Let’s elevate, for a moment.

Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet.

The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global.

The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning.

As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:

• The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well.
• If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year.
• Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall.
• The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion,”), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S.product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India.

This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles.

For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:

• Google: 54 percent
• Apple: 54 percent
• Facebook: 38 percent
• Amazon: 46 percent

Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers.

Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.)

It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market.

There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies.

You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues.

News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live  (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature.

A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

We’ve seen lots of consternation over numbers recently. Take Groupon’s foggy (more opaque than fuzzy) math now being dissected by the SEC. Dissatisfied with all the usual metrics-for-investors the business world has produced, it decided to create its own: ”adjusted consolidated segment operating income,” or adjusted CSOI.

The excellent WSJ piece, by Shayndi Raice and Nick Wingfield, lays it out well, though it’s a pinch-yourself, “Is-this-The-Onion?” kind of story. As one portfolio manager said, ”In essence, Groupon is asking investors to look at their profit before any expenses.”

In June, we read the Triumph of Charts over commonsense, with the Huffington Post surpassing The New York Times in unique visitors and the UK’s Mail Online now the secondmost-read site in the galaxy. I remember the good old days when it was hard to put up a chart on the web. Now, it’s so easy, anyone and everyone is doing it. Too often, it’s form before facts of consequence. Too often, charts feed delicious, SEO’able headlines that drive incredible traffic…that put some sites high up on the charts. It’s quite a circle, though lacking virtue.

Others (check out Steve Myers’ smart Poynter piece) have pointed out fallacies in the NYT/HuffPo comparisons. Let’s add to them with a look at the newsonomics of ARPU, or average revenue per unique visitor. It’s a great benchmarking metric, long used by telcos and in the cable TV industry, and one being increasingly used, though not publicly, in the digital news industry. In addition, it’s a revealing number when we look at such players as HuffPo, the Daily Mail, and NYTimes.com.

ARPU basically says: Don’t tell me how many customers you have; tell me how much money you are making on each of them. While it’s not the only number anyone wants to use to run a digital business, it’s a big piece of the puzzle — especially as we compare like companies to each other.

Let’s look at the ARPU of traffic. I’ve used full-year 2010 data, the cleanest available, and extrapolated where necessary.

For NYTimes.com, I’m estimating digital ad revenues of $170M in 2010. That’s 80 percent of total reported digital revenues for the Times News Media group overall. The Times represents just under 70 percent of total company revenues, and, clearly, the Times itself is driving more digital revenue, proportionally, than the smaller papers in the company. So 80 percent should be close.

In December 2010, comScore reported 48 million global uniques for the Times. So each unique would be worth $3.54 for the Times for the year. (Of course, uniques vary by month, and domestic uniques — 32 million or so — are worth more than non-domestic.)

For the same month, comScore reported 31 million global uniques for the Huffington Post. Most 2010 revenue estimates for HuffPo come in at about $30 million. So, in 2010, each HuffPo unique would be worth 96 cents.

Let’s take two supposed competitors in the UK, both in the news business, both selling advertising but attracting quite different audiences.

The Guardian took in £37.5 million in digital revenue in 2010. Using the December ABCe number of 39 million uniques, each unique was worth about £.96, or $1.53 at today’s exchange rates.

For the Mail, I extrapolate, from its reports, about £16 million in digital revenue for last year. Using the March (aligning with its reporting period) ABCe unique number of 66 million, I figure each unique visitor is worth about £.24, or 38 American cents to the Mail.

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

Why the differential? Reasons run a wide course. Take your pick from:

• “Premium” brands get higher rates than non-premium ones.
• Legacy sales forces are better at leveraging bigger buys than newer sales forces.
• Advertisers believe they get better results from the Times and the Guardian.
• The Guardian and The New York Times are driving more pageviews per unique visitor than the Huffington Post and Mail Online — both of which may have mastered search engine optimization and search engine marketing to tilt the unique numbers in their favor. The more pageviews, the more chance for monetization, and, thus, more revenue. Fly-bys are a huge part of everyone’s traffic (probably 60-70 percent of New York Times and Guardian traffic); they may be an even huger part of HuffPo’s and Mail Online’s.

