Important Details: Newsy is an unusual project. It’s a for-profit enterprise, housed at a university. It’s an aggregation product in the largely single-title environment of the tablet.  And it’s a digital product that is tablet first, smartphone second and, the web, a distant third.

Newsy now produces 25 to 30 video stories each day, seven days a week, on an 18-hour cycle. Its stories are unusual. They run two and a half to four minutes in length, anchored by a staffers. Newsy benefits from the its partnership with the UniEssentially, they are summaries of the day’s news, drawing from both video (NBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC and more) and text (newspapers) sources. The sources are prominently featured, in short video clips and paragraphs displayed behind the speaking anchor.

Usage of clips is covered by Fair Use law, just as text aggregators, such as Google, built their businesses, says Spencer.

President Jim Spencer, a veteran of MSNBC and AskJeeves, moved his fledgling operation to Columbia, Mo, home of the University of Missouri, receiving economic development incentives from the City of Columbia (REDI) and substantial tax credits from the Missouri State Department of Economic Development.  Newsy benefits from its partnership with the literally across-the-street University of Missouri, providing hands-on instruction to students and then hiring the cream of each year’s crop. He credits the lower-cost location and enthusiasm of the student/University community with helping to rapid growing the business.

“They [the students] intrinsically get it,” Spencer told Outsell, talking about their grasping of the new product form. “They’ll stay up two days in a row working on an initiative.” On the development path: personalization in various forms, and new Mandarin- and Spanish-language versions.

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 two-and-a-half-year-old Newsy now employs 18 full-time and 12-15 part-time staffers. It is expanding its advertising presence, using 15-second pre-rolls and bottom of the page banners as  its main business model, with others in the offing.

Implications: Outsell believes the Newsy model in and of itself is of great consequence to news creators. It’s an intriguing tablet native product that manages to grab a hold of much of what makes the new platform such a mind-boggling reader and advertising opportunity.

It’s a plus product, as in: Mobile + Video + Social + Curation, all on the foundation of News. On the tablet, these factors aren’t separate from each other; in fact, the confluence of them is, in part, what gives the tablet platform its game-changing power. It’s not just news publishers, or broadcasters, who can take note. All producers of information can learn lots from taking a look at the Newsy product and business model.

As Spencer notes, it’s the tablet that is the center of his business, because of its unique capabilities; mobile accounts for 70-80% of the traffic. The web, meaning desktop and laptop? “I publish to the the web as the platform of last resort.” That’s a mind-turning idea, and one that legacy companies can think through, tossing print into that “what’s your best platform for this product?” question.

The whole question of aggregation products for the tablet is a work-in-progress. While Google, Yahoo!, AOLand MSN have dominated the online space, the single brand-encouraging interface of the iPad has transformed the picture — for now. We see services such as Flipboard and Pulse out early with curation/aggregation products, but the big guys aren’t yet well represented. At the same time, both newspaper and magazine publishers (think Next Issue Media) are trying to figure out if industry aggregation plays, long discarded for online, may be resuscitated. Newsy, then, gives those companies and industries something to think about, and in its get-it-done, get-into-the-market-cheaply momentum, a model from which to learn.

Executive changes are sweeping the quality press in the UK, portending a time of greater change and disruption.

Important Details: The drama of the UK’s first coalition government in 70 years unfolded smartly on cable news, an especially intriguing quick change-over of power for American audiences, used to long interregnums and much pomp between Presidencies. Less covered has been the galloping change underway at many of the nation’s top newspaper companies, the “quality” papers, as distinguished from tabloid publications.

In recent weeks and months, consider the events:

