This is a time of revolutionary change, and we’ve got to separate — for a moment at least — the players from the plays. In writing about the major restructuring of the Deseret News/KSL operations in Salt Lake City this week, I suggested that Clark Gilbert and his inspired band were getting on with the business of remaking journalism. When I write about how smartly Demand Media has harnessed analytics to create a business, my enthusiasm shows. Why?

I believe the news world, oh-so-unevenly, is finally coming to grips with the digital era, and getting beyond the grief stage in saying a long good-bye to printed newspaper and broadcast-at-6 daily news shows. News people — editors, reporters and publishers — who pride themselves on being logical, follow-the-facts types should have followed the logic of digital change more quickly, more widely and more thoroughly. They didn’t though, and we have all suffered for it, in a decade when the public needs as much in-depth and knowledgable news coverage as it can get.

So I focus on the innovation; that’s where the new news business will be built, one way or the other. Whether it comes from a religious foundation, a quest to build toward an IPO or, in the case, of Rupert Murdoch, the last (?) chance to put his stamp on the industry he loves.

What we all learn — and apply — from the innovation of others, however much we like them or the goals, that’s the key.

In Utah, it gives me shivers to hear six big drivers of the journalism — the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community — and not hear the basic, enduring driver of journalism: to inform and educate communities and audiences without fear or favor or proselytization.  With Demand, and now Yahoo’s Associated Content, I sense the lost opportunity when those companies tell me that just want to pick off high-ad-value content (technology, health, finance, etc.) and that the news guys can just figure out how to make the rest pay. I think News Corp’s donation of $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, just ahead of a decade-setting election, compromises the integrity of the Wall Street Journal, a great news company.

We can’t though dismiss what the Mormon Church, Rupert Murdoch and ad moguls are up to. We have to learn from it and help it power a journalism that matters. That’s why I made the connection, for instance, between the Salt Lake experiment and TBD, between what Demand is up to and what the Financial Times is doing with analytics to create a new business. It’s the innovation that’s worth us all learning from, no matter what we think of the innovators.

Start with several cups full of daily newspaper and broadcast types. Take a teaspoon of the Christian Science Monitor. Add in a dash of HuffPo spice. Ladle a tablespoon of Demand Media into the mix. Borrow ingredients from two Washington D.C. news companies, the 143-year-old Washington Post and the one-month-old TBD.com. Now, into the hyperchange of late 2010, let it shred, dice, slice, puree, whir and, finally, blend.

That, in short, looks to be the new recipe in Salt Lake City. There, today, the Deseret News pulled together many of the innovations of the day in the news business and redefined the company, its workforce and its products in one sweeping move.

The immediate news that caught the attention of the news world: The Deseret News — one of two dailies in the market, in a joint operating agreement (shared business operations) with the MediaNews-owned Tribune — is cutting 43% of its newsroom, or 57 full-time and 28 part-time employees. That’s big news in and of itself, but in this case, only part of a much larger story.

We have to look at the Deseret News announcement in the context of another, USA Today’s (“It’s (About) Time for the Next Re-Invention“) last Friday. The news business is now blowing itself up, claiming radical reinvention, acknowledging that experimentation around the edges won’t get the job done.

Won’t the cuts mean lots less news coverage?

“That’s an Old Media world view,” Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert told me today. “We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.”

I first met Gilbert in the mid-’90s, when, as a Harvard prof, he talked to Knight Ridder editors and publishers about creative disruption, the then-vaguely academic-seeming phenomenon that would wreak havoc in the news business. Gilbert got the opportunity to apply his intellectual mettle to the pedal of news management when he assumed his job in Salt Lake City a year ago. Among advisors on his board is Clayton Christensen, the oft-quoted and but-too-little-applied author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and “The Innovator’s Description.” Newspaper company CEOs long discussed his work, but their companies have become textbook examples of what he preached, making moves that were too little, too late to meet the challenge of epochal disruption.

So let’s take a quick tour of the new Deseret recipe:

• Start with several cups full of daily newspaper and broadcast types. The newspaper had about 200 staff positions. Now, the newspaper staff and the news staffs of KSL TV and KSL Radio, all owned by Deseret Management Co., a for-profit business arm of the Mormon Church, are part of a single, combined media company. Gilbert says the new size of the combined staff is “north of 200,” but doesn’t want to disclose the actual number, given competitive concerns. Also tossed into the mixer is the company’s digital team, which has been working across print and broadcast for the past year.
• Take a teaspoon of the Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor has long served as a example of a religiously based journalistic organization, one that applied its otherworldly beliefs to the here and now. The new Deseret plan takes that idea, and intends to feed it the rocket juice of digital age, allowing its “values-based” journalism to carry to every corner of the earth, via the Internet. In fact, Gilbert lays out six values — the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community –  that the journalism the company will now focus on, and the word “values” pops up repeatedly both as “mission” and strategy. People in Salt Lake — now a majority non-LDS community — will tell you (KUER’s “The Future of Utah Journalism,”) that the Deseret News has long had one foot in the church camp and one foot in traditional daily journalism, tilting one way or the other, depending on the story, the editor and the pressures of the day. Now, it appears, the company is unambiguously grasping its faith, injecting into the very fiber of its news operations. Mark Willes (yes, the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, of the pre-Zell, Staples Center ad debacle period), has headed the parent Deseret Management Company since February, 2009, bringing in the values-based media strategy. Willes brought in Gilbert, the intellectual yin to Willes yang. Gilbert has brought in Christensen, among other national advisors. All three — Willes, Gilbert and Christensen — share the Mormon faith.
  
• Add in a dash of HuffPo spice. Vai Sikahema, sports director and anchor for NBC10 Philadelphia, host of the “Vai & Gonzo Show” on ESPN Philadelphia Radio and “Tongan Warrior”, is prototypical of the kind of high-profile writer that is an increasingly part of the new Deseret mix. That’s a page borrowed from the Huffington Post: get high-profile celebrities, who will write for nothing and bring their fans with them. Gilbert says you can expect many more Sikahemas, drawn from around the world.
• Ladle a tablespoon of Demand Media into the mix. Deseret Connect is the new take on Demand’s Pro-Am business model. Already, Gilbert says the company has received more than 100 applications for the new user-gen service. “It won’t be their main source of income,” says Gilbert. The company is seeking “high-quality people, who fit the values and will be edited,” to write about its key topics. How many?: Maybe as many as a thousand within a year.
  
• Borrow ingredients from two Washington D.C. news companies, the 143-year-old Washington Post and the one-month-old TBD.com. From the Post, Gilbert takes the ability to be two things, simultaneously, a worldwide political news leader and a company plying the waters of hyperlocal; he believes that in the digital age, you can difference faces for differing audiences. In this case, you can be both a worldwide Mormon vertical — serving a potential readership among 13 million co-religionists — and the newspaper of Salt Lake’s and Utah’s smaller communities.

Deseret clearly is following the same path as the brand-new TBD, as well, pooling text, video and audio skills. In reorganizing those skills sets, Gilbert is injecting a newly named staff of Rewrite/First Responders. That group, maybe a third of the new “integrated newsroom” of about 100, will work on both sides of the “field reporters.” The Rewrite/First Responders staff comes from a diverse digital/broadcast/wire background, and they form the hub expected to produce the kind of content in the best form (story, post, video segment, podcast) through the news day. In the moving arithmetic, it’s important to note that only about half of the combined newspaper and broadcast staffs move into the “integrated” operation. The others — roughly another 100 or so — stay in more traditional (“enterprise, investigative”) roles. Out of these moves, and through greater use of cross-trained (video-shooting reporters, text-writing photographers), Gilbert aims to reduce duplication of staff and focus more resources — Pro and Am — on stories deserving greater coverage.

The overall new math: “Our net news coverage goes up.”

• Shred, dice, slice, puree, whir and, finally, blend. And it’s all something of a blur, especially the view from outside the unique culture of Utah.  The deep talk of values and mission is enough to give an old newsie hives, and we’ll all have to watch to see how much “news” coverage is skewed by religious beliefs. In addition, though, the Deseret media company is a creation that immediately emerges as a new multi-media, multi-platform, Pro-Am- hugging, cost-cutting model. New NAA chairman Mark Contreras, a Scripps senior vice-president, was quick to laud it as one to watch: “The Deseret News team has showed courageous leadership, not just to make the difficult decisions around costs, but to define a broader and more digitally-focused future”. With the USA Today and Deseret announcements of the past five days, expect 2011 to be a year of fire-breathing change.

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

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

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

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

Among the features that suit the busy information customer:

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

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

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

Implications: The Reuters Insider product is impressive, a model of what can be done by companies recognizing changing digital habits, and the technologies that support them. What’s most impressive about the product is its aggregation, the sheer amount of content that it brings together in an intutive interface. Key here is the willingness to bring in non-Reuters content. While Reuters may have the largest news staff — 2900 — in the world, it acted on the realization that no news service is an island. It has been able to aggregate 150 content contributors — at no license cost — due in part to its first-mover advantage here. That move — smart aggregation of like content — is one that applies in many industries, from regional news to B2B to education.

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

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

The Washington Post Company has been much in the news recently, but not because of its flagship paper. It’s making news around its other holdings. It has shed Newsweek, staunching a $30 million annual bleed. More importantly to the company’s finances, its Kaplan “subsidiary” has been much in the spotlight, under investigation by the feds, along with other for-profit educators, for fraud around student loans.  Those inquiries have rocked The Washington Post Co.’s share price, sending it to a year-to-date low.

