Social

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

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

Today’s news that the Times Company is finally selling its New York Times Regional Newspaper Group holdings of 14 newspapers absolutely fits with the last week’s news of CEO Janet Robinson’s abrupt departure. 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,

As leading-edge publishers move away from destination-only strategies, they seek to colonize other habitable web environments; Facebook now looks like the friendliest clime, allowing publishers to keep all the revenue from ads they are selling within their Facebook apps. In addition, Facebook is providing aggregated data on user engagement — active users, likes, comments, post views, and post feedback.

It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, as in:

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

Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.

What will The Daily do with Cairo’s Time? Egypt is the story of the week. With The Daily planning on being a daily, not an instant, news product, its thinking and philosophy will be tested Day One. If it has yesterday’s Egypt news, as the revolution goes down, it will read like yesterday’s. That’s the advantage, the Journal, the Times and every newspaper has, a print compilation still valuable as a package to tens of millions — and the ability to do continually updated news. If The Daily does stay updated, using wires, the content may look like much of what others’ have, so that’s another challenge as well.

It’s astounding how fast the overall population is going digital, an acceleration even from several years ago when we clearly saw “power digital users”, whose habits were significantly ahead of the overall population. If anything, the print-to-digital revolution is only moving faster.

Well, worth a read by journalists and those that pay them, as we face fundamental questions like how much do journalists need publishers, and how much do publishers need journalists?

Young Otis Chandler — generation six of the family that built the Times into one of America’s great papers — talked about his four-year Goodreads, a social book review site that has grown to 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago. So if young Otis has modernized the book section, what other traditional newspaper section are ripe for digital modernization?

So we go from macro (“10 Reasons to Watch the TBD Launch,” to micro, as we all get look at the site, and can translate the good theory behind the site to its actual look, feel and execution.