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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Around Wednesday.”

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

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

I told the customer rep the problem.

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

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

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

Sunday arrived and no paper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Austin-based news site, along with California Watch, are creating models indicative of the future of journalism.

Important Details: In the fall of 2009, Texas Tribune was a promising idea. Nine months after its launch, it’s a fledgling success. To date, the $4 million privately funded non-profit start-up has:

• Built a substantial audience: The site reached the level of 240,000 unique visitors this month, with more than three million page views, well ahead of its 2010 goals already.
• Set up partnerships with major media throughout the state: The Tribune’s work has been published in the state’s major publishers, including the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio News-Express. KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate, decided on a partnership with the Tribune before the site launched. It has now “embedded” a reporter with the Tribune. That reporter reports both for KUT on air and writes for the Tribune; the Tribune then pays KUT for time taken away from radio duties, which the station uses to pay for other political reporting. “They shared our values. We know the principles,” KUT General Manager Stewart Vanderbilt told Outsell. That embedding may have wider significance as KUT plans its own local news push in early 2011, following the lead of numerous public radio stations across the country.
• Persuaded about 1700 people to become members of the site: at a price point averaging about $100
• Signed up more than 100 corporate sponsors: each pays at least $2500 annually
  
• Produced solid journalism in key areas of public policy: this includes such current hot-button topics as health care, transportation, education, immigration, energy and the environment. The site employs 24 people, half of them journalists.
  

Evan Smith, who serves as CEO and editor-in-chief, makes the case that a focus on statewide news coverage is one of the major areas impacted by the cutback in the daily journalism workforce — and he makes the connection between under-reporting and low civic engagement of the populace. On a macro level, he points to the roll-up budgets of the 50 US states ($1.4 trillion) and compares it to Congress’ “discretionary spending” ($1.04 trillion). He then points to Texas’ own budget of $72.8 billion and the fact that Texas ranks 43rd in voter turnout.

Against that backdrop, he says that Texas state government press corps, based in Austin, is half the size it was 20 years ago.

Funding is about building a wide base,  Smith tells Outsell. “We’ve gotten AT&T, JP Morgan and a lawyer who puts out a shingle on Congress Avenue” to join up. Smith says his aim is a funding model built on thirds, a third each from membership, corporate sponsorships and earned income. The latter category incudes advertising and event programming. Already, the Tribune has broken out of the box with community-reaching programs including “Texas Tribune Conversations,” “The Texas Tribune College Tour,” “the Texas Tribune Ideas Festival,” and “Texas Tribune Sponsored Events.” In so doing, the Tribune has made a relatively big splash in a big ocean.

Implications: Outsell believes the regional news start-up model has numerous lessons for the trade. It’s clear there’s an appetite and a market for aggressive regional reporting. Texas Tribune joins California Watch, a project of the Berkeley (Ca.)-based Center for Investigative Reporting, in taking a new approach to statewide issues, and tackling them with a small, but strong and passionate, staff of experienced reporters.

Clearly, this model works best, and most easily, in big states like Texas and California. We’d have to believe though that the principles, if not the scale, are widely applicable across the US and in other nations as well.

It’s important for traditional publishers to see what these sites have and haven’t done. They haven’t reinvented the wheel, but they’ve rounded it differently. Statewide and regional issues reporting has long been a mainstay of strong, metro papers. Most of them are still doing that reporting, but less of it while the public policy issues of the states and the wider society multiply. One “secret” of the Texas Tribunes and the California Watches is the singular focus they bring to their reporting. As start-ups with newer foundation funding giving them the belief they are at the beginning of something, they’re taking a spirited approach to the issues before them.

The Tribune’s numerous outreach programs bear study as well; it is boldly and publicly taking its news mission to the public.

Outsell believes that dailies — and TV stations as well as the ethnic press — have been smart to partner with these regional news operations. On a simple economic basis, they are now able to buy “outsourced” high-quality journalism at way-below-market prices, with the Tribune in fact making its stories freely available, while California Watch charges a nominal sum. That’s a no-brainer.

