NPR’s Facebook page and its 2.3 million-like audience is made up of users from thousands of cities across the world. We wondered: What if we focused on just one city?

The question arose after identifying a somewhat obscure Facebook feature that allows anyone with a Facebook page to customize posts by location. This means, for example, that you can post a story about Boston and modify it so that only users in Boston will see it in their Facebook feed.

Last October NPR Digital Services and Digital Media used this tool to launch an experiment with member station KPLU, in which we shared selected KPLU.org content on NPR’s Facebook page, but only for the eyes of the Seattle region (KPLU’s market). Four months into this experiment, we’ve made some unexpected discoveries around Facebook communities and the power of localization on a national platform.

How it works

From a technical standpoint, geofocusing page posts on Facebook is easy — just click the Public button next to Post prior to publishing. But before launching into this experiment — which is ongoing — we outlined how it would work, what it would look like and how we’d measure it.

The coffee shop test

We work with KPLU’s Online Managing Editor Jake Ellison each day to determine which KPLU.org story we’ll post. It must pass what we call the content coffee shop test: the conversation-style that NPR’s Social Media Desk has developed, mixed with a splash of local flavor. We want stories that will raise curiosity and be talked about in a Seattle coffee shop. Jake works with reporters to produce stories that will hit this sweet spot. If it does, Digital Services posts it to NPR’s Facebook page. If you live in the Seattle region and like NPR’s Facebook page, you may have noticed more Seattle-oriented stories from NPR, linking to KPLU.org. If you live outside of Seattle, this experiment hasn’t touched you.

Pacing

NPR’s Social Media Desk has a steady cadence — about every hour or so — for its Facebook posts. In a given day you may only see 10-12 NPR posts in your Facebook news feed. We don’t want to disrupt this pace and overflow Seattle users with too many stories, so we only post up to one KPLU story on NPR’s Facebook page per day.

Measurement

To our knowledge, no other news organization has used Facebook to geofocus content in quite this way. So before diving in we needed a way to closely measure the experiment. We wanted to know how this test would impact KPLU.org’s audience growth. For this we decided on campaign tracking — tacking a unique tag onto the end of each link we post. We also wanted to monitor engagement on Facebook to determine how users would interact with these local stories and whether or not the number of likes, shares and comments would differ from globally shared posts. For this we dug into Facebook Insights.

Audience growth

We knew posting a KPLU story to NPR’s Facebook page would result in a traffic bump to KPLU.org, even if only a small piece of the 2.3 million audience would see it. But we didn’t know how big of a boost this would give the site.

As it turns out, a big one. During the first four months of this experiment, we posted about 50 geofocused KPLU links — a fraction of all KPLU content — on NPR’s Facebook page. These posts accounted for 12 percent of KPLU.org’s sitewide visits during this four-month period. The test helped KPLU achieve three milestones: record traffic for a single day (January 19), second-highest traffic for a single month (October 2011) and the highest traffic for a single month (January).

High engagement

When a story is posted to NPR’s Facebook page the usual way (globally visible), the result is an instant flurry of likes, shares and comments from across the world. When a Seattle-targeted story is posted, it gets a high volume of likes, shares and comments, but usually fewer than a global post. This of course is because only a fraction of the NPR Facebook audience can actually see it.

Using data from Facebook Insights we were able to measure the relative engagement of stories, allowing for an apples-to-apples comparison. In other words, we looked at the number of likes, shares and comments on a Facebook post as a percentage of the number of unique people who viewed it. We call this a post’s engagement rate — of the people seeing it, how many likes, shares and comments are they generating.

We found that geofocused posts to the Seattle region usually had a much higher engagement rate than links shared to the global NPR Facebook audience.

For example, the KPLU story “Is Seattle a great but lonely place to live?” was posted to NPR’s Facebook page on January 6 to a geofocused Seattle audience. This story achieved relatively high levels of engagement compared to other local posts.

The NPR story “The Public Respects Civility, But Rewards Rudeness” achieved relatively high levels of engagement compared to other global posts and was posted to NPR’s Facebook page on January 26 to the entire global audience.

As is clear for these specific stories, the local post outperformed the global post in relative engagement across likes, shares and comments. After noticing this same trend for other individual posts, we wanted to know if this was the case more generally across local posts, so we rounded up the full body of posts and did the math. We found that during the first four months of this experiment, the average engagement rate across all geofocused post was six times higher than all global posts.