The Post’s case has also refocused public attention on how much the company is dependent on Kaplan revenues. Those revenues now amount to 62 percent of revenues, and 67 percent of profits. It became clear to even those who hadn’t been watching closely that the Post was more an education company than a newspaper one, though the family ownership of the Grahams clearly intend to use that positioning to protect and sustain the flagship paper.

The Post case is not an isolated one. Fewer news companies are, well, “news” companies in the way we used to think of them. More news operations find themselves within larger enterprises these days, and I believe that will be a continuing trend. It could be good for journalism — buffering news operations in times of changing business models — or it could be bad for journalism, as companies whose values don’t include the “without fear or favor” gene increasingly house journalists. That push and pull will play out dramatically over the next five years.

Let’s look, though, at the changing newsonomics of the companies that own large news enterprises.

Here’s a chart of selected companies, showing what approximate (revenue definitions vary significantly company to company) percentage of their overall annual revenues are derived from news:

News Corp.: 19 percent (newspapers and information services); 31 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
Gannett: 94.3 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
New York Times: 93 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
Washington Post: 21 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
Thomson Reuters: 2.3 percent (Media segment)
Bloomberg: <15 percent (non-terminal media businesses)
AP: 100 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
McClatchy: 100 percent (newspapers and broadcast)
Disney (ABC News): <14 percent (broadcast)
Guardian Media Group: 46 percent (newspapers)

The non-news revenues may be a surprise, but here’s one further fact to ponder: News, over the past several years, has continued to decline in its percentage contribution to most diversified companies. Given all the trends we know, it will continue to do so. Movies, cable, satellite, and even broadcasting all have challenges, structural and cyclical, but overall are all doing better than print and text revenues.

News Corp., the largest company by news revenue in the world with publications on three continents, is a great example. After all, although it is eponymously named, it is not really a “news company.” With only one in five of its overall dollars coming directly from traditional news, it’s much more dependent on the success of the latest Ben Stiller comedy or the fortunes of a blockbuster than on the digital advertising growth of The Wall Street Journal or the paid-content successes — or failures — of The Times of London. These matter, of course, but let’s consider the context.

In February, I wrote about the “Avatar Advantage” that News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal held in its increasingly head-to-head battle with The New York Times. At that point, Avatar had brought in $2 billion in gross receipts for News Corp., whose 20th Century Fox produced and distributed the movie. Now that number has grown by $750 million, to $2.75 billion in total. News Corp. shares that revenue with lots of hands, but what it keeps will make an impressive difference to its bottom line — and to what it can pour into The Wall Street Journal, as CEO Rupert Murdoch desires.

Compare that financial flexibility with the Times, and it’s night and day. The Times Co.’s total 2009 revenues: $2.4 billion, less than Avatar itself has produced. The Times is all but a newspaper pure play, deriving about 5.5 percent of its revenue from non-news Internet businesses, like About.com, after shedding TV and radio stations and its share of the Boston Red Sox.

It may be a one-of-a-kind pure play, in that it is the leading standalone news site and reaches vast audiences globally. Yet its pure-play nature can feel like a noose, which was tightening in the depth of the recession and only feels a lot looser now. The Times’ planned paid-content metering system, for instance, is a nervous-making strategy for a company with relatively little margin of error. Compare that to the revenue trajectories that News Corp.’s London papers may see after their paywalls have been in place for a year. Whatever the results, they’ll have de minimis impact to News Corp. fortunes.

Likewise, McClatchy — another newspaper pure play, like MediaNews, A.H. Belo, Lee, and a few others — is now betting wholly on newspapers and their torturous transition to digital.

While Gannett is heavily dependent on print newspapers, in the U.S. and UK, it has been benefited by the 13 percent of its revenues that come from broadcast. Broadcast revenues — buoyed by Olympics and election-year advertising — were up 18.6 percent for the first half of 2010, while newspapers were down 6.5 percent for Gannett. Broadcast may be a largely mature medium, too, but for the print news companies that haven’t jettisoned properties gained in an earlier foray into broadcast diversification, it has provided some balm. In addition to Gannett, Tribune,  MediaGeneral and Scripps are among those holding on to broadcast properties.

For the bigger companies, the consequences are more nuanced. I call these large, now globally oriented (in news coverage, in audience reach and, coming, in advertising sales) The Digital Dozen, twelve-plus companies that are trying to harness the real scale value of digital distribution.