(As another comparison to our news calculations, it’s intriguing to run the numbers for Groupon and Twitter. Twitter has about 139 million uniques (May, 2011) and maybe revenues of $150 million this year, or $1.07 ARPU. Groupon, with $460 million in U.S. revenue in 2010, estimated by Techcrunch, and about 10.7 million unique visitors in December, would have an ARPU of $42.90. That’s off the charts — and why it has attracted its valuation, despite its “profits” accounting.)

Whatever deeper analysis will show, the ad revenue numbers are real. Would you rather have the Times’ $170 million in digital revenues or HuffPo’s $30 million? (I know Tim Armstrong’s answer, and you AOL shareholders can sit down now.) Of course, it’s true, HuffPo/AOL traffic may continue to ramp up (or not), on a much-smaller cost base. It’s also true that the Times, still profitable, owns a huge brand equity — now being leveraged in digital circulation money as well — and has lots of upside, as it is challenged by its own legacy cost burdens.

Whatever kind of battle this is, it’s not a battle of equals, and it’s not a battle that can be understood by charting unique visitors.

Unique visitors are a great dumb count. As I’ve noted, it’s as if in the print world we counted the everyday subscriber — consuming 5 hours a month of a news publication — the same as someone who, standing on a Midtown corner on a windy day, happened to catch a sheet of flying newsprint as she held up her hand to hail a cab. Hardly equal, yet that’s what unique counts level.

Unique counts play to the wonder of Google search and, now, by Facebook and Twitter touts, but they are increasingly meaningless in a world that still seems to operate on a single currency: currency. Expect the bounce rates (hit one page and then leave the site) of the fly-bys only to increase in our new age of ubiquity, with mobile devices providing everywhere-and-anywhere access. It is hard not to run into big brands: Add to the Times, the HuffPo, the Guardian, and Mail Online such top-of-Google sites as Examiner.com and eHow.

Counting unique visitors — increasingly — is like counting air.

ARPU itself is just a beginning at better counting. Some will say it’s too general, the “A” as in average, just too broad to be useful. So companies can segment it, especially as they value core customers — say, the RPU of readers who read 50 pages a month compared to those who don’t.

Consider, in addition, how ARPU can be stretched and fine-tuned: mobile ARPU, smartphone ARPU, iPad ARPU, video-consuming visitor ARPU. Into the future, as each digital reader is offered an array of niche (sports, travel, health) products, increasing the ARPU of core readers becomes even more important. Much easier to upsell a customer, in any trade, than get a new one.

In addition, increasing ARPU is a better investment, says Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan, than either increasing sales volume or decreasing sales expense.

Some execs told me that ARPU is getting more important in the age of paid reader digital access, as, this week, Time Inc. ratifies that new age with its all-access provisioning for all 21 of its consumer magazine titles. While eCPM (the effective cost-per-thousand rate publishers get for their advertising, taking into account sponsorships and several sales types) is the preferred metric for ad efficiency, the emerging ARPU number can combine both how much a unique visitor provides in subscription (or pay per view, day, week) revenue and how much advertising revenue, on average, that unique enables.

Bonus question of 2011: What does the cross-platform (weekend print/daily digital, for instance) ARPU look like?

This isn’t an idea that’s alien to the legacy newspaper and magazine business — we’d have to combine a few legacy numbers to get an Average Revenue Per PrintSubscriber number — but the twists and turns, and added data, of the digital business give ARPU and its offspring increasing relevance.

It is all coming down to the same two revenue sources — circulation and advertising — just moved to the new digital business, gradually. (Lee Enterprises this week accepted Journalism Online’s advice and is up-charging print subscribers as it rolls out six tests.) As everyone toys with reader pricing, bundling, and add-ons, add up circulation and advertising, and we’ve got those increasingly familiar economics of transition.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he is surprised that customers weren’t more upset with Netflix’s digital shift. After all, he expected more upset, in his role as a pioneer, early in the game of forcing the digital shift. That’s the kind of digital shift now confronting news companies, so Netflix’s customer experience and strategy is highly relevant.

Hastings is quite clear in that strategy, telling investors on Monday:

“Believe it or not, the noise level was actually less than we expected, given a 60 percent price increase for some subscribers. We knew what we were getting into, we tried to be as straightforward as we could, and that has worked out very well for us.”