Throughout the course of this test we’ve had a lot of conversations about possible explanations for why this is happening. One concern we kept a lookout for was the possibility of confusion over where the content originated and where it linked to. However, steady growth in engagement throughout the experiment coupled with a lack of curious comments in the story threads seem to suggest that this is likely not a problem.

Community-driven conversations

Just a few days into this experiment, we noticed something different was happening. It was after we posted a KPLU story about Amanda Knox — a Seattle native — being flown back to her home town after Italian authorities freed her. The story focused on how SeaTac Airport was dealing with the media hysteria that would likely ensue.

This story sparked the normal gut-reaction comments, but the users also reacted to how the story related to them — the Seattle resident. They began talking to one another, sharing information as local residents.

“Would have been a lot smarter to SAY they were flying into Sea-Tac, but instead, arrive in Portland and drive up I-5 to get home.”

“Glad I’m flying in tomorrow.”

“It’s kind of like when it snows here. Everyone freaks out over 3 inches, schools close, nobody can drive, and the east coast sits back laughing at us.”

We saw this trend continue throughout the experiment and develop as the content became more pointedly about Seattle. For example, one KPLU story tackled a question Seattleites know well: Why don’t people in Seattle use umbrellas?

Residents of New York, Boston, or D.C. wouldn’t have much to contribute to a conversation around this question — or even understand why the question was being posed. But Seattle users — the only ones who saw this post on NPR’s Facebook page — had a lot to say.

“Because we spend more on rain gear than most people spend on computers.”

“It never rains hard enough to run makeup….you just get a misty glow. And umbrellas are for quitters ;)”

“Because it’s hard to open and close an umbrella with Coffee in your hand.”

What it all means

We’ve told you a lot about what we know from this experiment, but there are plenty of things we’re still investigating. We’re curious if this can be replicated in other markets and are exploring options for scaling it to more member stations. Some questions about this test will be answered when the experiment grows — something we’re looking to pursue. Although we’re still analyzing the results, we’re confident about the potential of this as a powerful journalism tool.

As someone who probably has spent more time thinking about the Knight News Challenge than anyone outside of Knight Foundation headquarters — doing a dissertation on the subject will do that to you! — I can’t help but follow its evolution, even after my major research ended in 2010. And evolve it has: from an initial focus on citizen journalism and bloggy kinds of initiatives (all the rage circa 2007, right?) to a later emphasis on business models, visualizations, and data-focused projects (like this one) — among a whole host of other projects including news games, SMS tools for the developing world, crowdsourcing applications, and more.

Now, after five years and $27 million in its first incarnation, Knight News Challenge 2.0 has been announced for 2012, emphasizing speed and agility (three contests a year, eight-week turnarounds on entries) and a new topical focus (the first round is focused on leveraging existing networks). While more information will be coming ahead of the February 27 launch, here are three questions to chew on now.

Does the Knight News Challenge still dominate this space?

The short answer is yes (and I’m not just saying that because, full disclosure, the Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Lab). As I’ve argued before, in the news innovation scene, at this crossroads of journalism and technology communities, the KNC has served an agenda-setting kind of function — perhaps not telling news hipsters what to think regarding the future of journalism, but rather telling them what to think about. So while folks might disagree on the Next Big Thing for News, there’s little question that the KNC has helped to shape the substance and culture of the debate and the parameters in which it occurs.

Some evidence for this comes from the contest itself: Whatever theme/trend got funded one year would trigger a wave of repetitive proposals the next. (As Knight said yesterday: “Our concern is that once we describe what we think we might see, we receive proposals crafted to meet our preconception.”)

And yet the longer answer to this question is slightly more nuanced. When the KNC began in 2006, with the first winners named in 2007, it truly was the only game in town — a forum for showing “what news innovation looks like” unlike any other. Nowadays, a flourishing ecosystem of websites (ahem, like this one), aggregators (like MediaGazer), and social media platforms is making the storyline of journalism’s reboot all the more apparent. It’s easier than ever to track who’s trying what, which experiments are working, and so on — and seemingly in real time, as opposed to a once-a-year unveiling. Hence the Knight Foundation’s move to three quick-fire contests a year, “as we try to bring our work closer to Internet speed.”