Beyond that simple economic transaction, dailies can also learn the new, digitally enhanced value of statewide news sharing, and of an emerging syndication market for any good journalism created that transcends city limits. This innovation also poses a challenge and an opportunity for the Associated Press. With its long presence in statewide reporting, it’s got to assess these start-ups as to how they affect its operations and business models, and that reassessment could help both AP and its member dailies.

“Patch expects to be the largest hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S. this year,” says the AOL release.

Let’s put this Patch push into perspective. About 400 new sites, spread out across the country. Five hundred new journalists being hired. Let’s remember, though, that this is one journalist per community, communities that range in size from 10,000 to 80,000 people. One journalist per community.

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

Still, we should take the news as good news. The more journalism, the better — especially if it can be sustained. Now-independent AOL, though, is a profit-seeking company, at the moment chastened a bit by its just-released quarterly earnings report. Patch has lots of promise, but it will have a tough slog to profitability, as mano-a-mano battle for local ad dollars only intensifies.

As we parse the Patch news, here are a beginning nine questions about the initiative:

1) If this is a big national, hyperlocal play, is that oxymoronic or does scale really help? It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

2) How do I parse the Patch taxonomy? Okay, you’ve got your sites. Each one covers a geographical area with some identity, with the sweet spot of population somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 — large enough to be an audience/market, yet small enough not to be an anonymous “metro” area. (That’s the same size as Backfence’s Mark Potts averred in the first hyperlocal go-round.) Each site has an editor, and Patch recently decided to add a 13th editor to each cluster, for back-up.  Each editor has a freelance budget equivalent to about one FTE, more or less, depending on the geography, and will pay stringers to extend what that single editor can do.

Then, you’ve got 12 sites per cluster, each cluster headed by a regional editor and regional ad/marketing manager. Expect between a dozen and two dozen ad sellers per cluster, as they try to divvy up territories to take advantage of their overlap in communities.

Then, you’ve got a block, which is two clusters. Those blocks then roll up to four editorial directors and four sales directors, who divide the country into sections, reporting back up to Patch HQ.

3) So who’s the ad competition? Maybe we should ask, who isn’t? Most importantly, in going after ad dollars, it’s a free-for-all. With Borrell Associates 2011 projection of $16 billion in 2011 local online advertising the mantra many companies repeat, the competition is intense. McClatchy is saying it is taking in $2.5 million annually in hyperlocal ads, Gannett is moving more aggressively through GannettLocal and, its recent broadcast site partnership with DataSphere and every other newspaper company sees that local merchant future. The question is how well they’ll execute on the emerging vision. Then, there are local broadcasters in general and Yellow Pages companies knowing that printed behemoths tossed on our doorsteps are endangered species. The target of all these legacy companies: SMB, the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses they used to largely ignore, but which now must be romanced with digital dreams, as bigger-money advertisers make bigger and earlier moves digital.

But, wait, that’s just the old companies.

Then, there’s Examiner.com, which has been replicating its own sites, on its national templates, served by national advertising.

It’s not 2005 anymore, so now we can dozens of local bloggers, independent sorts, scratching for their own livings, from veteran BaristaNet to sites everywhere. Most of these sites are out there selling ads and/or sponsorships. And now, there are ad networks forming. Consider the Miami Herald’s ad network around its partnership with local bloggers and the new TBD’s Community Network, a local blogger ad network out of the chute. (Newsonomics: “10 Reasons to Watch TBD“). GrowthSpur is working with TBD and others to train blog ad pitchers. Then there’s BlogAds and Addiply, among many other newer hyperlocal ad plays.

Soon, the neighborhood florist will have to wear a flak jacket, just to ward off the dozen “hyperlocal” sales guys and gals, all rediscovering the joys of local — at the same time.

