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.

The search goes on for a new business framework that makes journalism economically feasible in a digital setting. Weighing in on the quest are Forbes CEO Steve Forbes and the management consultancy Accenture.

Forbes believes a number of different models will emerge, but all will need to be sustained through advertising and marketing financial underpinning. Subscription revenue won't be enough, he says.

Meanwhile, Accenture has released its third straight survey of executives on the matter with the same conclusion: The biggest challenge is finding the new model. Its prediction: Hybrids are likely, micropayment models are less so.

Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute has some harrowing data involving U.S. newspapers: They've lost 70 per cent of their classified advertising revenue in the last decade. Where they were  driving more than $19 billion into newspapers, now they drive about $6 billion.

Edmonds, working on the upcoming State of the Media annual report, notes that recruitment advertising is down nearly 90 per cent. Automotive and real estate advertising are also down significantly in the decade. While some business will return when the recession's ravages ease, Edmonds notes much of it has dispersed.

He does note one bright spot: Other. By "other," it means obituaries, births, pets and garage sales. The newspaper continues to be a home for those forms of the classified ad.

Poynter Online's Mallary Jean Tenore posts on how news organizations are using social media as an advertising revenue stream, providing access to their followers and friends.

The measures from such places as the New York Times, Huffington Post and the Austin American-Statesman are seen as ways to attract small businesses with lower-cost opportunities to reach audiences.

The American-Statesman identifies its guidelines for the initiative: It Tweets twice a day, approves the content and requires that it be directive (offers, not generic brand-boasting).

The moves will surprise some people who view it as a blurring between sales and editorial functions, but the organizations involved say there is valuable learning taking place.

The author and media writer Ken Auletta has some advice for companies trying to cope with the challenge of continual change: If he were in your shoes, he'd have an engineer alongside.

It's important to have lean-forward, not lean-back executives, he told a confererence this week. But it's also vital to have an engineer to bounce your ideas off.

Auletta believes we're in an era of "maybe models" involving uncertain financial underpinnings of journalism. As he sees it, paying for content is going to be essential in the time ahead. Advertisers are shunning low-quality sites, he asserts.