The New York Times is slimming down to bulk up. It is no longer a newspaper company, with a strong national newspaper, a Boston cousin in the Globe and regional newspaper interests. It is a global news company whose future is mostly digital, and it will live or die on that adventure. It is a company that now sees 63% of its revenues (last from the third quarter) coming from the Times print and digital operations. Over the past several years, the Times — despite its many trials (selling its flagship building, participating in Carlos Slim usury, before paying back the 14% $250 million loan to the Mexican magnate) — has outperformed financially both the regional group and the Globe .

That only makes sense. Borrowing lessons from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others, the global Times is about scale. You can pay a Times reporter to write a story that can reach some of the Times ‘ 50 million global monthly unique visitors, three-fifths of them in the U.S. Or you can pay a Gainesville or Tuscaloosa reporter a little less to write a story that can reach a hundreth of that total. Do the math, and the future bet is on the company with the big global news brand and the reach.

The regional news companies, important as they are to their communities, have been but a business distraction. The Times has tried to sell them before, pulling back as market conditions forced it to do. Now Halifax Media Group seems set to complete its deal, which we’d have to believe is in final form given its inclusion of the NYTRNG papers on its website (courtesy of Romenesko), now taken down. Halifax is part of new generation of newspaper property buyers, believing they can make a go of these distressed properties, through more consolidation of jobs and other efficiencies. (“Now at Fire Sale Prices, a Few Newspapers…and Maybe More,” Newsonomics, Dec. 2, 2011)

For the Times now, and going forward, the competition is CNN, the BBC, News Corp, ABC, NBC, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Reuters and several others. Who indeed will be among the most trusted names in the (digital) news business?

The spasms of change at the Times come ironically after one of the most relatively successful years for the company. Yes, profits are still tough to come by — a measly $33 million in the last quarter — but the company pulled off a digital pay scheme that has established a modest beachhead. It begins to provide the Times a second digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising. Circulation revenues grew 3.4% for the last period, as the Times’ new digital All-Access push circulation had netted 324,000 “digital” subscribers of one kind or another and enabled the first Sunday home delivery print increase since 2006. It has positioned itself well with apps for emerging tablet and smartphone platforms, moving quickly into the Apple Newsstand, for instance. It is aiming for ubiquity and is in the lead of the newspaper pack, with the Journal nipping and biting along the way.

Yet, ominously, print advertising revenues decreased 10.4 percent and digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent in the last quarter. 2012 looks like another down year, in high single digits. In fact, there’s an array of numbers that offer a quite uneven path to success next year, as I described in the Newsonomics of 2012′s Magic Formula, last week.

Consequently, the company is barely keeping even, and will likely have to accelerate cuts next year to stay profitable. So the plow must be sped. With less than a quarter of its revenues now driven by digital, the Times has to move quicker. It may balance (smartly as its done with its Sunday print/digital pricing) package print and digital, but it is has to grab mind share and market share in all the emerging digital spaces, tablet, smartphone, connected TV and web.

Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world.

The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company, a company now seeing both CEO Robinson and digital head Martin Nisenholtz leaving at the same time, the latter by retirement. Famously balkanized, with numerous power centers, the company has been both innovative and plodding. That’s an odd combo, but one fitting its prudent-above-all news culture. With one distraction removed (and now we wonder about the Boston Globe, its own pay scheme innovation underway, and how long it will remain a Times Company property), the new CEO aces a tough terrain. Given that the company, even post NYTRNG sale, is 90%+ newspaper-based, it suffers in its ability to grow. News Corp, CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg all are part of large, diversified companies that can buffer them from the permanent print ad downturn. As Janet Robinson found, the path forward is an extremely narrow one.

We try to make sense of how much we’ve lost and how much we’ve gained through journalism’s massive upheaval. It’s a dizzying picture; our almost universal access to news and the ability of any writer to be her own publisher gives the appearance of lots more journalism being available. Simultaneously, the numbers of paid professional people practicing the craft has certainly lowered the output through traditional media.

It’s a paradox that we’re in the midst of wrestling with. We’re in the experimental phase of figuring out how much journalists, inside and out of branded media, are producing — and where the biggest gaps are. We know that numbers matter, but we don’t yet know how they play with that odd measure that no metrics can yet definitively tell us: quality.

