What’s your signature content?

Quick: If somebody buttonholed you in an elevator, a school play, or a bar, and said, “Why should I pay you for that?” — what do you tell them?

Each passing week, it seems we’re further into the age of signature content. That only makes sense: If the death of distance is now old news, if everything is available everywhere at the touch of button or the swipe of a finger, then what makes any news or entertainment brand stand out amid this plague of plenty?

Closed systems — from three or four TV networks to less than a dozen big movie studios to a half-dozen major magazine publishers to geographically dominant newspapers — made signature content less important. Sure, big shows and big names have always driven media to some extent, but now, media without big names or big shows are going to get lost in the ether. Take Hulu’s announcement last week about Hulu Originals. You do have to wonder if Hulu’s fictional 13-episode “Battleground,” about a dysfunctional political campaign, will be bested by the Republican reality show in progress when the show debuts next month. Hulu is also bringing a Morgan Spurlock series for a second run, and probably will feature one other new program. The Hulu announcement joins Netflix’s own foray into signature content. Three years ago, would the thought of Netflix signing up Little Steven to do an original comedy series have crossed anyone’s imagination?

Hulu and Netflix both need to distinguish themselves in the market — not only from each other, but from Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner, among others. They need to buy protection as supposed masses consider cutting the cord on packaged services, Roku-ing and Apple-enabling Internet video onto their living-room screens. In movies and TV, we’re quickly morphing from a world of news and entertainment anywhere — get all of these things, somewhat haphazardly (Comcast Xfinity, for instance) on all of our devices — to one in which consumers ask, “What special do you have for me, in addition to my all access? Yes, All-Access, the cool feature of 2011, will quickly graduate from a wow to an expectation.

Why as consumers should we pay $7.99 (down from an initial $9.99) to Hulu Plus, when the same stuff (kinda sorta) is available through Boxee, or Apple TV, or Netflix, if I can find it? Why am I paying $7.99 a month (apparently the magic price of the moment) to Netflix for a catalog of films that is both voluminous and too often lacking what I want? Consumers are going to be asking that question a lot more.

Publishers, distributors, aggregators, and networks all want more money, and they’ve seen — courtesy of tablets and All-Access — that consumers are now more ready to pay for digital content than ever before.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars.

News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Let’s be clear. Paid media is paid media, and the original-programming pushes of the video companies have great meaning for news and magazine companies, global to local. For them, the calculus is similar. News and magazine brands can launch new products, though that’s out-of-their-DNA-tough for many. So they’ve focused primarily on sub-brands, many of which are people. These are the faces of news and magazines; many of these have become hot commodities over the last several years (“The Newsonomics of Journalistic Star Power“) as companies try to distinguish themselves — and give readers and viewers a reason to pick them out of the crowd.

How, though, can media companies afford to pay a premium for branded, promotable talent, talent that may open consumers’ pocketbooks? That’s easy: spend less on other content. So we’ve got the rise of user-generated content, obtainable free or cheap, and all kinds of new syndicate action from Demand Media to startup Ebyline (and maybe NewsRight), all trying to make it cheap and easy to get more medium- and higher-quality content more cheaply. What’s old is new again — as a young features editor, I got regular visits from syndicate and wire salesman, ranging from high-quality to the Copley News Service, that sold its stuff by the pound.

Another prominent model no news or magazine company can afford to ignore: The Huffington Post. Back to the early days when Betsy Morgan first teamed up with Arianna, HuffPost has worked this evolving content pyramid. At the top, a few highly paid site faces, many opinionated faces (some paid, most not), and then low-cost aggregation, much of it AP, headlined with the site’s recognizable swagger.

Then, of course, there’s the old standby: staff cutting. We’ve seen lots of staff cutting. In fact, these days, while we see some announcements like Media General’s big Tampa cut, most of the bloodletting is less public, but no less real. If you need to pay more to stars, and ad revenues are still declining, staff cuts of less than premium content (and those that produce it) make economic sense (“The Newsonomics of the New News Cost Pyramid“). It’s the new news math.

These newsonomics of signature content are getting clearer. Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses — or $100 million a year — on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15-20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content.

Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10-20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.

Simply, Andy Forssell, Hulu’s SVP of content, explained the cost/benefit ratio to Variety: “…having an original scripted series that hasn’t been seen anywhere else yet is considered the best tool for standing out with either advertisers or viewers.”

As usual, we see the bifurcation of the bigger national brands — those with more audience to gain and more money to spend — and local news brands. While many local newspapers have cut to the bone, with too much of the tissue in the form of experienced, name-brand metro and sports columnists cajoled or drummed into “early retirement,” we see increased branding of stars at places like Time, The New York Times, Fox News, and ESPN. The sports network may be the classic business model of our age, and in its anchors and top analysts — many initially lured from daily newspapers — it has shown the way for many years now.

