What’s the difference between being informed and being educated?

What’s the line between learning something new and being taught something new?

Are news media and universities just two ways to do the same thing: gain knowledge?

As Coursera, Udacity, edX, and several other offerings begin to unravel everything we thought we knew about post-secondary education, we can’t help but make links to the world of news.

You gotta love the geeky name that applies to this new hybrid for-profit/nonprofit industry: MOOCs, or massively open online courses.

For top-rank universities, the embrace of online education promises to be transformational, upending many of the millennium–old rules of academe, as education, learning, certification, payment for services, and measurement of teaching effectiveness all inevitably succumb to major rethinks. For daily newspapers, themselves becoming mainly digital news products ever more quickly, it’s a time ripe for redefinition, for declaring new and expanded roles as the digital age removes long-ago built barriers — some real, some always imaginary.

At first glance, the question of whether professors and journalists are in the same business seems almost absurd, doesn’t it? We know what a college is, and we know what a newspaper is. One’s got ivy-covered walls, demands on-site instruction, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and grants certificates of completion, or degrees. The other is a physical, throwaway product that until lately cost a quarter a day and now can go at the top end — in print — for $650 a year. No prizes are awarded for reading daily — or for 50 years.

Online, though, these historic differences seem to fade rather quickly. We read to learn, whether it’s a course on European history or the latest twists and turns of current European economic drama. Greek tragedies of two different era. We read to understand and make sense of things.

What indeed, then, might media’s greater role in society be, and how can it now harness technology to multiply its impact? MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, among others, are wandering into that territory — testing the reach of technology — without knowing where their travels will take them in this terra incognita. We know that news media may be well suited to new educational roles. Why? It’s what we produce — information and perspective, building blocks of learning — and it’s what we believe when we talk about “public service.”

This emerging blur between media and education joins others. In its mischievous disruption, that’s much of what digital does. It blurs.

As the tablet makes mincemeat of the historic differences among newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, we see another bright line ready to dim: that seeming line between what a news organization and what a college each do. This is still another stopping point for all those leading the craft of journalism into the new age to ask what business we’re really in. What business does it make sense for us to consider, test, or ply? What fits with our mission?

Let’s take “mission” for a moment.

Our history offers lots of punchy “raise hell and print the news” missions. But scratch deeper and you find a commitment to learning and its cousin, community building — one that reaches beyond simply pitching the news.

How about The Wall Street Journal’s simply elegant, “The daily diary of the American dream.” Or: “The Scotsman. It’s thinking time.” Or The Everett (Wash.) Herald: “If It Matters To You, It Matters To Us.”

While we all know about The New York Times’ “All the news that’s fit to print,” consider its deeper declaration: “The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”

Beyond mere words, we can see small educational extensions of the news companies’ basic businesses. Most every paper has participated in Newspaper in Education programs, providing papers and, sometimes, lesson plans for elementary and secondary students. The New York Times sponsors many talks, lectures, and other learning events in the city. Education in the pre-online sense has long been part of its brand, and its Knowledge Network has offered “adult and continuing education opportunities.” Consider the Texas Tribune’s forays in events, both as a business line and a way of extending its journalistic raison d’etre beyond publication. Many newspapers sponsor candidate forums or public debates on an issue.

Largely, though, newsies inhabit an industry focused on the day. We trot out the well used quote, “News is the first rough draft of history,” but we let others make sense — and value — out of the incredible riches of newspaper archives. Let others create courses, connect the dots, and create knowledge. We’ve always been into a snapshot approach to the world. What’s news today lacks sufficient lineage to yesterday — or to tomorrow. We see such innovations as Storify and a few Google efforts (Living Stories, Timeline) that are efforts to connect the dots of news time.

All these efforts, though, are piecemeal, not intended as new ways of gaining mass impact, as in massive — think thousands or hundreds of thousands of people — open online courses.

So in the emerging age of the democratization of education, let’s consider how news companies could rethink their role in news, and education. Let’s call it the newsonomics of News U. [Update: I should have noted Poynter Institute's long-time and well-used News University, sometimes called NewsU, in the original post. The program, headed by Howard Finberg, offers more than 150 courses in journalism and multimedia. ]

Coursera, which has gotten a huge amount of press, is more than a collection of online courses. Working with the University of California, Princeton, Penn and, of course, Stanford, the Palo Alto-bred company has pioneered an “interactive online learning system.” Read its near-revolutionary mission statement of this Kleiner Perkins-funded company:

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

What if we take the Coursera’s thoroughly democratizing aspiration and apply it to a modern news media company that wants to stake a greater claim to learning and community as part of its mission?

We are an entrepreneurial company that takes advantage of the best sources of news, information, and knowledge in our area to maximally inform our citizenry, at prices that bring civic literacy to everyone in our community. We envision a future where media and citizens work together, building on fact-based knowledge to better the community and tackle long-standing issues. Our technology enables us to broadly engage community as never before possible in building on community knowledge, feeding the democratic process of debate and decision.

We believe that civic learning and engagement are lifelong pursuits, and we are dedicated to using the most contemporary techniques, technological and otherwise, to empower people to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities in which they live.

Too high-minded? Or is that simply another way of saying, with the aid of technology, what The Guardian, Journal, and Times first said more than a century ago?

What’s increasingly possible here — recognized by the pioneering elite educational institutions, but available to media institutions as well — is the ability to both increase the institutional reach of their brands and to provide transformational learning opportunities at small incremental cost.

Few traditional media have the know-how internally. One fascinating exception: U.K.-based Pearson. It owns the global Financial Times news franchise, Pearson Education is a leading K-12 publisher, and Penguin Books is positioning itself well to extend ebook links between “media” and “education.” While at Pearson, the press and the educational press share a home, most media will have to partner to test forays into learning, or to position themselves as Pearson does as “always learning.”

Beyond high-minded mission statements, what are some practical ways we can test media/education links? How about these to start:

• Build on in-depth series you’ve done or have in the works. Think of “courses” as an extension of the work. Pulitzer- (and other award-) winning series are naturals here and can take students into environmental science, health policy, hydrology, engineering, sociology, business management, and history, just to name a few academic areas.
• Take a page from One Book projects, in which communities settle on single books to read and discuss, by trying One Series courses that try to achieve maximum community reach. Topics like immigration, bullying and water planning come to mind, will draw new audiences.
• Add courses to the kinds of community engagement initiatives such companies as Digital First Media (and Steve Buttry, its leader in that area) are championing. (Thanks to Steve for the context and thinking, in his follow-up post.)
• Match up burgeoning ebooks initiatives (“The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year“)  to coursework. Sell the book; provide the course at a low cost? Local history courses are a natural here.
• Think next-gen Newspaper in Education program. While some newspapers put real effort in bringing the news alive in the classroom, many long regarded it as just another way to add a percentage point or three to circulation numbers. What would a digitally revitalized, 2012 NIE program look like?
• Membership programs — think “you’re more than a subscriber to me” — are all the rage from Boston to L.A. Membership needs to have some real benefits, and news-based learning opportunities can be among them.

So where do media companies look for partners?

Consider that this is much more than putting words into lesson plans, or creating education replicas of news products. At the MIT/Harvard-based edX, video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and much peer interaction. So these new MOOC companies themselves could be partners.

Other natural partners would be educators themselves, as school districts and community colleges, as well as the bigger, more prestigious colleges in the forefront of this movement.

The Knight Foundation — the funding pacesetter of the new journalism — should be of help. Its DNA is media and community-building. Just last Friday, Knight’s Eric Newton challenged journalism school educators to adopt a “teaching hospital” model to create greater community engagement and betterment. If transformative technology needs to be applied to enable media to become educators as well, maybe Knight would be a source of aid.