I’ve used the number of 1,000,000 as a rough approximation of how many newspaper stories would go unwritten in 2010, as compared to 2005, based on staffing reduction. When I brought that up on panel in New York City in January, fellow panelist Jeff Jarvis asked: “But how many of those million stories do we need? How many are duplicated?” Good questions, and ones that of course there are no definitive answers for. We know that local communities are getting less branded news; unevenly, more blog-based news; and much more commentary, some of it produced by experienced journalists. There’s no equivalency between old and new, but we can get some comparative numbers to give us some guidelines.

For now, let’s look mainly at text-based media, though we’ll include public radio here, as it makes profound moves to digital-first and text. (Broadcast and cable news, of course, are a significant part of the news diet. U.S. Labor Department numbers show more than 30,000 people employed in the production of broadcast news, but it’s tough to divine how much of that effort so far has had an impact on text-based news. National broadcast numbers aren’t easily found, though we know there are more than 3,500 people (only a percentage of them in editorial) working in news divisions of the Big Four, NBC, ABC, Fox, and CBS — a total that’s dropped more than 25 percent in recent years.)

Let’s start our look at text-based media with the big dog: daily newspapers. ASNE’s annual count put the national daily newsroom number at 41,500 in 2010, down from 56,400 in 2001 (and 56,900 in 1990). Those numbers are approximations, bases on partial survey, and they are the best we have for the daily industry. So, let’s use 14,000 as the number of daily newsroom jobs gone in a decade. We don’t have numbers for community weekly newspapers, with no census done by either the National Newspaper Association or most state press associations. A good estimate looks to be in the 8,000-10,000 range for the 2,000 or so weeklies in the NNA membership, plus lots of stringers.

Importantly, wire services aren’t included in the ASNE numbers. Put together the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg (though some of those workforces are worldwide, not U.S.-based) and you’ve got about 7,500 editorial staffers.

Let’s look at some areas that are growing, starting with public radio. Public radio, on the road to becoming public media, has produced a steady drumbeat of news about its expansion lately  ”The Newsonomics of Public Radio’s Argonauts,” “Public Radio $100 Million Plan: 100 Journalist Per City,”), asImpact of Government, Project Argo, Local Journalism Centers add more several hundred journalists across the country. But how many journalists work in public broadcasting? Try 3,224, a number recently counted in a censusconducted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s “professional journalists”, about 80% of them full-time. About 2,500 of them are in public radio, the rest in public TV. Should all the announced funding programs come to fruition, the number could rise to more than 4,000 by the end of 2011.

Let’s look at another kind of emerging, non-profit-based journalism numbers, categorized as the most interesting and credible nonprofit online publishers by Investigative Reporting Workshop’s iLab site. That recent census includes 60 sites, with the largest including Mother Jones magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and and the Center for Public Integrity. Also included are such newsworthy sites as Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen, Voice of San Diego, the New Haven Independent and the St. Louis Beacon. Their total full-time employment: 658. Additionally, there are high dozens, if not hundreds operating their own hyperlocal blog sites around the country. Add in other for-profit start-ups, from Politico to Huffington Post to GlobalPost to TBD to Patch to a revived National Journal, and the journalists hired by Yahoo, MSN and AOL (beyond Patch), and you’ve got a number around another thousand.

How about the alternative press — though not often cited in online news, they’re improving their digital game, though unevenly. Though AAN — the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies — hasn’t done a formal census, we can get an educated guess from Mark Zusman, former president of AAN and long-time editor of Portland’s Willamette Week, winner of 2005 Pulitzer for investigative reporting. “The 132 papers together employ something in the range of 800 edit employees, and that’s probably down 20 or 25 percent from five years ago”.

Add in the business press, outside of daily newspapers. American City Business Journals itself employs about 600 journalists, spread over the USA. Figure that from the now-veteran Marketwatch to the upstart Business Insider and numerous other business news websites, we again approach 1,000 journalistshere.

What about sports journalists working outside of dailies? ESPN alone probably can count somewhere between 500 and 1000, of its total 5,000-plus workforce. Comcast is hiring by the dozens and publications like Sporting News are ramping up as well (“The Newsonomics of sports avidity“). So, we’re on the way to a thousand.

