The relationship between a news organization and the community is what advertisers bank on when they place their notices. It's what special interests bank on when they provide information to get their messages out.

It should be no surprise, then, that the consummation of deals as a broker might seem attractive in the time ahead. Michael Skoler, writing for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at University of Missouri, posts on exactly that.

He's noticing the rise of firms like Groupon and  Living Social  as services offering audiences deals through newsletters. In exchange for establishing newsletters to communicate deals, the news organizations get a piece of the transaction.

Skolar believes that, if news organizations asked audiences what they want, they could then broker deals.

Clearly there are some ethical issues in trading audiences for access, but the newsletter concept is a way of putting sufficient distance and respect into the mix. As organizations look for new streams of revenue, Skolar expects this will be one way forward.

The routinely strong Seeking Alpha site features a somewhat conciliatory post from media corporate financial advisor on the impending coexistence of the Apple iPad and the newspaper industry.

Dan Ramsden has some tough words for Google. He sees its recent encouragement of the newspaper industry to experiment as self-serving --- the more papers try to do things online, the more Google's search engine technology benefits.

But he makes an interesting choice in where to place the technological bet. While recent media coverage has suggested Google's open-source design of its Android smartphone offers the greatest opportunity for old media to succeed, Ramsden begs to differ.

He is firmly in the Apple camp. It's the technology of choice by consumers, it's the technology company that has figured out (through iTunes and the iPhone) how to exact a premium for content, so it's the technology the newspaper business should focus on serving.

"Newspaper and magazine owners, who are struggling to redefine their business models for a new online and mobile environment, would probably be well served to align themselves with the platform that can offer a revenue model, and a mobile marketplace, and leave the experimentation and iteration stuff to young entrepreneurs and startups that do not yet have a franchise to protect," he writes.

He suggests: "Style, design, quality control, are all characteristics that will do much more to facilitate the popularity of paid content than one more colorful website that may or may not show up at the top of Google’s search results."

In his Monday Note this week, former newspaper executive Frederic Filloux notes the death wish many have for the print edition coming from what once was an exclusively newspaper newsroom.

It isn't time to euthanize the paper, he argues. Far from it. It isn't even time to accelerate the shift to digital in a newspaper/Web operation, because the economic support isn't there --- it's in the print edition.

Having said that, he notes that once the world economies recover, there will be a much swifter move by advertisers to the digital space. It's time to get ready. And consumption of media will alter substantially, too.

Filioux suggests the model for the newspaper is more of the daily magazine. He'll be writing about that next week.

Earlier this week Marc Andreessen was encouraging old media publishers to burn the boats, to just move into digital and leave the printing presses behind. Commentators like Alan Mutter weighed in and said the idea was ill-informed.

But the debate isn't going away. Today Erick Schoenfeld of TechCrunch has added his voice, but it's more of an emotional than rational pitch. He asserts that it's necessary for media companies to get on the new wave before it's too late.

What he uses as evidence isn't all that meaty. He somehow thinks the $30-billion business will diminish to $20 billion and then to zero and that newspaper companies will wind up without a leg to stand on. The sooner they jump, the better they'll be at the new business.

It's easy to understand what he's trying to say: Don't wait too long. It's not easy to understand why he's saying the jump should be made now, when the business isn't done.

It's difficult to accept that somehow the business just keeps steadily evaporating. While it seems assured to be smaller, there will be declines and periods of flat or even nominal growth at times along the way. The decision may never be made to simply abandon a print edition; it may never make business sense to do so. We don't know yet.

What Mutter and others (I would include myself) have asserted all along is that it's helpful to keep one foot in the camp that is driving revenue as you try to drive change.

By all means devote energy and attention to the new platform, but don't throw away an operationally profitable business, community connection and loyal market.

Jonathan Miller, the chief digital news executive for Rupert Murdoch's press empire at News Corp., believes the time has come to recapture what was lost: Two revenue streams for news sites from the Internet.

He doesn't see any other way. The opportunity to drive revenue was lost some time ago by free offerings.

“The choice between paywall or free is not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist based on quality of content and geography,” he told an elite media conference in Abu Dhabi.

The founder of Hunch.com, veteran Web developer Chris Dixon, weighs in on a controversial issue involving Google and the news business. The latter, in some cases, suggests the former is harming them by serving up search results of their content with ads adjoining --- basically, making money while someone else does the heavy lifting.

What Dixon suggests, though, is that hard news is hardly Google's preference. He notes that, with some tough subjects, Google takes a pass in serving up ads --- it just doesn't think the content is going to help an advertiser reach a customer with an ambition to buy anything.

In effect, Dixon says, hard news is lousy business. Its newsroom cross-subsidy is being eroded in the digital age of one reader to one story, and the largest search engine doesn't seem sufficiently attracted to it to add an advertisement to the mix. As he sees it, it's just a terrible stand-alone business, in need of a cross-subsi

The 140 characters of a Tweet have served users well to date. This week Twitter surpassed the 10-billion-Tweet mark.

But from the outset there has been frustration that it's just not enough room to express --- and, for some, express in such a way as to monetize.

Now Cascaad has come along with an API that it says will permit third-party Twitter applications to add context and monetization to the mix. ReadWriteWeb has had a look at the plan, and without blessing it, largely believes it's on to something.

Cascaad's API lets someone parse a Tweet, focus in on entities within it and contextualize (or link to monetizing services, it seems) them. Twitter has been promising for months now services that would help users --- and themselves --- use the platform to make money.

A new report from the Newspaper Association of America serves its interests well: Newspaper Web sites are considered of high value locally.

The November study of more than 3,000 Americans found local newspaper sites are the most trusted information sources. Additionally, they're considered the strongest local advertising sites.

The survey found relatively strong interest in the sites themselves and their content.

It is not a foregone conclusion that Web advertising will grow and grow with no real bump in the road.

What's needed, the World Mobile Congress heard in recent days, is a transactional function within mobile to spur the biggest growth.

Indeed, Gartner told the conference that the $530 million business last year could reach $13.5 billion by 2013. But growth on that scale requires a lever, and that lever appears to be functionality in mobile to permit more transactions by text.

Until that comes, analysts believe the potential won't be reached. At the moment, most of the advertising involves brand-building.

To date the conventional wisdom has been that Apple's impending iPad tablet could revive the audience for print-driven journalism. The assumption: A bigger audience will naturally yield better economic metrics.

But the general manager of the not-for-profit investigative journalism foundation, ProPublica, begs to differ. Richard Tofel argues that the iPad could kill the newspaper because digital revenue will not suffice in propelling journalism.

Even if circulation and subscription revenue can be supplanted by the iPad's arrival, digital advertising is lagging seriously behind print advertising and may never catch up. If this is so, the iPad could hasten a newspaper's decline.

For the iPad to be the newspaper's saving platform, digital advertising would need to be three to five times more costly --- a rate that seems utterly impossible to contemplate, Tofel argues.