Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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But journalism students show what she sees as a lack of desire to learn about JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other tools to help tell a story on a web page, rather than the front page, Mulligan wrote in the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. It’s probably never been easier for students of any age to actually learn to code — there’s free or near free online coursework from Codecademy, the MIT/Harvard EdX program or Coursera. But Mulligan’s recommendation is that J-schools need to integrate these coding courses — or at least teach students about how web pages deal with or render their stories — into the base journalism curriculum.

Mulligan wrote:

We need to innovate our curricula, really looking at what we are teaching our students. Learning, or mastering, specific software is not properly preparing our future journalists for successful, life-long careers. No one can learn digital storytelling in a semester. Mastering Dreamweaver and Flash isn’t very future-friendly, and having a single mid-level “Online Journalism” course offered as an elective does more harm than good. We should be teaching code in all of our journalism courses — each semester, each year, until graduation.

There is growing belief in many quarters that software programming is no longer just for programmers – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised to learn how to code; 6-year olds in Estonia may soon do the same. And with more news flowing through the web rather than print, what Mulligan proposes here is not surprising at all.

It’s our job as educators to remove fear of learning, a fear notoriously prevalent in journalists. HTML is not magic. Writing code is not wizardry; it’s just hard work. Learning to program will not save journalism and probably won’t change the way we write our stories. It is, however, a heck of a lot more fun being a journalist on the web once “how computers read and understand our content” is understood.

What is somewhat surprising, in my view, is the reluctance she sees among young would-be journalists to learn these skills. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, many young reporters are impressively proficient in these skills. It’s the geezers (ahem) who have a hard time with coding. But here’s the thing: Even geezers can learn. And if they want to stay employed, they will do so.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user argus

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Warren Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest men, got that way by making smart investments in companies like Gillette and Coca-Cola Co., and now he has acquired a newspaper: the Omaha World-Herald, which he bought recently for $150 million. Given his track record, we should probably pay attention to what Buffett thinks about the future of newspapers — and yet, in an interview with CNBC, the octagenarian made some comments about paywalls that suggest he misunderstands what the business of content looks like in our digital and hyper-connected age. Yes, that’s right: I am disagreeing with one of the world’s most renowned investors.

In the interview, Buffett says that newspapers face three problems: one is that they have lost their status as the place where people find out the news about most things — apart from certain specific areas such as “whether your friends are alive or dead” (which the billionaire says printed obituaries are still good for) or whether a local sports team won or lost. On that point, he is totally correct, as we have noted a number of times: for many people, news comes from their social networks first, although smart media outlets are taking advantage of that phenomenon by being active on those networks.

The second problem Buffett identifies is the simple cost of publishing a printed product: paying huge prices for newsprint, contracts with printing plants, delivery trucks and satellite time and all of the other tools that newspapers have to use to distribute their content. As the Berkshire Hathaway founder puts it: “You start with trees up in Canada and it’s very expensive… and that doesn’t go away.” He’s right about this one too — the cost of electronic production and distribution is lower by orders of magnitude.

Newspapers giving away their product? Not really

The third issue Buffett identifies is that newspapers have been giving away their product for too long. In other words, the investment guru seems to subscribe to what some newspaper executives like to call the “original sin” of online content: namely, the decision to give away the news by putting it online for free. Buffett says:

[N]ewspapers have been giving away their product at the same time they are selling it and that is not a great model. You’re competing with yourself… you shouldn’t be giving away a product you’re trying to sell. That’s key to the future of the newspaper.

This advice will no doubt encourage the growing number of newspapers who have launched paywalls, following in the footsteps of the New York Times and its “metered” subscription model. But as Jeff Bercovici notes at Forbes, the billionaire investment manager’s advice is exactly the opposite of the strategy taken by the Washington Post — a newspaper Buffett is an investor in. Although the paper’s chairman and controlling shareholder Donald Graham looks up to Buffett, so far the company has remained steadfast in its commitment to not put a paywall around its content. So who is right?

I’m going to side with the Washington Post on this one, and one of the reasons for that is the way that Buffett describes his argument: he says that newspapers are giving away their product while still trying to charge for it. But that assumes the “product” is the news, and that this is what newspapers are charging for — and I don’t think that’s really the case any more. For content companies of all kinds, the product is (and in many ways, always has been) the relationship that you can build with readers around your content. And the monetization of that now comes in many different forms.

