Honk if you still love newsprint enough to pay $700 or more a year for a seven-day print subscription to The New York Times. Of course, you have many other choices.

You can try one of several print/bundled options for considerably less money. Or if you want to be parsimonious, you can get 10 free article views a month, or more if you want to work the social and search on-ramps to NYTimes.com. Maybe you want to be among those who pay Ongo $1.99 a month, and get 20 Times news stories a day, among lots of other news content.

Love the Guardian, and want to follow each tick of the U.K.’s Murdoch saga? If you’re in the U.S., you can subscribe to the lively iPad edition for $13.99 a month — or access it for free via the Safari browser on the tablet. In the U.S., its smartphone app is free, but in the U.K. and Europe, it requires a subscription. Of course, it’s quite successful Facebook app gives you access for free as well, anywhere.

If you’re shopping the Ongo news kiosk, look at wide spectrum of prices individual publishers are charging for access through that product: The Guardian is 99 cents a month, The Christian Science Monitor is $3.99, while the Chicago Tribune is $9.99 and The Boston Globe $14.99.

It’s not just newspaper companies that offer a patchwork of buying (or not buying) choices.

Are you a late-arriving fan of AMC’s series “Breaking Bad”? If you want to catch up and subscribe to Netflix streaming, you’ve got a good deal at the $7.99 a month rate. Cram in the first three seasons’ 37 episodes in a single month (where did that month go?), and you’ll pay just 21.5 cents per show, and anything else you have time to watch is gravy. Ah, but if we want to watch Season 4, which you can’t yet see on Netflix streaming, you have to upgrade to those red envelopes and get Season 4 DVDs — but it’ll cost you another $7.99 a month, and you’ll have to wait until the DVDs are released in June. (Ah, maybe that’s one of the reasons Netflix’s maladroit move to streaming is pushing it to a loss.)

Or you can turn to Amazon VOD and get the episodes for $1.99 each (or $2.99 in HD!), or $25.87 for the season. Or why stream when you own the DVD in a few weeks for $29.99 (or add an extra 10 bucks for added Blu-ray clarity). But wait — I’m an Amazon Prime customer. Can’t I watch it for free? It’s not part of the Prime free streaming offer, but I can watch a whole lot of other stuff as often as I want for nothing. Or maybe I can access “Breaking Bad” through Comcast’s Xfinity $100-a-month plus service. Nah, no deal — “Breaking Bad” isn’t available.

One more try: on the AMC site itself, there’s quite highlights, blogs, and more on the series, but no full episodes.

Let’s add in music.

Take Tristan Prettyman. It’s $9.99 (or 83 cents a song) for her last CD on iTunes. Through my $36 annual ad-free Pandora subscription, I can listen to dozens of her songs, her musical soundalikes, and thousands of other tunes in a year, bringing down the cost to pennies per song. Or there’s Spotify, where her songs are available for either zero, five, or ten bucks a month, depending on what devices I want to use and whether I can stand ads.

Magazines, of course, are offering their own split-screen experiments. The U.S. magazine industry (“The Newsonomics of Next Issue Media’s All-You-Can-Eat Kiosk“) is testing the all-you-can-eat, cross-title buffet, bringing some its titles down to as long as 37 cents a month (if you consumed all 27 “basic” titles) through the kiosk, but $39, or $59, or $79 a year if you buy a single title directly through a publisher.

How much to charge?

It’s a fool’s paradise of pricing out there in the digital world, right now, at least for wily consumers. The Department of Justice’s ebook suit and related settlements only complicate things. Five and ten years ago we were wondering whether people would ever pay for digital media — Newsweek’s Steven Levy took us into the terra incognita in “Meet the Napster Generation” back in 2000. But now the question isn’t whether people, young and old, will pay — it’s how the hell to figure out how much to charge them throughout what we politely like to call our multi-platform world.

Content no longer demands to be free. It wants a fee — but how much of one?

Consumer pricing is not a core competence of many media companies. For decades, media pricing was on automatic. Newspapers picked a quarter or fifty cents, and then re-programmed the coinboxes. Magazines kept prices low enough to build audiences to reap substantial ad rewards. Book publishers did some minor stratification. Music companies picked a couple of price points, and let the vinyl and CDs fly.

In the digital era, though, pricing is confronting — and confounding — media companies. Just what in the digital world of vanishing manufacturing costs is digital media worth? Now with those 20th-century costs — printing, manufacture, distribution, shipping — passing into the night, the question of price, and value, is making itself loudly heard.

We can certainly identify the wrong-headedness of the Department of Justice’s price-fixing suit against book publishers and/or point out how the DOJ had little choice in pursuing the case, neither of which is a surprise. The law has struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with business changes wrought by the Internet, from fair use to antitrust to media monopoly. Oft-earnest American regulators find themselves falling farther and farther behind, trying to track technology’s dominating nature and make new sense of it. Often, European Union regulators take a more forthright stab but end up retreating.

Create a new legal framework that better balances producers, distributors, and consumers? Forget about that in this age of politics where stalemate and status quo is the order of the day.

Publishers of all media are on their own, then, and they’d better make sense of pricing. It’s core to their survival and future sustainability. Sure, the Amazons of the world will try to monopolize book pricing, returning closer to its pre-”agency pricing” market share of 90 percent from its current paltry 60 percent. Yet, publishers — especially of news and feature media, news organizations and “magazine media” — have many pricing plays to try as customers discover content near and far from traditional outlets.

The magic of a good price point

I’ll call this the newsonomics of 99-cent media because that’s the world into which we have moved. Today let’s look at that 99-cent model, and next week we’ll delve into the early lessons that pricing’s practitioners have stumbled across as they’ve moved into paid content.

At first, it looks like a tyranny of 99-cent pricing (or the parallel expected tyranny of $9.99 Amazon book pricing). Will 99-cent pricing cause brand damage? Will it last? If the U.S. follows Canada and forsakes the penny, then the 99 cent pricing may fall into history. For now, though, it’s got a certain consumer magic.

“Ninety-nine-cent introductory offers have done wonders for take rates,” says applied economist Matt Lindsay, president of Mather Economics. His company has worked with more than 200 titles — about 75 percent of them newspapers — on pricing and related strategic issues. Take a look across media pricing, from The New York Times to Hulu Plus, and 99 cents (or its derivatives of $1.99 to $7.99 to $9.99) are everywhere.

Take rate is simple: What percentage of customers click yes — and provide precious credit card data — when confronted with an offer. Offer readers the ability to start a “trial” for 99 cents, and you’ll see results two to three times any other number, says Lindsey. At 99 cents, readers “take that as a signal. They understand that you want them to adopt this product. By setting the full price at a high number, you are basically saying, ‘This is the true value of the product.’”

