Into the debate on whither-pay enters Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, writing for the American Journalism Review. His prescription: Put the paywall up, way up, or take content offline entirely.
Farhi's logic: Such a move would restore balance and focus on the paper, where the dollars remain in a very finite advertising realm. It would take away the distraction of the Web and its siphon on the newsrooms.
It's a provocative --- even irritating, considering the work that's been done --- argument for a return to an era of print-centric newsrooms.

The executive director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association has been producing a very sage, provocative blog in its early going. 


The Earl Blog, from Earl Wilkinson, has been imploring the newspaper industry (no matter than INMA now is named after Newsmedia and not Newspapers, it's still ostensibly aimed at the print operations with Web companions) to capitalize on difficult times instead of tucking its tail between its legs.


His latest concerns what he perceives as the fainthearted effort to market newspapers during the recession. He doesn't see a widespread industry effort to push the value of the newspaper and market it aggressively. Which, he notes, is ironic considering papers encourage advertisers to spend about five per cent of their revenues on marketing.


"In short, newspapers don't practice what they preach when it comes to marketing," he writes. "This is a shame because marketing works. And there's plenty of evidence to support it – especially during recessions."

The University of Michigan's school of business helps oversee the creation of a U.S. customer satisfaction index with industries and services, and then indexes it to permit quarterly comparisons. It is a limited survey, but an interesting indication of consumer tastes and preferences.


Its latest indicates news sites online are generally appreciated but not necessarily increasingly so. Newspapers themselves have fairly strong ratings, but search engines are clearly enjoyed.


The data suggests a 74-per-cent satisfaction level with online newspapers it covered, down about 1.3 points. The survey covered the sites for USA Today, ABC News, CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times.


Newspapers themselves had a 63-per-cent satisfaction rating, down 1.6 points in the last year.


As for the supremely satisfying service, look no further than Google, which enjoys an 86 per cent rating (compared to 83 per cent for the industry of search engines and portals).

The release Monday of Huffington Post's partnership with Facebook has touched off a quick response from Slate's Chadwick Matlin, who sees the aggregation/behavioural tracker as the future of journalism.

Essentially HuffPost Social News is going to use Facebook Connects to track the Huffington Post stories and assets you read and share. The implications are substantial for those who want greater insight --- and greater opportunities to monetize --- the practices of those consuming online media.

This application permits you to understand what your friends are consuming, too, which in this era of word-of-mouth-high-value ought to also yield useful data to produce business models.

Matlin asks what will happen if other sites develop this relationship with Facebook. What will be the social network's power in that case?

At a presentation today at the Aspen Institute conference on journalism, veteran media executive, CUNY professor and Buzzmachine blogger Jeff Jarvis talked about a new business model for hyperlocal news.

It presumes big and doesn't necessarily accommodate small.

But it's a first step in the reconsideration of the metrics necessary to ensure strong local coverage takes place in the time ahead.

Essentially Jarvis' model organizes local bloggers into a network that associates for advertising.

The concept founders on the existing economics of digital advertising, but the principle is an interesting one that ought to be explored more fully before dismissing it. (He took a fair amount of heat quickly from others attending the conference.)

It isn't clear how the bloggers would organize to avoid excessive duplication or assign and share work, but no matter --- that's in the details for later.

The announcement today that Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock organization has been purchased by MSNBC.com has prompted Alan Mutter to post on Reflections of a Newsosaur a lament.

In short, it's along the lines of: How did publishers miss the opportunity to buy it instead? And, by extension: How do they not realize MSNBC is going to come and try to eat their lunch?

Everyblock is a powerful source code that aggregates local data on crime, construction, civics and consumption, everything from restaurants to break and enters, and yields the data according to zip codes and blocks.

The good news is that the source code is open for others to use. The catch is that whatever you create you must let others use, too.

Mutter suggests Everyblock has the potential as a Cragislist-like competitor for local advertising. He wonder why newspapers didn't see this coming and construct the deal themselves.

The New York Times calls it "The Paper That Doesn't Want to Be Free," and it's true: Financial Times is mastering a model that charges well for its content in print and readily for its content online.

The paper fits the model most believe is necessary to earn subscription revenue digitally: It sits atop high-quality and specific content not easily emulated elsewhere. It's hardly fair to call economic news a niche, but FT.com at least corrals a good vein.

The Times piece suggests others are looking at ways to use the FT model. It will introduce a micropayment system shortly to supplement its subscription service. It wants to capture the large audience arriving from search engines but keep the overall service accessible.

The founder of Craigslist doesn't necessarily offer new insight into the news business in his latest blog. But he has a nice slogan: Trust is the new black.

He views trust as the single largest emerging factor in the success of news organizations.

"More people need to get the message that the news orgs that thrive in the future will be the most trustworthy ones," he writes. "That includes fact-checking, and a clear separation between reporting and financial needs."

As for the chaff amid the wheat: "Also, it might be okay for tabloids to manufacture conflict and controversy, if done transparently, but not okay to fake stuff."

He'll be delivering more on this theme next week at the Aspen Institute.

Two studies this week chronicle practices in social media. One is an early indication of the challenge of commingling advertising in that conversational space, the other is about the seemingly innocuous traits of that conversation.

Linkshare has determined that only about one in 20 social media users interact with advertising. Banner ads are only clicked through by four per cent of users. That said, fewer than one in five consider advertising intrusive in that space. Still, only five per cent on Linkedin and nine per cent on Facebook felt they were useful.

Then there is a study from Pearanalytics that seems to play into the prevailing criticism of Twitter --- that it's a haven for mindless prattle. The report found little news on Twitter (3.6 per cent, in fact) and a lot of vents and blasts (40.5 per cent). There are plenty of conversations and a fair amount of promotion and spam in the mix.

(My own view is that, when you follow a good group, you get a good reading on Twitter's value. If you simply open up to everything, you don't get value for the experience. Twitter wasn't established as a news distributor, but as a conversational tool --- as a social medium, after all.)

The Associated Press plan with its Web content stretches significantly into new territory and is required reading for anyone interested in the direction of digital media.

It redefines the news service and the terms by which it and its membership gather and distribute content. For instance, it holds back some content to permit members only to link to its central site --- essentially taking it out of syndication.

It partitions its content according to the "utility" or "unique" features it provides --- that is, information readily available from others has a commodity quality and utility function, while the unique material (value-added graphics, for instance) would only be linked from a member site to AP.

It would also use a technical tracker of content across the Internet to monitor usage --- and seek compensation, presumably. The technology is under development.

And it will attempt to garner massive search engine-driven traffic with its centrally located unique content, in that its member organizations will link to one place and not disperse the content's search-engine appeal across hundreds of sites.

The document asserts that the aim is to preserve quality journalism (presumably by keeping the monetization inside AP) and prevent unlicensed use of its content (presumably by keeping the monetization away from others).

The document outlining the policies, attached through the Nieman Journalism Lab and in the Scribd format below, was distributed in recent weeks to AP's board and executives.