When Netflix shocked everyone by pricing way up DVD-by-mail subscriptions — up to a 60-percent increase — that’s what he was doing: forcing the digital shift. The digital shift is what Hastings wants to happen faster. Right now, 60 percent of his 25 million subscribers are DVD takers, and the majority of the revenue is on that side of the business. He knew when he started the business that he would start with DVDs, but that the long-term business was streaming (“Six Lessons for the News Industry from Reed Hastings“). He just had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to that vision.

The economics of his business is clear. Charge consumers less (for now) for streaming ($7.99 a month) — and profit more. As he shifts the business, the cost of revenues has already decreased almost two percentage points in a year, from 64.6 percent to 62.8 percent. Lower cost of revenues means higher cross margin, and that’s what investors have loved about the company.

In the new strategy, we can see how Netflix can both push the digital transition faster and manage the DVD decline better. We can assume that the digital customer is worth more in profit to Netflix than the DVD customer. Then, Netflix wants to take out as much of that cost infrastructure (Post Office, warehouses, associated customer service) as possible, as fast as possible. Differential pricing is one way to do that.

In the meantime, if we as consumers really want those DVDs, we’re going to pay significantly more for them, in the neighborhood of $16-20 a month. The Netflix analog customer, used to holding the hunk of burning love in his hands (and increasingly aware of the spottiness of Netflix’s streaming choices, even as they grow monthly), now has a tougher choice to make. Netflix has a better way to manage its business.

DVD-by-mail used to be the whole operation. Now with two years of successful streaming, it’s becoming simply one part of a streaming-focused company.

It’s now a division “within Netflix, with a  P & L”, said Hastings in an earnings call. “We think it will be a small investment in its growth and sustainability, and we’ll figure that out over the next several quarters. The DVD can last a long time as a successful platform. Growth [of the DVD business] would be overstating it. It will shrink slowly rather than rapidly with a little operating investment.”

We can hear the great resonance in this transition for news and magazine publishers. First the principle: Spend your time on tomorrow, not today. For print publishers, that means moving as much of the thinking and as many of the resources to digital as possible — now. How about making “print” a division of a news(paper) company?

Netflix’s experience is early, and directional for news and consumer publishers. What Reed Hastings is essentially saying is that once a company has figured out its route to digital business model success, it doesn’t want to dally, straddling too long the old and the new. That’s tough, expensive — time- and mind-sharing-consuming. Better to get on with the transition.

For publishers, the path is not yet clear, but at least in the age of the tablet and of mobile generally, they now see the rough outlines of a route. While for Netflix, that route is a simpler single consumer revenue stream proposition, it is more complex for publishers.

The greater complexity for newspapers and magazines involves their two-part business model. The first part is similar to the Netflix consumer transition, though with differing twists.

Newspaper publishers started this process several years ago, saying, “Let’s have these print customers pay more of the freight of creating and delivering print.” Since then, community dailies that used to cost a quarter a day have tripledto 75 cents, and The New York Times goes for $6 on Sunday. They have priced in more of the cost of that expensive newsprint, ink, and delivery.

Now, this year, we’ve seen added in the charging for digital access. We’ve begun to see the answer to this question: How much will consumers pay for digital access? That’s still uncertain, though early evidence is coming in from The New York Times, Time Inc., and Journalism Online experiments, among others. In newspapers and in magazines, we see the interim play: the bundled, all-access subscription — pay us once and get both analog and digital, print and pixel. That’s a move for more consumer revenue in the short-term, but also a longer-term pricing play to get pure digital revenue as readers give up print.

Imagine 2020, and the always-out-there-question: Will we still have print newspapers? Well, maybe, but imagine how much they’ll cost — $3 for a local daily? — and consumers will compare that to the “cheap” tablet pricing, and decide, just as they doing now are with Netflix, which product to take and which to let go.

The print world ends not with a bang, but with price increase after price increase.

These economics of transition have a second, big piece for publishers that Netflix doesn’t have to worry about: advertising. With advertising accounting for 70 percent of newspaper revenues worldwide, the huge question for publishers is how much ad revenue they can make from purely digital customers. In the U.S, newspaper publishers know they make more than $500 a year on a Sunday print subscriber. With reduced digital product cost (like Netflix’s reduced cost of streaming), newspaper and magazine publishers won’t need the same level of revenue, but they will need a substantial part of what they are getting today. Those economics are just being modeled now in 2011, as the promise of higher-priced and higher-value tablet (and smartphone) advertising looks like it may be real and buildable.