• The Guardian has seen three significant changes in its executive ranks. At the top of the company, Carolyn McCall, CEO of the parent Guardian Media Group (GMG), is leaving to become CEO of airline EasyJet, after 24 years with the company.  Simon Waldman, long the director of digital strategy and development at GMG, has left to head group product direction for the DVD rental subscription service, LoveFilm, as that Netflix-like company moves increasingly digital. Emily Bell, who directed digital content for Guardian News & Media and led much of the growth of the site that now reaches 36 million unique visitors worldwide, is leaving the company to lead the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at New York’s  Columbia University.
• The Telegraph Editor-in-Chief Will Lewis is leaving the Telegraph Media Group, whose Daily Telegraph had just won newspaper of the year honors. Lewis’ unexpected departure apparently derived from his want to concentrate on and re-structure the Telegraph’s digital business.
• The  daily Independent and weekly Independent on Sunday, a spirited part of the quality press, changed ownership, owing to the financial woes of its parent company, Independent News and Media. INM retains ownership of its flagship Irish Independent. The new owner is Independent Print Limited (IPL), the company run by Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch (and among top 400 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes) who first made news when he bought the London Evening Standard in January 2009. Lebedev has turned the Evening Standard into a more widely read, 600,00-circulation free daily, winning a strong place in the evening commuter newspaper business. Now, having paid £1 and gained £9.25 million from INM towards operating costs, IPL is assessing the Independent’s future. Will the money-losing operation be taken free, as was the Evening Standard, or will it try hybrid free/paid strategies? One key question: How will IPL embrace the digital future? The Evening Standard’s web play has been a minor one, but the Independent, though small-staffed, has built a path forward for the company. Will IPL recognize digital as an essential part of a going-forward strategy?
• News Corp’s key quality papers — the Times of London and the Sunday Times — will begin charging for web access in June. The plan, part of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s much-talked-about efforts to get readers to pay for more of the freight in the news business, includes free web access for print subscribers. Non-subscribers can get a digital subscription for £2, or a day’s access for £1, to two new sites, www.thetimes.co.uk and www.sundaytimes.co.uk. International pricing — key because more than half  of the sites’ traffic has come from outside the UK — has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week.

These changes are set against a background of fast-declining print circulation. While the The Independent on Sunday showed a 1.88% gain in the most recent ABC tally, other quality papers –  The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian,  the Observer (also owned by GMG) — all reported double-digit declines, year-over-year.

Implications: Newspaper people come and go — but not usually so many in such a short period of time. It’s clear that the unsettled, post-recession, early-recovery period is not one of going back to old times, but of finding new footing in still-moving sand.

All the familiar questions are at play here, including:

• paid and free, as moves by the Times and the Independent may bring chaos and understanding to what it is consumers will and won’t pay for;
• digital integration/separation, as newsprint-legacy companies struggle with what it means to become digital-first publishers;
• how to keep innovators employed in the old industries, as new “green-field” digital companies offer less complicated, more direct routes to digital business success.

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.

This next-generation aggregated video-forward product provides a new model both for business news journalism — and for content producers across many sectors.

Important Details: Anchored in New York, London and Hong Kong, Thomson Reuters has just launched its Reuters Insider product. It’s a next generation video-on-the-desktop product, one that seeks to redefine news delivery for the broadband age.

Reuters Insider is designed to deliver “exclusive content for a finite, exclusive audience,” Mike Stepanovich, the product’s managing editor, told Outsell. That audience is the core Thomson Reuters enterprise market, the 500,000 customers worldwide whose access to Thomson Reuters news and data is paid for by the seat. The bullseye within the core: those in the financial services trades, those with “four screens open in front of them at one time.” Reuters Insider aims to become one of those four screens, a through-the-day-and-after moving picture of the business day.

The home page houses news of the day, and rows of video choices, sectioned by “research and analysis,” CNBC (a prime content provider) and lifestyles and offers other series and channel choices.  Video programming is offered on both a scheduled basis, like TV, and on-demand. Currently, Reuters itself is producing 350 video segments a week, many of those segments already in usage at its various properties, but now brought together in Reuters Insider. In addition, it launches with 150 content partners — from Forbes and the Economist Intelligence Unit to JP Morgan, T Rowe Price, Nomura and Africa Investor. These partners aren’t paid for their content; they get brand exposure and distribution links to their content in exchange and in addition can restrict viewing of their content to their clients.

Among the features that suit the busy information customer:

• A small video window (which is expandable) at the upper right of the home page, allowing customers to listen to (and watch if they wish) the three-to-five minute video segments. One notion here: while it is video, the news value is largely gleaned from the audio of interviews, stand-ups and explainers, allowing a customer to keep listening to the patter while reading other content on the page.
• Contextual text content, demarcated between Reuters-produced content and other content. The text content is largely driven by the metadata tags associated with the video. Key amid the preparatory work done for the product’s launch was the speech-to-text applications that seek out business-oriented keywords, thus enabling the video/text links. The translations also produce transcripts, available as a tab along with the video; within the transcripts, users can jump to relevant points in the video by clicking on words within, a popular feature at launch.
• The ability to customize content several ways, a recommendation engine that will tailor content per user over time and social features for sharing.
• A corps of analysts and columnists, built in part by the Breakingviews operation, acquired in 2009. That acquisition added about 30 staffers; now more than 50 columnists and analysts help feed the product, as the company increases  in interpretation of business. Three anchor studios, plus smaller satellite ones worldwide, enable video participation by Reuters’ far-flung workforce.