The Digital Dozen’s Thomson Reuters is a great example. Until 2007, Reuters was a standalone, a 160-year-old information and news services company news service struggling with its own business models in this changing world. Its three-year old merger with financial services giant Thomson now provides a greater insulation of its news operations, even as those operations contribute less than a tenth of TR’s annual revenue. That kind of insulation can be a good thing, both as TR figures out how to better synergize its news and business lines (a complex work-in-progress) and to allow investment in news products and staffing, [clarification added] even as news revenues find tough sledding. Meanwhile, its main competitor, AP, may have a strong commercial business (broadcast and print) worldwide — but it’s a news business, with no other revenue lines to provide breathing room.

National broadcast news, too, has seen rapid change, and much staff reduction in the past few years. GE, one behemoth of a diversified company, is turning over the NBC News operation to another giant, Comcast. ABC News is found within the major entertainment conglomerate Disney.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg — getting more than eight out of 10 of its dollars via the terminal rental business — is moving aggressively to build a greater news brand; witness the Business Week acquisition, and its push into government news coverage, formally announcing the hiring of 100 journalists for its Bloomberg Government new business unit. Non-news revenue — largely meaning non-advertising dependence — is what may increasingly separate “news” companies going forward. So we see the Guardian Media Group selling off its regional newspapers to focus, as its annual report proudly announces, on “a strong portfolio [of non-news companies and investments] to support our journalism.]

Journalism must be fed — but inky hands will be doing less and less of the feeding.

Bewkes, both with HBO and Time Inc plans, is on to something all savvy media execs should get. The customer wants the technology — and the platform of delivery — to be transparent. We want what we want, and we don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed along the way. One-number pricing, what I’ve called ”all-access pricing” across all platforms, depending on product, print, broadcast, cablecast, mobile and computer will be a winner with consumers — if the product itself is high-quality.

Of course, consumers will be able to buy a la carte as well. For those loyal and habituated to the brand, though, all-access will make the most sense.

The FT is offering all-access pricing, and expect the New York Times to offer it when it launches metering next year as well. Big question for the Wall Street Journal — and Dow Jones: Will it drop its per platform charges (now separate for iPad and mobile) and allow a single (and higher) rate for all-access? I’m betting yes.

Now, we see a new report out of Baseline, a New York Times B2B company that tracks the TV and film industries, well-reported by the AP’s David Bauder. The numbers are eye-popping:

• The median age for viewers at TV networks is 51.
• Broadcasters’ audience “has aged at twice the rate of the general population during the past two decades.”

In those numbers, we see a couple of parallels for the news industries, and newspapers specifically.

Old, analog, one-to-many, non-customized media — whether broadcast TV or newspapers or newsmagazines — are a nice fit for those who spent decades with them. Given a choice, though, younger entertainment and news consumers are gravitating to digital sources, whether music players, smartphones, laptops, and increasingly Internet-delivered TV. They offer a sense (at least) of choice, of interactivity, of participation.

Second, industry analyst Jack Myers makes the point that advertisers have moved the yardstick as they target broadcast audiences, from 18-to-49 (years old) and toward 25-to-54 (years old) in terms of network television. That’s akin to newspaper publishers — and their advertisers, perhaps — now targeting older readers for their print products, charging them more for subscriptions and single copy. Segmentation is coming finally to the news industries, as they use older media for older customers and newer media for newer ones.  It’s a tough dance, more art than science at this point.

Thirsting for good news, the welcome given TBD.com by news observers has been a bit overwhelming. In a desert of too-scarce good news about the news business, TBD represents one of the potential oases, like its smaller — and largely nonprofit — counterparts from San Diego to Austin to the Twin Cities to New York.

Most of the first appraisals have focused on the site’s product innovations. Let’s now take an early look at the size of this possible oasis and the unique business model under it, to gauge what kind of a test it may be. Let’s look at the Newsonomics of launching what is the nation’s first combined local online news startup/24-hour news channel.

That combination is the most basic to understanding the business of TBD, informing both TBD’s cost structure and revenue models. If TBD turns profitable within two to three years, it may become a prototype for digital/video/TV city-based news businesses.

While there may be two dozen or more metro news channels in the U.S, none has yet combined with a online news site to the extent that TBD is doing. The only parallel may be Cablevision’s News 12, its longstanding Long Island/Connecticut/New Jersey-oriented station that got a new cousin when the parent company bought Newsday from Tribune in 2008. In a post on that acquisition, I noted the potential synergies in the deal:

1. Joint ad sales.
2. Synergistic news-gathering and production.
3. Monetizing cable-produced news video through Newsday’s site.

Since then, we haven’t seen a lot of that synergy in New York, as the cable news site and Newsday.com remain separate, with those who don’t subscribe to either having to pay for direct access. A cursory look at the sites doesn’t betray much sharing, but there may be more under the hood.

It is those three principles, though, plus an all-important fourth one — promotion — that should define this next, and bigger, experiment, as TBD.com and TBD TV, which has been rebranded from the former NewsChannel 8, take flight.