But, wait, here’s the real payoff, for those that can wait: Mobile advertising and marketing. Again, the Borrell number is causing mass salivation, and I’d bet it’s whetting the appetites of the AOL Board as they swallow the investment in Patch. Local mobile ads, which fetched $285 million last year, are projected to bring in $4.7 billion in four years (2014). (Interesting fact: At the moment, Patch, unlike TBD, has no smartphone apps ready for its sites. )

4) Who’s the news competition? Same players, more or less. In fact, we may begin to believe that some local communities will soon be better covered by journalists (though metro coverage still suffers) in this digital age than they were in the analog one.

Examiner, with those hundreds of templated local sites, displays a growth trajectory a year ahead of Patch’s — and so its audience stats, provided by The Nielsen Company — greatly outpace Patch. The gap, though, is narrowing. And in sessions per month, and maybe time on site, Patch may be moving ahead. That would show that readers are seeing some value from Patch’s truly local news push, as compared to Examiner’s often shared-content across “local sites.” (Newsonomics: “Examiner: New Local Competitor or Faux Local?“)

5) So how do we make sense of Patch and whether it’s good for journalism? It may be too early to know. Patch is hiring hundreds of journalists to do journalism; that’s novel. Those journalists include 20-year veterans as well as twenty-somethings a few years out of school. It has provided new opportunities for editorial leadership jobs, and that’s a good thing since journalism-schools-as-refuge may have reached a limit.

Most importantly, for the moment, readers will get more news.

The question, here, is one of sustainability. Certainly, there’s the question whether Patch can sustain itself, as its parent AOL struggles to find a new identity and growing business model. Then, there’s the question of the sustainability of hyperlocal journalism already being done from coast to coast. These are true start-ups, often one-man (or -woman) bands, invented by journalists truly passionate about community coverage. Pre-Patch, it’s been the fledgling blog ad-and-distribution network experiments that gave hope that more money could be found to support these ventures. Now, we have to wonder whether Patch — which will link to other sites it finds useful, but won’t network them — will make the sustainability of these more organic, non-templated local blogs more questionable.

Once again, we’ll come back to the question not of how much coverage a community needs, but just how those doing it are going to be paid.

6) What’s in the secret SEO sauce? Wouldn’t a lot of legacy publishers like to know? As I pointed out in a quick post on a breaking Bay Area story covered by both Patch San Ramon and the Contra Costa Times, Patch’s story appeared at the top of Google (web & news), though the CC story was more detailed and more recent. Check on many local news stories. Time and again, Patch and Examiner will rise to the top, besting newspaper content. That’s the mastery of search engine optimization, a science too many publishers still flunk. Maybe the Knight Foundation, in its quest to bolster news content generally, should move up on its to-do list tools that help publishers finally master SEO.

7) Is there any connection between Patch and AOL’s Seed, beyond the garden-metaphor-approach to naming digital start-ups? Yes, in fact, though, just in the testing stage. Seed — AOL’s Demand-like, Associated Content-like Pro-Am news business — may feed freelancers into Patch. As each site’s editor decides how she wants to use that freelance money, one logical place to check will be Seed’s database of contributors, which, of course, is geo-tagged. Consider this a work-in-progress, but one way AOL will seek to connect the dots within its content-creating business, now including AOL Finance, Politics Daily, Engadget and more.

8) Who may the biggest winner out of the intense hyperlocal competition? With all those new players in action, we’ll see lots more content, even if the ad battle is brutal. So, look to the aggregators, like OutsideIn (partnered with Tribune+), FWIX (partnered with New York Times+) and OneSpot (partnered with Wall Street Journal+). Creating content is expensive; aggregating is cheap.

9) If hyperlocal is such a good idea, how come Rupert Murdoch’s not investing in it? Murdoch is ubiquitous in the talk of journalism’s future — Alesia bundled content site, new platform for tablets, a tabloid tablet product, pay walls and lots more — but we don’t see him in the hyperlocal space. Does he know something Tim Armstrong doesn’t? Or is the retail of block-by-block selling from Portsmouth to Pleasanton just too small potatoes?