The product is currently open for free trial to professionals for non-Thomson Reuters customers who apply.

At this point, the company has not announced plans for how it may apply Reuters Insider, or its parts, to its newly redesigned Reuters.com public websites or to its agency syndication business.

Implications: 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. Key here is the willingness to bring in non-Reuters content. While Reuters may have the largest news staff — 2900 — in the world, it acted on the realization that no news service is an island. It has been able to aggregate 150 content contributors — at no license cost — due in part to its first-mover advantage here. That move — smart aggregation of like content — is one that applies in many industries, from regional news to B2B to education.

Most fundamentally, of course, it recognizes that video is now mainstream, especially among its key markets, and a faster way of delivering market-making analysis, with the added benefit of enabling warp speed multi-tasking.

It will be intriguing to watch how Reuters applies the thinking of Reuters Insider to its consumer and agency businesses. In the short term, the B2B product is an in-your-face challenge to Bloomberg, Dow Jones and the Financial Times, all of which have been arming themselves for the expanding business news wars. In the longer term, the push toward video-first (scheduled and on-demand, and associated with text) and of meaningful-to-the-market aggregation is a model that many news companies must follow.

In LA, the Times has drawn criticism for lending its nameplate to advertisers while in Washington, the Post lost a blogger who violated its uncertain guidelines. Welcome to the new pressures — and opportunities — of news brand management.

Important Details: For centuries, newspapers have acted on their birthright to call out the excesses, foibles and miscues of government. In Los Angeles last week, the tables were turned.

All five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors  formally censured the Los Angeles Times for running a four-page ad for Universal Studio’s King Kong attraction, an ad section that carried the nameplate of the Times across its front and wrapped around the Times’ LATExtra, the newspaper’s breaking news section.  The elected officials’ protest letter was addressed to Sam Zell, chairman of the Tribune Company, which is now in its 17th month of bankruptcy, with a vote by creditors on the latest reorganization plan due on August 6th.

The protest letter didn’t mince words, urging the Times “stop selling its front pages to advertisers, especially in such an offensive and alarming manner. The cost of this distasteful practice to the people of Los Angeles County is far greater than any short-term gains by the Tribune Company….Today’s mock section makes a mockery of the paper’s mission.”

Times Publisher Eddy Hartenstein responded by article the evening of the protest, saying, “The Universal Studios Hollywood ad wrapping Thursday’s LATExtra section met our advertising guidelines, including a large, red ‘advertisement’ notification on top of the page.  Our readers understand the ad-supported economic model of our business, which allows us to provide the outstanding journalism they rely upon 24/7.”

Meanwhile, across the country, the Washington Post struggled with a brand problem of a different kind, as editor Marcus Brauchli quickly accepted the resignation of Dave Weigel, a Post staff blogger of three month’s tenure, whose private online comments about some members of the country’s conservative movement — the beat he’d covered for the Post — became public.

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, after talking to a number of staffers at the Post, concluded that standards were vague: “Like readers, some in The Post’s newsroom are perplexed. Internal guidelines say reporters should not “offer personal opinions on a blog in a way that would not be acceptable in the newspaper.” But they also are encouraged to blog with attitude and “voice,” which seems incompatible with neutrality”.

Implications: Welcome to brand management — quite unfamiliar terrain traditionally for newspaper companies — in the age of blurring boundaries. Many large companies consciously focus on brand management, its protection, its meaning and its extension as a key part of business strategy and operations. For newspaper companies, it’s traditionally been more of an unexamined given. The brand, exemplified by that old Black Letter type nameplate, has implied a commitment to public and community service, to being fair, to getting it right, and avoiding any perception of influence by the powerful, whether public official, company CEO or advertiser.

That long-standing position is now threatened by several forces, and Outsell believes the news industry’s mettle is being tested, as it is forced to address what news brands really mean in the digital age.

When the Fourth Estate is criticized by one of the first three, it’s a reversal of form, one made possible by the declining financial and political clout of newspapers, particularly metro newspapers. Weakened, newspapers both leave themselves open to attack — and to doing foolish things that trifle with the continuing value of their legendary brands. The LA Times, back to the Staples Center ad debacle of 1999 through the innovative ups and downs of the Zell era, has seen more than its share of controversy, but it’s far from alone. All newspaper companies face unprecedented pressures to blur the lines, as ad revenue becomes harder and harder to get.