Let’s look first at the costs of TBD. TBD has added 50 new positions, all additional to the approximately 50 jobs ported over from the former NewsChannel 8. Jim Brady, TBD’s general manager, outlined the 50 for me: “About 30 doing news, including 15 reporters, six editors, two senior editors, six community engagement people. Another 20 doing tech, sales, product, and design.”

That tells us that the nut for TBD is about $3.5-4 million, salaries and operating costs combined. It needs to find new revenue — exclusive of what the former NewsChannel 8’s sales staff of seven brought in — to get to profitability. Profitability is a key goal for this for-profit company, and one key to proving out the model for use in other metro areas. The cost side is one of the areas that distinguishes the TBD experiment; it’s two to four times bigger than most of the local online news startups we’ve seen.

Key to our understanding here is that TBD — the website and the cable news station — is one organization. Brady is in charge of the P&L of it, though he has a dotted-line relationship to the ad sales heads. While it adds costs to do 24-hour cable news as well as 24-hour digital news, it offers more revenue opportunities as well.

The key synergy: a kind of virtuous circle of promotion to stoke growth of audience and advertising dollars.

“They have the big megaphone [of promotion],” points out Phil Balboni, now CEO of startup GlobalPost, but also a veteran of New England Cable News, which he built and operated. “They can push TBD on every program. Within a short period of time, they will get great brand awareness.” So, yes, TBD TV pushes people to the website, but TBD.com also pushes people to the cable news channel. And WJLA, the ABC7 affiliate also owned by Allbritton, promotes both. JLA’s been the second-ranked station in the broadcast market.

The idea: Big promotion drives in samplers. Then the site must convert a good 20 percent of them to regular customers.

So what does TBD need to get to profitability — and make itself the model to match? Let’s quickly look at the two big qualifiers, audience and sales.

A big audience: Let’s remember that TBD starts with a significant audience, though one far smaller than WashingtonPost.com, just to drop a name. It gets traffic from both WJLA and the former NewsChannel 8; both of their former websites now point to TBD.com. According to Nielsen, WJLA pulled in about 327,000 unique visitors and 1,516,000 page views in July, while NewsChannel 8 appeared to attract a small fraction of that.

Make no mistake: Gaining attention in a crowded media marketplace won’t be simple — and is one of the reasons for the fast-out-of-the-chute TBD Community Network of 129 bloggers.

The Post is formidable competition. It is a premier regional website (built by Brady and others) and in a June Nielsen report, showed a 5.27-percent increase in unique visitors year over year, to 10,089,000 unique visitors and 106,387,000 pageviews. It zigged — up — while the news category zagged down 2.74 percent overall for the same period.

So figure that TBD.com needs a web audience of between 10 and 20 million page views a month at some point in the next 24-36 months to get to profitability. That’s a fifth to a tenth of the Post’s online audience, which, we should keep in mind comes more from outside D.C. than in within it.

Significant new revenue from both TBD.com and TBD TV: The revenue will be mainly advertising. As a for-profit, TBD.com is taking a different route than non-profits MinnPost and Texas Tribune, for instance, both of which are focusing strongly on membership and corporate/institutional sponsorships. The nonprofits are thinking that maybe a third — or less — of their revenue will come from traditional “advertising.” For TBD, though, it’s all about the sale of advertising. Just as TBD TV is critical to TBD.com site promotion, its own revenue growth will be key.

Figure that as much as 30 percent of new revenue generated out of the new enterprise could come from new TV revenue; to the extent it does, the site’s growth could trend more to the 10 million monthly page views, than 20 million, and still be profitable.

Brady says a new online-only sales staff of four will drive both online-only and bundled sales, working with the established sales force. “You start with a sales force that has relationships with an auto dealer, for instance, ” says Brady. “You don’t need a million uniques to get a meeting with them.”

The questions here are familiar ones for local broadcasters and for newspaper publishers: How do you a traditional ad sales staff — one mainly used to selling “time” — to sell the web effectively? How do you blend the online-only sales force with TV-oriented one? How much do you emphasize online-only sales, or continue a focus on bundling with TV time?

It’s a complex sell, combining sales of space, time, and pay-for-performance advertising. “They need to sell four or five different kinds of advertising,” says Arul Sundaram, an industry consultant who formerly was vice-president of strategy for Internet Broadcasting, which has powered dozens of local broadcast station websites. Beyond selling cost-per-thousand display advertising, Sundaram ticks off various pay-for-performance (largely search-based), video, and mobile ad products that the operation should learn to sell as well.