Magazine and newspapers aren’t yet ready to more forcibly shift the audience in the direction of digital-only.

Timing is a big question here. Reed Hastings is flipping the Netflix switch more heavily toward digital, even though fewer than half his revenues are yet there. For newspaper publishers, with no more than 20 percent of their overall revenues in digital, the time may be one to three years away.

When publishers flip that switch — pushing customers more heavily toward digital — they want the force to be with them, not against them. The news and feature businesses are different than Netflix’s. Yet the strategies involved — make the old business a division, model out the new business model, move to it as quickly as you can once you’ve got it figured out — all apply. In mid-2011, Netflix is a canary in a (circulation) coalmine, with lessons to be learned.

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.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one. The head of media company says: Why are we reinventing the wheel?

Why are we — we who know how to create stuff our audiences love — spending so much time and money on stuff we don’t know, like technology? Isn’t there a way to do it cheaper or faster, use what others are using or figure this out, together, with others in our business?

It seems so simple, yet the tale of the development of new, digital technology for publishers and broadcasters has been a tale of almost uninterrupted woe. Tech development has been a cost drain, a distraction, and ultimately a disappointment, as digital-only companies have outpaced legacy companies time and again. Time to market and scale really do matter when being first decides the race — in search (Google), video aggregation (YouTube), social connectivity (Facebook), saucy aggregation (HuffPo) and (aspirationally) local (Patch?), among too many other examples.

Against a backdrop of industry consortia that have gone from comically bad (starting with the newspaper industry’s New Century Network in the mid-’90s, to Tribune-Knight-Ridder-Gannett (TKG) moves to AP’s ongoing attempts to round the wagons to the latest talks between Gannett and McClatchy) to apparent half-steps (the consumer magazine industry’s sort-of-group play with Next Issue Media), what divides media people has been more important than what united media people (with apologies to the first-cowboy-from-Texas president, as his wannabe successor takes another tack).

NPR Digital Services is trying, against some odds, to set a new model. A decision point on the initiative’s expansion could come as early as July. Plainly NPR is at a crossroads, and it’s one that all who care about news — local and national — should better understand.

The effort that was once called Public Interactive is now called Digital Services and could become…a network. That network notion is a huge one, but one that’s still down the road from this Digital Services advance. First, we see the idea of shared, enable-us-to-move-to-digital-faster-and-more-cheaply and then, stations tell me, we’ll figure how to use the new engine to create new kinds of content (text + video + audio, of course, NPR’s core legacy advantage).

As we look at the newsonomics of NPR Digital Services, we can see big potential impacts and dollars. We also see that the public radio movement, and the effort to enlarge it to become public media (“‘Public Media’: $100 Million Plan, 100 Journalists Per City“), is now re-emerging. As politicians used NPR as a convenient pinata in the budget battles and NPR offered a couple of sticks, in the Juan Williams firing and Ron Schiller/phony sheik incidents, public radio put its head down, the better to avoid the fire, which it had done to some degree. It is now peeking back up, seeing if the coast is clearer. (Best joke summarizing the twin gaffes that, in quick succession, led to the CEO Vivian Schiller’s departure: “It’s not surprising that NPR shot itself in the foot; what’s surprising is how fast it reloaded.”)

NPR’s digital growth is impressive. On NPR.com alone, it’s seen an 87 percent increase in pageviews, to 50 million, and a 40 percent increase in unique visitors, year over year, to 4.7 million, according to The Nielsen Company. NPR’s own internal count shows a similar ramp, but counts 19 million unique visitors, among all the NPR applications from npr.org to tablet, web, and smartphone apps. In addition, more than a half dozen of the big city stations from WBUR (“WBUR celebrates its first year of operating a news site“) to WBEZ to Minnesota Public Radio to Oregon Public Radio to KPCC and KQED have recently innovated new local news sites of their own (distinct from the legacy programming guide sites) and greatly grown traffic as well. Significantly, as newspaper web traffic has showed signs of stagnating, NPR’s is growing — without the potential power of more robust content management and distribution strategies.