How should we define the “news” in News Challenge?

One of the striking things I found in my research (discussed in a previous Lab post) was that Knight, in its overall emphasis, has pivoted away from focusing mostly on journalism professionalism (questions like “how do we train/educate better journalists?”) and moved toward a broader concern for “information.” This entails far less regard for who’s doing the creating, filtering, or distributing — rather, it’s more about ensuring that people are informed at the local community level. This shift from journalism to information, reflected in the Knight Foundation’s own transformation and its efforts to shape the field, can be seen, perhaps, like worrying less about doctors (the means) and more about public health (the ends) — even if this pursuit of health outcomes sometimes sidesteps doctors and traditional medicine along the way.

This is not to say that Knight doesn’t care about journalism. Not at all. It still pours millions upon millions of dollars into clearly “newsy” projects — including investigative reporting, the grist of shoe-leather journalism. Rather, this is about Knight trying to rejigger the boundaries of journalism: opening them up to let other fields, actors, and ideas inside.

So, how should you define “news” in your application? My suggestion: broadly.

What will be the defining ethos of KNC 2.0?

This is the big, open, and most interesting question to me. My research on the first two years of KNC 1.0, using a regression analysis, found that contest submissions emphasizing participation and distributed knowledge (like crowdsourcing) were more likely to advance, all things being equal. My followup interviews with KNC winners confirmed this widely shared desire for participation — a feeling that the news process not only could be shared with users, but in fact should be.

I called this an “ethic of participation,” a founding doctrine of news innovation that challenges journalism’s traditional norm of professional control. But perhaps, to some extent, that was a function of the times, during the roughly 2007-2010 heyday of citizen media, with the attendant buzz around user-generated content as the hot early-adopter thing in news — even if news organizations then, as now, struggled to reconcile and incorporate a participatory audience. Even while participation has become more mainstream in journalism, there are still frequent flare-ups, like this week’s flap over breaking news on Twitter, revealing enduring tensions at the “collision of two worlds — when a hierarchical media system in the hands of the few collides with a networked media system open to all,” as Alfred Hermida wrote.

So what about this time around? Perhaps KNC 2.0 will have an underlying emphasis on Big Data, algorithms, news apps, and other things bubbling up at the growing intersection of computer science and journalism. It’s true that Knight is already underwriting a significant push in this area through the (also just-revised) Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project (formerly called the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership — which Nikki Usher and I have written about for the Lab). To what extent is there overlap or synergy here? OpenNews, for 2012, is trying to build on the burgeoning “community around code” in journalism — leveraging the momentum of Hacks/Hackers, NICAR, and ONA with hackfests, code-swapping, and online learning. KNC 2.0, meanwhile, talks about embracing The Hacker Way described by Mark Zuckerberg — but at the same time backs away a bit from its previous emphasis on open source as a prerequisite. It’ll be interesting to see how computational journalism — explained well in this forthcoming paper (PDF here) by Terry Flew et al. in Journalism Practice — figures into KNC 2.0.

Regardless, the Knight News Challenge is worth watching for what it reveals about the way people — journalists and technologists, organizations and individuals, everybody working in this space — talk about and make sense of “news innovation”: what it means, where it’s taking us, and why that matters for the future of journalism.

Is Facebook a threat to the open web?: There was still a lot of smart commentary on Facebook’s filing for a public stock offering rolling in last late week, so I’ll start with a couple pieces I missed in last week’s review: Both The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal and Slate’s Farhad Manjoo were skeptical of Facebook’s ability to stay so financially successful. Madrigal said it’s going to have to get a lot more than the $4.39 in revenue per user it’s currently getting, and Manjoo wondered about what happens after the social gaming craze that’s been providing so much of Facebook’s revenue passes.

How to supplement those revenue streams? A lot of the answer’s going to come from personal data aggregation, and law professor Lori Andrews wrote in The New York Times about some of the dark sides of that practice, including stereotyping and discrimination. Facebook also needs to move more deeply into mobile, and Wired’s Tim Carmody documented its struggles in that area. On the bright side, Wired’s Steven Levy approved of Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders and his articulation of The Hacker Way.