Pioneering models is a tough business. As the news business looks for new models, the man of the moment is man behind the TBD curtain, Robert Allbritton, CEO of his eponymous company. Allbritton’s gotten credit for seeing, and seeing through, Politico, his first web venture, to on-again, off-again profitablity. Importantly, he’s been credited with allocating sufficient resources, even in cash-negative startup times to create journalistic products that attract audiences.

As Phil Balboni sees it, Allbritton’s move, especially in this economic climate, is “a gutsy statement.” In 2010, especially, no guts, no glory.

You’ll find several good write-ups on TBD today. The actual launch will come next week, in the doggiest days of D.C. summer, creating a regional DC news alternative to the long-impressive WashingtonPost.com.  I’ll offer today 10 reasons why TBD is a launch worth watching by all those in Old and Newer media. It may be the first significant launch of the year, supported by 50 new staffers.

Ten reasons to watch TBD:

1) It’s a for-profit business, owned by Allbritton Communications. Allbritton, a long-time DC name, has found a winning formula in Politico, turning politics into a niche, making cross-promotion a daily fundamental and generally setting a new standard for national start-ups.  Some decry the non-profitization of the New News. Okay, let’s see what a well-thought out, for-profit site — and one with the scale of more than four dozen new staffers can do — can do.

2) It’s multimedia out of the box. Newschannel 8 [cablecast] and WJLA (Channel 7) broadcast, both also owned by Allbritton, will abandon their current websites and all the station-produced content will be found on TBD — one website. “Hard news on TV, hard news on the web,” is the intention.

3) New brand creation: Politico, along with the HuffingtonPost, has been the poster child for how you create a new brand, and find legitimacy (cable cross-partnerships, big media mentions). Now TBD itself is a new brand. In addition, NewsChannel 8 is being re-branded TBD — a big move in the market. (It’ll transition the NewsChannel 8 brand as a subbrand for some time.) Also expect good TBD representation on WJLA. Politico’s a national brand; TBD is a big effort to create a top-of-mind local news brand, to the extent that others haven’t.

4) New model for local broadcasters: Many focus on the text aspects of TBD. In starting with the “clean canvas” of a new site and brand, the site may create a new model for what local broadcasters can do to take full advantage of the web’s immediacy, text links/connections, blogging communities and social context. As Morris Jones, a veteran broadcaster and new anchor of a TBD news program said, “Station websites are for the most part like a second car in the driveway. You don’t use it much.” A few local broadcasters have begun to grab the web; most are behind their newspaper counterparts.

5) It’s an in-your-face challenge to the daily: Yes, the Washington Post’s resources, market clout and reader are huge, but that doesn’t make the paper impregnable. For TBD, as a start-up, it just needs to take a piece of the Post’s (and others’) ad revenue to be successful. And every dollar taken builds TBD and makes the Post’s budgeting more difficult. If it works, to any degree, metro dailies that have been more concerned about survival than competition, will see a second threat looming.

6) It’s seriously Pro-Am out of the box: The TBD Community Network, at launch, amazingly has 127 local/regional blog sites of every description signed up. These sites were selected and invited; so they are vetted for quality and integrity. TBD has learned from the blog aggregation/curation/ad network experiences of other  — “Everyone does a little bit of aggregation and curation,” says Jim Brady, who heads the site — but TBD seems to set a new standard. It’s a relationship that may work well both for “the mothership” and the sites, managing the nuances of brand and traffic. In addition, it offers an ad network (partnered with Growth Spur) out of the box, a key to making this new ecosystem seriously work.

7) It’s got a big established sales force to get it going. Both TV stations salespeople with accounts — and relationships. So TBD is an extension of that sales activity, not a start-up ad sell, which bedevils many other  start-ups.

It’s social out of the box. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more.  And all content is geo-tagged. Social is not an experiment; the site’s assumption of a place in the socialsphere is being orchestrated by Steve Buttry, engagement director, who’s deeply experienced at what works, may work and doesn’t in the social space. Lots of learning to come, of course, but the site’s social activities don’t start from square one.

9) It’s mobile of out of the box: Apps for the iPhone and Android will launch with the site. As Brady says, “You can’t wait to put in a mobile strategy.”

10) Experience, talent and passion. Ah, the intangibles. Jim Brady, Steve Buttry, managing editor Erik Wemple and a host of others among the 50 new staffers (out of 100 contributing, through Politico+), bring lots of journalistic and digital web smarts to the operation. Brady, an alumnus of WashingtonPost.com and Buttry, were both well-trained by their long daily newspaper experience. Ironically, that experience is now being used outside the daily newspaper realm. The passion is clear in talking with the founders, and it’s a quantity too much lacking in the traditional news world. Money and capital matter a lot here, but passion’s the secret sauce.

Make no mistake: this is an uphill battle for TBD, which is being given about three years to prove itself out. Yet it stands out as all these factors come together to make TBD the most watchable new news site of the year.