So where is the money here? Is there a business model to be found? The facile Silicon Valley answer may seem unpalatable to current newspaper company owners: Become more essential to people, and the money will follow. And what can be more essential, and more relationship-building, than lifelong education?

We see three other major web concepts in the business thinking of the MOOC founders: freemium, gathering data, and aggregation.

On business model, most MOOC courses are free to students at this point, a wonderful price point that brings in lots of customers, er, students.

On data, Coursera’s goal is to “analyze student data to obtain a better understanding of online pedagogy and student learning…and understand human learning at a scale and depth that has been never been possible before.” Think of the power of that data.

On aggregation, look at edX’s statement about the project, “The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.” Become the go-to source, globally, nationally or locally for something people value, and the digital world rewards you.

One other way we can look at building value and revenue here. Let’s take the prism of manufacturing. Publishers manufacture content (and ads), use it for a single purpose — the paper, the site — and then discard it. News is a raw resource, whose value is poorly amplified; better for publishers to move up the food chain and find higher-end uses for it in the creation of learning and knowledge.

Establishing new relationships and deepening old ones should create a future pipeline for products and services still to be born.

Forget Udacity — let’s think audacity. The audacity to think, in spite of news organizations’ shrinkage, they can make a larger, not smaller, contribution to their readers and communities.

Many non-profits, like NPR, like to tell the public that they are “mission-driven organizations,” words, I assume, that are meant to separate them from profit-seeking media. With news media profitability now only achieved by keeping the scalpel handy and well-oiled, the profit line works less as a defining difference. More important may be that, in comparison, much legacy news media seemsmission-free. It still exists, but in economic decline harbors increasing doubt about its own purpose. With self-doubt and its apparent clout receding, it has grown less clear about its role in democracy, rather than more clear.

Maybe a mission-based exhortation to adapt the technologies of the day to further community education, engagement and civic problem-solving is a tonic for the deepening media malaise.

Let’s let The Guardian’s C.P. Scott bring us full circle, reconnecting journalism and education.

Scott’s clear-eyed, pre-cable, pre-web view of what journalists — and educators — do rings even more important today: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred. ‘Propaganda’, so called, by this means is hateful.” In fact, one of the greatest shared values of the news and education industries is that both are fact-based enterprises, operating against longer odds as misinformation and disinformation can be funded on a different massive scale.

In 1921, he wrote:

A newspaper has two sides to it…It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.

A billionaire philanthropist buying into the woebegone American newspaper industry does make a good story and prompts the usual question: Why? Does he something others don’t?

As Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway relieves Media General of its newspapers — “We’ve come to understand that most investors do not view the publishing sector as a place to generate the best returns on their capital,” Media General CEO Marshall N. Morton put it succinctly in April  – I think we can see this deal roughly in line with the spate of other newspaper deals that have gotten done in the last year or so.

Most of these deals do not rely that much on the actual value of the newspaper property. Rather than rely on other things — the value of underlying real estate has driven numerous of the deals – and the meager cash flow of the properties themselves is seen as a way to generate enough revenue to pay off low-interest, acquisition debt. In this deal, Buffett has taken more of a three-cushion billiards approach, much as the headlines announce “Berkshire Hathaway Bets Again on Newspapers with Media General Deal.” Each cushion rings up advantages for the company, even if the newspaper ownership itself is the most problematic.

Buffett is, at base, an opportunistic investor. See a business, or industry deep in the doldrums, and think you can leverage money out of a deal, one way or the other, and you’ve got an opportunity. The difference, if you are Berkshire Hathaway, you get a better deal than others, because of your financial capacity and willingness to take the long view. That’s what BH did with General Electric and Goldman Sachs, back when the world seemed to be ending in 2009. With that long-term position, he is perceived much more as an eagle than a vulture, yet he’s a predator nonetheless.

So, Berkshire Hathaway takes the newspapers off of Media General’s hands. At $142 million, he is buying 63 titles or about 21 actual “newspaper” properties. So that’s like buying a top-of-the-line house in each city, but you get a newspaper with with it. When the pool ball drops in the corner, BH Media needs to figure out a new game plan for those properties, one that I’ll bet will involve bringing a higher degree of technology application in cutting legacy costs faster and deeper.

It’s the early movements of the ball that make this deal more a feat of financial engineering than a newspaper deal. Three cushions provide investment relief:

• Lend Media General $400 million, and extend a $45 line of credit, at 10.5% interest. That allows Media General to escape shorter-term financial pressures, and gives BH a good profit along the way.
• Gain warrants that are convertible to about 19.9 percent of Media General’s outstanding shares. The new Media General is mainly a broadcast company, a sector with its share of issues, but with lots more projectable upside than the newspaper industry. So it’s gotten — as Buffett earlier got in General Motors and other “bail out” deals — a better deal than your average investor, as Media General re-charts its future.
• Takes title to all the real estate these newspaper companies sit on.

Now the new BH Media Group can move forward with its properties — where and how will the Omaha and Buffalo properties fit here?  – and unencumbered by debt or short-term pressures. If you are a long-term investor like Buffett, you can afford to give “newspaper” properties a breathing period.

He, as well as anyone knows that the future will be mainly digital, though it will slower to unfold in Lynchburg and Winston-Salem than in competitive major metro markets. He can be buoyed by the profound industry move to charging for digital access, after decrying free digital access: “Newspapers have been giving away their product at the same time they are selling it and that is not a great model. You’re competing with yourself… you shouldn’t be giving away a product you’re trying to sell. That’s key to the future of the newspaper. giving away a product free in one place that you charge for in another.” We now have enough evidence to believe that core newspaper readers will transition over their payments for “circulation” as they themselves move to tablets and other devices, if publishers approach the transition smartly.

The problem is print advertising is far deeper; it’s in an unending and accelerating spiral. No doubt he is buying — by bypassing Media General’s Tampa Tribune — profitable entities. Indeed, we may find out, looking back, that Buffett is just another greater fool, having believed his buy was close enough to the bottom to justify. Or we may see the code broken well enough on new business models, as the BH Media Group takes a long, hard look at the realities of John Paton’s Digital First Media initiatives, to manage downturn and change well enough to stay in the black. As that drama unfolds, it’s the profits from a Media General broadcast bet, loan interest and potential sales of real estate that buffett this deal from the harsh day-to-day reality of newspaper downturn.

When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.

The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline.

Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The Newsonomics of 99-Cent Media“), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each.

Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless.

When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot.

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples.

The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust.

We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:

• 33-45 percent of consumers who pay for digital subscriptions click to buy before they ever run into a paywall. That’s right — a third to a half of buyers just need to be told they will have to pay for continuing access, and they’re sold. As economists note that price is a signal of value, consumers understand the linkage. Assign what seems to be a fair price, and some readers pay up, especially if they are exposed to a “warning” screen, letting them know they’ve used up of critical number of “free” views. Maybe they want to avoid the bumping inconvenience — or maybe they just acknowledge the jig’s up.
• If print readers are charged something extra for digital access, then non-print subscribers are more likely to buy a digital-only sub. Why pay for digital access is the other guys (the print subscribers) are getting it thrown in for “free”? Typically, Press+ sees a 20-percent-plus increase in signups on sites that charge print subscribers something extra. That extra may be just a third or so of the price digital-only subscribers pay (say, $2.95 instead of $6.95), but it makes a difference. Consequently, Press+ says 80-90 percent of its sites charge print subscribers for digital access. The company now powers 323 sites and thus has more access to collective data than any other news-selling source.
• You can reverse the river, or at least channel it. The New York Times took a year, but figured it out righter than anyone expected. It bundled its Sunday print paper (still an ad behemoth) with digital, making that package $60 or so a year cheaper than digital alone. The result, of course, is that Sunday Times home delivery is up for first time since 2006. It’s not just NYT or the L.A. Times which have embraced Sunday/digital combos. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune began a similar push in November. Now, of its 18,000 digital-only subscribers, 28 percent have agreed to an add on the Sunday paper, for just 30 cents a week, says CEO Mike Klingensmith (“A Twin Cities turnaround?”). So we see that consumers may well be more agnostic about platform than we thought. Given them an easy one-click way of buying even musty old print, and they will. Irony: If you hadn’t charged them for digital access, you probably wouldn’t have sold them on print.
• New products create new markets. 70 percent of The Economist‘s digital subscribers are not former print subscribers, says Paul Rossi, managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. That’s surprising in one sense, but not in another. Newspaper company digital VPs will tell you that they’re surprised to see how little overlap there is between their print audience customer bases and their digital ones. The downside here: Many print customers seem not to value digital access that much. The Star Tribune is finding a low take rate of 3 percent of its Sunday-only print subscribers willing to take its digital-access upsell. One lesson: The building of a new digital-mainly audience won’t be easy and will require new product thinking; it’s not that easy just to port over established customers.
• The all-access bundle must contain multiple consumer hooks. Sure, readers like to get mobile access as well as desktop and print, and maybe some video. Yet some may especially prize the special events or membership perks they are offered, as the L.A. Times is banking on (and start-ups Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Global Post have applied outside the paywall model). Some will like the extras, like The Boston Globe telling its new 18,000 digital subscribers, as well as its print ones, that they now get “free” Sunday Supper ebooks (“The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year“). Sports fanatics or business data lovers will find other niches to value — and ones that make the whole bundle worthwhile. Archives — and the research riches they offer — will prove irresistible to some. In 2012, a bundle may offer a half dozen reasons to buy, casting a wide net, with the hope that at least one shiny lure will reel in the customers. By 2013, expect “dynamic, customized offers,” targeting would-be buyers by their specific interests to be more widely in use.
• While pageviews may drop 10-15 percent with a paywall, unique visitors remain fairly constant. We see the phenomenon of those who do hit a paywall one month coming back in subsequent months, rather than fleeing forever. “It may be the second, third, or fourth month before someone says, ‘I guess I am a frequent visitor here, and I’ll play,’” says Press+’s Gordon Crovitz.
• Archives find new life. Archives have lived in a corner of news and magazine websites for a long time. They’ve been used, but not highly used or highly monetized. Now, courtesy of the tablet, and a new way to charge, The Economist is finding that 20 percent of its single copy sales are of past issues. Readers will pay for the old in new wrappers, whether back e-issues, or niched ebooks. The all-access offer can be much wider than cross-platform, or multi-device. It can extend across time, from a century of yesterdays to alerts for tomorrow.
• News media is probably underpriced. Take the high-end Economist. CEO Andrew Rashbass — speaking to MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2012, in a recommended video — said that a survey of its subscribers showed that a majority didn’t know how much they were paying for the Economist. When pressed to guess, most over-estimated the price. At the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, an early paywall leader in the middle of America, a recent price increase to $8.99 from $7.99 has so far resulted in no material loss of subscribers. At Europe’s Piano Media, early experience in Slovakia and Slovenia is that price isn’t a big factor, says Piano’s David Brauchli. “Payment for news on the web is really more a philosophical mindset rather than economic. People who are opposed to paying will always opposed to paying and those who see the value of paying don’t mind paying no matter what the price is.” That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial.
• Bundle or unbundle — what’s the right way? Mainly, we don’t know yet, and the answer may be different for differing audience segments. The Economist started with print being a higher price than a separate digital sub. Then it raised the digital price to match that of print — to assert digital value. It now offers all-access: one price gets you both. Next up: You can buy either print or digital for the same price, but if you want both, you’ll pay more. It’s an evolution of testing, and so far, it’s been an upward one.

Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it; “The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet Retailer“) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:

I think overall publishers have to start thinking more like e-commerce companies. More like Amazon. You can’t just throw up a wall or an app and expect it to just sell itself. We’re still building that muscle here at the Globe, and some of our colleagues in the industry are even farther along. We have extensive real-time and daily analytics and are employing multivariate testing to try offers and designs to refine the experience that works best for each type of user.

The nation’s top investigative watchdogs convened last weekend to figure out how to better get the work of public interest, democracy-supporting news done, and I’ve covered that Logan Symposium 2012, over at Nieman Journalism Lab this morning.

Indeed, it was a power-packed — and collaborative — weekend, yet it got off to sputtering and almost jaw-dropping start.

Logan organizer Lowell Bergman, who heads UC Berkeley’s growing Investigative Reporting Program and is a longtime investigative producer and reporter (Frontline, CBS, New York Times+), led off with a Friday evening one-on-one interview with Dean Baquet, the New York Times’ managing editor. Baquet was subbing for Times editor Jill Abramson.

With a strong theme of collaboration — reporters sharing ideas and tips, TV and newspapers partnering, more is better than less — running through the conference’s schedule, Bergman tossed out an easy question for Baquet about collaboration.

“This is going to sound arrogant, but we need it less,” he said. You know, when someone starts off a sentence like that, he is usually right. Bergman gave Baquet a few more chances to explain himself….and sound less arrogant. Baquet whiffed, repeatedly.

His reasoning:

• The Times newsroom of 1200 is large enough to do what needs to be done, “unlike the Washington Post which has given up areas of coverage.”
• The Times seems like a more stable business now, with the fledgling success of its paywall — both making journalists feel their work is valued in the digital age and contributing to revenues. Baquet likened the paywall decision to the Times’ 1980 decision to launch a national edition, as milestones in the company’s strategy.
• “Reporters blanch at having two sets of editors.”

Asked what he thought of the Times/local collaborations with Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen and the Chicago News Cooperative (the second and third having recently been terminated), his response: “We got some good coverage out it,” particularly Texas “for the 20 minutes that Rick Perry ran for President.”

The Times as “the center of the world” approach seemed a bit odd Friday night. One audience questioner, hearing the comments, did ask with a tone of incredulity, “Surely, you can’t cover the whole country with 1200 people?” Baquet did allow that there are big issues in the non-national press, “The dirty little secret of newspapers is that many aren’t that good. For every Philadelphia Inquirer, there is a dipshit paper.” Which is kind of a problem if there are only two serious national newspapers in the country and 1400-plus non-national ones.

As he I talked with participants over the weekend, the take was unanimous: Baquet hadn’t been merely arrogant, but extraordinarily and doubly so, given the conference’s reason for being.

Now, most observers were quick to point out that Baquet himself had proven to be a good — and collaborative — colleague in his years in journalism in New Orleans, Washington, L.A. and New York. Still his words seemed out of place. Let’s maybe blame it on the cold pills he may have been taking to soothe an ailment.

Whatever, the pose seems dangerous.

It’s wonderful that the Times still pays 1200 people, but how much longer will it be able to? In the depth of the recession, it cut more than 100 positions and as recently as last fall had to offer newsroom buyouts. Its financial future is far from assured, with its print advertising woes a great weight going forward. It is not out of the woods; it may simply be seeing a clearing.

When times get tougher, and they may well soon, the Times will need friends. You know, those people who are with you in the good, and bad, times. Talking like the king of the hill doesn’t win friends. Beyond that, even the Times’ 1200 staffers only provide limited capacity, and in the total distribution era of news, capacity counts. That’s one of the things that has made the the local collaborations of the Times such an interesting experiment. Could it generate more journalistic capacity — quality journalism that met its standards, though it was done by non-Timesmen and Timeswomen — with the local partnerships?