Facebook’s filing also spurred an intriguing discussion of the relationship between it, Google, and the open web. As web pioneer John Battelle said best and The Atlantic’s James Fallows summarized aptly, several observers were concerned that Facebook’s rise and Google’s potential decline is a loss for the open web, because Google built its financial success on the success of the open web while Facebook’s success depends on increased sharing inside its own private channels. As Battelle argued, this private orientation threatens the core values that should drive the Internet: decentralization, a commons-based ethos, neutrality, interoperability, and data openness. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM countered that users don’t care so much about openness as usefulness, and that’s what could eventually do Facebook in.

Another Facebook-related discussion sprung up around Evgeny Morozov’s piece for The New York Times lamenting the death of cyberflânerie — the practice of strolling through the streets of the web alone, taking in and reflecting on its sights and sounds. Among other factors, he pinpointed Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” as the culprit, by mandating that all experiences be shared and tailored to our narrow interests. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pushed back against Morozov’s argument, countering that there’s still plenty of room for sharing-based serendipity because our friends’ interests don’t exactly line up with our own. And journalist Dana Goldstein argued that a lot of what yesterday’s flâneurs did is still echoed in the web today, for better or worse — cyberstalking, trying out new identities, and presenting our ideal selves to the public.

The clampdown on breaking news via Twitter: One of international journalism’s leaders in social media innovation, News Corp.’s Sky News, issued a surprisingly stern crackdown on its journalists’ Twitter practices, banning them from retweeting information from any other journalists without clearing it past the news desk and from tweeting about anything outside their beats.

There were a few people in favor of the new policy — Forbes’ Ewan Spence applauded the ‘better right than first’ approach, and Fleet Street Blues rather headscratchingly asserted that “it makes no sense for them to pay journalists to report through a medium outside its own editorial controls.” But far more people were crying out in opposition.

Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa reiterated that argument that a retweet is simply a quote, rather than an endorsement, and Breaking News’ Cory Bergman said not all the broadcast rules apply to Twitter — it’s okay to be human there. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram and POLIS’ Charlie Beckett made the point that Sky should want its reporters to be seen as go-to information sources, period — no matter where the information comes from. As Beckett put it: “We the audience now privilege interactivity and added value over conformity. We trust you because you share, not because you have hierarchical structures.”

The BBC also updated its social media guidelines to urge reporters not to break news on Twitter before they file it to the BBC’s internal systems. BBC social media editor Chris Hamilton quickly clarified that the policy wasn’t as restrictive as it sounded: The BBC’s tech allows its journalists to file simultaneously to Twitter and to its newsroom CMS (an impressive feat in itself), and when that tech isn’t available, they want their journalists to file to the newsroom first — “a difference of a few seconds.”

J-prof Alfred Hermida said the idea that journalists shouldn’t break news on Twitter rests on the flawed assumption that journalists have a monopoly on breaking the news. And on Twitter, fellow media prof C.W. Anderson asserted that the chief problem lies in the idea that breaking news adds significant value to a story. “The debate over “breaking news on Twitter” is a perfect example of mistaking professional values for public / financial / ‘rational’ ones,” he wrote. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman, meanwhile, praised the BBC for putting some real thought into how to fit Twitter into the breaking news workflow.

An unclear picture of the Times’ paywall: The New York Times released its fourth-quarter results late last week, and, as usual with their recent announcements, it proved something of a media business Rorschach test. The company reported a loss of $39.7 million for the year, thanks in large part to declines in advertising revenue — though most of that was due to About.com, as revenue in its news division was slightly up for the quarter.

As for the paywall, media analyst Ken Doctor reported 390,000 digital subscribers and estimated the Times’ paywall revenue at $86 million and said the paper has climbed a big mountain in getting more than 70 percent of its print subscribers to sign up for online access. Reuters’ Felix Salmon saw the paywall numbers as “unamiguously good news” and said it shows the paywall hasn’t eaten into ad revenues as much as it was expected to.

Others were a bit less optimistic. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said the Times’ new paywall revenue still isn’t enough to make up for its ad revenue declines, and urged the times to go beyond the paywall in hunting for digital revenue. Media analyst Greg Satell made a similar point, arguing that the paywall is a false hope and calling for the Times build up more “satellite” brands online, like the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. Henry Blodget of Business Insider had a different solution: Keep cutting costs until the newsroom is down to a size that can be supported by a digital operation.