How about newsmagazine journalists? Figure about 500, though that number seems to slip by the day, as U.S. News finally puts its print to bed.

So let’s look broadly at those numbers. Count them all up — and undoubtedly, numerous ones are missing — and you’ve got something more than 65,000 journalists, working for brands of one kind or another. What interim conclusions can we draw?

• Daily newspaper employment is still the big dog, responsible for a little less than two-thirds of the journalistic output, though down from levels of 80 percent or more. When someone tells you that the loss of newspaper reporting isn’t a big deal, don’t believe it. While lots of new jobs are being created — that 14,000 loss in a decade is still a big number. We’re still not close to replacing that number of jobs, even if some of the journalism being created outside of dailies is better than what some of what used to be created within them.
• If we look at areas growing fastest (public radio’s push, online-only growth, niche growth in business and sports), we see a number approaching 7,500. That’s a little less than 20 percent of daily newspaper totals, but a number far higher than most people would believe.
• When we define journalism, we have to define it — and count it — far more widely than we have. The ASNE number has long been the annual, depressing marker of what’s lost — a necrology for the business as we knew it — not suggesting what’s being gained. An index of journalism employment overall gives us a truer and more nuanced picture.
• Full-time equivalent counts only go so far in a pro-am world, where the machines of Demand, Seed, Associated Content, Helium and the like harness all kinds of content, some of it from well-pedigreed reporters. While all these operations raise lots of questions on pay, value and quality, they are part of the mix going forward.

In a sense, technologies and growing audiences have built out a huge capacity for news, and that new capacity is only now being filled in. It’s a Sim City of journalism, with population trends in upheaval and the urban map sure to look much different by 2015.

Today, Patch (Newsonomics: “Nine Questions on Patch’s Push“) showed some smarts, acting on similar ideas — but with scale. It has signed agreements with 13 journalism schools, from CUNY to USC (and including UC Berkeley) to provide for-credit (not pay) internships with Patch sites. The program grows out of a test at Hofstra, with Bob Papper, the chair of journalism there and a smart commentator on broadcast media change. The J-schools involved include a number of top-tier ones.

Take that number, 13, though and multiply it; Patch Media President Warren Webster confirms that there can be more than one intern per site. Most importantly, Patch’s clustering of local websites in metro areas should mean we’ll see dozens, if not hundreds, of internships grow out of this new relationship.  Such numbers would provide one answer to those who wonder how the Patch business model will develop. Patch is simply acting on a key principle of getting good content cheaper (or free in this case), one that everyone from HuffPo to Demand Media to the New York Times is using as well.

Quite smart. There have been other newspaper/j-school internships/partnerships, but this one uses scale — 13 schools, and, lots of free help at Patch sites in metro areas. Last year, I wrote about a News Corps idea, as a way to reinvigorate local journalism. Patch’s approach begins to do that, though I do wonder about one key element of all internships — mentoring. In Patch’s case, the site editors largely work solo, out of their homes, and many are not far out of journalism school themselves. Will their mentoring — further squeezed into very long days — be that useful? How, alternatively,  will Patch figure out how to have their regional editors, who are more experienced editors, do some mentoring effectively? If the company is smart, it will devote the thinking and resources necessary to make the program valuable for all, Patch, students and readers.

The initiative proves the proposition that it’s not the idea or invention, it’s the rapid application that makes the most business sense. What we’re talking about here is innovation; not invention of internships, but the rapid usage of new kind of internship system applied at some scale. The scale immediately makes Patch U, as the project is called, something to be noticed, and significantly adds to the amount of coverage that Patch can put on its websites.

Schools participating: Hofstra University’s School of Communication; The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism; the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication; Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; the Missouri School of Journalism; the University of Connecticut Department of Journalism; the Indiana University School of Journalism; the Stanford University Graduate Program in Journalism; the Columbia College Chicago Journalism Department; the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism; the Seton Hall Department of Communication and The Arts; and the Quinnipiac University Department of Journalism.