Steve Jobs understood signaling in a parallel way. As Chris Anderson described well in Wired last November (“The Magic of 99 Cents”), one of Jobs’ great successes with iTunes and the iPod was that 99-cent pricing for songs. He could get the hardware and software right, but in the not-quite-post-piracy age, 99 cents was the third leg of the value equation. It worked as a signal: somewhere in between free and too much.

Start with 99 cents and you can conquer the world. As they set off on that quest, what are some of the pricing guideposts for publishers?

• 99 cents is a beginning and not an end. For newspapers used to being paid $200 or $400 a year, 99 cents seems like a declaration of cheapness. Put some round 0s on pricing; it just seems more honest. The oft-cited example of Louis CK’s $5 video is a case in point. Five bucks says authenticity. Yet media that answer thousands of reader questions every day aren’t comedians. Just because you set an intro price of 99 cents, the down-the-road price sends thatother important signal to value. Ultimately, says Lindsay, it’s true that “people take price as a signal to quality.”
• If you have lots more to sell, then 99 cents isn’t a price, it’s a price of admission. Responding to my recent column about ”small things” adding up, Rob Pegoraro asked, on Twitter, how The New York Times’ earnings results related to the notion. “I think NYT 454K dig subs become great market for ‘small things’ like ebooks, events+,” I responded. David Johnson then added, “You pay to be in a market. These business plans resemble theme parks and non-profit fundraising strategies.” That thought fits perfectly here: it’s not about the money, large or small, an even buck or 99 cents — it’s about establishing a new relationship. Or, to use the vernacular, 99 cents is gateway-drug pricing.
• Get ready to sell lots of stuff. So if you are Six Flags, or The New York Times or the L.A. Times, you’d better be able to leverage that new relationship by selling lots of stuff. Maybe not yet 100 products a year, but at least a half dozen to start. Ebooks, of course, fit perfectly here, as add-on products offered to members or subscribers. Sure, use some, as The Boston Globe is doing with Sunday Suppers, to reinforce subscriber/member value. But price others to match potential value. A guide to Boston-area colleges from, who else, the Globe, could be a $19.95 solid seller, given the $100,000-plus parental investment ahead. “Ebook,” though, is much too limited a name to put on it, and sounds like something not current. Wonderfactory founder and creative director David Link made this basic but hugely important point when we talked last week: There really isn’t a fundamental difference between an app and an ebook. “From an agency and a technology’s point of view, it’s only in how you create them. Talking about a recent product Wonderfactory worked on, “You go to the ebookstore, and it’s just text. You go into the app store and it’s got the text with 50 percent app-like sauce.” So, right now, publishers and their creative people are having to create multiple forms, but essentially the same product is both an app and an ebook. The technologies, and the costs, will clarify, as will the marketplaces for all the digital paraphernalia of our lives. The point for publishers selling more stuff is clear though: solve audience needs better than someone else, create products for the devices of the day, and price accordingly.
• It’s not just the content we’re paying for. That’s a tough, tough lesson for literal newsies. As with the music revolution Apple wrought, it was the combination of convenience, ease, presentation, pricing, and wonder that rationalized (for good and bad) the digital music industry. Today’s first batch of digital news subscriptions rely as much on convenience and mobility values as they do on the words and pictures.
• We’re all in the same business. Think of your own media purchases. A little music, more and more video, selective news and magazine subscriptions, increasing numbers of ebooks. Yes, the marketplaces for ebooks and apps, alongside this kiosk and that e-store, are confusing. Media, though, is media, and the pricing schemes are forming in a remarkably similar way across movies, music, newspapers, and magazines. We all like, for instance, the notion of All Access; we’ll pay once and get our stuff everywhere. So news and magazine publishers must look through the assorted lessons of the music and movie industries, those lessons still in much progress. News pricing is not an island.

Alfredo Corchado was used to getting mortal threats.

He received three in Mexico, but now he was in a Laredo bar, north of the border.

You better stop what you’re doing, or you’ll end with a bullet in your head and your body in a vat of acid, he was told. And then we’ll deliver the bones to your family in El Paso.

It was a chilling warning, or at least we’d expect it to put a chill into Corchado. An investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News (and a former Nieman Fellow), he’s been covering the ravages of drug trafficking for years, much to the concern of his parents living, as the traffickers plainly know, in El Paso. Yet Corchado goes on with his work — as do Adela Navarro Bello of Tijuana’s Zeta news magazine, Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and Ramita Navai of the U.K.’s Channel 4. As Navarro Bello explained of her paper’s coverage of the drug trafficking that has consumed at 50,000 Mexican lives, “If we don’t publish this information, we are part of the problem.” (Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz has captured Zeta’s struggle — including the murder of two of its journalists — with a new movie.)

Each is an investigative reporter who put their lives on the line to reveal stories they think readers must know about. They spoke on the “When the Story Bites Back” panel this weekend, at UC Berkeley, part of the sixth annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium (live blogging of the conference, here, with a #Logan12 Twitter feed).

That panel and the entire spirited weekend, organized and led by esteemed investigative producer Lowell Bergman, tells us a fair amount about the business of journalism. Though it is not — like most of my work — concerned with the dollars and cents of the business, in its very essence, it describes why the current crazy-quilt economics of the business matters. Funding the journalism business isn’t like funding Sears and Kodak  (“The Newsonomics of the Long Good-Bye“) or other fading institutions. It’s not even about saving a perhaps-vital American industry, like the auto industry.

It’s about keeping a lifeline of funding open so that our best reporters can do their jobs.

I’ll call it the newsonomics of risking it all because that’s what these reporters do. Many of the other Logan participants and attendees, thankfully, do less life-threatening work. Yet those represented at the conference — from ProPublica, the Washington Post, and New York Times to ABC, NBC, and NPR — are among the cream of the crop of investigative work and produce work with real public interest impact.

As we endlessly debate pay models, whether or not to work with Facebook, how to deal with Apple and Amazon and multi-platform journalism, the Logan Symposium is good tonic — certainly for those of us who attended, but really for all of us who know why this business matters to democracy. Whether and how the economics of the new news business work out isn’t an arcane question; it’s central to our collective future. The value of good, deep reporting is truly priceless.

So what about the state of investigative reporting? Look at the glass as half full and half cloudy.

What emerged from the conference, surprising to some, is that national investigative reporting is keeping its head above water. Both NBC and ABC talked about their expansions in the investigative area, while companies like NPR and Bloomberg have put new resources in as well. Units at the Post, L.A. Times, and New York Times may not be growing much, but seem to be sustaining themselves, for now.

“For now” is an important qualifier, and New York Times managing editor Dean Baquet’s opening interview at Logan, in its over-the-top self-assurance, bothered many of the conference participants with whom I talked. (See my related post about that.)