As I’ve argued over last several years (“Public Radio Emerging as Local News Player“), public radio values are the closest to newspaper values — and those “without fear or favor” values are more sorely needed as cable TV and too much of internet “news” traffic benefits from division, however real or contrived. Stronger public media operations could be both a good substitute for local newspaper news in continuing decline — and/or a partner for it, as new combinations of new local media operations become more viable and visible.

So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42 staffers and serve as the nerve center for public radio’s digital future.

It’s intended to be a full-service center, rooted in technology and branching out to wider, collective, and collaborative, deal-making. It starts with robust content management system, built on Drupal 7, and expands from there. “We’ll include research, analytics, training, product marketing, design, API development, business development, and network operations,” NPR digital head (and former USA Today editor-in-chief) Kinsey Wilson says. “It’s a complex choreography of talents.”

That bigger intention builds on a number of recent public radio experiments. Projects have included Project Argo‘s topical sites around the country, its Impact of Government initiative, its development of an NPR API, and more.

The new network will cost about $5 million a year to run. Funding it will be those member stations. Each station will be assessed a new mandatory fee, ranging from $1,800 to $100,000 per year, depending on station size. Stations would pay full assessments in 2014, a third in 2012 and two-thirds in 2013.

It’s the mandatory part that sticks in some craws. So the NPR board, in approving the costs of starting to build out Digital Services through this year also encouraged a listening tour. That tour, headed by Wilson and Kempf, has been touring NPR country. Eighteen cities in the the last eight weeks. Yesterday, in Atlanta, some eight to 10 southeast stations were represented by about 35 staffers. In total, Kempf figures that more than 175 of NPR’s 268 member stations will have participated. The tour is intended to gauge sentiment, gather station digital needs, and gain buy-in.

My non-scientific survey of station management shows fairly strong support. Why? The economics are compelling. Certainly, it makes sense to all those investing in get-beyond-radio to digital technologies to do it once, rather than hundreds of times. Beyond that, though, the economics of revenue are rising to the fore.

For KQED Public Radio General Manager Jo Anne Wallace, who runs the most-listened-to public radio station in the country (802,000 weekly listeners, followed by WNYC at 753,000), revenue is at the top of her Digital Services wish list. She calls it “networked revenue sales.” Wallace wants the power of the whole to bring her more national digital underwriting support, as the National Public Mediaoperation has provided national radio underwriting support. Heard strongly, in addition, on “the tour” has been “help us with online membership.” Smarter technology can connect up membership databases with site technologies to allow better targeting and customization of membership pitches and upsells.

Underwriting and membership. Or: advertising and circulation. It’s the same two-headed digital model that’s the talk of 2011 in newspaper world.

Summing it up, in support of Digital Services, Wallace says, “We won’t use all the services, but we can’t go it alone.”

Boston’s WBUR General Manager Charlie Kravetz — whose station on Wednesday won the prestigious RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for the “best large market radio website in the nation” for the second consecutive year — is equally in favor, summing up BUR’s next major push as the need for greater “engagement — hour to hour, not just day to day.” John Davidow, WBUR’s executive editor of new media, looks at it from an editor’s point of view: Digital Services would give him “more pieces on the chessboard to play with.”

The timing is now. On July 13 in Pittsburgh, some number of NPR’s member stations will meet (or conference into) the annual NPR member meeting. Digital Services will get a good airing there. Then on July 21, the NPR board — which, remember, has got to pick a new CEO soon to replace Vivian Schiller — will meet in Washington, D.C. Though their agenda is not yet set, expect Digital Services to rise on the agenda, maybe get a vote, and maybe get a full-speed-ahead.

What would hold it up?

Democracy. NPR’s member stations are as diverse as the small regions and mega-cities they serve. They reflect their audience and often their college station roots. They range from free-range granola to tightly wrapped brie crowds, with those stereotypes lubricated freely by copious amounts of Diet Coke and even Bud. The “niche” audience consists of 26.8 million weekly radio listeners (you know who you are). If, in truth, NPR listeners can’t be well-stereotyped, neither can station management.