It is a head-turner, which seems to be, at first, an only-in-Utah story. The Deseret Morning News, KSL TV, and KSL Radio, all owned by one company, the Deseret Management Co., a for-profit arm of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are combining operations.

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”.

Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”.

One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

Remove the religious subtext, for a moment, and I believe we see a model that will appear ordinary in many American cities, within a few years. Think about it. If we as readers, viewers and listeners want words, photographs, videos, and audio, and expect it to be served up in an easy-to-use, relevant-to-me way, then why would the companies that produce news in those various forms be separate?

They’re separate, of course, because those words/picture/audio used to be called newspapers/magazines, network and cable TV and radio broadcasters. Those words, though, describe the old world, those packages the content came wrapped in. In our digital world, we’re seeing delivery blur through the Internet. And, that inevitably, and now more quickly, means that single companies will produce words, pictures and sound — and they’ll find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently.

If you own the Salt Lake properties, or if you’re Tribune and own the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN radio, you practically have a fiduciary responsibility to rearrange assets that will make the company more efficient. If you own a broadcast station or a newspaper, you can more easily see the rationale in buying or combining with the other, to meet customer (reader/viewer and advertiser) demands of the coming age.

So the Salt Lake Experiment joins TBD’s (“10 Reasons to Watch TBD“) in putting together the text and video pieces. They are the next generation in this attempt to make convergence work. Call it News Convergence 2.0, with Tampa’s Tribune/WFLA experiment the best poster child for 1.0. How well the Deseret operation (or TBD) executes is, of course, the key. Journalism isn’t about white-board theories, in any era; it’s about getting the news gathered, analyzed, and distributed to readers, and doing it better than the competition.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of the Deseret decision, though. The numbers in play are curious ones, as Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert lays out a “less is more” theme in the major restructuring of his company. In fact, let’s use the more and less theme to gauge the moving pieces of the new business model.

• Less is More: Take that “43%” headline. The legacy news staff of the Deseret News has indeed been cut 43 percent — 85 jobs, including those of the editor and publisher of the paper. That number includes both full-time and part-time positions. So we’d expect a lot less coverage, right? With a bit of frustration in his voice, Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert tells me bluntly “That’s an Old Media world view. We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.” His point, and his plan: The combined operations of the remaining Deseret News staff and the sister news staffs at KSL TV and radio will operate smarter and more efficiently.“Say there’s a story on Capitol Hill [in Salt Lake City]. Right now, the paper sends a reporter and a photographer and KSL sends a reporter and videographer. That’s four people, and that story may end up on B3,” says Gilbert. “Now we’ll send one.”So, step one: “Reduce duplication.”

  So the news math changes dramatically. The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and “new employees expected to have those skills.” Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

  Step two: “Deepen coverage,” meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the “integrated newsroom,” with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. “You’re sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms],” explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite — so that’s going to be a busy staff.

  The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

• More Costs Less: Borrowing basic notions of getting cheap and free content from the Huffington Post and Demand Media, Gilbert is putting into action what he has long preached in academic and consulting circles. I’ve called this emerging time the Age of Cheap Content. That principle means that the new Deseret operation will leverage bigger-name writers (especially those consistent with its Mormon roots and values, like former BYU football star and current Philadelphia sports anchor Vai Sikahema) for little financial compensation. That’s the HuffPo model. And they’ll leverage Salt Lake and Utah reporters to address both topical and hyperlocal coverage, through the new Deseret Connect. That’s the Demand side of the idea, bringing together a large database of qualified writers — “not random bloggers,” says Gilbert — and keeping their payments low or non-existent. “Some of the best don’t write for money.”Deseret Connect already has received more than 100 applications, and Gilbert says he can see it scaling to a thousand or more contributors within the year, using management system techniques developed outside the news industry for BYU/Idaho faculty.Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum — though he’s clear to point out that people doing the writing won’t be looking to the company “as their main source of income.”

  So, looking at cost per content unit — a Demand-like analytic — the new company will be able to house lots more content under its brand, at a far lower cost point.