1) Can the publication escape semi-wonkiness? There may be nothing worse than semi-wonkiness. In part, Newsweek is a journal of public policy options, and ones that the Obama Administration is in the midst of mulling, in education, health, foreign policy, finance and more. It could fully embrace its inner wonk, pointing to Obama 2012, and be clearly and prescriptively a shaper of the re-emergent liberal agenda, building on the work of Fareed Zakaria, Julia Baird, Daniel Lyons, Daniel Gross and Jonathan Alter.  Or it could drop the wonky clothing, and learn some lessons from its erstwhile sister Slate, and have more fun with the news.

One way or the other, as almost all observers have agreed, the magazine must find a new identity, and a sharp one. Jon Meacham’s departure opens the door to that, but doesn’t at all guarantee it.

2) Doesn’t the “sale” mark Don Graham’s intention to save the flagship Washington Post, and shepherd it through to the new age? Yes, he got the going price of the moment, a buck, but he won’t let Newsweek’s liabilities weigh down the Post into the future. Just as the New York Times Company has shed baseball interests, buildings, radio stations and newspapers, and will sell its regional group and the Globe if a decent market for them returns, even briefly — all to get the Times itself stably into the digital age — the Post’s leadership understands that while Kaplan is the cash cow, now responsible for 58% of profits, the Post is the cream to be preserved.

3) Isn’t the future of Newsweek on the tablet? We see impressive iPad sales from magazines like GQ, Wired and Popular Science. And we see the Wall Street Journal ahead of the pack, selling iPad subs. The tablet is that long-dreamed-about oasis for magazines, giving them the ability to cut printing costs, find scads of new readers that didn’t know about their brands, satisfy hip advertisers and add new content dimensions to their print products. It’s hard to imagine that even in five years, we’ll see that many printed magazines — eco disaster! Newsweek’s sale, ironically, comes at a time when that tablet door is just opening. Sure, Apple is making subscription sales tough, but that issue is bound to be resolved as real tablet competition forces Steve Jobs’ hand.

Also, a potential fit: longer-form reading, one of the Harman’s stated intentions, seems to be finding a new tablet audience, just as everyone thought the short-form form of online news reading was turning the nation into zombie news snackers.

4) Which side of the Beltway will the new Newsweek land? The newsmagazine world has always seemed like a East Coast thing, and somewhat a Beltway thing, to those living out here far from New York and D.C. Yes, the federal government is reinvigorated with power, but much of the vitality of the country is found beyond a couple of cities. As US News peels back into niches and Time reinvents itself yet again, maybe one era of newsmagazines — the voices of God from The East — is ending, and another one beginning.

5) Can the new Newsweek find the new web? Early on, Newsweek did a deal with MSNBC, and re-upped it last year. It’s been a traffic booster, but failed to build well on two good brands. We’ll now see whether the deal will move with the new ownership, or be re-fashioned in a way that propels Newsweek talent forward. Check out iTunes and all you find is Newsweek on Air, an almost-hour-long program that defies the short-term sensibility of today’s listener and info grabber. Newsweek’s current talent is lost on that show. Audio and video could multiply Newsweek brand sensibility and reach.

6) Isn’t it time to get a little interactive? Take Conventional Wisdom Watch (major riff on conventional wisdom over at New Republic), an enduring editorial classic measuring the political zeitgeist. It’s iconic — and readers could play along submitting their own, crowdsourcing, inventing and interacting with the brand. Yet, it’s been stuck in print as the digital world — a world of possibility — has grown around it.

7) Doesn’t being bought by a 91-year-old bring up fairly immediate succession issues (and make 79-year-old Rupert’s own issues take a backseat for a week or so)? Harman even noted that succession would be a primary issue to work on, oddly ironic for the new owner of a publication that seemed on its deathbed.

Should Sidney ask Arianna, “What would you do with Newsweek?”?

9) Even if it’s just a reprieve, isn’t it comforting to hear Sidney Harman’s first non-Zell-like take on his new prize? “My purpose is to get the magazine operating in a reasonable amount of time — and that’s years, not weeks — on its own fuel. I bring intellectual curiosity and serious business experience to a place that could be done no harm from the first and a great deal of good from the second.”

It’s easy to get lost in the current era of Big Man in Town Journalism. Zell. Singleton, Murdoch. Tierney. Harte. So much of the recent drama in newspaper ownership change has been driven by personality, as keep-it-in-road, rationale profit-seeking companies turn up their noses at the prospects of buying newspaper companies. It takes an outsized ego, an outsized wallet (your own maybe, but preferably someone else’s) and a perhaps outlandish optimism to grab onto the horns of the bull and take off for a wild ride.

