Rishad Tobaccowala, the chief strategy officer for the VivaKi subsdiary of the Publicis Group, waxes about the value of the newspaper and suggests it's by no means discarded.

More people spend time with newspaper content than they realize, he suggests. Mind you, it's not always in print. But his central point in his post for AdWeek is that, with some rejuventation, the newspaper business isn't running its course.

"The people who created the cash cow of the paper package need help to create challenger products that will supplement and even cannibalize the newspaper," he writes. His belief: The next generation, with survival of the platform at stake, will be the ones to figure out the new product line.

He has other principal points: The role of technology needs to be thought out at the board level, the partnership opportunities need to be seized so organizations don't do more than they need to, and news companies need to figure what they can share and borrow.

The transformation to a digital culture is only part of the newspaper's challenge. The bigger transformation is to a digital revenue model that will yield a sustainable business.

Enders Analysis has examined some of the metrics of the transition and its conclusions are eye-opening:

1. A paywall subscriber is only worth one-quarter to one-third of a newspaper subscriber. Even if every subscriber converted to the paywall, there would be a problem of scale.

2. Paywalls will not be able to expand the revenue base by expanding the audience, due to the abundant source of free content online, in broadcasting and print.

3. Newspapers will have to re-examine their scale to retain their bearings. Rather than a 500-journalist operation, they will be looking at 200-journalist operations (the report is written in England --- thus the large newsroom numbers). 

Parenthetically, Canada's largest newspaper today hired one of its rival's former editors to be  its new vice president of business development. Ed Greenspon, former editor in chief of the Globe and Mail, has surfaced a year later at the Toronto Star, where he will work on development of new business models and write a weekly column.

Richard McManus provides an early synopsis in ReadWriteWeb on the climate for newspaper innovation as iPad applications emerge. His conclusion: More work ahead.

What McManus found isn't surprising: Newspapers often want the iPad app to emulate the experience of the newspaper, in no small part because these are early days for the tablet and our understanding of the experience it provides.

With news that News Corp. has set its sights on an iPad national newspaper (reportedly named The Daily Planet), McManus found that to date the newspapers aren't creating anything technically new on the tablet. He found Flipbook and Newsy, two made-for-iPad apps, far more in line with what's likely needed to succeed in the space.

He suggests interactivity and personalization need to be features to provide depth and different experiences.

At first, the notion of a paywall seemed silly. Better to take it down and get the traffic.
But when the traffic didn't turn into profit readily, the notion took on new seriousness. For some time now, publishers have been weighing the benefits of reconstructing a paywall to bring revenue.

In his latest post, veteran media and tech executive Alan Mutter notes the arrival of new, well-heeled local players in the game (Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post), all willing to give away content others contemplate placing in behind the paywall. 

Mutter's conclusion: "For anyone other than publishers of mission-critical business or government news like the Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times, pay walls will not fly. It is time for everyone else to move on to more productive pursuits."

Those pursuits? Unique products for print, online and mobile, valued by customers and advertisers alike. Charging for day-to-day coverage is not likely "fruitful," he argues on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

The New York Times writes about the increasing number of ads online that follow users from site to site.

The persistent "retargeting" takes advantage of tracking technology and is now a strategy for several companies in their campaigns that understand a first encounter with a product isn't necessarily the point of decision on a sale.

The relevant ads aren't merely related to categories users have followed. They're personalized to the point of serving ads about products or services someone has at one point perused. They follow someone around.

The response has been generally positive, the Times reports, although some feel stalked by products they didn't particularly want but had evaluated --- or were sharing a computer and didn't want others to know about what they were perusing.

Critics are also wondering about whether privacy is being breached and regulation needs to be introduced to moderate the phenomenon.

John Hartigan, the chairman of the News Ltd. chain of Australian papers, believes the new era of digital journalism offers immense opportunities. The challenge is for journalists to find a way to do the work and for management to build an optimal environment for them, "then get out of the way."


Hartigan's speech to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association was brimming with optimism about a new era of tablet and smartphone news consumption. "The demand for news is greater than ever, and rising rapidly," he said.


Rather than own the news agenda in the morning with the newspaper, publishers need to think about owning it all day, he argued.


"I wish I was starting out all over again," said Hartigan, whose company is a subsidiary of News Corp., run by Rupert Murdoch.

Arthur Brisbane, in his first column as public editor of The New York Times, lays out his principles nicely and raises one interesting issue for news organizations in the digital age:

"If The Times is going to publish more and faster, it will have to react faster to rectify more mistakes. The speed and volume of correction or response has to try to equal the speed and volume of error."

That's a thought we haven't heard before. Newspapers tend to correct in their next edition, and unless there are legal reasons to strip online content or correct it, usually make the correction in a convenient way online without any proscribed standard of service.

Brisbane promises to see if this idea of a speedy fix is practical in the Times, but he's introduced an intriguing notion.

The New York Times reviews the declaration last week that the Web is dead by contending with media history. Its conclusion: Media adapt to newcomers and rarely die just because of them.

"Today, traditional media companies face the adaptive challenge posed by the Internet. That challenge is not just the technology itself, but how it has altered people’s habits of media consumption," writes Steve Lohr.

But Lohr notes that history shows evolution, not dissolution, is the order of the day when media are threatened by new forms of communication. What is different this time is the speed of change and the disruption of consumption patterns. As one academic tells him, change has changed.

College students don't wear watches, they carry cellphones as time pieces. They don't email, they text. People don't talk as much on phones; they text and arrange calls for important matters. People aren't blogging as much; instead, they're using social networks to tell their stories.

A few weeks ago the Digital Media Test Kitchen at University of Colorado unfurled some impressive work on the early stages of mobile applications from newsrooms. It's worth taking another look at one element of its work on the specific challenges for news organizations as they embrace --- or don't --- mobile.

Author Lauren Seaton concludes that the initial apps coming into the market are tepid, far less innovative than non-news organizations are producing, and she wonders why.

"While templates and layouts are similar from app to app, they generally lack originality and creativity," she writes. The smartphone offers opportunities for news organizations to reach audiences, but "most of the news applications that have been created by single news brands do not do enough to encourage interactivity, customization, or creativity."

In another chapter on the far-reaching report, author Jordan Wirfs-Brock notes the new uses emerging with smartphones and suggests opportunities exist for news organizations in such areas as geo-location, augmented reality, voice-to-text, financial transactions, push reminders, social incentives, multi-touch, and gesture.

Dan Gillmor, the digital journalism veteran, is finishing a book (Mediactive) that encourages people to participate and not just consume media. But he's stymied in finding a term to describe this participation.

"We are all creating media. Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions -- deciding to try one, what we do with what we’ve created, and how the rest of us use what’s been created -- is going to be complex and evolving. But it’s the future."

Are those people journalists? Creators? Collaborators? Participators? And, does it really matter?

Gillmor, in a post on Salon.com, suggests it does. In an era of mass social production, he believes we need a term to fit those who choose to play. Trouble is, he doesn't have one. Do you?