We’re left wondering what the Times learned from those partnerships, and where it goes from here. We’re used to not feeling warm and cuddly about the Times; arrogance has often walked hand-in-hand with its great journalism.

Yet, journalism, inevitably is a humbling trade, and even the Times is better off, for itself and for all of us, remembering that.

Try this: Call up your local newspaper or online news organization. Tell them you want to buy something and ask them what they can sell you? Of course, at first, they’d be non-plussed: Sell you something? Then, after giving it some thought, they’d say you can buy a newspaper or a subscription or a membership — or, maybe, an ad? Would you like one of those?

Those days — mark it — are coming to an end. We’re on the brink of news companies producing hundreds of products for sale each year. While digital technology hath taketh (the easy ability to make money on news distribution), digital technology also giveth back, with the ability to create hundreds and thousands of newsy products at small incremental costs. The bonus: News organizations will be able to satisfy groups of readers and advertisers (often disguised thinly as sponsors) better than ever before. Double bonus: The let-a-hundred-products-bloom revolution fits neatly with the all-out embrace of all-access circulation initiatives, which news companies in North America, Europe, and Asia now can’t seem to implement quickly enough.

Can we call this the ebook revolution? Maybe, but that’s probably too narrow. Delivery of new products to new audiences can take several forms. A text-only ebook, a shinier iBooks-enabled product with video, or an app with all the glorious functionality apps offer. It’s not the form; it’s the content, content that satisfies niches rather than serves masses with one-size-fits-all newspaper or magazine products.

Call it the newsonomics of 100 products a year, or just one way to envision a much bigger future.

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model  (“The Newsonomics of Crossover“)  that I detailed here a few weeks ago. The big, hairy challenges of accelerating print ad loss and onerous legacy costs remain, but at least we’ve got a couple of building blocks we didn’t have two years ago. By we, I mean those of us who care about news and great professional content.

Is it a big moneymaker? We don’t know yet, though we can extrapolate some numbers below.

It’s directionally right, though, for at least a couple of strategic reasons. The notion of 100 smaller products reminds us that so much of the new world is based on volume. Google has built a monstrous advertising business on hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers, while daily newspapers reaped huge profits on relatively few bigger advertisers. Even as movie watching by streaming surpasses DVD watching, more money is still in the old medium. Streaming will monetize at a lower rate, but end up generating bigger dollars over time. The same thing is true in the digital music business. Selling lots of stuff to lots of people at smaller price points is something the Internet enables superbly.

Yes, there are definitely new winners and losers in movies and music, as there will be in news. Those who transition best and fastest will win.

Second, it’s in line with the strategic push to satisfy the hell out of core customers. As publishers have figured out that it’s the top 15 percent of site visitors who make the big difference in building the new digital business — perhaps paying for subscriptions, consuming many more pages than fly-by users sent by Google — core customer satisfaction is key. Ebooks deeper the relationship to that reader customer.

This 100-product-a-year model may fit as well with the new California Watch/Bay Citizen combo (“The Newsonomics of the Death and Life of California News“), finalized Tuesday, as its does with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, GQ, or Conde Nast Traveler.

Let’s take one example. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe launched “Sunday Supper & More.” It’s a cookbook. It’s New England. And it could be the beginning of a new franchise: Expect summer, fall and winter editions each year to join this spring debut. The Globe’s staff built it with Apple’s iBooks Author tool, so it offers video within it.

Want to buy it? Not so fast. Today, Sunday Supper & More is only available to Boston Globe print, all-access, and digital subscribers. So subscription — think “membership” (the recent riff of the L.A. Times new paywall intro) — is gaining new benefits. Surprise, says the Globe, you not only get our paper, our spiffy new replica-plus edition, if that’s what you want, and our mobile apps — you also get our cool cookbooks, with more to come.

The Globe will sell the book to non-subscribers — probably at $4.99 — but will decide the timing of that sale after next week’s Globe confab at which execs and editors will plot an ebook plan for the company.

“Events and ebooks will be the two biggest perks” of the new Globe subscription push, says Jeff Moriarty, the Globe’s VP of digital products. Beyond Sunday Suppers and a new spin on the Fenway 100 historical Red Sox book, we can picture the Globe soon mining its archives in both sports and features to provide new value for customers and a new leg of revenue. It experimented early with three books on its Whitey Bulger stories, and learned some lessons in pricing, distribution, and the technical creation process along the way.

The Globe has plenty of company in this push. We see Canada’s National Post committing to a couple of dozen ebooks in the coming year, again from hard news to features (“To learn what works (quickly), Canada’s National Post dives into ebooks”). Guardian Shorts is an early innovator; Politico is churning out four campaign ebooks this year.

Magazine publishers, faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet as the next-gen platform, are also ahead of most newspaper publishers in ebooks. Vanity Fair’s done more than a half dozen, and its parent Conde Nast is hosting an explosion of more single-purpose apps in the iTunes Store, some unrelated to Conde’s magazines. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan is embracing ebooks, and now partnering, along with ProPublica — an early tester of ebooks — with Open Road Integrated Media . Open Road Integrated Media?

Well, it’s a book company, an ebook company juiced on the possibilities of our age. Headed by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, the company is prototypical of a new group of middlemen. With book marketing savvy (cover design, marketing, distribution+), these companies are now feeding the emerging ebook marketplace. They are also partnering back for that old standby, print, as Open Road has done with book services company Ingram. In Canada, it was Harper Collins Canada that became the National Post’s partner in bringing news ebooks to market.

Just as the web has knocked many middlemen for a loop, it creates openings for new ones.

If you talk to publishers about ebooks, they are farther along in experimenting than they were a year ago. Yet some basic issues — producing the books, marrying them to commerce engines, placing them prominently in e-stores and more — are giving them headaches as they push forward. “How do we make the right offer to the right person at the right time?” one experienced exec asked.

The marketplace has been exploding (recall that Amazon announced last spring that its ebooks were now outselling its paper books), but those issues are setting the stage for a new group of companies, many staffed with graduates of the book industry, offering their help. Newspaper and magazine publishers are looking to the Open Roads for guidance.

Some are turning to their digital circulation partner, Press+. That company, which is powering more than 280 titles’ subscription commerce, says its system can handle the commerce and even help with identifying likely customers, based on tracked content usage, so its customers are just beginning to ply the ebook trade.

ProPublica general manager Dick Tofel opted for Open Road for the non-profit investigative publisher’s fifth and sixth books. He says the company will start producing a half dozen or more a year now and is now fielding calls from other publishers eager to get the benefit of his early ebook experience.

So far, ProPublica has put 90,000 ebooks into the market. The first couple were free downloads, but with the addition of new original introductions to work ProPublica had already published free online, Amazon and ProPublica agreed on test pricing of 99 cents and $1.99, and new revenue is rolling in. It’s small, but “pound for pound, it generates more than advertising,” notes Tofel, who is a Wall Street Journal veteran. And, of course, the incremental cost of creating ebooks is closer to zero, with most sales cost able to be a commissioned cost of sale.

As assistant publisher, Tofel oversaw the print books business that’s been a good Dow Jones sideline for a long time.

Those books — personal investing and more — are naturals for the ebook revolution now. Look for the Journal to experiment more with those titles, perhaps niching by life stage.

As news and magazine publishers look to this new revenue stream, here are six points to ponder:

It’s about product development: Yes, it’s editing, but fundamentally, it’s a mindset change for many publishers stuck in the one-size-fits-all world. Publishers either need staffers with new product chops or partners wanting to license publisher content and create the products for the marketplace.

Free the archives!: Digital archives have never been a big business for publishers, caught somewhere between Google and musty library connotations. Packaged archives — for specific audiences — can offer new life for older content.