At the Times, consider business editor Larry Ingrassia’s build-up of business columnists, from veterans Gretchen Morgenson and Floyd Norris to new(er)bies Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Stelter, David Carr, Ron Lieber, and David Pogue. And the Times more recently picked up James Stewart from archrival Dow Jones.

At Fox News, Roger Ailes has cannily built the most successful cable news operation not on the interchangeable blondes that provide so much fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but on O’Reilly and Hannity.

At NBC, the news franchise is so built around Brian Williams that his well-received newsmagazine “Rock Center with Brian Williams” is synonymous with its host.

At Time Warner’s CNN and Time, we see the building of a worldly franchise on Fareed Zakaria’s clear-eyed, no-nonsense view of our times.

And then there’s the more local and regional press. Newspapers have long believed that it wasn’t any one or a half-dozen names that sold the paper. They’ve believed the news itself was the star, and the daily information report was the brand. That may be still be true of the Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a handful of other national/global news organizations — all of which have substantial, multi-hundred newsrooms that produce branded, unique products. It’s less true of regional and local dailies, many of which still present too much commoditized news in national, business, entertainment, and sports coverage, and have bid goodbye to many faces familiar to readers. Those that have retained familiar faces must do what they can to keep them; all need to recruiting more.

Then they may have a good answer to the question, in one form or another, consumers and advertisers will increasingly ask: What’s your signature content?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask most publishers or editors about games, and they’ll tell you their business isn’t about fun and games. It’s about the serious, semi-Constitutional role of informing the public.

Game dynamics may change that thinking.

When we think of games these days, our minds move to enraged birds or fortune-seeking farmers. We think of the little games now app’d onto our smartphones, a diversion, something trivial. But think of the playable game — the fun — as the hood ornament. The business of game dynamics — or gamification — is what happens under the hood.

Game dynamics isn’t about time-wasting. Au contraire: it’s about a seductive, powerful drawing-in of human habit. It’s about changing those habits, leading us to do new things (over and over again). This being America, those habits increasingly have a lot to do with selling stuff, with commerce. On the Internet, they increasingly help companies chase greater engagement with customers, be they buyers, readers, or both.

Silas Lyons is a pioneer among newspaper people in understanding the potential value of game dynamics to the news business. “It’s basic human psychology,” says Silas Lyons, editor of the Record Searchlight in Redding, Calif., VP of new media content and a co-chair of one of the Scripps’ task forces that pushed forward with the game dynamics idea. “We’re not trying to solve an audience problem — we’re trying to solve an engagement problem. The reader is being rewarded for consuming, sharing, commenting, and finding insight.”

Lyons explained the new notions to readers, in a column, entitled “Civilization comes to Redding.com.”

The goal here isn’t simply to build core customers. It’s to bring greater civility and perspective — what Lyons calls “insight” — to the site. Readers now can mark others’ comments as “insightful,” resulting, over time, in higher ranking of commenters the community seems to value. You gotta love it, at this time and place in America: Let’s play civilization.

The Redding Record Searchlight (circulation of 25,000 on Sunday, 22,500 daily, and more than a half million unique visitors monthly) is an E.W. Scripps newspaper located in northern California, about 200 miles north of San Francisco. It’s far from big media markets and a paper of record for its far-flung geography. In print, it’s long been a little center of civilization, a community center. Online, it hasn’t, like most newspaper websites. The new initiative, partnered with gamification pioneer Bunchball, is an effort to apply old values on the new medium.

Take a look at the two-week-old new features page on Redding.com. Readers are invited to check it out with an invitation at the top of the home page: “Redding.com now recognizes users who contribute to the community. Explore the new features“.

It is prize- and recognition-based. “Badges recognize you for being a valued member of our local news community”. They can earn points a number of ways, including viewing stories or photos, sharing news on Facebook or Twitter, or commenting on a story. The more you participate, the more points you earn. Your points build on your profile page — your own place on the site, your “trophy case” — and allow you to compete for placement on Redding.com’s leaderboard.

Overall, the two- to three-week-old metrics are promising. Registration is up 35 percent and comments are up 19 percent. 7,600 users are in the game. (Redding.com’s top user has toted up 8,800 points already; profile here.) 16,200 comments have been rated “insightful.”