It ranges freely from those who would be entirely comfortable in the corporate news world to those who still aren’t sure that bluegrass and classical music through the days and nights isn’t just fine for their audiences. Talk to the general managers, and you find a fierce pride of place and of individuality. Which brings up back to the question, familiar to all of us who have toiled in the digital news world: Can you network localism, providing tools to make it better?

It’s been a religious argument over the years, and, I believe, it’s time to drop the faith-based approach. The facts tell us that pure-play, digital-only companies, from the Googles to the HuffPos, have a strong economic advantage in operating on single, scalable, more-easily-taken-to-the next stage technologies. If those who base their work first on fair and free news reporting and community service — newspaper and public radio and some commercial broadcast people fit in here — don’t face those facts, they will (and are) being replaced by those for whom fair and free news reporting and community service are secondary priorities.

That said, there are some good arguments, and cautions, about Digital Services.

Take Torey Malatia’s. Malatia, a strong innovator and co-conspirator with Ira Glass in the invention and nurturing of This American Life, says simply that while Digital Services may be a good idea for hundreds of stations, it’s not a good idea for WBEZ, the Chicago station he has long run. His two points: 1) WBEZ has substantially invested in many of the technologies Digital Services will provide; 2) WBEZ is so locally focused that it would benefit little from whatever network synergies, such as sharing of content, that may come down the line.

Others raise, privately, a caution about creating a strong digital operation. How do we know, they say, that the national operation — under whomever may run it in years ahead — will maintain the same premium approach to NPR product that the network enjoys in radio? While Wilson uniformly gets good marks as a collaborator, the future does always bring risk.

These are good cautions. National networks always provide disproportionate benefit. Yet, at this crossroads moment, it’s easier to say “slow down the process,” then let’s grasp the moment. As Kinsey Wilson points out, the marketplace is now moving quickly and the larger individual stations will feel compelled to solve their own individual problems, with their own money, unless a common program is agreed upon soon.

I wouldn’t lay any odds at this point (democracy can be a heartbreaker), but from my experience I’d hope the NPR board steps up, rather than to the side. It could be easier to snatch defeat from the jaws of a largely victorious listening tour. It could well mean, though, that NPR would miss the moment to make a bigger difference for its own future — and ours.

The FT move isn’t an iron stake in the ground, encased in concrete. It’s more like a moveable post. It can be moved, like a football (American) yardstick up or down field, depending on market experience.

The FT’s release heralds for its first-in-the-news-biz innovation:

FINANCIAL TIMES FIRST MAJOR NEWS PUBLISHER TO LAUNCH NEW BROWSER BASED APP FOR TABLETS

In bullet points, it then details the consumer benefits of the new “browser-based” app, including:

• “Reading offline – saving a shortcut to your home screen so you can read it offline, at any time, just like one of our existing apps

• Web browser access – no download needed

• All access – one registration or subscription will offer customers access to FT

content through a range of devices or on a PC

• Speed – the new app offers improved performance

• Automatic updates – instant product improvements with no need to download

new versions of the app

• Specific to smartphones – a completely new and improved design, inclusion of

images and FT video content, a new currency converter

• Specific to tablets – new content from FT Blogs

There are many real benefits there. What the release says between the lines, and how it will be read in Cupertino: And we no longer need Apple’s proprietary apps to build our digital subscription business, thank you.

There are two converging tech worlds here. One is the Apple world of native apps, as in iOS, which fuels iPhones and iPads. Android and HP’s (nee Palm) Web OS are similarly native apps. The other world is the emerging world of HTML5. We first heard of HTML5 as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash as Apple excluded Flash from its products. HTML 5, though, has proven to be a strong foundation for next-generation digital product development (“The Newsonomics of Apps and HTML5″). HTML5 is also the basis for web apps, and it is web apps — those browser-based apps the FT is trumpeting today — that are now providing tech and business competition to native apps.

While many major publishers are now developing both native apps — especially in iOS, given Apple’s market share — and web apps, straddling both worlds, the FT is the first to strongly favor web apps. FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told me Monday that the FT will continue to build some native apps (iOS and Android), but that the introduction of new features will be done first on the web apps and then, weeks or months later, for native apps. The FT is no longer doing parallel development; it’s betting business growth on web apps.