• Google
• Apple
• Visa
• Mastercard
• and, of course, Verizon AT&T and T-Mobile

The latter three — Sprint’s apparently out there in 4G land — announced a joint venture to “develop a mobile payment service.”

We’ll see lots of head-banging among those companies in the next couple of years, as they try to re-create their middleman role on mobile.

Content-creating companies, unfortunately, sit on the sidelines here, again, rarely having a seat at the table. They are waiting for pieces of the infrastructure to come into place, and then see what kind of revenue shares they can negotiate.

There’s both promise and peril here.

The peril: the pipes (the telco companies’ JV is intended to make sure they don’t become “dumb pipes”, lower-value enterprises) and wallet middlemen take too big a share of revenue delivering paid content experiences, leaving publishers with some variety of pennies or dimes for their expensive content-producing efforts.

The promise: A stable, ubiquitous system of mobile payment, even run by a cartel, should give publishers a better ramp to mobile paid content, which, so far has been largely a non-starter. Apple wants its 30%, the erstwhile phone companies are deciding on their desired share and Google’s trying to figure out the nexus of Google Checkout and paid content. As whatever system develops out of that competition, publishers could finally have a means to more easily monetize mobile content.

Two intriguing questions, at least, for the moment:

• Where are the feds in this? The FTC has been aggressive in at least raising anti-trust concerns and giving air to the journalism crisis. Potential anti-competitive mobile billing agreements pose new issues. Just as the FTC is newly looking into standardized e-book pricing, mobile billing — a  grander business with grander impact — may bear scrutiny.
• How will publishers, old or new, get access to their customers through mobile billing? These middlemen all want to own the data, and that means the transaction data as well, an issue for publishers (and others) used to maintaining their customer relationships. Even as the iPad rolls royally out, Apple hasn’t resolved this issue with publishers. It has even failed so far to come to a mutually smart way to sell subscriptions, witness the ongoing issue between Apple and Time, Inc. (as well reported by AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka, here) hanging up publishers’ embrace of the tablet platform.

The mobile revolution is transformative, not a niche of what is mainstream today. As Mashable points out, “The mobile wealth creation/destruction cycle is in its earliest stages”.

Important Details: The Financial Times has built on its direct licensing initiative with two new programs; both are indicative of the next stages of of news usage on the web.

In April 2008, the FT made a significant break from traditional practice by reclaiming control of its licensing activities. At that point, it said that building and growing direct customer relationships, rather than indirectly licensing via aggregators, was a top goal. In addition, the FT believed it could maintain product value and pricing power better with this strategy. The FT now has more than 550 direct customers in its program. These direct customers can choose to have unlimited access for a defined group of users to FT journalism via FT.com and/or any of 21 aggregators. Academic and public library customers can continue to access FT journalism under a 24-hour embargo via the indirect licensing model.

Fundamental to that approach is the FT’s consumer model. Like the Wall Street Journal, the FT charges for online access, after allowing readers to sample up to 10 articles per month.

This year, the FT built on its direct license service in two ways:

• It began offering a customized RSS feed to its direct license customers. Corporate information managers can now pick FT content — by topics, byline, key word, company name, etc. — and let the FT headlines flow directly into the relevant places in its intranet. Each information manager can then update search criteria over time, making adjustments on the fly, with no limit to the number of RSS links that can be created. The news and information flow can also then be tailored to specific departmental or individual needs, with click backs to FT.com where direct customers have unlimited access rights.
• It began offering IP-authenticated access to its direct license customers. FT.com had previously used an individual sign-on/password authentication, which is still available and best used for remote access. The new IP-authenticated access provides organizations with unlimited access rights for a defined group of users and a single picture of the amount of usage.