“We’re seeing some very strong movement in engagement — users commenting, marking other comments insightful, sharing our content, registering, opting in to email products and news alerts,” Lyons told me this week. “If these trends hold up, they give us a very strong foundation on which to build. The key to making this work so far, and potentially to building it out in the future, has been the Scripps development and user experience teams. They’ve been working deep in the code and templates so that the game dynamics are tightly intertwined with the full experience on the site, and they’ve created something that relies on our technology partner, but is really unique. It doesn’t feel bolted on, because it’s not. Strategically, that’s where we want to be.”

In addition to the civilizing effort, what are the newsonomics of game dynamics? More page views and greater audience data-for-targeting for advertisers, for starters. Engaged core customers who really make Redding.com a starting point, a center of their digital lives will be a great market to serve anything from daily deals to special services to new products, and possibly to charge for digital access (as Redding watches Scripps’ digital circulation initiative soon to be tested in Memphis.)

The Redding experiment is an intriguing one and good start. It forces us all to think about what community, community engagement and civil behavior should be in this digital age. Redding.com is emphasizing commenting out of the chute. That may be worthwhile — it’s high-minded to hope that insight can be rewarded — and we’ll watch eagerly to see how it succeeds.

But commenting, I think, is at best the tip of iceberg here. We really want to greatly re-engage local readers in community, engagement far beyond what was ever possible in print. That print newspaper was a wonderful community water cooler — with 50-percent-plus household penetration — but it was tough for readers to go beyond discussion.

Now we have the tools to do that. So let’s start to think about the kinds of additional engagement that game dynamics could incent, re-enforce and help build. We’re five years into thinking of readers (courtesy of Jay Rosen) as the people formerly known as the audience. Readers are a lot more than audience these days, but can we use habit-forming incentives to create new pro-news behaviors? For instance, what if news companies provided a wider array of incentives for help in:

• Crowdsourcing: Occasional news tips are great. What if community tipsters got points?
• City guide population: MediaNews’ new TapIn Bay Area tablet product is big into points as well, as it seeks to have readers help it build its next-generation city guide product. Newspapers have something of value to offer those who help populate city guides that Yelp doesn’t: digital (and/or print) subscription discounts, better daily deals and ad discounts for merchant contributors.
• Blog writing: Gamification can support pro-am community blogger outreach. “Pay” ongoing contributors with points.
• Buying stuff: Why not earn points by buying stuff from advertisers? It’s co-op, game-inflected capitalism for the 21st Century.
• Data crunching, visualizations: The Guardian and The New York Times, among others, are open-sourcing more of their code, inviting wider collaboration. Why not incent this behavior as well?
• Design: Build a better site section, a better app or a cool new product. Give major points — major benefits — to those who make major contributions.

For one great example of applying incentive techniques to business building, check out WSJ’s Andy Jordan’s Tech Journal video segment, “From Web Surfer to Successful Inventor.” It tells the story of New York invention start-up Quirky, “a social product development company,” a great tale unto itself. But catch this quote from Quirky’s 24-year-old CEO Ben Kaufman: “For literally centuries, it’s been really, really hard to make stuff. You needed access to capital. You needed to know the right people. You needed to be multi-disciplinary between design, engineering, manufacturing and retail, and you needed all these things to push one new product out into the world. We’re just not okay with that.”

So Quirky uses its widening community to refine dozens of products in invention. It incents contributors with something we all understand — money — and shows their small, but growing, receipts (based on the value they add to the products) in real-time on a website.

Creating new physical goods is in many ways harder, and different, than new digital news goods, but the thinking is immediately applicable. Are the rewards points, or badges, or money, or community standing? We don’t know yet, but there’s clearly a new ability to value readers — and for readers to value news/community centers.

That belief is increasingly shared. Scripps, along with MediaNews’ TapIn, is one of the leading-edge experiments here. Hearst and Morris are testing out gamification. Even The Economist tells me it is looking at testing game dynamics over the next year.

These game techniques are beginning to pervade our lives. They are used by media more widely, and by merchants of all kinds. Mike Earhart is vice president for marketing at Silicon Valley-based Bunchball, Scripps’ technology partner. The 40-employee company was into games “too early,” he says, before mobile ignited casual gaming. So it turned to helping established companies use game techniques. It counts 125 million unique visitors through its products, with those visitors executing 2.3 million “actions” a month.

Bunchball has worked with NBC (“The Office”), Bravo (“Top Chef”), Meredith National Media Group, and Wendy’s among others. Using game dynamics to jumpstart new business strategies may seem like a stretch — initially — for both marketers and media. Yet, says Earhart, it boils down to using the new techniques to answer an age-old question: “What are you trying to get your users to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the dream that the MediaNews’ new made-for-the tablet, TapIn taps into. Potentially – and I cannot emphasize that word too much — it may become a prototypical product for the news industry, pointing a new way out of the hollowing-out landscape into which the news industry has meandered.