• More Beats Less: The Deseret play aims to bring together text stories and blogs, video, and audio. That supposes that readers want all kinds of coverage brought together for them. It’s a bet that products that converge video and stories for readers will beat the competition, competition like MediaNews’ Salt Lake Tribune, the biggest non-church-owned news presence in the state. One big question here: How will the customer experience be converged? In Washington, two ongoing TV stations folded their websites into the new TBD at launch. How separate and how unified will the DeseretNews.com and KSL.com sites be?

• More is More: The new Deseret operation doesn’t just focus on geography — Utah’s more than 700,000 households. It’s taking a twin approach to being a general interest news site — and a new worldwide voice for the Mormon faithful of 13 million or so worldwide. In the company’s strategy, that’s described as a values-oriented approach, and you can already read that six-point values mantra widely. The six: “the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community.” They make for a strong philosophy, but in marketing, that’s quite a straddle — one that may be difficult to pull off, especially as Salt Lake City itself has become majority non-Mormon.

The economics of it are clear, though. Pay (or don’t) to get a story written or a video shot once, and then distribute it many times over. It’s basic Internet economics, with a nichy, religious angle, one of many variations we’ll soon be seeing on these increasingly popular themes.

This week, we see a notable project, harnessing the power of a local network to do — journalism.

With the deep recession making homelessness a widespread and enduring phenomenon, the Seattle Times, worked with seven local blogs (West Seattle Blog http://westseattleblog.com/blog/, Beacon Hill Blog http://beaconhill.seattle.wa.us, My Edmonds News http://myedmondsnews.com/, Seattle Local Health Guide http://localhealthguideonline.com/, Rainier Valley Post http://www.rainiervalleypost.com/, Mercer Island – Surrounded By Water http://mercerislandblogger.wordpress.com/ and Aurora | Seattle http://www.auroraseattle.com/).

The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.

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.

Thinking about the recent terminations at the Washington Post and CNN, though, I wonder if the press priesthood is still another cultural institution in the process of being swept away, encumbered as much as it has by habit as by principle.

In America, we don’t require press licenses, owing our craft we believe to one of the birthrights of the nation, the First Amendment. At the same time, in mainstream media, mainly the daily press and TV news, we’ve developed an order over the years. It’s one with its own sense of right and wrong, one of quick trial and punishment, one that often uses excommunication as a first punishment.

Those ex-communications can electrify debate, as they have in the last two weeks, as first the Washington Post let blogger Dave Weigel go and then CNN rapidly dispatched 20-year veteran Octavia Nasr.

They paid the price of an absolutist system, a system that owes its certainty to a different age. The priesthood, understanding the pressures of commercial and get-ahead-anyway-you-can America, has always taken a tough line with news reporters. Avoid any conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof. Don’t let personal beliefs get in the way of your reporting. Pre-Internet, that could be a tough discipline, but it is one that largely served the press and readers well.

Now, each Sunday, it seems, there fewer congregants in the church.  There’s a strange information promiscuity sweeping the land. In fact, down the street, revivalists – in the case of the Post, TBD.com – are setting up tents from coast to coast to draw some of those who have left the mainstream news faith.

The High Church of Integrity is challenged. Its doctrines and dogma are being challenged by those who believe a more contemporary set of principles and practices can replace the received wisdom.  Let’s call it the new approach a Society of Friends, with tips both to the Quaker collaborative style and to the Facebook era.

There’s both a philosophical and practical reason for the challenge to the old way of doing things. Philosophically, many editors have come to believe that journalism in the Internet age demands new ways of expressing and maintaining integrity. Practically, the evolving Big Tent theory of journalism – the more journalism from bloggers, hyperlocal site operators and Pro-Am writers of all kinds – means evolving new practices that breathe fresh air into still-valuable principles.

TBD’s approach is instructive, both philosophically and practically.

Steve Buttry is director of community engagement for TBD, moving there from the world of dailies, after winning Editor and Publisher’s editor of the year award.