Don’t think content; think problem solving: Publishers too often start with content. If we start with audience — college-planning students and parents, new mothers and fathers to be, bored cooks, and, big time, sports enthusiasts of all ages — we can see the motors of ebook publishing beginning to role. Think life stage, just for starters, and add the geo angle, and regional publishers can play.

Mining the database: As onesies and twosies, it’s fairly easy to pick content from publishers’ own databases. Think of bigger production cycle, going beyond the 100 a year, to a thousand, all niched products that could be semi-automated and templated over time. Better tagging of content for ebook usage then becomes a priority.

Ebook or app?: Early experimenters say let the content be your guide. The more multimedia, the better an app may work. Ebooks, though, can be sold through more distributors, while Apple continues to dominate the app business.

Pricing: What’s an ebook worth? If it solidifies a subscriber/member paying $300 or more a year, it’s worth a lot, even if it’s free. Think of the lifetime value of that subscriber.

To the right niche, some ebooks will be worth $1.99 and others — Retina perfect — will go for $19.99. Let’s take our 100 products a year. Let’s average 5,000 sales for each. Let’s price at $2.99 on average. That would be $1.5 million. Some books, though, could be blockbusters. We can play with this math and see where it goes.

For the ProPublicas, it’s a nice non-ad revenue stream. For other publishers, it’s at least a growing third leg of revenue (beyond ads and circulation) and one that may be nurtured into something significant. (Last fall, Will Sullivan offered a gaggle of reasons ebooks make sense for publishers.) As importantly, it can reinforce those two legs, pleasing subscribers/members with free (or discounted) perks and advertisers/sponsors who have new opportunities to represent themselves to niche audiences. That’s a pretty good combination, and one that publishers will soon embrace, just as they lately have all-access digital circulation.

By historical measure, it’s a strange move. A large newspaper company CEO is captain of his own ship, at a pinnacle of American company life and compensation. The Associated Press, on the other hand, has been something else indeed, a wire, about as unsexy as a news company can be. Retiring CEO Tom Curley came over to AP from his role as publisher of USA Today almost nine years ago. It’s been a helluva nine years of transformation, of turning the quite traditional company he inherited from long-time head Lou Boccardi into a modern news company. He got it part way there.

Now Pruitt takes the baton, as most reports paint a picture of night falling on one of America’s oldest industries. The Council of Economic Advisers has reported that the press is “America’s fastest-shrinking industry”, measured by jobs lost,” and the Financial Times headlined its recent newspaper round-up, “Bleak outlook for US newspapers.”

Why do it? Why trade in the sleepiness of California’s capital city (Sacramento is McClatchy’s headquarters) for the bright lights of Broadway, a long walk from AP’s NYC offices?

Number one on list may be McClatchy fatigue. Pruitt and his CFO, now-successor Pat Talamantes, have rowed the third-largest U.S. newspaper company oh-so-gingerly around the bankruptcy shoals that have grabbed more than dozen of their peers. They’ve had to make devastating cuts in staff and other expenses along with other companies, but get some points for greater efforts to keep newsroom size and spirit going in the face of that bleak reality. It’s important to note that McClatchy has found no special sauce in transforming itself for the digital age, performing on par, sometimes better, sometimes worse, than its peers. Pruitt is getting this job not on the basis on being a proven transformative player, but on being a known, highly respected news exec who understands the challenges of the times.

Almost exactly six years ago, Pruitt seemed like a big hope for higher-quality, newspaper journalism in the transitional print/digital age. On March 6, 2006, which seems like two eternities ago, McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder, then the second-largest newspaper company in the country, and my work home for 21 years through 2005.  Though Knight-Ridder’s quick demise was shocking, Pruitt’s commitment to journalism was reassuring. I remember the conference call the company did to tout the purchase, and the optimism and commitment in Pruitt’s voice:

“Opportunities like this come perhaps once in a company’s lifetime, and  we’re thrilled to have this chance to extend McClatchy journalism and our  proven newspaper operations to 20 high-quality newspapers in high-growth  markets. Our two companies operate in the finest traditions of American journalism,  devoted to independent, public interest reporting and the highest ethical  values. Combining the two creates a company particularly well-positioned to  lead the way in a changing media landscape. It’s truly a chance for McClatchy  to do more of what it does best.”

We hoped Pruitt would become a strong public leader for those values in this difficult age. Fending off bankruptcy, challenged by new non-family shareholders and consumed by month-to-month survival, that leadership went underground. There was little percentage in asserting journalistic values in that environment, it seemed.

So now: AP. Certainly, the company owns its own set of life-and-death challenges. The non-profit cooperative, owned by newspaper companies, is still somewhere betwixt and between a wire and a global media company.

One thing Pruitt trades in: a non-national company of diverse properties for a worldwide media play. In a word: Scale.

AP is one of the Digital Dozen companies I wrote about in the Newsonomics book. The digital business is all about scale: do something better than others and then take it out, at very low incremental costs, to the rest of the world. The Wall Street Journal, BBC, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Guardian and a half dozen others fit that definition; many will be the winners when we look back from 2020. Yet AP isn’t in that league.

Though only about 20% of its revenues these days (down from 40% when Tom Curley arrived in 2003) are paid by member newspapers, those newspapers control the direction of the non-profit company. Understandably, member/owners haven’t wanted AP to directly compete with them in the digital, death-of-distance age, but they’ve often been far stronger in what they didn’t want AP to do, than in what they wanted it to do.

AP’s been essentially a B-to-B company, with one of its prime customer revenue bases eroding so quickly. AP has made up part of that deficit by selling national content to web portals and upped its broadcasting and global businesses, but, like its owners, it has had to cut. The company’s made smarter investments in mobile lately, revamping what had been ho-hum, if early-to-market, iPhone and iPad apps. Those products offer glimmers of hope that the power of AP, and its members, can be realized by consumers. Mobile is the only area in which AP is going direct to consumers, with the goal of being the go-to site for news in the U.S. That’s a tall goal, with lots of competition.

So what should be at the top of Gary Pruitt’s to-do list?:

• In one word: Leadership. Yes, a sky (print) is falling. Yet, we’ve never more needed strong, courageous leadership in the news industry. What journalists — and not just those employed by daily newspaper companies — do is hugely importantly to their democracies and their communities. Tom Curley tried to make those points; too often his comments were received as those of the Old Guard simply trying to hold on. It’s not easy to change the conversation, but before the public, Congress and the industry, Gary Pruitt must step forward with an optimistic, inclusive view of the future of the news business.
• Embrace Big Story storytelling: Check out the new Big Stories section on the new AP Mobile app. It only contains five topics now, but its larger principle is important. AP is probably the second-largest company, by staff, in the world, with about 2700 journalists, second to Reuters’ approximate 3000. It made its reputation of getting it first, globally. That’s still vitally important. Yet, its ability to move beyond a commodification of sorts — for publishers, taking AP’s first story, then come behind it with a deeper story — is essential if it’s going to climb the mountain of value and charge more. As AP escapes from the age of Last In, First Out into a web of greater contextual value to its business and consumer customers, the more it can claim a place in that Digital Dozen.
• Master advertising: McClatchy is an advertising company; AP’s not. AP, if it is to be global player, needs to develop and bring in-house — quickly — advertising chops. Yes, its content-buying customers will sell their own advertising, but AP needs capacity to do that same, and not be wholly dependent on those buyers to create — and share value.
• Leverage global connections: The world’s news agencies employ 10,000 or more journalists among them. Collectively — if they were working even more closely together — that would be the largest journalistic workforce on the planet. Finding ways to leverage more and more any journalistic synergies (technology can help here) is an opportunity AP’s competitors don’t have. Some of those news agencies have found more alternative funding sources than others, though all are struggling with their core businesses. Learning from them is essential.
• Play paywall pool: With Lee’s embrace of paywalls, we’re now seeing pay systems become the default at U.S. dailies. Paywalls aren’t only a digital circulation revenue move; they reconfigure customer relationship and should force re-thinking of product portfolio. Consequently, figuring out where AP fits into the new paywalled world (and as more than in-front-of-the-wall, bulk-up-the-free content) has suddenly increased in priority.