Outsell believes that 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.

Finally, Outsell believes that the re-envisioning of news brand is essential. Take the Post’s contretemps. The Post’s instinct in hiring Weigel to bring a fresh voice to conservative movement coverage was on the money. It extended the Post’s franchise, putting more valuable-to-the-reader content under its brand. In its seemingly contradictory directions to its staff, the Post displayed its uncertain footing in the new terrain, an uncertainty shared almost universally in the trade. As Kate Phillips pointed out in a New York Time blog post, Weigel could have gotten a lesser penalty and continued to add value to the Post. Instead, faced with an affront to its credibility, the Post made an either/or decision and his work was gone.

There is a middle way, and it is fast emerging among newspaper companies. It’s the big tent approach to amassing more valuable-to-readers content under a community news brand — and at lower cost. Down the street from the Post, its new competition, TBD.com, formally launching in the fall, has already signed up 82 local blogs for its TBD Community Network, and daily newspaper brethren from the Seattle Times to the Miami Herald to several Hearst papers are taking a similar approach. It’s possible to aggregate lots of useful news and opinion content, at pricepoints from low to high, and let readers know that the content is coming from partner sites — not from the newspaper itself. Readers are smart, and with a clear news site disclosure, they’ll be more flexible about differing standards of staff and non-staff content.

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.

Digital ad spending has surpassed TV in the UK and newspapers in Japan. With its growth trajectory, it is poised to be the leading source of advertising worldwide within a couple of years.

Important Details: The first quarter numbers are in for the US news industry. Overall advertising was down 9.7%, with online advertising showing growth of 4.9%. Those numbers show that the bleeding of revenues experienced by newspaper companies is slowing. However, it is worth remembering that the first quarter of 2009 — the comparables against which the 9.7% decline is measured — was the depth of the Great Recession, as panic gripped everyone. The optimism is tempered, a sense of possible returning stability, even though this quarter’s measure is being compared to one of the worst quarters in US history.

The facts, looking globally, point to digital advertising becoming the number one category of ad spend, across the Western world, in the next several years.

Last year in the UK, which experienced brutal recession, digital ad spend surpassed TV ad spend — and grew by 4.2% year over year. Europe as a whole, in just-released numbers, grew 4.5%. Last year in Japan, also gripped by the economic turndown, digital ad spend has surpassed newspapers — and grew 1.2% year over year. In addition, the first-quarter data on digital advertising shows it is coming roaring back, with positive comparables to a year ago, compared to newspapers’ negative ones. In the US, digital advertising grew at 7.5% for the first quarter.

In the US, digital ad spend remains third ($22.7 billion in 2009), behind TV ($26.2 billion in 2009) and newspapers ($24.6 billion in 2009). Given the still-negative trajectory of newspapers and TV recovering, but more slowly than digital, it’s not hard to see digital becoming number one soon.

Implications: Remember how Eric Schmidt proclaimed the end of the recession night last August, and said Google would start buying companies rapidly, which it’s now done at the astounding rate of one a month? Google, the prime barometer of the velocity of digital advertising, calculated that the recession was just a hiccup for it and the digital ad industry. For the newspaper industry — which gets no more than 15% of ad revenue from digital sources  — the recession was a big complication; the patient was already sick, and what was a hiccup for Google was chronic indigestion for newspapers.

Put together those two trajectories — trying to get to positive growth for newspaper companies, while still trimming expenses compared to double-digit positive growth for the biggest beneficiaries of digital advertising, which are hiring (Google alone, 800 in the first quarter) and buying companies (Apple is on a buy-a-company-a-month spree as well), preparing themselves for more growth.

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. That’s compared to a 20% share of the total ad spend that they consistently got in the pre-digital world.  So while they do partake in this fastest-growing ad category, and companies like McClatchy and Hearst, among others, are more rapidly pushing online-only sales, they’re collectively taking in dimes of the digital dollars, while the big aggregators are getting the biggest shares.

One last wrinkle here. It’s still so early in the digital ad game. Yes, digital ads are poised to become #1, but we’re seeing a further acceleration of spending here. Think what’s developed just since the first year of the year: Google gets AdMob approval from the FTC, Twitter gets moving with Promoted Tweets, Facebook multiplies in commercial presence, and Apple gets into the ad business big-time with iAds. Lastly, the iPad — with its fast adoption curve — is turning the heads of top digital ad agencies, eager to test the brand-immersive capabilities of the platform.