Washington Post investigative editor Jeff Leen suggested that there were 200 investigative reporters paid by news media in the U.S., which I calculate as one for every 1.5 million Americans. That’s not a ratio that’s going to hold many big institutions — government, business, labor — to account. Maybe that’s why as Logan participant and new-media vet Neil Budde tweeted, “How many times will ‘existential’ be used this weekend? I think count is six so far.”

Importantly, it is largely the largest news media — mainly national and global ones — that continue to put money into investigative work; these are the Digital Dozen companies I identified in my Newsonomics book. For them, as NBC senior executive producer David Corvo put it, investigative work is a “differentiator,” important to distinguishing big news brands from one another in the digital age.

What’s going on regionally is more of a patchwork.

Dozens of people like the Logan family are using their wealth to fund investigative enterprises from coast to coast, most with little fanfare. The Knight Foundation, represented at the conference by its senior advisor and grant-giver extraordinaire Eric Newton, has put $20 million into investigative journalism. With the decline in newspaper budgets, and thus in funding of investigative teams at many regional papers, such private funding has been a lifeline, though there’s a profound sense that significantly less in-depth work is being done at former powerhouse regional papers.

This Logan conference lacked the always-odd spontaneity of a Julian Assange appearance, but it offered intriguing emphases:

• Front and center, though not appearing in person was Rupert Murdoch.After screening “Murdoch’s Scandal,” Bergman’s Frontline documentary that aired March 27, “The Murdoch Effect: News At Any Price,” made for a raucous panel. Milly Dowler attorney Mark Lewis told how the phone hacking scandal had consumed his life and spoke of the “commercial despotism of Murdochracy” in the U.K., given the News Corp. CEO’s multi-party, decades-long influence. Big questions: What next, and if and how this tale plays out in the U.S.
• “If it’s not on TV, the American public doesn’t know it,” observed Diana Henriques, the New York Times financial investigative reporter. Yes, we may be on the brink of this multi-platform age, where old newspapers like the Times and the Journal do video alongside print, but still — in terms of notice and public action — there’s nothing like the impact of TV documentary.
• This is a generational challenge. Journalism has always had its challenges, but never has there been more uncertainty about how one generation can pass along its best practices to the next. Through that foundation funding, a couple of dozen younger journalists and students had their way paid into the conference. Surveying the group on the last day, Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and California Watch, summed his baby-boomer generation’s role: “I’m a bridge — we’re all bridges to the future.”

Bridging is, in part, what Lowell Bergman’s program does. UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program is a partner in the new Collaboration Central project, along with PBS MediaShift. With new funding, IRP will soon move into a new permanent office. It provides lots of training and fellowships, bringing along new generations to work alongside people like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bergman, whose career has spanned from early Ramparts through CBS, The New York Times, and Frontline, and who was played by Al Pacino in the tobacco industry exposé The Insider.

Bergman paid tribute to his one-time CBS colleague Mike Wallace, underscoring Wallace’s storied tenacity. That tenacity, based on Wallace’s fierce journalistic power (highlighted at CBS, in story and video), is what it took a non-journalist to highlight in Berkeley.

Jules Kroll, who led the invention of the modern intelligence and security industry, gave the trade good, pointed advice. Saying he had heard a lot of journalists talking about how beleaguered they are, he noted, “You have a big impact.” His shared his inside view of the power of a good investigation. Colloquial translation: Stop whining and get on with it.

And that’s always good advice. As ProPublica managing editor Steve Engelberg aptly said, “They were whining in 1989, when times were good.” That’s true. There may be more to whine about these days than in 1989, but the power of great public service work, sometimes when lives are on the line, is one of the things that must propel the trade forward.

The nation’s top investigative watchdogs convened last weekend to figure out how to better get the work of public interest, democracy-supporting news done, and I’ve covered that Logan Symposium 2012, over at Nieman Journalism Lab this morning.

Indeed, it was a power-packed — and collaborative — weekend, yet it got off to sputtering and almost jaw-dropping start.

Logan organizer Lowell Bergman, who heads UC Berkeley’s growing Investigative Reporting Program and is a longtime investigative producer and reporter (Frontline, CBS, New York Times+), led off with a Friday evening one-on-one interview with Dean Baquet, the New York Times’ managing editor. Baquet was subbing for Times editor Jill Abramson.

With a strong theme of collaboration — reporters sharing ideas and tips, TV and newspapers partnering, more is better than less — running through the conference’s schedule, Bergman tossed out an easy question for Baquet about collaboration.

“This is going to sound arrogant, but we need it less,” he said. You know, when someone starts off a sentence like that, he is usually right. Bergman gave Baquet a few more chances to explain himself….and sound less arrogant. Baquet whiffed, repeatedly.

His reasoning:

• The Times newsroom of 1200 is large enough to do what needs to be done, “unlike the Washington Post which has given up areas of coverage.”
• The Times seems like a more stable business now, with the fledgling success of its paywall — both making journalists feel their work is valued in the digital age and contributing to revenues. Baquet likened the paywall decision to the Times’ 1980 decision to launch a national edition, as milestones in the company’s strategy.
• “Reporters blanch at having two sets of editors.”

Asked what he thought of the Times/local collaborations with Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen and the Chicago News Cooperative (the second and third having recently been terminated), his response: “We got some good coverage out it,” particularly Texas “for the 20 minutes that Rick Perry ran for President.”

The Times as “the center of the world” approach seemed a bit odd Friday night. One audience questioner, hearing the comments, did ask with a tone of incredulity, “Surely, you can’t cover the whole country with 1200 people?” Baquet did allow that there are big issues in the non-national press, “The dirty little secret of newspapers is that many aren’t that good. For every Philadelphia Inquirer, there is a dipshit paper.” Which is kind of a problem if there are only two serious national newspapers in the country and 1400-plus non-national ones.

As he I talked with participants over the weekend, the take was unanimous: Baquet hadn’t been merely arrogant, but extraordinarily and doubly so, given the conference’s reason for being.

Now, most observers were quick to point out that Baquet himself had proven to be a good — and collaborative — colleague in his years in journalism in New Orleans, Washington, L.A. and New York. Still his words seemed out of place. Let’s maybe blame it on the cold pills he may have been taking to soothe an ailment.

Whatever, the pose seems dangerous.

It’s wonderful that the Times still pays 1200 people, but how much longer will it be able to? In the depth of the recession, it cut more than 100 positions and as recently as last fall had to offer newsroom buyouts. Its financial future is far from assured, with its print advertising woes a great weight going forward. It is not out of the woods; it may simply be seeing a clearing.