TBD’s Community’s Network has already signed up some 90 community sites, though TBD won’t launch for a couple of months. How is TBD dealing with issues of potential conflict of interest, with credibility and with integrity? It’s taking a far different approach with those partner sites

“We aren’t placing any requirements or guidelines on them,” he told me. “We aren’t presenting them to the public as professional journalists operating by the SPJ Code of Ethics (though some of them are). Sometime after we launch, we will ask them to choose some labels that would identify whether they are independent or involved in the activities they blog about, etc. Actually we think they are pretty transparent about that. Some don’t identify themselves publicly, which I would prefer. But on the whole, I would say bloggers do transparency better than traditional media. Our basic approach is that we trust our audience to be discerning and smart. We think they can tell neutral reporting from blogging about personal passions and activities. Some will want both. Some will gravitate to one or the other (or another of the many types of content and perspectives we present). We are fine with that. If we learn of egregious ethical violations such as plagiarism, fabrication, deception, we will drop someone from the network and explain why. But we are not expecting all of the network to follow traditional journalism standards and, frankly, I’m glad that they aren’t as hung up on the myth of objectivity the way traditional journos do.”

That’s for the community network. What about TBD staffers, of whom they’ll be a couple of dozen? Says Buttry, ” No staff policy or guidelines at this point. We’ll have lots of conversations about ethics. I think conversations shape ethical decisions better than rules.”

Ironically, TBD is headed by Jim Brady, the Post’s prodigal son, who ran and got accolades for his role leading the content side of WashingtonPost.com for years.

TBD’s approach is web, 2010. It’s a Society of Friends approach, and one being put into place not by starry-eyed newbies, but veteran journalists reinventing their craft on the fly. There’s risk there, of course, for Steve Buttry and Jim Brady in the approach. Undoubtedly, controversies will pop up on their watch, and their new practices will be dissected.

For Marcus Brauchli’s Post, the challenge is strong as well.  He and his paper represent, now more than ever, the gold standard in American journalism, along with a handful of other newspapers. He deserves credit for aiming to keep a high bar in place in a shifting age. Safeguarding the Post’s integrity, thankfully, remains a given; the question is how to do it and successfully extend the Post’s reach and breadth, especially when TBD is out to take a bite out of its lunch.  Post ombudsman Andy Alexander and others have pointed out that the Post’s own internal standards, and the communication of them to staffers, are confusing and uneven.

For the Post, on a practical basis, its own effort to build a bigger tent — ironically, a goal in hiring Weigel and others — must continue, especially given the TBD competition. How to build that tent in the modern age now becomes the Post’s big issue.

A great Poynter chat, moderated by Steve Myers and involving both Dave Weigel and Jay Rosen, dissected the issues well. Objectivity. False objectivity. Disclosure. Engagement with readers and not underestimating their intelligence.

As Jay pointed out, “What’s at issue is how a craft that is replete with judgment explains itself when questioned. The old explanations have broken down. But there are careers that essentially rest on them. This is one reason they are not easily given up…. The Voice of God and the View from Nowhere were never that believable; there was just no alternative and no way to talk back. Now there is. Journalism ought to come down from the clouds and live among the people as the imperfect and improvised product that it always was.”

On a practical level, the Times blogger Kate Roberts laid out well why a punishment short of excommunication could have worked well in the Weigel affair.

“For both Mr. Weigel and the Post, a reprimand, suspension or even just imposing some standards – think without speaking or writing everything out loud – might have been a better outcome.”

In CNN’s quick termination of Nasr, a 20-year-veteran (Weigel had been on the job for three months), we see further absolutism in dealing with social media-inflected change.

Certainly, Nasr had to take responsibility for seemingly simplistic homage to a terrorist, but one 140-word tweet needn’t determine a whole career. Readers are smarter than that, as Buttry points out, if editors give them the chance. Twittercide – the tanking of a career based on one stupid post – needn’t be synonymous with capital punishment.

In the age of Twitter and of “confidential” journalist list serves (the quicksand that enveloped Dave Weigel) the point is that the Church must examine its teachings and its rules. That doesn’t mean changing its principles, just realizing that the multiple forms of expression before us all demand more nuance in judgment – the judgment of management as well as that of reporters.

• Bob Hall, former Philly publisher under Knight Ridder, who is returning as chief operating office, the #2 job, for the new private equity owners.
• Two union leaders, local Newspaper Guild president and Daily News columnist Dan Gross and President of Teamsters Local 628 John Laigaie.