It’s early in the digital ad game, but as digital advertising is poised to become the leading ad category, that ascendancy poses even more questions for news companies trying to find dollars, pounds, euros and yen — and stability.

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.

Important Details: It seemed like an odd pairing, with first reading of the press release: the New York Times has partnered with Thought Equity Motion, a company specializing in “motion content solutions.”  The Times is the first newspaper company to sign up with seven-year-old, Denver-based Thought Equity, which counts among its clients CBS, NBC, the BBC and NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation.

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. Certainly, broadcasters have an advantage here, producing moving pictures as part of their legacies, yet most have been slow to understand the translation of that advantage to the web, as text-based competitors like the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Guardian and Times Online ramp up their embrace of video.

Thought Equity CEO and Founder Kevin Schaff told Outsell that much of the work is foundational, with the company having 10.5 million hours under contract, but has only digitized 10% of it so far.

Its services are straightforward: it provides transcoding and digitization (turning tape to video), some speech-to-text categorization and is building out a marketplace to help syndicate news video, in addition to leveraging its existing sales staff.  The addition of metadata and rights management completes what is intended to be a fully outsourced video management system for news media.

In addition to syndication monetization, media companies gain access to the video for usage on their own websites, in context with text stories, based on matching of metadata.

Its business model is a simple, if nuanced one. Media companies can pay the cost of the technology processing and then keep all licensing revenues, or Thought Equity Motion can pay the costs and gain a larger revenue share of licensing, or the parties may meet somewhere between. Schaff says that over the last year, media companies have increasingly opted to pay more and bet on greater rewards down the road.

Key content areas of focus for the company are sports, number one, and news, number two.

“We’re going after speed to context,” says Schaff. “They [media] used to have 24 hours to break a story. Now they have seven minutes. And then there’s social media,” which virally spreads video near and far instantaneously.

As college basketball’s March Madness starts its run this week, Thought Equity Motion has co-produced NCAA Vault with CBS, having digitized “every play, every stat for the last 10 years.”

Implications: It’s noteworthy that the New York Times is the first newspaper company to sign with Thought Equity Motion. If we look out over the next couple of years, as broadband becomes increasingly dominant, web video becomes an everyday experience for the masses and mobile video quickly loses the sense of being exotic, we can see the great value in instantly accessible digital video — and the ability to link it automatically to related text content.

It’s ironic that broadcasters have been slow to move on their archives and their daily production, but they are now moving quickly, and regional broadcasters are, in fits and starts, joining them. Text-based publishers started delving into news video a couple of years ago, with many pulling back in the recession.

So far, we see a large divide among the top nationally and globally focused companies’ recognition of the opportunity and related investment, and local media.

Outsell believes the Times announcement is a wake-up call for all news media. The future is arriving sooner than some companies have planned.

Important Details: In 2010, we foresee lots of competition for the digital news reader, with everyone from national start-ups to hyperlocal upstarts aiming for attention. It is the business news reader, though, that may be drawing the most intensive attention. That attention is coming mostly from large, increasingly global news purveyors, all sensing the same opportunity.  Business-reader-oriented advertising still fetches among the higher effective cost per thousand rates in the industry, especially as companies narrow their targeting to business niches. In addition, readers and/or the companies for whom they work are more likely to pay for the news and information itself, providing another revenue stream.

Just since the first of the year, we see these marketplace moves:

• Dow Jones bought the half of SmartMoney magazine that it didn’t own before, price undisclosed, from Hearst. SmartMoney was launched as a 50/50 joint venture in 1992. Its circulation has dropped to about 800,000 monthly, with some deep discounting; ad pages were down 23% in 2009. Dow Jones gets another personal finance weapon, solely for its own use, as it expands its reach in its consumer arsenal. For its part, Hearst takes a payment and moves on; Hearst Business Media, under Richard Malloch’s savvy leadership, has seen double-digit revenue growth last year from its 20 business units (see Insights 25 April 2008, Plotting a Course to the Workflow, Hearst Business Media Acquires Map of Medicine). Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal has launched Digits, a new daily web broadcast, utilizing the synergy of diverse business news holdings, as it leverages personalities from the Journal,  Barron’s, All Things Digital, Dow Jones Newswires and Fox Business Network. Finally, the company’s Marketwatch — a free business news website – has begun adding to its subscription newsletters, launching Revolution Investing and planning to extend Mark Hulbert’s newsletter franchise.
• Reuters has just hired the Financial Times managing editor Chrystia Freeland to be Global Editor at Large. The company says that its new re-designed US website — one aiming most directly at the business news reader — has so far pushed time on site up 25%. The US site is a test bed for other top Reuters sites in UK, Europe and Asia. In addition, the company’s Reuters Insider, a video-based financial news site, will officially launch in Q2.
• The FT — now the emerging poster child for paid content “metering” models – signs up Paypal to provide a pay-per-view alternative for payment, to its already successful subscription programs.
• Bloomberg launches an ad campaign, promising to “reinvent the business magazine”, and its unveiling of the new Bloomberg Business Week, bought for a pittance during the recession, goes forward on April 23. The company also closes on its acquisition of Eagle Eye publishers, a government-oriented data firm, as it sculpts its new Bgov strategy (see Insights 11 March 2010, Bloomberg Moving Further Afield With Acquisition and New Government Information Business).

Implications: As companies come out of their recession-era bunkers, they’re looking for areas that will produce the most bang for a few bucks of investment. That roadmap for many companies now points to the global business reader, the investor, the savvy consumer. Even paid content experimentation is built on the experience of two business news publishers, the FT and the Journal.

Outsell believes that 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.

How transferable digital business news journalism is to other topics, including health, travel and entertainment, is uncertain at this juncture. The digital business news push, though, in text and in video, will gain momentum this year and next, with a handful of victors dominating the market.

Important Details: Apple’s market release of its iPad is still six weeks or so away, and almost a dozen iPad alternatives are already in production, poised to fight for web attention and electronics store shelf space. Tablet devices have been hailed as a potential business model changer for the news industry, with their advertising and long-form reading potential. The main conversation, though, in the news world, is around pricing, control and data. As Ken Li reported in the Financial Times:

“Customer data is everything,” said one magazine publisher. “We have for many years relied on subscriptions to be able to communicate with our readers,” said Sara Öhrvall, senior vicepresident of research at Swedish publisher Bonnier. “It is absolutely crucial to keep the data. That’s something that our advertisers need. It is something that we need.” Without the ability to identify customers on different digital platforms, publishers would be unable to offer print subscribers discounts or free access to new digital versions. Customers “will be really upset if we try to charge [them] again”, Ms Öhrvall says. Whether it’s an Apple device or another device, “it’s a deal killer”.

The big issues that have arisen, so far, include:

• Customer data: Who gets to see how customers actually use the devices and the content on it, what kind of content, when and at what frequency?
• Customer relationship: Who can talk to the customer? If newspapers and magazines have a subscription relationship with a tablet user, will they be able to keep it, or will the appliance manufacturer or some other third-party claim that relationship?
• Who Gets What: Everyone’s talking about revenue shares. Kindle started the ball rolling the wrong way here, claiming 70% of subscription/single copy prices, with only 30% going to content creators. Apple’s model looks like it is the reverse of that.
• Pricing: Reports indicate a healthy discussion within the New York Times, with print people reportedly wanting to charge more print-like prices of $30 a month for tablet access, with digital business people advocating a $10 price point.

Implications: Outsell believes that the industry and individual publishers should calibrate their concerns and their tablet planning.  News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was one of the first publishers to call Kindle’s revenue share outrageous. He was right, although it’s only outrageous if you can’t get away with it.  Now with many competitors, and especially Apple, emerging, it looks like we can call it outrageous. Publishers are right to push for a fairer share of revenue derived from products that are rooted in high-quality, expensive-to-produce content. Equally, it’s good to see their concern for data; it is a lifeblood of publishing going forward. The best and fairest solution here would be share it; both parties have interests in it.

What’s absent from the conversation may be as noteworthy.

The big question, Outsell believes, is not the price you charge (and there are many nuances to pricing, including how to treat print and/or smartphone bundling, and how to build niche products at higher price points into the equation), but what you charge the price for.

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. There are products that go beyond repurposing one single title’s work, and aggregate content with a niche reader in mind. Figure out the kind of products that customers will love to use — and then let the pricing follow accordingly. It’s a tough lesson for companies that have long prided themselves on pricing acumen, but it’s a lesson they can have learned from the first couple of rounds of internet innovation. Create state-of-the-art audience-pleasing products, creating new value — and then harvest it.