“Both of these [initiatives] are the tangible results of our direct relationship,” says Caspar de Bono, managing director of B2B for the FT. On the RSS initiative, the belief is that the more customizable RSS will lead to more usage. As de Bono says, the FT wants to “help the customer make best use of their time – to filter out the noise.” Greater relevance equals more usage. More usage equals more value. More value equals increased ability to retain customers and to maintain price. Similarly, the IP-authenticted access, de Bono believes, will work in FT’s favor to prove, and re-prove, value.

Implications: Whether publishers license directly or not, Outsell believes that some lessons out of the FT’s emerging experience are key for all publishers who syndicate — and the syndicators that work with them.

These are the keys:

• It’s one thing to say the customer’s in control; it’s another to give them tools of control. To prove and re-prove value, publishers and aggregators need to provide better customization tools to customers.
• RSS is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Too many news publishers have begrudgingly offered RSS feeds, but many of them have defined them so broadly as to be of little usefulness. The granularity of RSS feeds is a key. Some readers — in the enterprise, in the school or in the local community — may just want a RSS feed of their most highly-regarded writer, or on a subject that’s a niche of a niche. Giving them what they want encourages engagement and loyalty.
• Knowing your customer is a long-term proposition. Many sellers — of information and much else — put much effort into the front-end of the relationship: the initial sale. The metrics are clear though that the cheapest way to gain business is first to retain, and then grow, the current customer base. In these times, such retention and growth must be fed by analytics. If the customer is not making complete use of the product (and how many are?), then sellers of information must first know that and then act on it. That’s one of the goals of the FT’s IP-authenticated access. For sellers of information generally, it’s key: keep learning about customer behavior and keep applying that knowledge.

Are you ready to receive? That’s the question news company should be asking themselves this month, as the second half of the year — with its unexpected flow in mobile ad dollars — beckons.

The numbers are mostly anecdotal at this point, though as some of us forecast, tablets promise a new, significant source of revenue for the companies that are ready to play the tablet game, and play it well.

Among the early evidence, reported by AP’s Andrew Vanacore, are:

• $50 CPMs ($50 per each one thousand views) for USA Today’s iPad ad, as compared to maybe $10 for its web ads.
• Irrational exuberance! Brian Quinn, WSJ’s VP/general manager for digital ad sales, says overall ad spend is increasing because of the iPad version, not just switching dollars from one platform to another. “Out of the gate, there was an exuberance about this,” he says.
• Chase Sapphire, which is a New York Times iPad sponsor,  says its ads are getting a remarkable 15 percent clickthrough rate. That’s 150 times the rate of an average web ad.

Add to that the July 1 launch of Apple’s iAds, which will introduce ads within iPhone and iPod Touch (but not yet iPad) apps, and which will begin with $60 million in sales, with such companies as Disney, AT&T, and Best Buy participating. You can bet that when the program launches on the iPad, a vastly superior ad medium given the screen size, it will do well. Even just on the “phone” side of the business, the iAds launch should give Apple — and, importantly, apps — almost half of the mobile ad spend in the U.S.

Want a little flavor to understand advertiser enthusiasm? Check out this Steve Henn Marketplace report featuring a VP for The Gap. She’s near-ecstatic in describing her enthusiasm for the iPad/tablet as a way of selling stuff and gaining customer knowledge.

So, yes, maybe the iPad ad euphoria should come with a few grains of salt. But, still, the “multi-touch” immersive future, painted by Steve Jobs and talked up by the big digital ad agencies (themselves looking for new reasons to be in the supply chain) is upon us.

So, are publishers ready?

I had a conversation recently with someone who runs a digital division for a major newspaper group — smart guy, a pioneer in the field. I asked: “So are you working on an iPad app?” Answer: “We’ve looked at our logs, and we’re seeing increasing traffic from the Kindle, but not much yet from the iPad, so we’ll wait awhile.”

I felt a rant coming up, but suppressed it then and will channel it now: If not now, then when?