A nonprofit journalism merger: After a few weeks of speculation, two of the U.S.’ more prominent nonprofit news operations, the Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting, have announced their intent to merge. Both groups are based in California’s Bay Area, and the CIR runs the statewide news org California Watch. The executive director of the new organization would be Phil Bronstein, the CIR board chairman and former San Francisco Chronicle editor.

Opinions on the move were mixed: Oakland Local founder (and former California Watch consultant) Susan Mernit thought it would make a lot of sense, combining the Bay Citizen’s strengths in funding and distribution with California Watch’s strengths in editorial content. Likewise, the Lab’s Ken Doctor saw it as an opportunity to make local nonprofit journalism work at an unprecedented scale.

There are reasons for caution, though. As Jim Romenesko noted, the Bay Citizen has recently gone through several key departures and the unexpected death of its co-founder and main benefactor, Warren Hellman (and even forgot to renew its web domain for a bit). And California Watch pointed out some of the potential conflicts between the two newsrooms — California Watch has a partnership with the Chronicle, whom the Bay Citizen considers a competitor. And the Bay Citizen has its own partnership with The New York Times for its regional edition, something PBS MediaShift’s Ashwin Seshagiri said could now prove as much a hindrance as an advantage.

J-prof Jay Rosen said the two orgs aren’t a good fit because of their differing institutional bases — the CIR is more established and has been on a steady build, while the Bay Citizen’s short history is full of turmoil. And the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Steven Jones argued that Bronstein’s rationale for the merger is misrepresenting Hellman’s wishes.

Reading roundup: Lots of other stuff going on this week, too. Here’s a quick rundown:

— Another week, another few new angles to the already enormous News Corp. phone hacking scandal: The FBI is investigating the company for illegal payments of as much £100,000 to foreign officials such as police officers, a political blogger told British officials that the Sunday Mirror’s top editor personally authorized hacking, and The Times of London admitted it hacked into a police officer’s email to out him as the author of an anonymous blog. How much is this whole mess costing News Corp.? $87 million for the investigation alone last quarter.

— News Corp.’s tablet news publication The Daily got the one-year treatment with an update on its so-so progress in The New York Times. News business analyst Alan Mutter also gave a pretty rough review of the status of tablet news apps as a whole.

— A couple of other news developments of interest to folks in our little niche: The tech news site GigaOM announced it was buying paidContent from the Guardian (PBS MediaShift’s Dorian Benkoil loved the move, and the Knight Foundation announced the first of its new News Challenge competitions, this one oriented around networks.

— A couple of cool studies released this week: One from HP Labs on predicting the spread of news on Twitter, and another from USC on ways in which the Internet is changing us.

— Finally, for those of us among the digitally hyper-connected, The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a poignant piece on the enduring value of in-person connections, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci offered a thoughtful response.

Original Twitter bird by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

Since last year we’ve known the Knight Foundation would be revamping their annual innovation contest to better meet the pace of change in technology and information. After completing its initial five-year run — which saw 12,000 applications and $27 million in funding to journalism and information projects — Knight said they would pull back and examine how they could continue to fund that kind of experimentation in the future.

Today we know a lot more about what that will look like. The biggest change is to the calendar: Instead of one big competition a year, there’ll be three in 2012. The new News Challenge is more topic-focused: Two of this year’s contests will seek projects on specific themes, with the third remaining a catchall. And Knight is going farther than ever before to widen the kinds of people who might apply: removing its requirement to open-source the project’s work and emphasizing it will take appeals from individuals, nonprofits, for-profits, and presumably any organizational structure on land or sea. (You can get an idea of the kind of, er, stylistic freedom they’re preaching in the 1992-fever-dream video above.)

The emphasis is on speed — competitions will last no more than 8-10 weeks each, rather than the October-to-June cycle of some previous iterations. The total amount of money at stake remains about the same as before: a total of $5 million in this first year of the new model, Michael Maness, Knight’s vice president of journalism and media innovation told me.

In the first installment of the new-look News Challenge, which opens Feb. 27 and closes on St. Patrick’s Day, the focus is on networks, a topic that’s purposefully broad. As they explained in the blog post introducing the new challenge:

There are a lot of vibrant networks and platforms, on- and off-line, that can be used to connect us with the news and information we need to make decisions about our lives. This challenge will not fund new networks. Rather, we’re asking you to describe ways you might use existing platforms to drive innovation in media and journalism.