Why? Well, for one thing, it’s cheaper. Grimshaw says the explosion of the app world enabling mobile products is costly, with the FT increasing development costs more than 50% since the recent dawning of the age of Apple (and Android) mobile products. It can take months, he says, to build each new proprietary native app, and it will only get more complicated as the market sorts out the Apple/Android/HP/Microsoft (Windows Mobile 7)/Blackberry Rim mobile world. So, the FT’s new web app will be the main focus for the company, as it tries to convince customers that the web app experience is as good as the native app one, and offers other benefits to boot. (Other companies, including the New York Times are building on web apps first, then wrapping native app shells around them, economizing to some degree, but still doing building out both kinds of apps.)

The business benefits of web apps for the FT, and all other publishers, is already clear. Web apps, available through a browser — an open platform, after all — enable the publisher to maintain control and independence. The FT can charge what it wants for its web apps, and for all-access (including print) subscriptions, and keep all the money, not having to share 30% of it with Apple or anyone else. It can use its own much-invested-in e-commerce and customer management systems, gathering whatever data it wants from customers, not having to argue with Apple or others about it.

It sounds like a dream come true: cut costs and maintain control of the business. The risk: What will the FT — which won’t be selling digital subscriptions through Apple’s stores — miss out on? What about the lead generation Apple’s 200 million registered (with credit cards on file) users can offer? That’s one potential downside, finding its competitors, including the Wall Street Journal in iTunes, but no longer the FT. Another: what if readers — we who have been lately conditioned to believe in the miracle of sprightly presentation of apps, as compared to the mundane “online” world — don’t take the web app jump?

Grimshaw, who sportingly points out that this is a pro-FT, not anti-Apple move — “We don’t want to be seen as squaring off against Apple” — is comfortable with data that supports his decision.

First off, a little more than half of mobile users — smartphone and tablet — access the FT through the mobile Safari browser already, a number he says has been consistent over the months. That usage should be bolstered as the web app experience and presentation improves with the new launch.

Second, only 15% of the FT’s digital subscriptions — now totaling 224,000 overall, out of combined print/digital circulation of 605,402 — are currently coming directly from mobile devices, though most of them do come through Apple. Many FT subscribers add on mobile to their web or print subs. With more 85% of digital subs clearly coming from outside the world of Apple, Grimshaw believes the risk is low.

So what does the FT move mean to everyone else? That’s more nuanced.

Consider two points:

• Build-out: The FT can do what it is doing today because of what it’s done for more than 10 years. Charging for content since 2002, it’s built out impressive systems in cross-platform authentication, e-commerce, customer management, content management and analytics, coming the closest of any news publisher to becoming Amazon-like in running its business (“The Newsonomics of the FT as Internet Retailer“). Only the Wall Street Journal comes close — in some areas — to that build-out. Without that build-out, most news publishers are far more reliant on others, including Apple, to jumpstart their mobile businesses.
• Tablet-forward: Grimshaw makes the point of the FT being “ahead” of the customer, in the tablet/mobile market. The company isn’t fooling around with low-cost, “replica” tablet products. Among a half dozen top global news publishers (among those “Digital Dozen” I identified in the Newsonomics book), it is already into successive generations of tablet products — now built on the faster-to-market web app strategy — and that gives it something strong and tangible to sell to readers through the browser. Most publishers don’t have their products ready, too focused on “waiting for the market to develop,” a strategy we’ve seen repeatedly fail for news companies. If they do it again with tablets, it’s like a horror sequel; Saw 8?

At best, the FT moves acts as a counterweight in the marketplace. Given news of the Apple’s latest innovations (good visual rundown in Mashable) with the new iOS, it’s clear that company isn’t slowing down; in fact, it’s Newsstand auto-update directly blunts one of the FT web apps advantages noted in the release. Yet, the question of where paying customers, new core readers, especially among those under 50, will come from is a big one. Yes, Apple may drive them to news publications new and old, but so will Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft. The FT aim: build a business with lots of partners, but maintain control of it, not farming out bits and pieces here and there, subject to the data whims and revenue share usuries that can develop. That’s a laudable goal, and once again, the company is offering the news and magazine industries both new models and new tests, with the learning valuable to all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The six:

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

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

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

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

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

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