It’s easy to get cynical about hyperlocal news on the web. People have been working to figure out a scalable model to support it for years. But news-model fatigue shouldn’t be mistaken for permanent failure — it’s just that no one has yet found success.

Community journalism pioneer Steve Buttry, now heading up community engagement at Digital First Media, says he is buoyed by disruptive-change theorist Clayton Christensen’s notion that 90 percent of successful startups start out with the wrong strategy and often take three or four attempts to get it right. That makes some kind of web sense. For those of us trained in the arts of journalism, though, it’s probably a tough lesson: We’re trained to get it right thefirst time.

With that in mind, let’s look into the next round of hyperlocal, the emerging newsonomics around Patch’s aim to become profitable, just as Digital First Media (DFM) dials up its own hyperlocal strategies. Though many newspaper companies are testing hyperlocal strategies, individually or through their chains, Patch and DFM stand out for the scale of their intent. We’ll stick with the term “hyperlocal,” even though it’s a squishy one, because it still best describing the kinds of close-to-where-we-live school news, local sports, police reports, and government coverage we find useful. It may a community of 20,000 or 80,000, but for many of us, it’s less than a whole city.

Let’s start with Patch. Each quarter, as AOL announces its financial results, CEO Tim Armstrong sticks his head in the boxing ring, and lets it get punched around a bit. He took over a newly independent Time Warner spinoff and has been madly transitioning it beyond its sinecure of the old-timey Internet access business.

I won’t debate here his hits and misses, his romancing of Arianna (or was it the other way around?), or the half-life of AOL, given its trajectory and the fact it haslost more than $800 million since its 2009 spinoff.

For the news business, two facts stand out. First, Patch is doing journalism, employing more than 1,000 journalists. Second, it is testing a model that needs testing, however Patch’s history is eventually written.

That model may be getting a rocket boost of revenue, if January’s trends hold up. In an interview last week, Patch President Warren Webster says that January booked ad revenue alone equaled half of all of 2011 ad revenue. If that trend were to continue, we’d be looking quite differently at Patch’s chances of making it into the black before AOL’s investor patience runs out. Just last week, Starboard, an “activist fund,” increased its AOL stake to 5.1 percent, pushing for strategic changes, and Patch is in the middle of its sights.

[Update, 2:52 p.m.: Some added context to the Patch ad revenue increase: The January ad revenue noted above should be noted as bookings for the year as a whole, committed by January. Further, Patch says that, as of today, it now has commitments for more than 75 percent of the total revenue that it recognized in 2011. Those are ads that it has sold and that will run some time in 2012. It recognizes the revenue, like almost all ad sales companies, when ads run. Indeed, January 2012 is up manyfold over January 2011, but in terms of the yearly revenue contribution, it will be relatively small given that January is a light ad month throughout the industry. While it's impossible to extrapolate whole year 2012 revenue, based on the data so far, the sharp turn up in trajectory portends a major boost in ad revenue in 2012 — how large and how sustainable, still to be seen.]

That model may be getting a rocket boost of revenue, if January’s trends hold up. In an interview last week, Patch President Warren Webster says that January ad revenue alone equaled half of all of 2011 ad revenue. If that trend were to continue, we’d be looking quite differently at Patch’s chances of making it into the black before AOL’s investor patience runs out. Just last week, Starboard, an “activist fund,” increased its AOL stake to 5.1 percent, pushing for strategic changes, and Patch is in the middle of its sights.

AOL won’t release specific Patch financials, but we can piece together numbers — Patch CSI — that tell us the story so far. AOL has said publicly that one quarter of its 864 sites are making $2,000 a month or more of revenue. That would also mean that 645 or so of its sites are making less than $2,000 a month in revenue.

On revenue, let’s be generous and say that one-quarter of the Patch sites are making an average of $2,500 per month. That would mean $30,000 a year. So 215 (or one-quarter of the sites) at $30,000 kicks up to $6.45 million annually.

Let’s say that on average the other three quarters of sites are earning an average of $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year. Multiply that by 645 and we get $11.6 million.

So annual 2011 revenue would come in at about $18 million. That matches up with other extrapolations, guesses, and the like, which put the number around $20 million.

We know that AOL is spending $160 million a year on Patch. So on an operating basis for 2011, total revenue of $18 million would leave Patch with a $144 million operating loss.

But wait. If January was that good, equaling half of the 2011 revenue rate, that would mean Patch took in $9 million in that month. If it could sustain that number all year, it would be up to $108 million in revenue. Yes, its sales cost would increase, so let’s add in another $20 million for those. If all the other costs were constant, 2012 costs would be $180 million. 2012′s revenues would be $108 million.

You could look at that number two ways:

— It would still be losing $82 million a year;

— It would have erased 43 percent of its operating loss in a year.

A Patch half-green, or a Patch half-brown.

On the green end is Patch’s maturing approach to ad sales. For instance, Webster is enthusiastic about its recent initiative to add a third leg of revenue, in addition to national impression-based advertising and largely sponsorship-based local advertising.That third leg is better monetizing of its directories. “In the last two months, we pushed our sales team to push claims.” “Claiming” is getting local merchants to verify their free business listings. Of course, the next step is to get them to advertise and to enhance those lists. “We hit an all-time high recently,” he says. “We got 400 claims in a single day across Patch.” Patch says its claimed-listings rate is up roughly 124 percent over the past six weeks.

The big potential payoff here: Claiming is lead generation, and Patch has found claiming merchants to be 4 to 5 times more likely to advertise once they claim. These enhanced directories offer video profiles, highlighted listings and “owner messages.”

Journalistically, what does Patch have to do to win a race towards profitability, a marathon that will probably last at least three more years? Fundamentally, it needs to fulfill its promise: “Hi there, we’re Patch, your source for local knowledge you can’t live without,” a promise it curiously makes on its overall entry page, but not on its town sites.

If I were giving out grades, I’d give many sites As and Bs for vitality and enthusiasm — and those are good starters in journalism. The better sites do give us a sense of townness, a tribute to the reporters running ragged around their geographies, snapping photos, doing quick interviews, promoting Patch, and more.

In news, they’re in and out — no real competition to good daily newspapers, even with their diminished staffs. They’ll hit on good stories here and then, but can’t be depended upon to do it. I thought that the March 2011 acquisition of Outside.In would lead quickly to better news aggregation from other local news producers — creating a better local news briefing — but so far I see scanty evidence of that.

Blog posts are increasingly numerous — Patch is up to 14,000 active bloggers, Webster says, or 16 per site on average. But they run a wide gamut in quality and readability.

In utility, Patches are hit and miss. Lots of local events can be found — to the gratitude of civic-minded organizers of them — but the presentation isn’t the most user-friendly.

As sources of finding a good new restaurant or a handyman or the best child care in my neighborhood, they fail. The city guide vacuum (“The newsonomics of the Swift Street Courtyard“) — still left in place after the Sidewalks, Digital Cities, Real Cities, and more have come and gone — is a market opening for Patch. Yet its directories are utterly generic, not distinguishing an above-average eatery andJack in the Box (“Whether you’re looking for a quick bite for breakfast, lunch or dinner, or a late-night snack, this Jack in the Box, conveniently located on Ocean Street near Water Street, is ready to serve you 24/7. You’ll find favorites such as cheeseburgers, Sourdough Steak Melts, Chicken Fajita Pitas, shakes and fries, as well as specialties that include a chicken teriyaki bowl, deli trio grilled sandwich and grilled breakfast sandwiches. Salads, tacos and a kids’ menu are also available.”)