Over radio, you could practically see the next set of battle lines drawn. Speculation in Philly has it that Hall’s first and main task will be dealing with the company’s 14 unions, drawing on his past relationships and reputation (Philly tough, but fair to deal with) to tame the labor beast, as new CEO and Publisher Greg Osberg focuses on lighting a digital age rocket igniter under the paper-centric company. As a friend pointed out, the sale was reported by Inquirer as “Phila. Newspapers sold to lenders.” Note that only is “Newspapers” capped, unusual in Philly style, but ironically, the new owners made clear that it was the digital future that they were investing in. Sure, they’d like to milk the long, though dwindling, tail of print revenue, but it’s digital that promises growth — and justified a $139 million bid. While the papers keep losing circulation, Philly.com has more than tripled page views in the last couple of years.

The union negotiations won’t be just about cuts, though those are surely coming. They are as likely to be around “skills,” as Osberg has already made the point he needs people who are flexible enough to meet the various journalistic and sales challenges of the day. As Osberg put it plainly to the Daily News’ Will Bunch: [Of journalists wedded only to the old ways of news delivery], “That type of person doesn’t fit well into where our overall strategy will be.”

The Guild, in particular, has tried to flex its flexibility muscles as the industry has cratered; Philly will be a next test for it and the new owners of whether you can successfully transform a largely old-world workforce for what’s needed today. Those labor challenges offer a double edge: 1) cost restructuring, key as ad revenues won’t grow dramatically; 2) a change in the very content created daily, online and in print.

Brian Tierney deserves much credit, for his pugnacious and unflagging spirit and real Philly patriotism, in the unanticipated times of deep recession. The next challenge, though, is less in saving the fortress newspapers than in building a community-based future. The new company needs to reach out — broadly — to its wider region, partnering with other media, top local blogs and more, much as its leading peers across the country have begun to do. (The coincidental release of J-Lab’s Philly-centered Networked Journalism Collaborative report gives the new owners a free handbook, here; thanks should go to the Knight Foundation and J-Lab exec director Jan Schaffer, an Inqy alum). As importantly, it needs to revamp its ad/marketing strategies, here, too, reaching out to a far broader spectrum of advertisers with the digital tools and services of the day.

Philly’s next re-do — maybe it will catch the recovery wind at its back this time — won’t happen in isolation. Down the road, in D.C., it’ll be able to watch Allbritton’s TBD start-up experiment, beginning in June. The first lesson: Figuring out how to serve substantial top-flight journalism and the commerce that accompanies it is no longer just the province of newspaper companies trying to figure out their next act.

This week, though, also saw an impressive report from another of the key players in the local journalism game — a foundation. The William Penn Foundation (assets: around $2 billion) commissioned J-Lab, an energetic newer media provocateur largely funded by the Knight Foundation, to figure out what was going on in local news, and what could be done about it. J-Lab’s recommendation, encapsulated in a readable, short-form report:  A Networked Journalism Collaborative for Philadelphia.

Most of you will nod as you read the key findings, my own emphasis added:

• The available news about Philadelphia public affairs issues has dramatically diminished over the last three years by many measures: news hole, air time, story count, key word measurements.
• People in Philadelphia want more public affairs news than they are now able to get.
• They don’t think their daily newspapers are as good as the newspapers used to be.
• They want news that is more connected to their city.
• People from both the Old Philadelphia, anchored by the city’s union and blue-collar workers, and the New Philadelphia, representing tech-savvy, up-and-coming neighborhoods, want to be involved in helping to generate that news.
• The city is awash in media and technological assets that can pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.
• There is strong, but guarded, interest in exploring a collaborative journalism venture.
• A significant number of Philadelphia’s new media outlets have expressed interest in pursuing a collaborative media initiative.
• Any collaborative news effort must validate and support the fiercely independent mindsets of the city’s new media makers.

Philly’s a special place in some ways — argumentative, feisty, proud of many heritages — and, in some ways, it’s like many other cities. While daily newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy (13 in the U.S.), proclaim profit and swear that the ad revenue bleeding is lessening (though they are taking in less revenue in 2010′s first (recovery) quarter than they did in 2009′s (near-Depression) quarter, many outside of daily newspapers believe they’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t include the dominant, near-monopolistic presences of daily metros that it used to.