When I asked Maness what that means, he said applicants should focus on how existing systems can be used to deliver information in new ways. Instead of coming to Knight with a pitch for the next Facebook, talk about how your proposal could use it better. “We’re saying there are already robust tools on the internet. Let’s use those,” Maness said. (Sorry, aspiring Zuckerbergs.)

For Knight, the networks that matter aren’t just your Facebooks and Twitters and Pinterests and LinkedIns. There’s also the network of Knight-funded projects, initiatives, and people. (A network that, full disclosure, includes this site, a Knight grantee.) Last year’s class of News Challenge winners included a number of projects that built on early News Challenge winners, and efforts like Knight’s “test kitchen” at Northwestern are aimed in part at assembling and recombining the pieces of other innovative efforts.

Other Knight grantees have long been a source of support and information for News Challenge winners, Maness said. But more broadly, those networks of existing technology and other platforms can be a stepping stone to success, and ultimately sustainability, he said. What Knight is saying, to a point, is your chances of making it increase if you aren’t starting from the ground floor, building something that might not have the momentum to survive once the funding runs out. “If something can grow and fend for itself it can have a broader impact,” Maness said.

By dropping the open-source requirement, Maness said the foundation can better help people on all ends of the spectrum, from early-stage projects to those that are already established. One example: a company that might need a nudge to get to the next level but don’t want to show their code just yet. But Maness said Knight still wants to encourage open-source development because that can help future projects and, on a philosophical level, is good for the web. “Ultimately our goal is social return on what we do, so [a project] has to be something that makes sense to what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.

The overarching message seems to be a desire to cast as wide a net as possible to spur innovation in journalism and community information. By pulling back on past restrictions, while emphasizing things like impact and scalability, Knight is also trying to be a smarter, more agile organization that can ensure a return (even if its not a monetary one) on their investments. In that same way, they also want to leverage the institutions, people, and technology that are already available in the world of journalism — especially those Knight helped lay the groundwork for.

And they want to do it fast — faster than a year at a time. “Over the course of five years, what started as being radical at the time…the speed of the Internet and disruption happened so much faster,” Maness said. “We wanted to focus on making a contest that was faster and more nimble.”

The incredible growth of Pinterest — the (invitation-only) social bulletin board dominated by young and female users — hasn’t gone unnoticed by news organizations. Like Tumblr before it, Pinterest offers the chance to reach massive, sharing-oriented new audiences — but also requires a different, more visual kind of editorial thinking. The Wall Street Journal is giving it an early try by looping in another booming young social app.

The Journal has deployed nine journalists to cover Fashion Week in New York, all armed with iPhones and Instagram accounts. They are encouraged to file constantly. (For fashion reporters, capturing photos is a form of note-taking.) Their tweets and images are automatically pulled into the Fashion Week section of the Journal’s website. The best ones are featured on Pinterest and re-posted on the Journal’s main Instagram account. The two social networks are perfect companions.

Pinterest is a “really fast-growing social network that a lot of people are super-excited about,” said WSJ social-media editor Emily Steel, who used to cover digital advertising and marketing for the paper — “a lot of people both in the digital media/marketing/tech world, but also consumers who are really into fashion and arts and crafts and food.” In other words, people who may not be big Journal readers.

I was embarrassed to tell Steel I didn’t know the Journal even covered fashion.

“One of the fashion reporters, Elizabeth Holmes — she’s super active on Twitter and Instagram and social media — and what she said is that she’s always gotten a really big boost in followers during Fashion Week, and that people will tell her that they didn’t realize that the Journal covered fashion,” Steel told me. “That’s also kind of the idea with Pinterest…It’s a cool way to expose the Journal’s content to some people who might not know about it.”

The Journal’s Fashion Week pinboard has attracted about 900 followers so far. The Instagram account, a few weeks old, is approaching 8,000 followers.

Steel said she took notice of Pinterest users sharing WSJ content among themselves. A few weeks ago the Journal started building out its own Pinterest boards — a board for hedcuts, those famous dot drawings of newsmakers; a board for historic WSJ front pages; a board for WSJ Magazine covers.

Sometimes it feels like social media moves as fast as fashion. At this time a year ago, Instagram was almost brand new but had already signed up more than a million users. Pinterest was barely on the radar.