We can look at each of the major revolutions in digital news and commerce, and see how news companies responded.

Search. Late.

Paid search. Way too late.

Video. Late.

Social. Too late.

Mobile. Largely too late.

News companies have used old yardsticks to measure new technologies, and the results have been, predictably and disastrously, too little, too late.

Now with the iPad, the advent of tablets generally, and the invention of the app metaphor as a way of navigating the digital life, news companies have another chance. The newsonomics of tablet ad revenue are uncertain — will iAds simply flood the ad market with more low-cost ads, as developers happy to get any ad revenue price their ads low? — but the tablet offers the biggest do-over potential for engaging readers anew and re-engaging advertisers, at rates somewhere between the laughably low of the web and the near-impossible-to-sustain-long-term highs of print.

The digital division head told me that the logs told him that there was insufficient customer demand to justify investment in an iPad app. This, I think, is like managing by rearview mirror.

The whole metaphor of the iPad is the app; ask anyone who uses it, and they’ll tell you they are surprised how little they use the browser and use search. So if you are counting browser views of your website coming through the iPad browser, you have no idea how a reader might use your product if it were built to take full advantage of the tablet’s abilities. In addition, consider that the sale of iAds require an app — not a browser-available site.

If this sentiment were uncommon, fine, but I fear it’s too commonly held. Wait and see. Wait — until it’s too late. That’s what I generally see happening among regional and local newspaper companies. They talk about early adopters and the high cost of a state-of-the-art iPad app, and most are waiting.

The big guys — what I’ve called the Digital Dozen — aren’t waiting. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, The Guardian, BBC, and AP are in the game — some with better apps than others — and all planning the next generation of products. We’re seeing impressive sales in the thousands for the WSJ paid app and can wonder about the applicability of Wired’s impressive sales of 73,000 (which are on a trajectory to beat print newsstand sales) to news and newspaper companies.

We’ve already seen a great separation in product development, audience engagement, and ad revenues between the nation’s and world’s biggest news companies — each with struggles of its own — and the other guys. Yet as they struggle, they’ve gotten most of the ad revenue smartphones have so far generated, as local news media has failed to get any revenue of scale. At this point, the iPad era looks like it the opening of an even greater divide among the largest media — and the rest

1) With Clay Shirky and Nick Carr duking it out (“Does the Internet Make Your Smarter or Dumber“) in the Wall Street Journal, isn’t it the right thing for both of them to do to donate their brains to science? Not immediately, of course, but down the digital road.

2) Are print newspapers better understanding the aging niche they serve? Breaking news today from L.A. Times publicity: “L.A. Times to Bring Back its TV Guide.” Back from the dead of 2007, one of many TV tabs to meet its demise, the new one will be punched up, up to 44 pages from 28, and replete with 24-hour daily grid listings, puzzles galore, and a dedicated sports programming page. Hard to imagine anyone under 30 (40?) using a TV tab instead of the cable guide. Next up: LARGE print TV tabs — and obits.

3) Who will be first through door #3? We’ve now seen a return to small profitability at newspaper companies, while YOY revenues continue to disappoint. Yes, the rate of loss is slowing, but they are still losing revenue, unlike other media. So the cutting isn’t yet over. And these companies, which must remain profitable to satisfy new owners and more-vigilant lenders, have three choices of what to do with any positive cash flowing. #1 Pay down debt. Big issue for those (other than Belo and Scripps, which emerged debtless as their companies divided) companies who know that the tough road ahead simply won’t sustain much debt service. #2 Increase profit. Yes, no one’s really happy to be in single digits. #3 Invest in product. That’s a tough one, given the pressures of debt and profit. One big question here: Will they invest in the next generation of mobile products, and the different skill sets necessary to create and produce them?