One current installment of that drama is playing out in Long Island, home of once-proud Newsday, a paper that innovated ahead of its day and then saw its fortunes cascade through the Times Mirror and Tribune funhouses. As Sam Zell stares down his first balloon debt payment, Newsday’s hit the block, and an unusually crowded one it is. Isn’t it great to see a bidding war for a newspaper company? It is highly enjoyable, if unique to market circumstance. With Murdoch’s Post and Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News in lethal competition, both have a hard time imagining the other getting Newsday and using it as cudgel in the war.

The weapon for each in that case is, of course, cost reduction — a relentless streaming of cost in all departments — ad, circ, production and printing and finance, not to speak of how newsroom synergies might be achieved. It’s the other bidder in this case — currently the high one — that I think paints a more interesting picture of what the local “press” may become.

Cablevision (CVC) has offered $70 million more than either Mort or Rupert, currently at $650 million, $150 million above its original offer. With Rupert and Sam increasingly better buddies (formally on AP board and informally, we can only guess), I would have put my money on that deal (and agree with Alan Mutter’s notion of a potential Murdoch/Zell endgame, here). But $70 million is quite a differential, and for now, Rupert is saying he isn’t going up. Further the potential of FCC review of his increasingly entangling NYC-area cross-ownership (the Post, WWOR-TV and WNYW-TV, Dow Jones and Newsday) would at least slow down and bring uncertainty to the deal. Sam Zell’s bankers don’t like uncertainty.

So that may leave us with a new attempt at….synergy. In fact, it could turn the emergent idea of Triple Play — TV cable service, Internet service, local phone service — into a Home Run, adding “newspaper” to the diamond.

In this new synergistic interpretation, we’d observe what new owners would see as complementary in combining Cable News — including News12 Interactive.com (its cringe-worthy tagline — “only in cable not on phone company tv or anywhere else”; you need a password to get in unless you are a local cable subscriber) — with Newsday. It’s been done before you say, and you’re right. In fact, Cablevision and Newsday themselves jointly produced a one-hour cable news program years ago. But it was too early and didn’t pencil out. It’s been done elsewhere as well, with mixed results.

What’s changing now, I think, is that the time is coming back around to do it right and to make it pay. Is it a “TV-centric” time, as someone close to the Dolan family, who control Cablevision, said? TV-centric misses the point. It’s more video-forward than TV-centric. News video is now here to stay. More than half of the US population has watched video within the last month; already in Britain, that number is now more than 90%. We’re getting used to seeing video first, on our time, time-shifted, Apple TV-enabled, and through the Internet. The much-maligned pre-rolls and their children, “in-video” ads, are still highly sought after and fetching $25-35 CPMs, on average. We do like to watch.

Look at most newspaper sites, and you see dabbling. The AP Online Video Network is so far populated on about 1800 sites, newspaper and broadcast. On too many, though, it’s relegated downpage, and seems like an after-thought.

So what happens, in this new, coming age of convergence — in which easily watchable video marries quick-read text and always-on opinion — if you combine the resources of a Newsday and a Cablevision, which, too, counts hundreds of journalists in its newsrooms that span from northern New Jersey to southern Connecticut.

There’s no doubt that web newsies want the best coverage in one place — words and pictures. There’s no doubt that if some bright-eyed market entrant were to start a news-gathering and ad-selling operation, she’d do it as a single operation, not as separate “TV” and “newspaper” businesses.

That of course is the challenge of synergy. Combining existing staffs and hierarchies, with their skills and skills deficits, is in reality much harder than a white-board exercise. But someone is going to make it work, and Cablevision may be the next to try.

What does synergy mean?

I called Phil Balboni, the man who created New England Cable News, a Cablevision-like operation. Balboni, who has won accolades for his operation, recently left NECN to found Global News Ventures, an international news start-up to watch.

I think Cablevision and Newsday make a fit here… Video can populate the Newsday website. There is a substantial upside. It stresses the overall proposition that Cablevision has invested in the community.

My sense is that there is lots of potential around putting a strong local newspaper together with local cable news. Balboni ranks those synergies in this order:

1. Joint ad sales.
2. Synergistic news-gathering and production.
3. Monetizing cable-produced news video through Newsday’s site.

There is lots for newspaper people to chew over in this kind of deal. Adding the Dolans to the Zells, Singletons, Murdochs and Tierneys brings with it all the same concerns about what Big Man in Town journalism looks like. The Dolans have been true cable innovators in New York and have also been much in the news themselves for years, as they’ve bought into local sports franchises (Knicks, Rangers, Madison Square Garden) and tried to lead a management buyout of their public company.

For newspeople though — wondering whether a newspaperman like Murdoch or a swaggering non-news outsider like Zell — it’s just one conundrum on a long list. Who’s going to come up with a formula to save a critical mass of journalism jobs and right the sinking ship?