TapIn, which launches today (you’ll find it in the iTunes app store as an iPad app), is parent company MediaNews Group’s big play for the iPad, “a better version of Patch,” says MediaNews exec Steve Rossi.

Debuting in the Bay Area (where MediaNews is the largest daily publisher, and recently centralized its Bay Area titles, including the Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune, under a single editorial structure), it will launch in Los Angeles later in the summer. In fall, it will take flight in Denver, home of the MediaNews’ flagship Denver Post. It’s a fresh start, in thinking and in content presentation for a traditional newspaper company. It’s the combined brainchild, about nine months in the making of MediaNews digital leaders and of Tackable, a BayArea start-up, whose technology grows out user-generated photo aggregation, intending to become the “Twitter of photos,” according to Luke Stangel, CMO and a co-founder. (Good Q & A with Stangel, at CJR.org)

It’s a $4.99 a month product (after the free trial period, which carries into the summer) — and can be paid for in cash or in points earned through techniques strongly adapted from gaming companies.

When you open up TapIn Bay Area, it greets you pleasantly, colorfully and youthfully; it’s a visual product in three modes tilted toward a younger demographic than read newspapers, or newspaper readers aspirationally who would love to look young and vibrant again.

It’s a product that works on the metaphor of layers.

Browse through “on tap,” and you find photo/video feature stories and galleries.

“Explore” with the Bay Area map, pinching in or out and find the same photo/video features, located by geography.

“Find” maintains the large map, but taps into the potential power of newspaper editorial and commercial databases. Behind this screen is the real power of the interface. Choose from among above-the-map icons for features, deals, events, a business directory, movies, news and “gigs.”  You can open one, several or all of the icons simultaneously leading you to deeper into the product, by your neighborhood or region.

This is not your father’s replica or replica-plus product. Such text-centric replicas, done on the relative cheap by and for news companies are placeholders. They offer up the brand of the newspaper — and its re-purposed print/online content — but they embrace the promise of the tablet. They don’t delight. Delight, of course, is what newspaper city guide products have been after for 15 years. From Digital Cities to Real Cities, from Sidewalk to Zip 2′s Just Go, from the Washington Post’s Local Explorer to Zvents and OutsideIn’s appropriation of Google mapping, we’ve seen all kinds of attempts to both harness event-based information and to present it in useful ways.

What is TapIn? You can see Yelp or Kayak in it more than a newsprint legacy. In fact, my first reading says it works better for city guide/directory/doing stuff than for news itself.

“It’s as much a new media type as the website was for the newspaper. I don’t know how well it will play on the desktop,” says Jeff Herr, vice-president for digital for the California Newspaper Partnership, which publishes 34 dailies and 50 weeklies in the region. MediaNews drives CNP, which includes Gannett and Stephens Media holdings as well. ” We’ve set up a product platform.”

That indeed seems to be the best word for it. I’ve plumbed around the prototype. As with any early product, there are a few head-scratchers and missed linkages, lots of questions of depth and breadth, but overall I can see how the product could become a daily point of usage. That would make it stand out from the first 15 years of newspaper-company websites.

I’ll point to four characteristics of TapIn that distinguish it:

• Tablet native product: Largely, it’s not starting with the website and porting it over, though its news pages look too mercurynews.com for me,  complete with small ads. It’s highly visual, interactive and has, at best, a feel of Flipboard about some of its presentation. Remember all the pub Rupert’s The Daily got, a few months ago. That’s greatly attributable to it being made-for-the-tablet. This is the first, big regional news initiative made for the tablet.
• Commercial platform: TapIn begins to change the marketplace dynamic. Website advertising has been a dud for most local newspaper companies, returning low ad rates on display ads, while offering some ability to “digitize classifieds”; the whole newspaper industry takes in $3 billion annually in digital advertising, compared to the $20 billion+ it has annually lost in print. TapIn’s immediate commercial play can best seen in its deals — GotDailyDeals.com is MediaNews’ Groupon-like play here — giving those deals their own button and making them geo-findable. Its interstitials — in photo/video galleries — offer the kind of tablet immersiveness that advertisers are starting to test. At best, TapIn can support the new regional digital agencies initiatives, undertaken by many local newspaper companies (“The Newsonomics of Eight PerCent Reach,”), from selling SEO to SEM to couponing to display to social. I also talked with Herr about all kinds of e-commerce revenue share possibilities, from movie ticketing to Open Table to StubHub, and he acknowledges the platform is well set up to take advantage of those and many more. Curiously, there are no classifieds in the launch product; the issues of tech integration, there, are numerous.
• The incorporation of game dynamics: For Herr — and increasingly the mantra heard newly throughout the digital news industry — it’s all about engagement. Engagement, we’ve learned, means going well beyond presenting news. So TapIn customers will be able to earn points for everything from commenting on stories to posting photos to reviewing restaurants to sharing TapIn with friends. In fact, the prominent Gigs button — a centerpiece of the Tackable photo product play — allows editors to ask for specific user-gen coverage of community events. As TapIn users engage, they gain points, points that are currency and can be used to pay for the TapIn subscription.
• Syndicatable, networkable platform: In addition to rapidly rolling out the platform through MediaNews, the company is already in talks with a couple of other newspaper chains, about licensing the technology. For companies looking for a next-gen tablet play, it will be attractive — assuming reader and ad results tell an early, good story.

