relative affluence, and more — in clear mind. For local publishers, their opportunity is mainly around local content knowledge, whether that’s the key sports teams, knowledge of the local wedding industry, or what makes home and garden different in Miami than Montreal.

While today we see only nascent activity in the new cafeteria, soon the app stores will be full of the stuff, and like digital information content overall, only the best will be paid for by readers and create new winning franchises.

Form and format: At this point, we’re all fumbling for words. An “ebook” defines these new digital products by their old world analogs, much as e-newspapers did in the ’90s (and e-editions struggle to do today). Yes, there are words, and there will increasingly be pictures, data, video, and touchscreen interactivity only now being invented. So it’s long-form narrative, it’s more-than-bits-and-bites journalism, and even “manifestos,” as The Domino Project’s Seth Godin calls his revolutionize-the-book industry imprint products. Godin’s Amazon-powered project is a big one to watch, bearing lots of model-busting and model-making meaning for the news industry (see my companion piece, laying those out in “Six Lessons for News Publishers from Seth Godin“). Let’s toss in the innovation of The Atavist, which David Carr rightly described as breakthrough thinking, as three guys in Brooklyn reinvent paid “long-form journalism” in mobile reading form.

One reason we see the Kindle format ascendant first: the company defined the new new here, when it announced Kindle Singles way back last October, telling us that the tyranny of package definitions — “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length” — no longer held in the modern age. We don’t yet have “iPad singles”, though publishers have been selling single magazine issues, including specials from American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer and Star. Early on, it saw the potential, creating three custom-to-the-tablet products around fitness and health.

Another factor in format: cost. ProPublica’s Dick Tofel says it might take an “hour or so” to create an ebook given the easy repurposing technology. iPad single development, well done, will be costlier, but as in APA’s example, doable and scalable.

Dealing with Amazon’s and Apple’s policies: Lots of nuance here, but increasingly publishers will find ways to create new works (maybe derivative works in the old copyright sense) that take stuff that was available free on the web, add to it, segment it, and package it in ways that distinguish from repurposed web stuff. That should satisfy paying readers — most importantly — and Amazon and Apple, as they eagerly take their 30 cents of every dollar.

Sponsorship will drive revenue here as much as reader payment: Seth Godin’s second Domino book just picked up GE as a sponsor — and is making the book free to readers on April 20. Sponsors got in early on the iPad, propelling much unbudgeted (!) revenue for news companies in 2010. Big brand advertisers like associating with hot, new — and whole — products. It’s an identity thing, and should have legs as a business model. Importantly, here, two legs of revenue: reader and advertiser.

All of this is just the next mind-turning stage of the digital news revolution. Disaggregation by portals and search combines. Re-aggregation of “whole” products, courtesy of Amazon and Apple. And, then, disaggregation, again, segmenting a wide range of products — first dozens, then hundreds — for lots of audiences. One size won’t fit all.

It forces us to reconsider: What’s journalism? What’s a book? How much does it matter? Journalism, as expressed in newspaper, magazine and book form is jumping the old boundaries, in search of new territories and hungry readers, perhaps hungry and willing to pay for great, useful and timely-to-them content.

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.

A logical position: We’re the new free, anti-Murdoch alternative! At at a time when News Corp, the New York Times and dozens of others U.S. newspapers are “going paid,” about to erect porous (metered) and solid pay walls, taking a free position can be clear to mass audiences confused by what wall they may run into here or there. Imagine the new AOL/HuffPo ad soon after the New York Times goes metered — best in the Times itself:

Come Visit Us

Anywhere

Anytime

FOR FREE

That kind of position may fit well with Tim Armstrong’s mantras and manifestoes. If the former head of Google advertising really believes he can more efficiently monetize digital content than his various competitors, then he bets the company on it. Forget the two legs of revenue — advertising and circulation — that the old guys want, we’ll just focus on the fastest growing kind of advertising in the country and the world, digital, and do it better than anyone else. He’s got a major issue with that, of course, pointed out by many observers. The new independent AOL is not (yet) climbing the digital ad mountain quickly enough. In fact, its last report showed continuing year-over-year declines.

Execution must match up with strategy, and now given the HuffPo purchase for $315 million, sooner than later. One key question there: where exactly is AOL’s mobile push? Its apps are anemic, still focused on instant messaging, and so far lacking for Patch, this as the location-aware mobile marketing revolution takes flight.

Advertising execution may be key, and today Tim Armstrong put a new face on his brand. In fact, given the announcement that Arianna will head editorial operations overall, we’re unclear how much the going-forward brand is in fact AOL or HuffPo, or some nested version of the two, a nesting that would probably only confuse the marketplace and readers more.