Today Instagram has 15 million users and signs up a new user every second, according to the company. This month Pinterest reached 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, according to data obtained by TechCrunch, “crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.” Visitors spend an average of 98 minutes per month browsing that site.

Jeff Sonderman said “it’s time for journalists to pay attention to Pinterest,” with its loyal, distinct audience. Time, LIFE, Newsweek, PBS NewsHour, and Mashable are among the other news outlets dipping their toes in the water.

Photo of Aisha Tyler in Badgley Mischka by Elizabeth Holmes/The Wall Street Journal, via Instagram

The massive changes we’re seeing in California journalism portend even faster journalistic change across the country. We Californians like to believe we’re always at the birth of the new new, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Certainly, that’s been true of news change — and now that change has greatly accelerated, doing spins, free falls, reversals of fortune, and lots more. It’s not really change — it’s chaos. No one can tell what the journalistic landscape of the state may look like in, say, 2014. All we can say with certainty: we’re witnessing the death and life of California news.

Who will own the biggest news media? Who will manage the biggest news media? How much of a life in print will be left for newspapers as they go digital? And, of course, how many journalists will be paid to get the news to the state’s 37 million residents and to the rest of the country? Already, well over 1,000 daily newspaper journalists have lost their jobs over the past five-plus years.

How many new combinations — among news entities formerly known as newspapers, broadcast, and digital news startups — will emerge and grow to scale? Those combinations are already beginning to tax legacy imaginations, and as of this week, we’ve got a new intriguing model to add to the mix.

The promise of California Watch’s model

Tuesday, we saw a new model birthed: the friendly takeover of one digital news startup by another. California Watch, the almost-three-year-old statewide-oriented model of a modern news agency, is merging with Bay Citizen, the two-plus-year-old Bay Area-oriented news startup, which has had more than its share of birthing pangs.

Both sites were born in the depth of the recession and a relatively dark period of Bay Area journalism. (See “Bay Area Online News Renaissance: 7 Pointers Forward.”) Both hired talented staffs (from voluminous applications) and won journalism awards. Yet California Watch, built on $5 million in foundation funding, developed under the wing of the Center for Investigative Reporting (itself founded way back in 1977). It has prospered, grown, and earned quick legitimacy and even respect from the state’s major media, which run its stories. CIR, which has long focused on investigative pieces of national import, is now largely synonymous with California Watch; it’s one organization made up of 30 journalists (writers, editors, producers, data analysts, and more) and nine other staffers.

We’re seeing in the merger the greater strength of the California Watch model. Call it B2B (business-to-business), a statewide news agency re-imagined for this century. It’s a model being eyed by journalists in some of the other 49 states: Produce muscular, multimedia journalism once (with a little tailoring of stories by market) and distribute it to many news outlets, from Voice of San Diego to KABC-TV in L.A. to the San Francisco Chronicle. These news distributors pay small sums for the stories, but the money is adding up. Increase the flow of journalism, in the Bay Area specifically and California more widely, and the networking “new wire” importance of California Watch grows, especially as struggling dailies continue to cut their own content-originating staffs.

Bay Citizen foundered on leadership and strategic disagreements, on personalities, on the editorial priorities muddied by the otherwise-valuable feeding-stories-to the-regional-edition-of-The-New-York-Times program, and more. That’s all history now.

CIR/California Watch executive director Robert Rosenthal, and his former boss at the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein — the two served as managing editor and executive editor, respectively in the last decade — now face strategic and operational decisions on how best to put together the combined nonprofit. Bronstein, who has served as president of the CIR board, now serves as the executive chair of the merged organization, in part owing to the last wishes of the Bay Citizen benefactor Warren Hellman, who died unexpectedly in December. Two long-time daily newspaper guys, now able to build a new news model outside the constraints of constant cost-cutting and legacy hand-wringing. The foundation is set, with such stories as “On Shaky Ground” (“The newsonomics of a single investigative story“), which won over many editor skeptics.

For the moment, the big news out of this move is this: the potential to establish a new local model of scale and capacity. California Watch/Bay Citizen will be able to move forward with an editorial staff of more than 50, providing a scale that’s been needed to fill the yawning vacuum of local and statewide coverage. National investigative nonprofits from ProPublica to the Center for Public Integrity have stepped up their work, in volume and value, as newspaper-based coverage has slipped. In America, though, it’s a local-to-statewide news — across the 3,500-mile expanse of the country — that’s been crying out for bigger, new models to build on the successes of the MinnPosts and Texas Tribunes.

