Outsell

Key to Newsy’s strategy is the engagement mobile news providers are finding with delivery to the new tablet devices. On its iPad product, Newsy has found that more than 45% of sessions are greater than three minutes in length, with 15% of all sessions being greater than 10 minutes. Shorter sessions are conducted on the iPhone, consistent with most publisher experiences: Newsy is finding users generally spend one to three minutes, and watch fewer videos (2.3 videos “initialized” compared to 3.4 for the iPad user). Median session length on the iPhone app is around 150 seconds, says Spencer. All those numbers compare favorably with industry online usage.

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.

In the coming digital decade, news brand management will become more important than ever. Since the internet age dawned, news publishers have thought of the print product and the dot.com. Now in the age of the smartphone, iPad and TVs becoming monitors, those news brands that endure and prosper will be ones that master ubiquity. That means that those brands, merrily crossing and re-crossing platforms, become even more important identifiers, stamps of recognition — and one would hope, trust — as digital ubiquity both complicates and simplifies our information worlds.

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

Here’s another number that’s important, in this big scheme of things, in the where-the-world is going vs. where it’s been reckoning: Of digital advertising — not only soon to be #1, but also the fastest-growing kind of advertising — newspaper companies get maybe 10 or 12% of the total digital ad spend.

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.

For the Times, Thought Equity Motion will take about two years of news video, from the time when the company started to produce video in earnest, and enable their greater re-use. The Times hopes that digitization will open the door to wider web usage and greater monetization.

The push in business news shows several key trends in the marketplace:

* Niching. Beefing up “news” in general is out; targeting select readers is where investment is going.
* The action is greatest among the Digital Dozen, the term I’ve originated to describe top globally-oriented news concerns, those that seek to profit from almost-free internet distribution, leveraging costs across a variety of products, platforms and brands.
* Business models are, reliably, two-fold, focusing both on reader (or company) payment for content and advertising.

The tablet shouldn’t be mistaken for a newspaper made of pixels. Sure, it can receive repurposed newspaper (or online) content. However, with its next-generation, multi-touch interactivity, ability to combine text, photo, video and social elements, it offers news publishers the possibility of creating whole new categories of news- and features-based products.