Paywalls are only one way to monetize a content relationship

Charging users for content is one way to try and monetize that relationship, and some newspapers like the NYT and the Wall Street Journal have had some success with that (although not enough to make up for the ongoing decline in print advertising). And a paywall may help stop print circulation from eroding, but that still makes it seem a lot more like a wall of sandbags than any kind of coherent digital strategy. And in any case, a paywall is almost inevitably going to appeal to only a small subset of readers.

So what is a content company to do? The Washington Post and some other media outlets have chosen to focus on reaching new audiences in different ways — including Facebook’s social-sharing apps, which Don Graham talked about in an interview with Om. I have some issues with content companies giving over that kind of control to a walled garden like Facebook, but there is no question that this can expose a newspaper’s stories to much larger groups of people, and one of the strategies in the age of “democratized distribution” is to go where the readers are instead of expecting them to come to you.

The Washington Post has also been experimenting with more targeted offerings like the WaPo’s new election app for the iPad, which is free but allows readers to pay extra for certain special content. That is much closer to the idea of a “reverse paywall,” as suggested by both journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and former WaPo managing editor Raju Narisetti — a model where readers who engage with the content are rewarded instead of being penalized by hitting a paywall. Both are ways of monetizing a relationship, but one seems to have a lot more potential than the other, at least to me.

In many ways, newspapers and other media platforms were the original social networks: companies that gave away their services for free (their content) and then tried to monetize that attention by appealing to advertisers. That game has changed, but that doesn’t mean throwing up a wall is going to solve anything, even if you are a billionaire. The full interview with Buffett is embedded below:

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Fortune Live Media and Giuseppe Bognanni.

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If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.

Although the paywall and related print-subscription deals helped boost circulation revenue by almost 5 percent in the NYT’s media group — which includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune — and digital advertising revenue was also up by about 5 percent for the quarter, neither of those things were able to compensate for the continued drop-off in print advertising. Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.

Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap

The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Paul McMorrow, an editor at CommonWealth magazine, put together a chart that shows the contrast between the NYT’s advertising revenue, circulation revenue and its total revenue:

According to newspaper-industry analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT is probably pulling in about $86 million or so from its digital paywall — or “metered access,” as the paper likes to call it, since you get to read 20 articles for free before you get hit with a request for your credit card. But that’s not even close to being enough to make up for the decline in ad revenue, both print and digital, which dropped by 7 percent in the quarter.

One of the biggest problems for the Times is that its former online star About.com, which the company bought in 2005 for $410 million, has seen both its profitability and revenue-generating ability implode in the wake of an update to Google’s search algorithm — a change that was designed to penalize what the company called “low quality” content sites, or what some call “content farms.” In the most recent quarter, the NYT said About’s revenue fell by 26 percent, and profit fell by a staggering 67 percent.

As McMorrow’s chart shows, the Times is still far under water in terms of revenue, despite the benefit of its paywall. As I’ve argued before, there’s nothing wrong with having a paywall — although in many cases it amounts to building a wall of sandbags around the print newspaper edition, which provides most of the ad revenue — but if a paywall is your only strategy for responding to digital disruption of the media business, then you are almost certainly doomed, whether you are the New York Times or not.

Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future?

So what should a new CEO be looking at to revitalize the NYT for a digital age? Ken Doctor suggests that the paper needs to look beyond just subcription revenue and focus on how it can target those 325,000 digital subscribers — since it knows who they are and where they live, and it already has their credit-card numbers.

I would take it one step further, however, and suggest that the new CEO think about some of the suggestions about “reverse paywalls” that have been made by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and also by former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti (who is now at the Wall Street Journal in a digital role). The main principle behind this idea is that regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.

The NYT has taken a few steps towards trying to build relationships with its readers through what I’ve called the “levelling up” process that it recently added to its comment section, where readers can achieve preferred status for good behavior. Those are the building blocks of a relationship that the paper could use to its own benefit in all kinds of ways, many of which could generate new sources of revenue — real-life events, for example, which has been one of the things that has helped turn The Atlantic around, or a line of e-books based on the newspaper’s original reporting.

Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. Is it to act as a gatekeeper for certain kinds of data and try to reimpose the scarcity that used to exist in the print era? Or is it to find partners to distribute that information in as many ways as possible, and to think of the paper as a data platform, as The Guardian has with its open-platform project? One way looks to the past, and the other to the future. Which way will the NYT go?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Giuseppe Bognanni

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In a column about the launch of some recent digital projects from the Washington Post, the newspaper’s ombudsman expressed concern there might be too much innovation going on at the paper, and all this change might be happening too quickly for some, both inside and outside the paper. But as a number of responses have noted — including one from the Washington Post‘s own managing editor for digital — the last thing the Post (or any newspaper, for that matter) needs to worry about is whether it’s moving too quickly. If anything, the pace of change in media is speeding up rather than slowing down.

The column from ombudsman Patrick Pexton mentioned a number of new projects from the WaPo, including the launch of the paper’s Twitter-tracking “mention machine,” which follows the presidential candidates via social media. But while Pexton said he was glad to see the Post experimenting with such new features, he added that a number of reader emails had expressed some frustration with recent changes to the paper’s website, and criticized the emphasis on new bells and whistles such as the Mention Machine instead of on real journalism. Then the ombudsman added:

They have a point. And I know from talking to folks in the newsroom that all the change may be exhausting the staff, too… Staffers say that sometimes they feel as if the innovations are just tossed against a wall to see what sticks, without careful thought as to which of them will enhance and shore up The Post’s reputation and brand.

The WaPo needs to go faster, not slower

It’s a little ironic that Pexton’s column came along just as I was thinking about innovation at the Washington Post as well — but I was thinking the newspaper should be applauded for all the experimentation it’s doing, even if not all of it seems guaranteed to succeed. My train of thought was sparked in part by a Wall Street Journal  piece looking at the friend/mentor relationship that has developed between Washington Post publisher Don Graham and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and how that has led to experiments like the “social reading” app that the newspaper launched recently.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m skeptical about the virtues of handing over content and reader relationships to Facebook for a number of reasons, but there’s no question that the impetus behind the social-reading app — to reach readers where they are, and benefit from social sharing — is a valuable one. And the Washington Post is at least experimenting with things like that, including its Trove recommendation engine (which powers the Facebook app) rather than staking its future on things like paywalls. Perhaps it will even try a “reverse paywall” of the kind envisioned by its managing editor of digital, Raju Narisetti.

Narisetti, not surprisingly, doesn’t think the Post is innovating too quickly at all. “I wish this were true,” he said in a response to Pexton’s column. Others chimed in with similar thoughts, including former Sacramento Bee  editor Melanie Sill (who also wrote a fascinating report recently for the Annenberg Innovation Lab on the need for a philosophy of “open journalism”). As Sill noted, the biggest problems for newspapers don’t stem from innovating too quickly; they are a result of the exact opposite: being too cautious:

The biggest threats to newspapers aren’t just their familiar revenue problems and ever-proliferating competitors, but also the opportunity costs of failing to innovate more boldly — to be transformative, not incremental, in moving forward.

To truly change, you have to change the culture

Josh Stearns of the non-profit advocacy group Free Press noted in his response to Pexton’s column that one of the big issues that keeps many traditional media outlets from moving more quickly is a culture that doesn’t value experimentation or innovation. For every newspaper that launches an internal “lab” like the New York Times‘ beta620 or tries to help incubate media-related startups — the way the Philadelphia Media Group and Digital First Media are both trying to do — there are others who see new projects and the potential for failure as a distraction from the “real” business of a newspaper.

Media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out this attitude ignores that during times of massive disruption of the kind the media world is experiencing, no one can possibly know what the right solution is, and therefore, experimentation is the only logical response. Experimentation is what turned The Huffington Post from a personal project into a $315-million media powerhouse, and it’s what could turn BuzzFeed from a repository for funny-pet videos into a journalistic enterprise — at least, that’s what the company’s new venture backers seem to believe. Are they right? Who knows.

As for the repercussions for the Washington Post‘s brand if it continues this rampant experimentation, I think Pexton’s concerns are misplaced: Why not imagine what could happen if the Post became known for being the most forward-thinking and innovative mainstream newspaper out there? That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing at all.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and zert sonstige

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Can we find clues about the future of news and journalism in the way a link-sharing site like Reddit operates? David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Web 2.0 book The Cluetrain Manifesto, took a look at that question over the weekend and came to the conclusion that yes, we can — not that Reddit is the future of news, necessarily, but that it could be part of a potential future for media and journalism. Weinberger’s argument has some merit to it, and it’s a good reminder that the eventual replacement for what we see as the mainstream news media may look very different from what we are used to.