All that said, TapIn has a long way to go to be commercially successful, a point which Jeff Herr, a leading digital innovator, understands.

First, it must port in lots of content. It offers a movies button, but no trailers, ticketing or professional reviews (local or Rottten Tomatoes-aggregated). It has restaurant listings, business directory-like, but no reservation functionality nor built-in reviews. It lacks the utter usefulness of a Yelp, which, especially in the Bay Area, is a bible for local finds, and avoids. Newspapers first thought one of their key competitive advantages was their restaurant and movie reviews, for instance. Having failed to win the local wars with that ammunition, many are now just starting over, fresh, seeking user-gen reviews; my sense remains that combining the two, Pro and Am, still offers the most reader value. Starting “fresh” sounds appealing, but in 2011, the product starts out far behind Yelp, Open Table, Angie’s List, Rotten Tomatoes and many others for reader comment and in utility.

I do think the tablet can spawn a new digital marketplace, quite distinct from the print newspaper, the online newspaper site or the patchwork of Google/Amazon/Yahoo commerce of today. As a location-based commercial center, allowing me to personalize and customize (potentially coming, says Jeff Herr), it holds lots of consumer promise — and of several new revenue streams. Putting a $60 a year price on it will be counterproductive to creating, quickly, that marketplace. (Putting a price on news — the whole digital circulation debate — does make sense to me, but more as a bundled print/digital play.)

Which gets me to my final point, for now, on TapIn: It does work that well, yet, as a news vehicle. Its news mapping is clearly a work in progress. It’s hard to both give a sense of the most important regional news, and let readers zoom in on the dozens of more local stories with relevance to them. The connections so far in place don’t do that well, and I’m not sure the tablet real estate works effectively for a region as large as the Bay Area, with its population of seven million.

INN founders talk to each other regularly, by phone, online and at the occasional conference. Yet, they haven’t had a way to easily do things in common, to harness common technology, to do common business deals. A recent deal, executed by the Investigative News Network, promises to bring some order, a model perhaps, out of the motley chaos.

INN’s deal with Reuters is a test, and a significant one for both INN members and Reuters, which will begin distributing an INN-branded product, as an add-on to its wire, by the September meeting of the Online News Association.

“This is about understanding our commercial value,” INN’s CEO, Kevin Davis, told me. “Only the market can tell us how much it values our content.” The idea: piggyback on Reuters’ extensive marketing and sales operation to take high-grade, but  non-traditional branded content to many potential customers, from online-only sites, to newspapers to broadcasters. The payoffs for the 30-plus (of the current 52) INN members that have opted into the deal:

• Revenue, potentially, as Reuters and INN member sites, share licensing revenue;
• Brand awareness of these high-achieving, but nascent brands
• A few services provided by Reuters to those who opt in, proving them with some access to assets they otherwise couldn’t afford.

The deal also pushes INN’s tech abilities ahead. In using the Thomson Reuters-powered Calais, INN is able to draw its diverse content set together, and then subdivide by topics and by regions, at once making the sum of the parts greater than the individual pieces, and more marketable.

Davis says the deal includes full-text from those sites opting in, but that data and video are not included.

For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization“). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers those three promises to INN members. The big hope: the establishment of  a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.

For Reuters, which in the past year, has put together similar packaging deals with Examiner.com, The Wrap, SB Nation, CCTV and others, it’s a smart way to increase the content offered under its brand, but without the cost. It is learning the chops of next-age curatorial syndication, borrowing lessons from HuffPo, user-gen content and Demand Media.

What would have been an unlikely match several years ago — disparate online start-ups and a 164-year-old traditional news wire — has now taken on a logic of its own.

What’s a story worth?

Last week, I looked at a single investigative story (California Watch’s “On Shaky Ground“), and we saw the tab of half a million dollars for a 20-month-long tale of sleuthing. What about that ordinary daily story, quotidian journalism as we know it — the grinding out of less eventful articles, the kinds of things that keep us informed but don’t offer epiphanies? How much does it cost, and how much does that matter to the future of the news business?