When times get tougher, and they may well soon, the Times will need friends. You know, those people who are with you in the good, and bad, times. Talking like the king of the hill doesn’t win friends. Beyond that, even the Times’ 1200 staffers only provide limited capacity, and in the total distribution era of news, capacity counts. That’s one of the things that has made the the local collaborations of the Times such an interesting experiment. Could it generate more journalistic capacity — quality journalism that met its standards, though it was done by non-Timesmen and Timeswomen — with the local partnerships?

We’re left wondering what the Times learned from those partnerships, and where it goes from here. We’re used to not feeling warm and cuddly about the Times; arrogance has often walked hand-in-hand with its great journalism.

Yet, journalism, inevitably is a humbling trade, and even the Times is better off, for itself and for all of us, remembering that.

So what is it? iTunes for magazines? Maybe Hulu for periodicals? How about Piano Media for American titles? Tivo for print?

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.

In short, the Next Issue kiosk idea is transformative — though we’ll have to see how quickly customers take to its unknown brand.

It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc’s People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst’s Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith’s Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch.

Magazine publishers long eschewed the web as largely detrimental to their business, and they participated on it unevenly and haphazardly. Without the loss of classifieds threat experienced by their newspaper cousins, they could better afford to hold back, though many titles have seen a steady decline in both circulation and advertising revenues.

So when the tablet came along, they sniffed it with great interest. In terms of size, it looked like…a magazine. Sports Illustrated demoed it first and that WonderFactory-wow-of-a-prototype has generated 1.135 million YouTube views in three years. Since then, magazine publishers have moved faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet. Some have told me they expect the tablet to grab a third or more of their print subscriber bases within two to three years. Many have put all-access pay-me-once subscription models into place, making it easy to pay for print and get tablet, too.

They’ve grumbled and growled about Apple’s onerous customer data and revenue sharing, but have moved ahead, in varying degrees with Apple’s Newsstand and other sales outlets. Additionally — and here’s the big difference with the newspaper industry — they pooled their efforts in Next Issue. That company is owned by the five behemoths, and it had difficult birth pangs. At times, it has seemed that Next Issue would become a side attraction (as so many publishing industry consortia become), just dabbling in the Android slice of the tablet market (though the slice is thickening).

Behind the scenes, though, it looks like Next Issue has become a major play of magazine publishers. Though the kiosk at launch only works with Android devices, expect iPads (and then iPhones) to be on board by late summer; Next Issue is about to offer up its product for Apple approval.

Non-Android users can get a sense of the product at Next Issue’s website, though the tablet, of course, is the best way to experience it, as Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther affirmed yesterday in an interview: “It’s all about touching product.” Guenther, a former TIVO exec, is a West Coast guy, and interestingly Next Issue seems like a bi-coastal play.

Last June, Next Issue released some beta products, all in run-up to this kiosk. “In Silicon Valley, we call it beta. In New York [where most of his owners reside within a few dozen blocks of each other], they call it ‘preview release.’ Business operations are in New York, but it’s the 40-plus product people and engineers in Palo Alto that have worked to create this Next Issue experience.

“It’s all about the USP,” says Guenther. And you can’t have a unique selling proposition, if you don’t have a compelling, ahead-of-the-crowd customer experience. While I’m Android-less, there are a number of reasons to believe that Next Issue may have gotten the new product right, or at least, righter than many of the products or consumer propositions out there.

Let me outline seven things to watch as you take a look at Next Issue:

One way to read: Sign up once — and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials — and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it’s an intuitive design, that’s a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.

One price: Well, almost. Next Issue’s pricing seems simple enough:

• Buy a single copy ($2.49-$5.99) of a magazine or a single subscription($1.99-$9.99 a month), and with the latter, access to growing archives that began Jan. 1, 2012.
• Buy one of two kinds of unlimited passes. For $9.99 a month, you get Unlimited Basic (think cable tiering). For $14.99 a month (or $180 a year), you get Unlimited Premium. At that tier, you get Times Inc’s Entertainment Weekly, People, Time, and Sports Illustrated — plus Conde Nast’s New Yorker.
• If you’re a print subscriber of an all-access-offering magazine, like Time Inc’s, you can get free access through the Next Issue site (and even if you’ve already “authenticated” through Time’s direct app). That kind of seamlessness is customer-pleasing.

The 32 launch titles are premium, not the low end of these publishers’ collections. Next up: adding more owners’ titles, and then non-owners’ magazines.

Newspapers? Well, maybe some, says Guenther. If so, think large regionals like the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, or Houston Chronicle, and not a proliferation of small, local paper apps. Not (yet) represented: Next Issue Media owner News Corp.’s The Daily, which as a magazine-like newspaper might fit in well here.

Revenue splits built on “engagement”: So Next Issue, for its work and investment will take a “industry standard” commission, which we can figure is in the 25-40 percent range. While Guenther won’t disclose the formula for divvying up the subscription revenues among publishers, he does say it will be built on “interaction by the consumer.” That sounds similar to what Piano has pioneered in sharing revenues by tracking actual reader usage of content. Consortia often fall apart on revenue sharing issues, so just getting an initial deal done is noteworthy.

New accommodations with Apple: Just as Netflix is newly playing with Apple and ponying up its commission cut, Next Issue looks like it will play along as well. The big reason: Next Issue owners have found, says Guenther, that most of their digital subscribers are new, non-print ones. With cannibalization of the print base less of an issue, paying a rev share to Apple becomes a less emotional cost of doing business.

Get ahead of Flipboard: It’s not a Flipboard-killer, but it’s intended to aggregate before tablet aggregators get the better of the aggregatees, as they’ve done on the web. Flipboard remains a superior browsing experience — cool, comfortable and serendipity-pleasing — and importantly offering a blend of changing content all within one interface. While Next Issue offers a single navigation, it’s not a blended product in the same sense that Flipboard is.

Down the road (how far will be the question), says Guenther, are the additions of search and personalization — and maybe, should the publishers allow it — cross-title topical bundles of health, fashion, or travel products. (Remember Mine magazine?) Should Next Issue continue innovating, combining the best of high-branded bliss with Flipboard fun, it could triumph. Flipboard, for its part, could still find a place in this adjusted ecosystem funneling some new (and younger) readers into Next Issue’s payment system, for a cut of the action.

It’s all a set-up for the print-to-tablet transition: So will a third of print magazine readers prefer the tablet sooner than later, as surveys seem to tell us? Readers love tablet magazine reading. If they transition quickly, and are paying subscribers, then the big business question is advertising.