As Weinberger describes in his post, Reddit has developed a number of interesting features, in addition to simply allowing users to share and comment on links to interesting or quirky articles from around the web — something that other sites like Digg (which has seen a dramatic decline in traffic recently, after a traumatic redesign) and Fark also do. In Reddit’s case, however, it has also added some quasi-journalistic features, such as “Today I Learned” and the popular “I Am A… Ask Me Anything” series.

In “Today I Learned,” users at Reddit post facts that are interesting in some way, or that run counter to conventional wisdom. While this is similar to what many newspapers and other traditional media outlets do, there is no editorial control over the “facts” that are posted. Instead, the Reddit community fact-checks the information after the post goes up (some journalists would, no doubt, argue that this isn’t the way newspapers work, but in many cases, newspaper and magazine articles are also fact-checked and verified by commenters).

Crowd-powered interviews

The more interesting of the Reddit features, however, is the IAMA series. In these, a user posts a comment that describes themselves in some way, and offers to answer any question from the Reddit community. Some recent examples included a woman with a serious disease, a man who recently sold his company for millions of dollars, a writer who worked on The Simpsons TV show , and a U.S. Navy officer serving on a submarine. The quality of comments and responses varies widely, but as Weinberger notes:

[I]t’s not exactly “60 Minutes.” So what? This is one way citizen journalism looks. At its best, it asks questions we all want asked, unearths questions we didn’t know we wanted asked, asks them more forthrightly than most American journalists dare, and gets better — more honest — answers than we hear from the mainstream media.

And while the “Today I Learned” feature only gets the fact-checking that interested commenters provide, the “Ask Me Anything” series is moderated by administrators at Reddit — in other words, editors — who in many cases will ask the person submitting to the interview to verify their identity in some way (the discussion itself is also moderated for offensive comments, as all Reddit threads are).

Reinventing community journalism?

I agree with Weinberger that this looks and feels a lot like a form of community journalism, or “crowd-powered” journalism. At the newspaper I used to work for, we used a live-blogging tool called Cover It Live (now owned by Demand Media) to host live discussions with people in the news — eyewitnesses to a news event, scientists who released research reports, and other newsmakers of various kinds — in which readers would ask questions and have them answered.

The IAMA feature at Reddit feels very similar, and it also feels a little like what occurs over at Quora, where people in the news often respond to direct questions from users (Quora has also recently started setting up actual interviews). Are these things inherently different or less valuable because they don’t involve a newspaper or occur at a mainstream media website? I don’t think so.

Many people, including (but not limited to) traditional journalists and media-industry players, think the replacement for newspapers and magazines and other mainstream entities will look more or less the same as the things they are replacing — that the replacement for a community newspaper will look like a newspaper, and so on. But that may not be the case at all. Some communities may get their news from Facebook, or a local blog, or a discussion forum on Topix.net, or from something like Reddit. That may not be great for the newspapers, which used to fill that niche, but the communities themselves may be better off, or at least not inconvenienced.

As Weinberger notes, what sites like Reddit and Quora do very well is take advantage of the social elements of the news and media — in many cases, far better than their traditional media competitors. This is just a small part of the disruption that the media industry is undergoing, which includes the rise of collaborative tools and the explosion of non-journalistic sources via social-media platforms like Twitter, such as the man who live-tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Obviously, Reddit and its ilk aren’t a replacement for investigative journalism, or foreign reporting, or any of the other valuable things that major newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post provide. But they can be players in a much broader journalistic ecosystem, and they have lessons to teach traditional media players, if they want to listen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Garry Knight and Jennie Moo

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After delaying the project while it launched a paywall, the New York Times has finally rolled out its version of Google Labs, the now-shuttered project that provided a home for the search company’s various web experiments. Called beta620 — a name derived from the newspaper’s address on Eighth Street Avenue in New York City — the site is designed to be an open forum for showcasing everything from web apps to new services and tools. But can a 150-year-old newspaper successfully adopt the kind of culture that drives startups, or is the new NYT site just a sideshow?

The newspaper had originally planned to go live with the experimental project last year, but it was shelved while the company developed its paywall plan, according to comments made by a senior NYT vice-president who is the general manager for the New York Times website. “We had a little thing called the digital subscription model that obviously wasn’t so little and really took a lot of energy and resources, not just from developers and engineers but our management team,” Denise Warren told Advertising Age magazine.