It’s not an academic question. This week, McClatchy added to the long line of down financial reports, telling us that it was down 11 percent, year over year, in ad revenues and 9 percent in overall revenues, for the first quarter. That announcement follows on from similar reports from The New York Times Co., especially its regional properties, and Gannett. The U.S. news industry is extending its unwanted record: 21 straight quarters of revenue down quarter to quarter. That’s a lost half-decade.

Add up those down revenues and the need to maintain profitability — for public or private owners — and there’s but a single answer: cut costs. Certainly, the industry has cut out major costs in the last three years, but cost-cutting is slowing, if you look at the company reports. The New York Times’ costs were flat in the first quarter, Gannett’s down 0.9 percent and McClatchy’s down 6.5 percent. That’s in large part due to rising newsprint prices, making it harder to get costs more appreciably down. With those continuing revenue declines, though, expect more cost-cutting. It’s a given.

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab, on April 28

So, let’s ask about that daily story. What’s it cost?

Of course, we’ve never looked at it that way. We’ve hired people, told them to write, at times monitoring their production, but rarely taking a look at the cost of what they’re producing. Given the pressures of the day, given the Demand Media model and given the predilection to start counting whatever can be counted (“The newsonomics of Washington Post’s reader dashboard 1.0“), story cost accounting is inevitable.

In fact, it’s already started. Let’s take a brief look at what is bound to become a bigger topic in the months ahead, the newsonomics of a single story.

Clark Gilbert, Salt Lake’s dean of disruption, is getting into the nitty-gritty of retooling editorial content production, top to bottom, and that includes getting a handle on differing costs of content. Gilbert is a key part of the team that is transforming the media properties of the daily Deseret News and leading local TV and radio stations KSL, all owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church. Last August, Gilbert announced one of the most major restructurings in journalism, making major staff cuts — a prelude to the re-architecting now being done. That restructuring includes the launching of Deseret Connect, an initiative to round up pro-am user-generated content from around Utah, and around the globe.

The new CEO of Deseret Media will soon be able to tell you exactly how much articles cost him. He’ll specify the differing price points of local, proprietary content, of AP content, of a blog post written halfway around the world, and lots more.

For now, he draws upon his experience as a Harvard Business School prof and strategic consultant. From that career work, he estimates the following, general cost metrics for the content offered by news companies in print and online:

• $250-$300 per staff-written story;
• $100 per stringer story;
• $25 per Associated Press story;
• $5-12 for “remote” stories, largely written by the emerging class of bloggers

“You better know your cost per story,” he says. “That’s the kind of rigor you need.”

As focused as he is on building digital ad revenues, he makes the point directly: “You have to work both sides [revenue building, cost reduction] of this.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m not willing to pay for content,” says Gilbert. “I’m paying a boatload for stories that are a commitment to my audience.” It’s a straightforward strategy: If you are going to pay a boatload for some stuff, you better pay a lot less for other stuff.

Still, those numbers are bound to chill many a journalist. You think posting reader metrics in newsrooms is still a point of contention — wait ’til story cost accounting becomes mainstream. And it will. It’s just simple manufacturing, and like it or not, that’s what the news business has long been. Manufacturing, with lots (New York Times, Wall Street Journal) of quality added or with (insert your favorite rag here) just enough to draw ads. News creation used to be a sunk cost, with headcount a small and usually polite battle between editors and publishers. That was in stable times. In these times, knowing business drivers, down to the dollar, is going to be part of the new world.

The metrics-driven thinking may have been first demonstrated by Demand Media, with its $10, $25, and $50 stories (“The newsonomics of content arbitrage“), but once opened, that Pandora’s Box won’t be closed.

Clark Gilbert is early in the game, but others are taking a parallel cost-conscious approach.

John Paton, CEO of the new, continuous-revolution Journal Register Company, breaks it down differently, but is highly cost-aware.

“We’re not looking to save money on local, professional content,” Paton told me this week. Notice the emphasis on “local” and “professional.” Like many others, Journal Register is beginning to round up hundreds of local bloggers (as Patch joins that club), who will be largely unpaid.

What Paton emphasizes, though, in his cost-of-content analysis, is the 60 percent of JRC’s content — across print and digital — that is national. He’s done a careful counting of what’s in his products, and says that while 40 percent is local (above average for dailies, he says), 60 percent is national. So Project Thunderdome, newly headed by D.C. veteran Jim Brady, has put a bullseye on that content. The notion: Lower the cost, and where possible, raise the quality of national content. That thinking is behind JRC’s recent deal with TheStreet.com, which is now providing its national business news. It’s a revenue share, with JRC gaining national revenues. In addition, says Paton, it has increased its local business content-related revenue, given both the new inventory of ad impressions made possible and the quality of TheStreet.com content. That’s a model Paton intends to extend to other non-local content.

