News Corp/Dow Jones

We can’t though dismiss what the Mormon Church, Rupert Murdoch and ad moguls are up to. We have to learn from it and help it power a journalism that matters.

As the much-ballyhooed “fight for livingroom” plays out, can national news companies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR, or local news companies, get a piece of the pie, whoever (Apple, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, Dish) slices it up?

The UK moves have many parallels in the US, but the concentration of them in so short a time portends new waves of news industry transformation, and maybe some regression, across the Western World.

The Reuters Insider product is impressive, a model of what can be done by companies recognizing changing digital habits, and the technologies that support them. What’s most impressive about the product is its aggregation, the sheer amount of content that it brings together in an intutive interface.

News Corp.’s Avatar has taken in $2.75 billion. Compare that financial flexibility with the Times, and it’s night and day. The Times Co.’s total 2009 revenues: $2.4 billion, less than Avatar itself has produced.

Why it’s a big story: 1) The size of the gift. $1 million.
2) The size of Rupert Murdoch’s presence in the news world.
3) The size of Fox News in the political news landscape.
4) The size of Murdoch’s influence at the Wall Street Journal.

ProPublica offers a handy index of the aptly named “Investigations Elsewhere.” Pulling from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, Parade and Mothers Jones, and including major dailies around the country, it’s a great showcase, and check-in on the state of longer-form investigative pieces. We see a half dozen new pieces added daily.

We could say that news companies — from Slate to the Journal and Times — have figured out that playing the ad game by someone else’s rules didn’t make a lot of sense. In the game of gross numbers, they couldn’t win.

Are there any positive growth numbers to report? Which categories may be turning positive — maybe national or retail display ads — as the sagging economy continues to plague the traditional classified strengths of auto, recruitment, and real estate?

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.