Tablet ads continues to fetch rates (mainly for national publishers) five times or more greater than web ads. That differential may moderate, but the tablet’s immersive, customer-educating, consumer-grabbing capabilities offer major upside to advertisers and sponsors. It will take a couple to several years to reach some maturity, but the tablet ad ecosystem is developing quickly. Consider that earlier this week, we learned that both Hearst and Conde Nast will start releasing key-to-advertiser metrics on tablet usage, and that the Association of Magazine Media announced its own guidelines. The association goals: “to drive growth of advertising on tablets,” by providing data on:

1. Total consumer paid digital issues

2. The total number of tablet readers per issue

3. The total number of sessions per issue

4. The total time spent per reader per issue

5. The average number of sessions per reader per issue

In another words, just as Next Issue launches, the ad foundation is being thickly laid.

A model and a warning for the newspaper industry: In one sense, newspaper titles are very different than magazines. Other than the U.S.’s three national titles, newspapers are by nature local, appealing only to tiny slices of the national population. Yet in creating a single place to buy subscriptions, or single copies — and then potentially packages of content  (“The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year“) — Next Issue is well ahead of the U.S. newspaper industry. Piano Media, in Slovakia and Slovenia and soon farther west, is testing the newspaper portal notion, with fledgling, if small-scale, success.

AP’s new mobile apps create a better national/local aggregation that its first-generation did, but they don’t lead to digital subs. Press+, with now more than 300 customers, has the capability to create a newspaper kiosk, but has seen little enthusiasm among its customers to do so.

One big question for Next Issue is who will notice it? It’s been a business-to-business brand largely. Consumers know how to buy magazines from magazine sites or from Apple or Amazon, but they don’t know much about Next Issue. That stealth position may be one of the reasons its publisher owners have gone forward with it.

They can hold onto, they think, their current print subscribers, transition them over to all-access over time, and use Next Issue — as it tests out new markets — to find new readers and customers.

So what is Next Issue? It is a Netflix wannabe, in the CEO’s vision. Visit, see a bunch of choices, queue ‘em up, and pay a single price for unlimited usage. It’s not iTunes with individual price points. It’s more like the Pandora or Spotify pay-us-once-and-forget-about-it model. And like all digital-native companies, it will focus as much on harvesting data on its customers and their usage, knowing that intel may be a large part of the company value going forward.

That makes consumer sense. It could make a lot of consumer sense.

Let’s recall the innovative New York Times paywall model. The Times priced digital + Sunday print $60 below digital only. That meant a significant number of new Sunday subscribers (home delivery Sunday subs went up for the first time in five years), but it also meant some number of seven-day print subscribers giving up the print habit for Sunday print + digital.

In the Next Issue case, well-magazine-read consumers may do the math and find the $180 a year premium bundle (all-you-can-read, including archives, of all the magazines in the kiosk), such a good deal that they’ll drop individual magazine subs. My first math shows that if you subscribe to seven or more titles, that price point may be economical, though if you get the Next Issue pass, you’ll be passing up the print editions of the magazines, which publishers are almost throwing in these days, à la NYT.

So we can see the planning in the pricing: preserve print if you can, bring in new digital-only customers, and then upsell those into print for as little as five bucks a year more.

Aggregation. Customer ease. Pricing that psychs out consumers. We see the makings of our new print/digital/print world.

By historical measure, it’s a strange move. A large newspaper company CEO is captain of his own ship, at a pinnacle of American company life and compensation. The Associated Press, on the other hand, has been something else indeed, a wire, about as unsexy as a news company can be. Retiring CEO Tom Curley came over to AP from his role as publisher of USA Today almost nine years ago. It’s been a helluva nine years of transformation, of turning the quite traditional company he inherited from long-time head Lou Boccardi into a modern news company. He got it part way there.

Now Pruitt takes the baton, as most reports paint a picture of night falling on one of America’s oldest industries. The Council of Economic Advisers has reported that the press is “America’s fastest-shrinking industry”, measured by jobs lost,” and the Financial Times headlined its recent newspaper round-up, “Bleak outlook for US newspapers.”

Why do it? Why trade in the sleepiness of California’s capital city (Sacramento is McClatchy’s headquarters) for the bright lights of Broadway, a long walk from AP’s NYC offices?

Number one on list may be McClatchy fatigue. Pruitt and his CFO, now-successor Pat Talamantes, have rowed the third-largest U.S. newspaper company oh-so-gingerly around the bankruptcy shoals that have grabbed more than dozen of their peers. They’ve had to make devastating cuts in staff and other expenses along with other companies, but get some points for greater efforts to keep newsroom size and spirit going in the face of that bleak reality. It’s important to note that McClatchy has found no special sauce in transforming itself for the digital age, performing on par, sometimes better, sometimes worse, than its peers. Pruitt is getting this job not on the basis on being a proven transformative player, but on being a known, highly respected news exec who understands the challenges of the times.

Almost exactly six years ago, Pruitt seemed like a big hope for higher-quality, newspaper journalism in the transitional print/digital age. On March 6, 2006, which seems like two eternities ago, McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder, then the second-largest newspaper company in the country, and my work home for 21 years through 2005.  Though Knight-Ridder’s quick demise was shocking, Pruitt’s commitment to journalism was reassuring. I remember the conference call the company did to tout the purchase, and the optimism and commitment in Pruitt’s voice:

“Opportunities like this come perhaps once in a company’s lifetime, and  we’re thrilled to have this chance to extend McClatchy journalism and our  proven newspaper operations to 20 high-quality newspapers in high-growth  markets. Our two companies operate in the finest traditions of American journalism,  devoted to independent, public interest reporting and the highest ethical  values. Combining the two creates a company particularly well-positioned to  lead the way in a changing media landscape. It’s truly a chance for McClatchy  to do more of what it does best.”

We hoped Pruitt would become a strong public leader for those values in this difficult age. Fending off bankruptcy, challenged by new non-family shareholders and consumed by month-to-month survival, that leadership went underground. There was little percentage in asserting journalistic values in that environment, it seemed.

So now: AP. Certainly, the company owns its own set of life-and-death challenges. The non-profit cooperative, owned by newspaper companies, is still somewhere betwixt and between a wire and a global media company.

One thing Pruitt trades in: a non-national company of diverse properties for a worldwide media play. In a word: Scale.

AP is one of the Digital Dozen companies I wrote about in the Newsonomics book. The digital business is all about scale: do something better than others and then take it out, at very low incremental costs, to the rest of the world. The Wall Street Journal, BBC, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Guardian and a half dozen others fit that definition; many will be the winners when we look back from 2020. Yet AP isn’t in that league.

Though only about 20% of its revenues these days (down from 40% when Tom Curley arrived in 2003) are paid by member newspapers, those newspapers control the direction of the non-profit company. Understandably, member/owners haven’t wanted AP to directly compete with them in the digital, death-of-distance age, but they’ve often been far stronger in what they didn’t want AP to do, than in what they wanted it to do.