Further, he’s taken dead aim at the cost of getting content through the mechanics of a newsroom. Saying that about half of U.S. editorial staffs are engaged in producing content for publication — not creating it — he’s focused on changing that ratio. Instead of five of ten journalists engaged in production, he’s aiming for two of ten, to be accomplished through centralization and templating of the production functions. “Then, two or three more of the ten can create content,” he says.

Both plans will, in effect, reduce the cost of content overall. And, as with Clark Gilbert’s philosophy, the intent is to invest in unique, local, proprietary content, even though it’s far more expensive.

Let’s consider one more take on story cost accounting. As CEO of Huffington Post, Betsy Morgan pioneered the unique brand of higher-end, often personality-driven aggregation that distinguished the site’s offerings. Out of that experience, and in her new role as CEO of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze site, she’s evolved her own metrics. They divide nicely into thirds.

• One-third original, professional content, largely reported journalism.
• One-third voice and opinion.
• One-third aggregation, or to use the updated term, “curation,” as editors aggregate, honing off-site story selection given their understanding of their unique audiences.

Morgan tells me that “the thirds” form both an audience strategy and a cost strategy. Clearly, as the venture-backed HuffPo began its life, it watched its dollars very carefully. That meant that curation wasn’t just an audience-pleasing idea, of course, but a cost-saving one, as bloggers (at least then!) willingly forked over content in exchange for play and recognition, not money.

Going forward, the “thirds strategy” offers another twist on Clark Gilbert’s and John Paton’s (and Arianna Huffington’s) strategies. Obviously, you don’t pay for the curation part, other than for the technologies or smaller staff to handle it. You can pay for some of the voice and opinion, but there’s a hell of a lot of it you can get for free or cheap. And, once again, you concentrate your costs of content on the high end — original, professional, largely reported journalism.

The new AOL/HuffPo’s been doing that with pro hire after pro hire. Morgan herself is doing it, as recently as this week with the hiring of former Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi.

Add it all up, and it’s a new cost structure for the craft of journalism. As with all metrics, the good or bad they inspire depends on who is using them. What’s clear is that those news outfits — local, national or global — which only concentrate on paying staff, like in the old days, will find themselves out-strategized by those who take the blended approach.

Is it all about thirds? No, but it’s a good place to start.

I think of it as a pyramid. Original content — content that distinguishes news brands — is at the top, and, yes, is the most costly. At the bottom is clearly aggregation, because as Morgan points out, “[readers] can’t easily find and read what’s of interest to them.” Then, there’s the middle third or so. For regional news companies, that includes hyperlocal bloggers and subject-specific (transportation, public health, sports) experts; for national sites, it’s non-staff “contributors” of differing skills and costs. That third is quite open to innovation.

It’s a great whiteboard exercise, at least, for anyone in the news business. Pass the marker, please, and work the pyramid.

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 the digital business, the old aphorism — “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” — is rapidly moving from article of faith to fundamental operating principle. Measurement systems are just getting better and better.

Yes, there are still quite a few naysayers in the digital news business, those who believe that editorial discretion is superior to any metric the digital combines can kick out. They’ll say you can’t measure the quality of journalism created — and, of course, they are partly right. The truth of the moment is that good (to great) editors, armed with good (to great) analytics, will be in the winners in the next web wars. The same is true for digital marketers working for news companies. Unless they combine their knowledge of markets, customers, and advertisers with often real-time numbers about performance, they’ll lose business to those who do.

The counting of numbers, though, is tricky. So many numbers, so little time, as 24/7 digital keystrokes stoke endless reams of data. Which ones to count, and which to pay closest attention? Meaningful numbers, of course, are called metrics, and meaningful interpretation of those numbers we now call analytics. These analytics, discovered or undiscovered, then drive the business, and they are particularly important in great times of change, when whole industries move profoundly digital. As that old investigative reporter Sherlock Holmes said, “Data. Data. Data. I can’t make bricks without clay.”

In the spirit of the new year, let me suggest some of the more valuable emerging metrics for those in the news business in 2011. Further, in that spirit, let’s pick 11 of them. These aren’t intended to be the most important ones — the mundane price of newsprint, trending up recently, still is a hugely influential number — but ones that are moving center stage in 2011.