That may explain the recent hiring of Rachel Fishman Feddersen, late of Bonnier’s Parenting.com, and an early city-guide staffer, way back in 1995 for New York City’s Metrobeat, which was later bought by CitySearch. A feature pro and a mom in Montclair (once the hyperlocal capital of the country, when Patch, Baristanet, and NYT’s The Local competed there, and now still deeply competitive even after the Times pulled out), she’s into her second week on the job. She told me that her job as chief content officer will range from “the unsexy stuff” — things like page load times, better SEO, newsletter-sending time — to showcasing Patch best practices to coming up with winning editorial features.

Patch is also experimenting with new more visually interesting designs in a couple of dozen markets. Webster acknowledges that the directories in particular and other parts of the site “are not yet built out.”

What else might AOL and Patch do to close the profit gap faster? It could grow its audience more quickly by better connecting Patch to other relevant parts of AOL. Huffington Post, for example, doesn’t automatically recognize local visitors and give them easy access to a local Patch site. Find the “Local” tab, and you can choose one of HuffPo’s city sites — but there’s no Patch content to be seen. That seems like a no-brainer. Further, a dedicated tablet app (rather than the 2x smartphone product) seems like it should be in place by now.

“Everyone wants us to fast-forward to the end of the movie,” Webster notes. He has a sensible point. Given how each Patch rumor — two sites consolidated here, freelance budgets cut back there — is treated as forensic evidence, Webster is in relatively hardy form. He admits that Patch, with its fast expansion, took too much of a one-size-fits-all approach to site deployment, and was too “cookie cutter.” Some of the changes in budgeting — for instance, devoting some site budgets more to marketing awareness and less to paying stringers — derive from overall understandings of the market; others attempt to learn that needs in West Des Moines are different than in West Orange.

That’s only fair, I think. Whether the moves have been right or not, it makes sense to tweak this hyperlocal business and journalism model, and each change shouldn’t be a cause for suspicion. Let’s remember that at the same time Patch may be cutting out freelance dollars here and there, daily newspapers are continuing to remove dozens of full-time jobs.

Further, as Buttry points, it takes time to get things right — though it’s not clear how much time Patch has, given growing competition.

Advertising competition is ubiquitous, with Google, Facebook, and Yahoo all taking new runs at local treasure. Buttry’s Digital First is making moves of its own. The company, which is making itself famous for developing dozens of new local, digital advertising products, is now in a couple of big Patch territories, particularly Connecticut and California, as Digital First digs deeper into MediaNews management in both Northern and Southern California.

People increasingly will compare Patch and Digital First. Says Buttry: “We get a lot of attention because of the geographic overlap, and we have big ownership [Alden Global Capital, in Digital First's case]. But we are transforming whole newsrooms, not setting up one-person shops.” Digital First’s Connecticut Group Editor Matt DeRienzo outlines the coming competition even more directly, pointing to the strengths of his Connecticut test lab in Torrington, a model soon to spread to Oakland and New Haven, with numerous variations elsewhere. He makes three points — ones that all legacy newspaper companies would have to use against insurgents like Patch:

• “A larger staff, and a newsroom structure with reporters who have editors on site leading and counseling them;
• 134 years of history covering the community (and in Torrington, we opened our entire archives for free access to the public, one of the most popular features of the newsroom café);
• A physical gathering place that is built more like a community center than a newsroom (free public meeting space for the Garden Club, Little League board of directors, Young Republicans, etc., classes and workshops for the public, open story meetings, etc.).”

And yet: Digital First, at this reading, has about 1,000 bloggers within its cities, compared to Patch’s 14,000.

Then there’s the overlap question: Aren’t these guys doing the same thing? Well, sorta, kinda. Buttry even says Digital First could reach out to Patch, offering a partnership or aggregation arrangement of some kind, though he hasn’t done that yet. “We should include them in our local networks.”

So it’s not David vs. Goliath, nor David vs. David, nor Goliath vs. Goliath. In fact, these may be two Davids both fighting against the Goliaths of Facebook and Google, which are rapidly gaining digital ad market share on everybody. It’s just another front in the digital wars, one perilously close to our homes.

Let’s look this week at the journalistic turmoil in the world’s eighth-largest economy: California, a.k.a. the Golden State (beta motto: “We get post-IPO Facebook capital gains taxes — you don’t”).

The massive changes we’re seeing in California journalism portend even faster journalistic change across the country. We Californians like to believe we’re always at the birth of the new new, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Certainly, that’s been true of news change — and now that change has greatly accelerated, doing spins, free falls, reversals of fortune, and lots more. It’s not really change — it’s chaos. No one can tell what the journalistic landscape of the state may look like in, say, 2014. All we can say with certainty: we’re witnessing the death and life of California news.

Who will own the biggest news media? Who will manage the biggest news media? How much of a life in print will be left for newspapers as they go digital? And, of course, how many journalists will be paid to get the news to the state’s 37 million residents and to the rest of the country? Already, well over 1,000 daily newspaper journalists have lost their jobs over the past five-plus years.

How many new combinations — among news entities formerly known as newspapers, broadcast, and digital news startups — will emerge and grow to scale? Those combinations are already beginning to tax legacy imaginations, and as of this week, we’ve got a new intriguing model to add to the mix.

The promise of California Watch’s model

Tuesday, we saw a new model birthed: the friendly takeover of one digital news startup by another. California Watch, the almost-three-year-old statewide-oriented model of a modern news agency, is merging with Bay Citizen, the two-plus-year-old Bay Area-oriented news startup, which has had more than its share of birthing pangs.

Both sites were born in the depth of the recession and a relatively dark period of Bay Area journalism. (See “Bay Area Online News Renaissance: 7 Pointers Forward.”) Both hired talented staffs (from voluminous applications) and won journalism awards. Yet California Watch, built on $5 million in foundation funding, developed under the wing of the Center for Investigative Reporting (itselffounded way back in 1977). It has prospered, grown, and earned quick legitimacy and even respect from the state’s major media, which run its stories. CIR, which has long focused on investigative pieces of national import, is now largely synonymous with California Watch; it’s one organization made up of 30 journalists (writers, editors, producers, data analysts, and more) and nine other staffers.

We’re seeing in the merger the greater strength of the California Watch model. Call it B2B (business-to-business), a statewide news agency re-imagined for this century. It’s a model being eyed by journalists in some of the other 49 states: Produce muscular, multimedia journalism once (with a little tailoring of stories by market) and distribute it to many news outlets, from Voice of San Diego to KABC-TV in L.A. to the San Francisco Chronicle. These news distributors pay small sums for the stories, but the money is adding up. Increase the flow of journalism, in the Bay Area specifically and California more widely, and the networking “new wire” importance of California Watch grows, especially as struggling dailies continue to cut their own content-originating staffs.

Bay Citizen foundered on leadership and strategic disagreements, on personalities, on the editorial priorities muddied by the otherwise-valuable feeding-stories-to the-regional-edition-of-The-New-York-Times program, and more. That’s all history now.