AP’s been essentially a B-to-B company, with one of its prime customer revenue bases eroding so quickly. AP has made up part of that deficit by selling national content to web portals and upped its broadcasting and global businesses, but, like its owners, it has had to cut. The company’s made smarter investments in mobile lately, revamping what had been ho-hum, if early-to-market, iPhone and iPad apps. Those products offer glimmers of hope that the power of AP, and its members, can be realized by consumers. Mobile is the only area in which AP is going direct to consumers, with the goal of being the go-to site for news in the U.S. That’s a tall goal, with lots of competition.

So what should be at the top of Gary Pruitt’s to-do list?:

• In one word: Leadership. Yes, a sky (print) is falling. Yet, we’ve never more needed strong, courageous leadership in the news industry. What journalists — and not just those employed by daily newspaper companies — do is hugely importantly to their democracies and their communities. Tom Curley tried to make those points; too often his comments were received as those of the Old Guard simply trying to hold on. It’s not easy to change the conversation, but before the public, Congress and the industry, Gary Pruitt must step forward with an optimistic, inclusive view of the future of the news business.
• Embrace Big Story storytelling: Check out the new Big Stories section on the new AP Mobile app. It only contains five topics now, but its larger principle is important. AP is probably the second-largest company, by staff, in the world, with about 2700 journalists, second to Reuters’ approximate 3000. It made its reputation of getting it first, globally. That’s still vitally important. Yet, its ability to move beyond a commodification of sorts — for publishers, taking AP’s first story, then come behind it with a deeper story — is essential if it’s going to climb the mountain of value and charge more. As AP escapes from the age of Last In, First Out into a web of greater contextual value to its business and consumer customers, the more it can claim a place in that Digital Dozen.
• Master advertising: McClatchy is an advertising company; AP’s not. AP, if it is to be global player, needs to develop and bring in-house — quickly — advertising chops. Yes, its content-buying customers will sell their own advertising, but AP needs capacity to do that same, and not be wholly dependent on those buyers to create — and share value.
• Leverage global connections: The world’s news agencies employ 10,000 or more journalists among them. Collectively — if they were working even more closely together — that would be the largest journalistic workforce on the planet. Finding ways to leverage more and more any journalistic synergies (technology can help here) is an opportunity AP’s competitors don’t have. Some of those news agencies have found more alternative funding sources than others, though all are struggling with their core businesses. Learning from them is essential.
• Play paywall pool: With Lee’s embrace of paywalls, we’re now seeing pay systems become the default at U.S. dailies. Paywalls aren’t only a digital circulation revenue move; they reconfigure customer relationship and should force re-thinking of product portfolio. Consequently, figuring out where AP fits into the new paywalled world (and as more than in-front-of-the-wall, bulk-up-the-free content) has suddenly increased in priority.

We watch a conveyor belt of passing numbers, moving faster and faster. A few stand out and capture our imagination.

The passing of print advertising in the U.S. has caught everyone’s attention in the last month (though we saw that passage in the U.K. two years ago). The gap between print ad loss and digital ad gain — 7-or-8 to 1, depending on your source — has been another attention grabber. Or this amazement, from mid-2011: While news sites struggle to average more than 10 or 15 minutes of usage a month, Facebook counts six hours a month, globally. Six hours. That’s engagement.

So we’ve seen The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal embed their flags in the fertile Facebook soil, planting new colonies and seeing a heavy immigration of digital natives (“With WSJ Social, the Wall Street Journal is Rethinking Distribution”).

Six hours is impressive, and it’s a number digital ad pioneer Dave Morgan now uses a lot. The still boyish Internet genius has graduated from the web, migrating back in time to an older medium with which we all grew up. Hint: It’s not newspapers.

“Six hours a month is good,” he says in his New York startup office. “Six hours a day is better.” Only one medium has that kind of pull: TV.

Indeed, time spent on TV clocks at almost 33 hours a week, according to the latest Nielsen study — maybe not consistently six hours a day (though it may hit that on some days), but almost five on average.

That’s why TV advertising is still way ahead of digital, pulling in $60.7 billion in 2011 and estimated to grow to $72 billion by 2016. In addition, time spent watching TV matches the ad dollars spent on the medium: TV takes up 42.5 percent of people’s media time and collects 42.2 percent of national ad spending. Newspapers and magazines still have more print losses to which to look forward, given their time-spent-vs.-ad-spend mismatches (“The Newsonomics of Crossover“).

It’s enough to force us to revive that old Clintonian 1992 campaign strategy, hitting the pause button and thinking about the newsonomics of TV, stupid.

While Morgan, the entrepreneur behind digital ad companies Real Media (sold as part of 24/7 Real Media to WPP for $649 million in 2007) and Tacoda (sold to AOL for $275 million in 2007), may be focused on that glowing living-room flatscreen, that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his roots: targeting audiences with more effective ads.

That’s what his 37-person, NYC-based start-up Simulmedia does: Bringing contemporary ad targeting to an industry more used to selling share and ratings points. To do that, it is assembling “the largest database of TV watching.” That’s a tall order, with 500,000 different national ads out there at any point.

The Simulmedia story begins with data — lots of it — and will end there too. How much? An almost terrifying number: Simulmedia takes in “150 million events per day” and retains the data indefinitely. It now houses 50 terabytes of data.

Simulmedia can capture what channels are being watched, when channels are being changed, and “when people change channels in the middle of ads.” It gets aggregated customer data from seven of the eight major cable systems operators (CSOs) in the U.S, with the exception of Time Warner.

For a news industry getting increasingly focused on digital video (thank you, new iPad, with dazzling display and 4G speeds), the Simulmedia story is one to watch. Its targeting potentially makes TV — whatever we mean when we use that word five years from now — an even stronger advertising competitor. Further, it should act as a reminder to publishers that selling broad “impressions” without better and better targeting may net them less and less.

Morgan gets his data from set-top boxes. He adds to that with data from more traditional TV sources, including Nielsen, Kantar Media, Tribune Media Services, MRI, and Rentrak. All that data does two things for Simulmedia: It rounds out Simulmedia’s own rough edges and it provides legitimacy as the startup goes about its business.

That business is selling ads. By using its trove of data, it is working some new TV territory. Simulmedia is aggregating smaller audiences found on a host of cable channels. Add up a lot of little audiences, about whom you know more than other people, and you can, Morgan argues, improve the ad yield for both the CSOs and individual channels. Morgan is taking advantage of what he sees (and writes about for Media Post and Ad Age): fragmentation.

While older readers may remember three big TV networks, today’s coming-of-age generation is used to hundreds of cable channels. (Low-cost-to-produce real estate porn alone seems to occupy a quarter of them some evenings.)

