Great discussion. I’m trying to apply your ideas about surviving newspaper sites to a local TV news operation, where I labored briefly before being laid off. Broadcast TV news is personality-driven, but stations’ Web sites haven’t done a good job of capturing that dynamic and extending it to more interactive platforms.
Any thoughts?

Have you read Dave Chase’s blog entry on Alan Mutter’s site? I think the focus on content innovation is misplaced–the key is on the revenue side.

So where are the analytics on marginal revenue vs. marginal cost on various revenue streams: on-line ads, on-line subscriptions, paper ads, paper subscriptions? With fully allocated costs to each revenue stream?

A NYT exec says roughly 50% of ad inventory is network ads. You probably know better than I the discount of those over premium ads. The most profitable web site inventory has far more supply than demand. The marginal revenue for additional page views is low, and that is not going to change. It’s probably headed lower.

The easiest way to reduce supply is to charge. I am surprised that so few people look to how Rupert Murdoch has decided to run his site. The common response is, “Well, the WSJ is a special brand” or “It only works because business people can expense it.” I don’t buy that.

My bet is that local news is just as valuable (if not more!) of a commodity to people. Our local paper charges for on-line subscriptions, and always has.

I wish some industry insider would look at and analyze marginal revenues and marginal costs of subscriptions vs. advertising. I expect the most profitable revenue innovation is to give people a good reason to pay for on-line subscriptions. This solution would probably require some pricing optimization analysis–most people don’t got to a newspaper web site everyday.

A strategy of giving local readers enough value that they will pay seems like a much stronger revenue foundation than playing to the fickle and fast-changing on-line advertising market.

Thanks,

I bet Sandy wouldn’t like all this Twitter, podcast, Facebook stuff. But if you want a blast from the past, read his obit:

http://is.gd/ijy5

Though reading about Sandy, I do see similar qualities in some of our more outlandish bloggers. So I don’t think his spirit is gone.

(BTW, Stu, I owe you an e-mail reply. Haven’t forgotten; just running behind.)

The journalist of the future may become a digital newshawk and gadget-carrying multi-functional social-networked cyber-reporter-blogger with a passion for video-audio-print presentations operating from the twilight zone of virtual reality – a pixel-pushing replicant employed by the Tyrell-NYT Corporation on the prowl in the microchip jungle for Johnny Mnemonic.

He/she/it will be blessed with total recall, a wireless Intel implant; a blade runner originally seeded as a Brad Pitt clone look-alike in a secretive CIA lab somewhere in Brooklyn, and one of many used as universal soldiers in Quebec, a slave colony, and elsewhere.

The newspaper of the future may become a ghost in the touch-screen technologies of Odyssey 2050, a rather insidious smart “cookie” used by the media and other interested agencies to track, monitor, and report the evil doers of a so-called free society, a one-eyed trojan implemented to protect the nation and operating system of Microsoft.

I am evidently suffering from watching too many X-Files …

In the good ‘ol days of journalism, we wrote a story on a clunky black typewriter, a cigarette dangling from our mouths, and left the building wearing a dirty trenchcoat and a fedora, cocked every so slightly, and made our way to the press club for a game of poker, a bottle of Johnny Walker, and, if available, the city editor’s wife.

What happened?

Today, I’ve lost my ink-stained soul, my paper, my dearly departed friends, my poker-playing pals, and I’m staring at this fuckin’ screen on the mother of all gadgets looking for an answer. I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore!

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Dreams die last, the author said.

From my window, out there, I see these kids with plugs in their ears, cellphones clipped to their belts, knapsacks that can whack the shit out of little ‘ol men and, of course, notebooks or netbooks – some white, some pink, some black.

These Children of the Chip look a little dazed, out to lunch, zombie-like, move a little strange, talk a little weird, and I begin to believe I am in the wrong place, the wrong time, a journey in the silence of age and yesterday.

We have come a long way since MS-DOS and down-and-dirty software.

The 25-year-old in the next room sleeps with her Mac, and I wake up with Charly, my desktop PC, a P4 with Windows XP and red-colored duct tape pasted over a fan speed control switch – a CPU cooler so loud, it sounds like a Pratt & Whitney jet engine.

Charly, however, works.

So does the Net, most of the time.

And, that’s the issue, isn’t it?

I have become a Google-ized ‘ol fart, and no different than that 25-year-old who now lives, works, breathes and talks in bits ‘n’ bites, one of the millions of denizens who now inhabit a virtual world with virtual friends in a virtual existence – a global sandbox where e-mail and YouTube and RSS and Mp3s and Twitter and Facebook have replaced … friends and family and those moments and memories of another time, another place.

Blogs?

A cost-effective approach to having your say, professional and otherwise.

We *connect* with our market, our audience, our fans, and try to persuade, to inform, to enlighten, to entertain, to sell.

Top of the Ticket has become one of the Technorati Top 100 blogs.

“Malcolm … has a following there of more than 2,000 people … if we go by the conventional wisdom that $10 in print ad revenue equals $1 in online revenue, then Malcolm’s blog is bringing in revenue equivalent to what his old print content produced for the company.”

“Top of the Ticket is successful because it takes a social-media approach. Malcolm blogs, participates in discussion threads, and uses Twitter.”

Top of the Ticket is successful because it is a good read. The rest is marketing and promotion.

Didn’t we do just that on newspapers in the good ‘ol days?

The botton line is that it is FREE!

And, that, is the issue, the problem, on the Net.

“Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime?”

I am very much in agreement with you on your predictions for the new digital newsroom. I’m the Founder and CEO of TrueSlant.com, a new kind of News network with backing from Forbes Media and Velocity Interactive Group. We are in Alpha testing right now with 25 or so test contributors who are doing many of the things you are talking about. I recently commented on Fred Wilson’s blog about similar points he was making. It’s an exciting new world for journalists, authors, experts, academics and others with topic specific news knowledge who embrace the dynamics of the web. At True/Slant, we’re providing the tools and more for credible and experienced content creators to connect with news enthusiasts who want to know.

Lewis

The examples you cite, of new web-only news organizations starting from scratch (often by or including cast-off newspaper journalists), are now quite common. But obviously I’d paint various different scenarios if trying to dream up how those would look. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be non-profit, but it surely would be smaller than the newspaper that’s gone all-digital.