So we see re-grouping everywhere. J-Lab’s report, like Len Downie’s last year, deserves credit for describing the reality well: Less is less — and it’s not enough. Foundations are redefining local journalism as a public good, like education, health and the arts — all community benefits that nobody expects the market to completely support. They’re pouring dollars into experiments, as are angels like Warren Hellman, the financial force behind Bay Citizen and Buzz Woolley, instrumental in getting Voice of San Diego off the ground. Entrepreneurs are testing models like TBD, as Allbritton (a TV veteran and innovator of Politico) believes a profitable enterprise can be constructed that’s digital-first, community-connected and tech-forward. The FTC continues hearings, roundtables and inquiries to see what can be done to “save” American journalism.

One big question that the Philly report begins to tackle is how to connect up diverse local media in any metro area. That seems like an academic question — the cliched herding of cats multiplied — but it’s not. Clearly, we see metro futures in which local news media will be far more diverse — public radio; news start-ups; commercial broadcasters; reduced, yet still substantial daily newspaper-based operations, plus a host of ethnic media and hyperlocal blogs. Connecting them smartly is key for two big reasons, ones that are the currency of the digital business: distribution and revenue.

Findability — the discovery of the local content — is key. Everyone from Outside In and FWIX to Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL is trying to lasso local content, seeing the findability problem. Aggregation is happening, though it’s ungainly. Readers don’t yet know where to look for the best aggregation of diverse, yet trustworthy local news. Research I’ve done with Outsell confirms that while we’re all quite used to using aggregators to get to national and global news, we’re still stumbling around as we look for local, tepidly sampling newspaper and broadcast sites, without forming strong time-on-site attachments.

So whoever can best aggregate any single metro’s news content — in a way that’s logical, useful and fun (think iPad here, for instance) — can drive a big audience. That big audience, of course, will drive the revenue, revenue for the aggregator, and in the Philly model and some others, revenues that will fund (not just form a sick trickle down) the local content producers. It’s arithmetic that’s just forming, so it’s hazy to see.

It leaves us, for the moment, with these kinds of questions:

• What indeed is a daily newspaper’s role in these collaborations? The Philadelphia operation now run by publisher Brian Tierney and editor Bill Marimow seems old-school in seeing their papers’ roles in the community. Yet, in other cities, we see the Miami Herald, Seattle Times, Charlotte Observer (all three funded by J-Lab) and Seattle PI.com actively reaching out to other local journalists, forming big tents of various constructions.
• If not the local daily, then who may do the organizing? TV broadcasters could do it, but it’s not much in their DNA, though a few national leaders like Raleigh’s WRAL show leadership here. Public radio could do it, and it may, spurred by local innovation and Project Argo-like national encouragement. The New York Times (or Wall Street Journal) could do it, if it decides its Chicago (Chicago News Cooperative) and/or Bay Area (Bay Citizen) models make broad financial and journalistic sense. The start-ups themselves could do it, but most are more oriented to doing the journalism, than organizing it more widely. The big aggregators, Yahoo foremost among them, have seen the coming, big local ad play, but may not have the patience and provision of resources for what will likely be a laborious bringing-together of local media. The Outside Ins and FWIX’s are tools companies, able to offer good software, but unlikely to do the aggregating themselves.

The magic word here from a business perspective: Roll-up. Whoever figures out how to roll up major audiences and monetize them wins. J-Lab’s report holds out hope that may come about somewhat organically. History, though, teaches us that it’s more likely to come by dint of more singular zeal.

In Philly, the next steps sound more foundation- than journalism-like, three Penn Foundation grants directed at planning, enterprise encouragement and creative use of technology. J-Lab Executive Director Jan Schaffer, herself an Inqy alumnus, notes that the enthusiasm the study encountered is palpable: “There were people that wanted to start tomorrow.” What does the project need? “The right editor,” says Schaffer, one that combines the savvy of the old and new news worlds. They are out there.

The newest start-ups show that. In D.C. TBD’s head, Jim Brady (Poynter’s Steve Myers good piece on Brady and his push here) is one of them, as are two of his key hires, Erik Wemple and Steve Buttry. Jonathan Weber brings three lives of news experience to Bay Citizen. Soon, there will be lots more.