Simulmedia’s business is nascent, and doesn’t release revenue numbers. Simulmedia has run more than 150 campaigns, and claims that those campaigns “have successfully boosted target audience reach by at least 75 percent over advertisers’ standard or base campaigns.”

How does it improve that effectiveness? “If I know every ad that runs for Purina Dog Chow by Zip code, cause and effect can be measured,” says Morgan. Combine watching with Zip-oriented purchase info, and you’ve got a more competitive ad product. That ad product, Morgan says, is aimed at maximizing prices of what has been traditionally low-end advertising; think late-night Ginsu Knife spots. If you can prove it’ll sell more dog food, you can triple or more the price of the ad spot.

Increasingly, put all the data together, and the business can become more predictive, finding “persons of interest” for merchants selling products or TV networks touting new shows, for instance. And those set-top boxes are only getting smarter, becoming more digital, more computer-like, and more able to report more and more information about viewing habits.

How does “TV” as we’ve known it fit into our new world of at least five screens: desktop/laptops, smartphones, tablets, connected TVs, and connected cars? The recent Nielsen study provides a good moving snapshot of our changing behavior: Read the full report, and you’ll see that yes, there is some cable-cutting and lots more viewing on non-TV traditional screens. But traditional TV viewing still dominates streaming watching about 50-1, measured by time.

That’s a powerful number, which shows us why TV’s digital disruption has been far more limited than print’s.

It also shows us why a little company called Google is laying down fiber in Kansas City and apparently getting into the TV subscription business. Of course, Google with its own ad targeting machine has poked around the edges of TV in several different ways, including Google TV. It has now reenergized its several-years-old TV ad selling business.

Will Simulmedia succeed, and if so, in how big a way? No one’s got a clue at this point. What is clear that is that the biggest ad medium across the western world is facing the kind of change its print brethren have seen: the impact of better targeting for commercial messages. As “TV” moves to more on-demand and time-shifted, such technologies as Simulmedia only make more sense.

Yes, Times Square and Shibuya Crossing electronic billboards will endure — marvelously untargeted, humongous and garish. Each day, though, we move into a more targetable commercial landscape, fed by Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics and Omniture and many others. We move into a world of interactivity that we didn’t expect: TV watching us just as much as we watch it.

It’s easy to get cynical about hyperlocal news on the web. People have been working to figure out a scalable model to support it for years. But news-model fatigue shouldn’t be mistaken for permanent failure — it’s just that no one has yet found success.

Community journalism pioneer Steve Buttry, now heading up community engagement at Digital First Media, says he is buoyed by disruptive-change theorist Clayton Christensen’s notion that 90 percent of successful startups start out with the wrong strategy and often take three or four attempts to get it right. That makes some kind of web sense. For those of us trained in the arts of journalism, though, it’s probably a tough lesson: We’re trained to get it right thefirst time.

With that in mind, let’s look into the next round of hyperlocal, the emerging newsonomics around Patch’s aim to become profitable, just as Digital First Media (DFM) dials up its own hyperlocal strategies. Though many newspaper companies are testing hyperlocal strategies, individually or through their chains, Patch and DFM stand out for the scale of their intent. We’ll stick with the term “hyperlocal,” even though it’s a squishy one, because it still best describing the kinds of close-to-where-we-live school news, local sports, police reports, and government coverage we find useful. It may a community of 20,000 or 80,000, but for many of us, it’s less than a whole city.

Let’s start with Patch. Each quarter, as AOL announces its financial results, CEO Tim Armstrong sticks his head in the boxing ring, and lets it get punched around a bit. He took over a newly independent Time Warner spinoff and has been madly transitioning it beyond its sinecure of the old-timey Internet access business.

I won’t debate here his hits and misses, his romancing of Arianna (or was it the other way around?), or the half-life of AOL, given its trajectory and the fact it haslost more than $800 million since its 2009 spinoff.

For the news business, two facts stand out. First, Patch is doing journalism, employing more than 1,000 journalists. Second, it is testing a model that needs testing, however Patch’s history is eventually written.

That model may be getting a rocket boost of revenue, if January’s trends hold up. In an interview last week, Patch President Warren Webster says that January booked ad revenue alone equaled half of all of 2011 ad revenue. If that trend were to continue, we’d be looking quite differently at Patch’s chances of making it into the black before AOL’s investor patience runs out. Just last week, Starboard, an “activist fund,” increased its AOL stake to 5.1 percent, pushing for strategic changes, and Patch is in the middle of its sights.

[Update, 2:52 p.m.: Some added context to the Patch ad revenue increase: The January ad revenue noted above should be noted as bookings for the year as a whole, committed by January. Further, Patch says that, as of today, it now has commitments for more than 75 percent of the total revenue that it recognized in 2011. Those are ads that it has sold and that will run some time in 2012. It recognizes the revenue, like almost all ad sales companies, when ads run. Indeed, January 2012 is up manyfold over January 2011, but in terms of the yearly revenue contribution, it will be relatively small given that January is a light ad month throughout the industry. While it's impossible to extrapolate whole year 2012 revenue, based on the data so far, the sharp turn up in trajectory portends a major boost in ad revenue in 2012 — how large and how sustainable, still to be seen.]

That model may be getting a rocket boost of revenue, if January’s trends hold up. In an interview last week, Patch President Warren Webster says that January ad revenue alone equaled half of all of 2011 ad revenue. If that trend were to continue, we’d be looking quite differently at Patch’s chances of making it into the black before AOL’s investor patience runs out. Just last week, Starboard, an “activist fund,” increased its AOL stake to 5.1 percent, pushing for strategic changes, and Patch is in the middle of its sights.

AOL won’t release specific Patch financials, but we can piece together numbers — Patch CSI — that tell us the story so far. AOL has said publicly that one quarter of its 864 sites are making $2,000 a month or more of revenue. That would also mean that 645 or so of its sites are making less than $2,000 a month in revenue.

On revenue, let’s be generous and say that one-quarter of the Patch sites are making an average of $2,500 per month. That would mean $30,000 a year. So 215 (or one-quarter of the sites) at $30,000 kicks up to $6.45 million annually.

Let’s say that on average the other three quarters of sites are earning an average of $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year. Multiply that by 645 and we get $11.6 million.

So annual 2011 revenue would come in at about $18 million. That matches up with other extrapolations, guesses, and the like, which put the number around $20 million.

We know that AOL is spending $160 million a year on Patch. So on an operating basis for 2011, total revenue of $18 million would leave Patch with a $144 million operating loss.