CIR/California Watch executive director Robert Rosenthal, and his former boss at the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein — the two served as managing editor and executive editor, respectively in the last decade — now face strategic and operational decisions on how best to put together the combined nonprofit. Bronstein, who has served as president of the CIR board, now serves as the executive chair of the merged organization, in part owing to the last wishes of the Bay Citizen benefactor Warren Hellman, who died unexpectedly in December. Two long-time daily newspaper guys, now able to build a new news model outside the constraints of constant cost-cutting and legacy hand-wringing. The foundation is set, with such stories as “On Shaky Ground” (“The Newsonomics of California Watch’s Single Investigative Story,”), which won over many editor skeptics.

For the moment, the big news out of this move is this: the potential to establish a new local model of scale and capacity. California Watch/Bay Citizen will be able to move forward with an editorial staff of more than 50, providing a scale that’s been needed to fill the yawning vacuum of local and statewide coverage. National investigative nonprofits from ProPublica to the Center for Public Integrity have stepped up their work, in volume and value, as newspaper-based coverage has slipped. In America, though, it’s a local-to-statewide news — across the 3,500-mile expanse of the country — that’s been crying out for bigger, new models to build on the successes of the MinnPosts and Texas Tribunes.

MediaNews dives into Digital First

The merger isn’t the only big news news in the Bay Area; it’s just the most public.

MediaNews — the largest news publisher by circulation in the state, with more than 30 dailies and great strength in the Bay Area, north of the Bay Area, and in greater L.A. — is about to be shaken to its Dean Singleton foundation. Singleton built the company, deal by deal, and assembled a coalition of willing executives to run the businesses and newsrooms.

They clustered, they cut, and they maneuvered through bankruptcy, and now their leader has been pushed into retirement, replaced by the wild, private-equity-bankrolled revolutionaries from Digital First/Journal Register Company (JRC). CEO John Paton and company moved rapidly (especially in newspaper time) to turn the financially and editorially bankrupt JRC upside down, lopping legacy costs, shooting voluminous video, opening newsrooms, and jettisoning anything and everything that didn’t smell of local.

That’s easier done in New Haven and Macomb that it is in San Jose and L.A. Applying faster, digital-first fixes to larger newsrooms and newspaper operations offers a complexity of challenge that will makes good drama for the rest of us. Expect to see rolling retirements of the Old Guard, with Denver Post CEO Jerry Grilly already announced.

Reorganizing newspapers on paper (or computer) is one thing — the new management knows its toughest and first challenge can be summed up in one word: culture. Yes, after the newspaper industry has been half-sized, culture, good, bad, and silly, is usually the first challenge new management faces in pushing change.

As MediaNews’ California properties change, they’ll change the landscape around them. Expect differing kinds of new competition and new potentials for unorthodox partnerships. Partner up, in fact, the MediaNews turmoil with those of another high-profile experiment: Patch.

The hyperlocal shoot of AOL, it has made a big bet on California. Of its 800-plus sites, 132 are based here. Many of the sites are lively, with good features, calendars, and lots of local, if episodic, bloggers — even if the sites don’t come close to living up to Patch’s tagline: “Hi there, we’re Patch, your source for local knowledge you can’t live without.” AOL, of course, won’t release traffic data, but its latest financial report showed that its $120 million investment isn’t close to bringing in enough ad revenue. That’s confirmed by checking on the sites (national ads prevail) or attending a local Patch-sponsored community meeting, as I did last Friday. Second question from the audience: “Why don’t you have local ads?”

Given Digital First’s open-newsroom strategy and philosophy, Patch is particularly vulnerable to the MediaNews changes. MediaNews can do what Patch is doing — and cover the news with more than single reporter/editors. Or MediaNews properties could partner with Patch.

Don’t think that Bay Area media change is restricted to text and print. KGO Radio, the market’s long-time talk leader, saw its talk line-up of multiple decades jettisoned one night in December — to public uproar, where else, but on Facebook — as it embraces the all-news (broadcast and digital) mantra and goes head-to-head with KCBS.

Public radio on the move in L.A.

Moving briefly to the south, we can see that the change is only prologue.

If Californians like to be first, they can be the first to claim one metro area with three — count ‘em, three — bankrupt daily newspapers. That would be metro Los Angeles. Both MediaNews (Los Angeles News Group, or LANG, with holdings like the Daily News, the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Pasadena Star-News) and Freedom Communications (Orange County Register) fell into bankruptcy and emerged quickly from it, with banker and private equity owners. Then last summer, the two tried to mate, as Alden Global Capital, holding about 40 percent of each, tried to arrange an arms-length (tough to negotiate with yourself within the bounds of law) marriage and somehow failed. Tribune’s Los Angeles Times entered bankruptcy in December 2008 and has yet to emerge from equity owner/bondholder hell. Those three companies continue to gyrate in the marketplace, maneuvering within their increasingly limited options.

With L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein assuming the Tribune CEO title as well last spring, the Times has been shaking up its strategy and management, edging into its own digital-first territory. One clue: the November appointment of a quartet of new VPs tried to find new harmony in digital revenue. They include Jennifer Collins from Variety and Andrea Nunn from HBO, giving an indication the newspaper company is trying to stretch well beyond its roots. They move in as long-time Times chief revenue officer John O’Loughlin moves out, having just assumed the president’s job in a exec-suite reorg at the Houston Chronicle.

Among the Times’ many options: a flipping-the-switch bet that would have it abandon some print to cut costs and become more heavily digital faster.

Ahead of still more staff cuts, the Times lost its change-oriented editor, Russ Stanton, in December — and then saw him hired by public-media mover KPCCas VP of content. Even a few years ago, that would have seemed a bizarre career move. The editor of The Los Angeles Times goes to lead the news effort at a local public radio station?

Yet when you compare the two enterprises — today — you see one in decline and one believing in its own upside.

Yes, The Los Angeles Times still has (today) 500-plus newsroom people, and KPCC can claim fewer than 60. But as the Times cuts, though, the Southern California Public Radio (SCPR) board has given the go-ahead to double its newsroom to more than 110 by July 1, 2014, needing to raise $24 million over four years to do it. Already raised toward that goal: $8 million so far. Already hired: 20 people in the last year. For 2012 alone, the plan is to bring in at least 13 more news positions — including producers, editors, bloggers, and hosts.

Those numbers are curious ones, but still seem small. Don’t, however, under-estimate SCPR president Bill Davis. Davis is a public media exec in the mold of his mentor Bill Kling, the Minnesota Public Radio visionary entrepreneur who first outlined how public radio could become public media and move into the local news vacuum. In fact, MPR, through its joint parent American Public Media subsidiary, is a sibling to KPCC.

Davis knows how to raise money, and he sees the journalistic devastation that’s enveloped his city. Add that energy and ability to the mix and the journalistic arithmetic begins to change. Five hundred newsroom people at the L.A. Times sounds like an army. Peel off the parts of that army that are devoted to sports, entertainment, and the production of content (as opposed to the creation of it), and you may be down to a couple of hundred who report the local news.

That local news — sans entertainment and sports — is what the expanded KPCC plan aims at. So let’s say that KPCC could get to 100 (Kling’s magic number) in the next several years, as public-spirited citizens (a la Philadelphia and Chicago?) chip in to create and sustain a local news alternative. Let’s say the Times continues to reel, run aground on the shoals of legacy costs, and its newsroom, already dispirited, trims down to 150 local news creators. As Rick Santorum said not long ago in Iowa: Ballgame.

Finally, let’s head to the border. There, the San Diego Union-Tribune, worth a billion dollars a decade ago, has been sold twice in three years. This time, local developer Doug Manchester bought it and promises to turn the newspaper of record in California’s second biggest city into a booster sheet. Across town, online startup Voice of San Diego — a California Watch affiliate which just had to cut staff due to budget cuts — has recently partnered with the local NBC station for news coverage.

Mix ’em, match ’em. It’s a Mating Game that seems like it could only come out of California.