4) How patient will the Angelo Gordons, the new lords of publishing, be? They like the return to profitability, but are deeply concerned about those bad 2009 comparisons. (Newspaper overall advertising was down 9.7%, with online advertising showing growth of 4.9%, a little less than overall online ad growth.) Question they are asking: Is there a sustainable, profitable future here, future meaning 2-5 years, and, so far, they are unsure of the answer.

5) Are we beginning to see the Last Man Standing strategy play out in the U.S.’s biggest cities? The New York Times is planning on building out 10-15 regional editions, on the model of its Chicago (partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative) and Bay Area (partnered with Bay Area Citizen) models. Now the Wall Street Journal is renewing its previously announced regional forays, into Chicago, L.A. and perhaps other places. WSJ CEO Les Hinton noted this week that “we’ve done focus groups and see a growing antipathy among high-end readers, towards what’s happened to their local newspapers.” One publisher’s nightmare is another’s opportunity.

I call this the Last Man Standing strategy, with the Times and the Journal parsing out national/local, print/digital editions — and learning how to sell targeted local ads better. We may well be headed into a world where those with the newsprint habit will maintain their habit, but like a smoker, cut down on it. So, get one print edition delivered, which at least seems to cover national and local, rather than two. Greener solution, and one that the iPad Era will probably hasten. That new world could include some print at the top — Journal and Times — and at the bottom, my smaller community daily or weekly.

6) When will most dailies create reasonable iPad editions? The big guys have jumped ahead — once again (my piece over at Nieman explores the topic more thoroughly, “The Newsonomics of tablet ad readiness,”) , but regional newspaper companies may get into the fray before the end of year. Verve Wireless has been the main go-to company for dailies going up on the smartphone. Verve tells me that it’s recently added the Blackberry to its iPhone application, and is now moving on to Android. Then: iPad. So, with the ability to save on centralized tech development, some companies may be waiting on Verve. Big question: How good will the Verve product be?

7) How much of your news site’s traffic is coming from social media? At Netgain, 2010, Scribd’s Tammy Nam said that the site was now deriving 50% of its traffic from social network sites. Now that’s a lot higher than news sites, which tell me they’ve seen anywhere from five to 20% of their traffic coming from Facebook, Twitter and others. Social Media Optimization is something all sites now need to focus on.

In the crazy-quilt world of new syndication, might we see the Los Angeles Times re-join its erstwhile partner the Washington Post in a new combo with surging Bloomberg, East Coast, West Coast, and all around the business world? The Times has never been comfortable, pre- or post-Zell as part of the Tribune empire, and bankruptcy (if ever resolved) may lead to its exit.

9) Won’t iPad revenue be an unexpected growth line for some publishers in 2010? A handful of news companies got out of the starting gate quickly, including Reuters with three beginning apps. Reuters’ Alisa Bowen, senior vice president and head of consumer publishing, tells me that she expects “that advertising on the iPad will grow to 50% of our total mobile ad revenue before the end of the year.  This is 50% based on dollar value, not number of campaigns or impressions, obviously, so we are seeing not only a rapid growth, but an impressive yield for the premium user experience.” Curiously, Reuters is also seeing good traffic from iPad browsers, not just its apps: “We’ve seen some very stunning analysis in recent days about the web browsing traffic on iPads, which is ramping at a substantial pace.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation at AllThingsD

If it’s yesterday’s news, what’s that make yesterday’s news?

The Q & A, part one of two, tells you much about the current state of thinking in newspaper’s newest leadership, blossoming here and there — and largely coming from outside the newspaper world. We hear about mobile, about using analytics, about learning from other media and, of course, lots on metering. That makes sense: A new Strib board member is Gordon Crovitz, a co-founder of Journalism Online, whose Press+-based metering approach will get a good test this year. If you could get a dollar for each of Klingensmith’s mention of  “moving the dials,” you’d have a profitable morning.

Klingensmith’s formulae sound commonsensical. Now we get to watch as the meters get turned and twisted, and gauge yet another outside-in way of transforming daily journalism.