Make no mistake. Armstrong needed to put a face on the brand, for AOL, overall, has been faceless. Sure, Armstrong is well-known among media people, but not more widely. AOL, like Yahoo, suffers from portalitis,a big grab-bag of topics and sites that don’t have a common consumer promise. (It’s no accident that both showed revenue drops, as digital advertising is going gangbusters again in the recovery.) With Egypt exploding over the last couple of weeks, it was CNN, Al Jazeera, the Times, the BBC and the Guardian that people turned to. No one said, I’ve got to see what AOL has out of Cairo.

Ah, but what kind of new face will AOL/HuffPost’s be?

It could be, simply, the anti-Murdoch. Sure, The Daily is “centrist,” whatever that means in the world of 2011, but the right-leaning proclivities of Murdoch Media are clear. MSNBC has tiptoed into the “anti” position, leaning forward gingerly, but then wrapping itself in knots over small campaign contributions. Arianna could simply embrace the left end of that spectrum, porting over her passion and partisanship, the very elements that have defined her Post, the fastest growing news site on the web (“The Newsonomics of HuffPo’s Pinball Wizardry“. In fact, if she doesn’t bring along what got her to where she is, then what exactly is AOL buying and where will her core audience go?

Would Tim go for it? Yes, if it makes money, as we saw clearly in the leaked AOL Master Plan. For Armstrong, it’s simply about the efficiency of the markets, bringing state-of-the-art digital manufacturing techniques to the old standbys of editorial and advertising. He needs lots of content — some from highly paid names and lots more from good-enough user gen — and must get his machine (better SEO, more pageviews per story, lots more lucrative video) tuned before he runs out of money. Just one suggestion for a short-term moneymakers: pay-per-view web video of Arianna’s first meetings with Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington and Engagdet’s Joshua Topulsky. Bonus WWE prices if she talks to them together.

In writing about HTML5 and apps last week, one source summed up one of the virtues of HTML5. “There’s no latency,” he said. That post overall was one of the more technical I’ve done, and I appreciated AdAge’s Matt Creamer noting it as “dense, but clear.” As a non-techie, it made my head hurt to think it through, but it probably jump-started some new neural networks for me.

I was reminded of the connections between these astounding technological developments and our civilian lives this weekend. After much agonizing research, I had finally put together an integrated contemporary audio and video system last month. And then I hired an hourly “technology integrator” (!) to make sure Roku, Samsung Blu-Ray, Sonos, Comcast and Harman Kardon all played well together. After a few glitches, success.

Now I’m encountering how much my expectations for instantaneity — no latency — have grown, as I think all of ours have. I noticed that Pandora still performs flawlessly. Pick out a new Sara Watkins station, and it helpfully asks, would you like to play it now? Imagine, even 10 years ago, being able to pick out essentially a set of music, make a mix or the like, and have it it done in 20 seconds, with no extra work — or payment — on my part. Yet, that’s now my expectation, though I hope to retain the wondered appreciation of the change. Sonos, its multiple digital choices able to be turned on and off, room by room, is an amazement.

I also starting playing with Netflix, via Roku, itself a marvel of almost-instant Internet connectivity, as long it has the plug-ins publicly available, or in my evolving understanding, privately, as in YouTube. Sure enough, Netflix, via Roku, showed me what was instantly available from my pre-selected queue. The process of picking out new films that might be available by streaming is more easily done online rather on TV (Google TV 8?, maybe), if you want to see what critics have to say, rather than pick films based on simple on-TV blurbs. So I picked a couple, added them to our queue, and turned back to Netflix via Roku. No new films available in my streaming queue.

I was surprised. I expected instaneity, and didn’t get it. I can’t imagine how many refreshes of systems are required to get my laptop picks back onto the TV, and my guess is that they were available later in the evening.

Then there’s Xfinity, Comcast’s new entry into the entertainment everywhere, anywhere sweepstakes. I’m still confused about what I’m getting for my 100 bucks a month spent on cable. I’ve been able to log in to Comcast on my laptop, nice, and see some of what’s available via cable. It’s mind-boggling, though, that I can’t access Xfinity on my TV. Or is just me? Sure, Xfinity is meant to be watched on computers and, sure, Comcast provides On Demand selections for TV watching via cable. The consumer confusion is that none of the programming matches up and On Demand availability seems to come and go capriciously. I may need the new Hulu Plus — for another $7.99 a month — to actually get any of the NBC, ABC or Fox TV shows I may have missed or want to see again, and which I’ve already paid for via cable. So Xfinity, which seems to be an improvement, comes across as a reminder of how fragmented availability is. It’s not instantly available, and you seem to need a degree in technology integration yourself to figure out how to watch what when.

It’s all interim internet TV technology.

Internet TV is no longer in its infancy; it’s toddlin’. Yet our human capacity for change, and our expectation of it, may always be a step ahead. As consumers, we expect all these connections to be made, and yesterday. Given the pace of tech change, that’s not totally unreasonable. For those producing content — music, video or news — though, it’s a big headache. The Daily’s dazzling debut last week reinforces that notion, setting a new visual standard for tablet news.

Yesterday’s solution simply is like yesterday’s news: Old, and in the way.