The new site has a distinctly startup-ish look to it, with the lower-case beta620 label, and a series of quirky images that identify the different projects underway at the NYT. In addition to tabs that describe the current projects, the site also highlights ones that have “graduated” to become permanent fixtures at the newspaper, including the “recommendation engine” that suggests stories to readers based on their reading history at the New York Times website, the “coming up next” widget that shows a new article link automatically as a reader scrolls to the bottom of the page, and the NYT Skimmer — an app that provides a different view of the paper’s articles designed for tablets.

Although they are interesting experiments, it’s not clear how many people actually take advantage of the Skimmer app (which competes to some extent with the NYT iPad app) or the suggestions from the NYT’s recommendation engine. But the “coming up” widget seems to have taken off, in the sense that a number of other websites and content publishers have adopted something virtually identical, including the Nieman Journalism Lab site. The company’s new projects, meanwhile, include the following:

• The Buzz shows how much traction Times articles are getting on social media, like an in-house version of Newsbeat’s dashboard.
• Times Companion lets readers pull up information on topics in the article they are reading without leaving the page, much like Apture.
• Times Instant. A search page that shows results as you type, which is very similar to a search feature from a large web company you’ve probably heard of.
• Community Hub. A dashboard that shows all your comments on the NYT site, as well as a feed of other people’s comments.
• Longitude plots the articles from a given day of the newspaper on an interactive Google map.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said on Twitter that the launch of beta620 is a turning point for the newspaper company because it means the media giant now has an “openly experimental newsroom.” In an inaugural post on the new site, meanwhile, NYT staffer Joe Fiore said the company hopes it will become a place where Times developers “interact with readers to discuss projects, and incorporate community suggestions into their work.”

There’s no question that the New York Times has a history of experimentation online, one that includes its many interactive tools and online features. And it’s great to see a company adopting the kind of outlook that Anil Dash of Activate Media recommended in a recent presentation on how media companies need to think more like startups. Some of the NYT’s internal projects have even found a life outside the company as startups in their own right, such as News.me — the customized news-reading app that was a partnership between the NYT and Betaworks, the New York-based startup incubator run by John Borthwick.

But can a company whose financial status is still less than stellar really devote much time or resources to something like beta620? The New York Times may be a digital leader, but the reality is that the vast majority of its revenue comes from the printed product it has been manufacturing for a century and a half, because that contains the advertising that is its bread and butter — and even though many see the paywall as a success, its contribution to the bottom line remains relatively minuscule. Will the Skimmer or the NYT’s take on instant search make a difference? That seems unlikely.

It’s interesting to note that even Google — whose entire culture is based on experimentation in a way that the New York Times‘ isn’t — recently closed down its Google Labs venture, because CEO and co-founder Larry Page said it was diverting the company’s attention away from its core businesses. So while it’s great to see the NYT experimenting publicly, and getting feedback from readers, my optimism is tempered by the knowledge that the paper has much bigger problems on its hands than coming up with cool web apps.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user jphilipg

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Users of Netflix’s digital movie-rental service have been up in arms about a sudden change to the company’s pricing plans, which appears to be aimed at reducing demand for its DVD-by-mail service by jacking up prices. In other words, Netflix is trying to manage the transition of users away from the physical product and toward digital streaming. Are there any lessons newspapers and other media companies can learn as they try to move away from the physical print product and toward a digital-only future? Yes and no — publishers shouldn’t get their hopes up too much about copying the Netflix model, because the two businesses are very different.

Media analyst Ken Doctor, author of a book on the news industry called Newsonomics (and a blog by the same name), took a look at the comparisons between the two in a post for the Nieman Journalism Lab. He notes that the obvious impetus for Netflix to change its pricing plans — which effectively penalize people who want both the physical DVD-rental part of the service and the streaming digital part — is to simultaneously generate more revenue that can be applied to the physical parts of its business, and at the same time reduce demand for that product.

The similarities to the traditional news publishing business are pretty obvious. Newspapers and magazines and other print-based entities are also trying to do two things at once: to manage a business that involves a shrink-wrapped physical product that gets shipped to people’s homes — and therefore involves trucks and plants and other expensive things — while trying to simultaneously shift that business into a digital-only product that is far cheaper to produce. Doctor describes Netflix’s rationale for its pricing change:

In the new strategy, we can see how Netflix can both push the digital transition faster and manage the DVD decline better. We can assume that the digital customer is worth more in profit to Netflix than the DVD customer. Then, Netflix wants to take out as much of that cost infrastructure (Post Office, warehouses, associated customer service) as possible, as fast as possible. Differential pricing is one way to do that.