1. How much are news companies getting for tablet advertising? Or, in more numerical terms, what’s the effective CPM, or cost-per-thousand readers? In 2010, those with tablet news products reaped a small windfall, gaining rates as high as $150 per thousand readers, which would be 20 times what many of them get for their website ads. Much of that business was “sponsorship,” meaning that advertisers paid simply for placement, not actually based on number of readers. It was the blush of the new, and the association with it, that drove that kind of money. While early 2011 pricing is still very good, as the tablet market goes mass, what will happen to the rates news companies can charge advertisers? This is a huge question, especially if tablet news reading does hasten movement from ad-rich newsprint (see “The Newsonomics of tablets replacing newspapers“).

2. What percentage of unique visitors will actually pay for online access?It’s going to be a tiny percentage — maybe one to five percent of all those uniques, the majority tossed onto sites by search. If it’s less than one percent, paid metered models may be of little consequence. At two percent, especially for the big guys, like The New York Times with its imminent launch, the numbers gets meaningful and model-setting.

3. Where are the news reading minutes going? The Pew study showing that Americans are reading news 13 minutes a day more, probably given smartphone usage, was a thunderbolt — a potential sign of growth for a news industry that has felt itself melting away. With tablet news reading joining even more smartphone reading (only 20 percent of cellphones are “smart” right now), each news company will have to look at its logs to see which readers are reading what with what kind of device — which will tell where reading is increasing and where (let’s guess, print) it is decreasing. Then comes the job to adjust products accordingly.

4. How good are the margins in the fast-developing marketing services business? Tribune’s 435 Digital, GannettLocal, and Advance Internet are among the leaders selling everything from search engine marketing and optimization to mobile and social to local merchants. It’s a big shift for big newspaper companies used to selling larger ticket ads to relatively few customers. There is no doubt that local merchants want help in digital marketing. The number to watch for the newspaper companies is their margin on sales — after paying off technology partners from Google to Bing to WebVisible. Once we see how those margins settle in, we’ll know whether marketing services is a big, or small, play to find local news company profit growth.

5. How much of digital revenue is being driven by digital-only ad sales?McClatchy has been a leader in unbundling print/online sales, with digital-only now approaching 50 percent. That’s a big number for all media companies to watch. Not only is the market pushing them to offer unbundled products, but the sooner they sell digital separately on its own merits, the faster they grasp the growing business and slowly cut the cord to the declining one.

6. How much of news traffic is now being driven by Facebook and Twitter?A few companies, including The Washington Post, know daily how much of their traffic is driven by social media; many others have little clue. Those that do watch the number know that Facebook and Twitter are the number one growth driver for news “referral” traffic, and that social traffic (friends don’t let friends read bad news) converts better to more regular readership than does search traffic. This metric then pushes newsrooms to more greatly, and more quickly, participate in the social whirl.

7. How much will membership grow at the highest-quality, online-only local news start-ups? MinnPost just hit 2,300, an impressive number, but it’s been a three-year road to get there. It is hiring a membership director and trying to better convert regular readers to members. The Texas Tribune is pushing toward 2,000 and Bay Citizen 1,500. Can membership be a significant, and ramping, piece of the new news business model, or will it have to look elsewhere — advertising, syndication, events, more grants — to find sustainable futures?

8. How many titles — and readers — is Journalism Online able to bring into its Press+ network? Journalism Online has moved from a question mark to a well-situated player in the iPad-fueled universe of paid content. Its Press+ network offers the promise of that elusive “network effect” — but only if it gets real scale.

9. How much “extra” do news companies charge for digital access? Okay, every publisher wants to be paid for news content. But as they test out pricing, they’re all over the board in how much to charge. Some want to charge as much for digital as for print; others are willing to throw in digital access for “free” if readers maintain print. The number to watch is one probably about 10-20 percent higher than print alone — as an opt-out upsell — and see how much that sticks with print readers. If that works, new “circulation” revenue helps replaces some of that disappearing ad money — and provide a route to a time of mainly digital, partially paid access.

10. What’s your cost of content? No journalist likes to be thought of as a widget producer, but news is a manufacturing trade, as the Demand Media model has shown us. How can news companies lower the cost of content while creating more? That’s why we see new Reuters America deals, Demand partnerships, more user-gen, more staff blogging. Editors are more needed than ever to make quality judgments about new content, but they and their business leaders must understand what content — high-end and low — really costs to produce.

11. How much do you spend on analytics? Ultimately, investing in the collection and interpretation of data is a big test of news companies’ ability to play digital. I’ve noted (“The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet Retailer,”) how the Financial Times has set the pace for the industry in establishing a new team of (non-newspaper) people to run its analytics arm. That operation now numbers 11, up from nine last year. A good beginning metric for any news company to ask: How much money are we investing in understanding our business with the tools of the day?