But wait. If January was that good, equaling half of the 2011 revenue rate, that would mean Patch took in $9 million in that month. If it could sustain that number all year, it would be up to $108 million in revenue. Yes, its sales cost would increase, so let’s add in another $20 million for those. If all the other costs were constant, 2012 costs would be $180 million. 2012′s revenues would be $108 million.

You could look at that number two ways:

— It would still be losing $82 million a year;

— It would have erased 43 percent of its operating loss in a year.

A Patch half-green, or a Patch half-brown.

On the green end is Patch’s maturing approach to ad sales. For instance, Webster is enthusiastic about its recent initiative to add a third leg of revenue, in addition to national impression-based advertising and largely sponsorship-based local advertising.That third leg is better monetizing of its directories. “In the last two months, we pushed our sales team to push claims.” “Claiming” is getting local merchants to verify their free business listings. Of course, the next step is to get them to advertise and to enhance those lists. “We hit an all-time high recently,” he says. “We got 400 claims in a single day across Patch.” Patch says its claimed-listings rate is up roughly 124 percent over the past six weeks.

The big potential payoff here: Claiming is lead generation, and Patch has found claiming merchants to be 4 to 5 times more likely to advertise once they claim. These enhanced directories offer video profiles, highlighted listings and “owner messages.”

Journalistically, what does Patch have to do to win a race towards profitability, a marathon that will probably last at least three more years? Fundamentally, it needs to fulfill its promise: “Hi there, we’re Patch, your source for local knowledge you can’t live without,” a promise it curiously makes on its overall entry page, but not on its town sites.

If I were giving out grades, I’d give many sites As and Bs for vitality and enthusiasm — and those are good starters in journalism. The better sites do give us a sense of townness, a tribute to the reporters running ragged around their geographies, snapping photos, doing quick interviews, promoting Patch, and more.

In news, they’re in and out — no real competition to good daily newspapers, even with their diminished staffs. They’ll hit on good stories here and then, but can’t be depended upon to do it. I thought that the March 2011 acquisition of Outside.In would lead quickly to better news aggregation from other local news producers — creating a better local news briefing — but so far I see scanty evidence of that.

Blog posts are increasingly numerous — Patch is up to 14,000 active bloggers, Webster says, or 16 per site on average. But they run a wide gamut in quality and readability.

In utility, Patches are hit and miss. Lots of local events can be found — to the gratitude of civic-minded organizers of them — but the presentation isn’t the most user-friendly.

As sources of finding a good new restaurant or a handyman or the best child care in my neighborhood, they fail. The city guide vacuum (“The newsonomics of the Swift Street Courtyard“) — still left in place after the Sidewalks, Digital Cities, Real Cities, and more have come and gone — is a market opening for Patch. Yet its directories are utterly generic, not distinguishing an above-average eatery andJack in the Box (“Whether you’re looking for a quick bite for breakfast, lunch or dinner, or a late-night snack, this Jack in the Box, conveniently located on Ocean Street near Water Street, is ready to serve you 24/7. You’ll find favorites such as cheeseburgers, Sourdough Steak Melts, Chicken Fajita Pitas, shakes and fries, as well as specialties that include a chicken teriyaki bowl, deli trio grilled sandwich and grilled breakfast sandwiches. Salads, tacos and a kids’ menu are also available.”)

That may explain the recent hiring of Rachel Fishman Feddersen, late of Bonnier’s Parenting.com, and an early city-guide staffer, way back in 1995 for New York City’s Metrobeat, which was later bought by CitySearch. A feature pro and a mom in Montclair (once the hyperlocal capital of the country, when Patch, Baristanet, and NYT’s The Local competed there, and now still deeply competitive even after the Times pulled out), she’s into her second week on the job. She told me that her job as chief content officer will range from “the unsexy stuff” — things like page load times, better SEO, newsletter-sending time — to showcasing Patch best practices to coming up with winning editorial features.

Patch is also experimenting with new more visually interesting designs in a couple of dozen markets. Webster acknowledges that the directories in particular and other parts of the site “are not yet built out.”

What else might AOL and Patch do to close the profit gap faster? It could grow its audience more quickly by better connecting Patch to other relevant parts of AOL. Huffington Post, for example, doesn’t automatically recognize local visitors and give them easy access to a local Patch site. Find the “Local” tab, and you can choose one of HuffPo’s city sites — but there’s no Patch content to be seen. That seems like a no-brainer. Further, a dedicated tablet app (rather than the 2x smartphone product) seems like it should be in place by now.

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

That’s only fair, I think. Whether the moves have been right or not, it makes sense to tweak this hyperlocal business and journalism model, and each change shouldn’t be a cause for suspicion. Let’s remember that at the same time Patch may be cutting out freelance dollars here and there, daily newspapers are continuing to remove dozens of full-time jobs.

Further, as Buttry points, it takes time to get things right — though it’s not clear how much time Patch has, given growing competition.

Advertising competition is ubiquitous, with Google, Facebook, and Yahoo all taking new runs at local treasure. Buttry’s Digital First is making moves of its own. The company, which is making itself famous for developing dozens of new local, digital advertising products, is now in a couple of big Patch territories, particularly Connecticut and California, as Digital First digs deeper into MediaNews management in both Northern and Southern California.

People increasingly will compare Patch and Digital First. Says Buttry: “We get a lot of attention because of the geographic overlap, and we have big ownership [Alden Global Capital, in Digital First's case]. But we are transforming whole newsrooms, not setting up one-person shops.” Digital First’s Connecticut Group Editor Matt DeRienzo outlines the coming competition even more directly, pointing to the strengths of his Connecticut test lab in Torrington, a model soon to spread to Oakland and New Haven, with numerous variations elsewhere. He makes three points — ones that all legacy newspaper companies would have to use against insurgents like Patch:

• “A larger staff, and a newsroom structure with reporters who have editors on site leading and counseling them;
• 134 years of history covering the community (and in Torrington, we opened our entire archives for free access to the public, one of the most popular features of the newsroom café);
• A physical gathering place that is built more like a community center than a newsroom (free public meeting space for the Garden Club, Little League board of directors, Young Republicans, etc., classes and workshops for the public, open story meetings, etc.).”

And yet: Digital First, at this reading, has about 1,000 bloggers within its cities, compared to Patch’s 14,000.

Then there’s the overlap question: Aren’t these guys doing the same thing? Well, sorta, kinda. Buttry even says Digital First could reach out to Patch, offering a partnership or aggregation arrangement of some kind, though he hasn’t done that yet. “We should include them in our local networks.”

So it’s not David vs. Goliath, nor David vs. David, nor Goliath vs. Goliath. In fact, these may be two Davids both fighting against the Goliaths of Facebook and Google, which are rapidly gaining digital ad market share on everybody. It’s just another front in the digital wars, one perilously close to our homes.