Newsonomics of….

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

Commercial conversation, especially targeted commercial conversation, is the Internet’s next generation of advertising. The first generation of impression-based web ads has been a low-clicking disaster. These new ads — some better executed than others, of course — insult our intelligence less and provide what we could call a freemium ad experience. We’ll pay you for your time, they whisper, by giving you information or perspective you may find useful, and then you may want to buy something from us. The play goes well beyond the Journal and business/financial products, of course, to cars, real estate, furniture, and health. Of course, any news (or entertainment or social) medium has to offer a ready-for-prime-time tablet experience in order to qualify for such commercial conversation. Those that don’t — or only put up barely interactive, PDF-plus tablet products — won’t fool readers or advertisers

All we can say with certainty: we’re witnessing the death and life of California news. Who will own the biggest news media? Who will manage the biggest news media? How much of a life in print will be left for newspapers as they go digital? And, of course, how many journalists will be paid to get the news to the state’s 37 million residents and to the rest of the country? Already, well over 1,000 daily newspaper journalists have lost their jobs over the past five-plus years. How many new combinations — among news entities formerly known as newspapers, broadcast, and digital news startups — will emerge and grow to scale? Those combinations are already beginning to tax legacy imaginations, and as of this week, we’ve got a new intriguing model to add to the mix.

The 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.

Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011:

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

What stands out most prominently is that U.S. newspapers’ ad revenue decline is worse, percentage wise, than either Kodak’s or Sears’. Yes, although Kodak and Sears are now poster children of legacy businesses gone wrong, newspapers — as counted through their main revenue source — are doing worse.

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.)

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:

There’s an irony to such publisher partnerships, of course. On the one hand, Google is a “partner,” magnifying publisher businesses through its ad and search products. On the other, initiatives such as Google Tomorrow are a potential dagger to newspapers’ jugular. That’s the way of the web world. For Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or Facebook, any new initiative it takes on has its own internal logic. Should another industry — say newspapers — be wounded in the process, it’s just collateral damage. Given the size of these digital behemoths, as they decimate legacy industries, you can almost hear them say, “Sorry, did I sideswipe you? I didn’t feel anything.”

If reality seems a little hard to take, let’s take a little tour of “augmented reality,” a terrain in which those who practice the business of news will soon operate.