News Corp/Dow Jones

The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in the obit. AP faces a similar tension as it seeks a successor for long-time CEO Tom Curley. Dow Jones, cushioned by parent News Corp.’s better-lined pockets, too, is finalizing its CEO search. Put them together, and it’s a signal moment for American news media, as three top positions open themselves up to possibility, and imagination, simultaneously.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars. News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?

Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and multiplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)

Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

1) The transcendant transformative age of the tablet
2) The dawn of digital circulation
3) Social curation joins editorial curation:

Now let’s turn the news and magazine industry, and ask a few questions:

–What’s the difference between a shipping fee and a subscription?
–What’s the difference between a buyer and a reader?
–What’s the difference between a newspaper subscription and a membership that gets you “free” media?

Next Tuesday, look for The New York Times to announce its first Sunday print circulation gain…since 2006. Let three words soak in: Print. Circulation. Gain…. What’s been dismaying this week, though, as I talk with many publishers at the dozens of other dailies now charging for digital access, is that it’s hard to find the Times model moving similar Sunday-plus trends elsewhere. Publishers don’t want to disclose actual numbers, but the apparent consensus among those who have charged for six months or more (which covers the reporting period we’ll see when the Audit Bureau of Circulation FAS-FAX numbers releases its half-yearly numbers Tuesday) is that print/digital reader bundling hasn’t had much effect on the decline in circulation numbers.

Consider emerging tablet news disruption. For 18 months, the tablet and smartphone news environment has been single-brand-oriented. Early top-drawer brand winners include: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the BBC, NPR, the Financial Times, and CNN. Three start-up news aggregators have popped up their heads. Zite, a product that has pushed the concept of “fair use” taut, has been scooped up by CNN. Flipboard, with a revamped publisher relations strategy in place, and backed by$60 million in venture capital, would like to be the tablet news aggregator, as would Pulse. We’ve wondered where the big guys are — those winners in the online web derby. We won’t have to wonder much longer. Google Propeller and Yahoo Livestand will soon join AOL Editions, as Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all up their various tablet aggregation plays, as well. 2011 may well be remembered as a short time of innocence in the tablet news landscape.

WSJ Live, launched last week, is a milestone product. It’s not Fox News. It’s not CNN. It’s not New York Times news video. WSJ Live is its own thing, and a model for the news industry. Newspaper companies can talk the talk of becoming multimedia companies, but most are still text-bound. WSJ Live is a news video product that does a great job of leveraging the new technologies of the day and converging them to create an easy-on-the-eyes, easy-to-use new consumer product….It leverages the tablet-sized screen well. It mixes on-the-hour scheduled programming with on-demand access. It balances the talking heads of its global reporting workforce, via Skype, with anchor-hosted programs (News Hub), photo stills, and graphics. It is faster-paced than most news video, with some of the print-reporter geekiness at least acceptable and often enjoyable compared to the slick, no-surprise, Wolf Blitzer-me-to-sleep monotony of cable news. Within the business news world, it sits somewhere between the casualness of American Public Media’s Marketplace and CNBC’s button-down coverage.

It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, as in:

1 brand
2 major sources of revenue, advertiser and reader
3 products: print, computer, and mobile
4G, as in the coming of faster connectivity