So why don’t newspapers just hike their prices the way Netflix is? Well, the short answer, as Doctor notes, is that they are; many newspapers have boosted their cover and subscription prices by substantial amounts over the past few years. I was in a meeting at one major metropolitan newspaper in which the editor-in-chief bragged about how much the paper had been able to jack up its prices for print subscribers without much backlash. The plan was to just continue to do this until people started cancelling their subscriptions en masse.

In many ways, newspapers are a lot like Microsoft. The software giant is wedded to a shrink-wrapped product that involves huge amounts of revenue for the per-seat licenses it sells for Microsoft Office, and that makes it hard for the company to make a transition to a “cloud-based” model that sees the same services delivered online. Newspapers also get vast amounts of their revenue (as much as 80 percent in some cases) from their print product. How do they give that up as they move to digital only?

But the biggest issue for newspapers and other publishers is something Doctor mentions towards the end of his analysis: namely, that media companies rely on advertising for their bread-and-butter revenue, not subscriptions (which pay for, at best, a small fraction of the cost of a newspaper). The problem with that model is that online advertising produces a tiny fraction of the amount of revenue per reader that print does — up to 10 times less, in some cases. While some newspapers such as John Paton’s Journal-Register have committed to trying to make this transition from “print dimes to digital pennies” work, there’s no proven method for doing so.

So while Doctor says the future of print is “price increase after price increase,” as publishers try to force readers to make the transition to digital-only, the biggest stumbling block isn’t the behavior of users the way it is with Netflix; it’s the behavior of advertisers. Until they decide to start paying dramatically more for online ads than they have in the past — something that isn’t likely to happen — traditional publishers can only look at Netflix’s model with envy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Shironeko Euro and Si Brindley

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The phone hacking saga is one of the biggest political scandals in recent U.K. history, and some have speculated that it could not only lead to the end of Murdoch’s reign at the helm of News Corp., but even cost the country’s prime minister David Cameron his job. No wonder media organizations from all over the world are going to cover the testimony live, with hearings beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT / 6:30 a.m. PDT.

A few outlets are also streaming the testimony live online:

• CNN.com will stream the entire testimony live on its website as well as through a number of mobile apps.
• C-SPAN will stream the testimony live as well on C-SPAN3.

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The Daily will be available for a subscription of either $0.99 a week or $39.99 a year (roughly $0.14 a day, as Murdoch pointed out during the press conference). As per its name, The Daily will be published 365 days a year, beginning with today’s inaugural edition.  The newspaper will feature video, images, animation, audio and text to convey its information, depending on the story. It features a navigation interface that resembles cover flow in iTunes, and offers professional audio voice-overs of top stories and a video anchor who takes you through the news of the day.

Unlike many existing print and newspaper magazine conversion apps, The Daily seems to feature a lot of clickable and interactive elements. Web links will bring up pages in a built-in browser, and Twitter feeds are accessible from within the app. There’s also an in-app text and audio commenting system for greater reader interaction. The app will also be able to pull in breaking news using Twitter and other sources, so that it stays fresh throughout the day without undergoing the kind of massively frequent overhaul you see on blogs. It’ll be interesting to see how The Daily strikes this balance.

No back-issues will exist at launch, and users instead will have to save articles for later from within the app or retrieve them on the web via HTML. Plans for improved access to older content are in the works, but won’t be included at launch.

At launch today,  The Daily will be available only to customers shopping in the U.S. store, and will be free for the first two weeks. According to a leaked official memo published by Gizmodo (which was completely accurate regarding other details), News Corp. is planning to bring The Daily to international markets (and other tablets) in the coming months.

Apple VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue announced the inclusion of new in-app recurring subscription billing with “one click,” but didn’t offer any further details. Cue noted that an upcoming  (“soon” was the only timeline hinted at) Apple announcement would detail this new feature further, including implementation plans among other publishers.

Basically, Murdoch and News Corp. seem to have followed a lot of the advice I suggested for news media on the iPad, and I’m excited about the results. We’ll have a look at The Daily in action coming up soon.

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