MediaNews dives into Digital First

The merger isn’t the only big news news in the Bay Area; it’s just the most public.

MediaNews — the largest news publisher by circulation in the state, with more than 30 dailies and great strength in the Bay Area, north of the Bay Area, and in greater L.A. — is about to be shaken to its Dean Singleton foundation. Singleton built the company, deal by deal, and assembled a coalition of willing executives to run the businesses and newsrooms.

They clustered, they cut, and they maneuvered through bankruptcy, and now their leader has been pushed into retirement, replaced by the wild, private-equity-bankrolled revolutionaries from Digital First/Journal Register Company (JRC). CEO John Paton and company moved rapidly (especially in newspaper time) to turn the financially and editorially bankrupt JRC upside down, lopping legacy costs, shooting voluminous video, opening newsrooms, and jettisoning anything and everything that didn’t smell of local.

That’s easier done in New Haven and Macomb that it is in San Jose and L.A. Applying faster, digital-first fixes to larger newsrooms and newspaper operations offers a complexity of challenge that will makes good drama for the rest of us. Expect to see rolling retirements of the Old Guard, with Denver Post CEO Jerry Grilly already announced.

Reorganizing newspapers on paper (or computer) is one thing — the new management knows its toughest and first challenge can be summed up in one word: culture. Yes, after the newspaper industry has been half-sized, culture, good, bad, and silly, is usually the first challenge new management faces in pushing change.

As MediaNews’ California properties change, they’ll change the landscape around them. Expect differing kinds of new competition and new potentials for unorthodox partnerships. Partner up, in fact, the MediaNews turmoil with those of another high-profile experiment: Patch.

The hyperlocal shoot of AOL, it has made a big bet on California. Of its 800-plus sites, 132 are based here. Many of the sites are lively, with good features, calendars, and lots of local, if episodic, bloggers — even if the sites don’t come close to living up to Patch’s tagline: “Hi there, we’re Patch, your source for local knowledge you can’t live without.” AOL, of course, won’t release traffic data, but its latest financial report showed that its $120 million investment isn’t close to bringing in enough ad revenue. That’s confirmed by checking on the sites (national ads prevail) or attending a local Patch-sponsored community meeting, as I did last Friday. Second question from the audience: “Why don’t you have local ads?”

Given Digital First’s open-newsroom strategy and philosophy, Patch is particularly vulnerable to the MediaNews changes. MediaNews can do what Patch is doing — and cover the news with more than single reporter/editors. Or MediaNews properties could partner with Patch.

Don’t think that Bay Area media change is restricted to text and print. KGO Radio, the market’s long-time talk leader, saw its talk line-up of multiple decades jettisoned one night in December — to public uproar, where else, but on Facebook — as it embraces the all-news (broadcast and digital) mantra and goes head-to-head with KCBS.

Public radio on the move in L.A.

Moving briefly to the south, we can see that the change is only prologue.

If Californians like to be first, they can be the first to claim one metro area with three — count ‘em, three — bankrupt daily newspapers. That would be metro Los Angeles. Both MediaNews (Los Angeles News Group, or LANG, with holdings like the Daily News, the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Pasadena Star-News) and Freedom Communications (Orange County Register) fell into bankruptcy and emerged quickly from it, with banker and private equity owners. Then last summer, the two tried to mate, as Alden Global Capital, holding about 40 percent of each, tried to arrange an arms-length (tough to negotiate with yourself within the bounds of law) marriage and somehow failed. Tribune’s Los Angeles Times entered bankruptcy in December 2008 and has yet to emerge from equity owner/bondholder hell. Those three companies continue to gyrate in the marketplace, maneuvering within their increasingly limited options.

With L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein assuming the Tribune CEO title as well last spring, the Times has been shaking up its strategy and management, edging into its own digital-first territory. One clue: the November appointment of a quartet of new VPs tried to find new harmony in digital revenue. They include Jennifer Collins from Variety and Andrea Nunn from HBO, giving an indication the newspaper company is trying to stretch well beyond its roots. They move in as long-time Times chief revenue officer John O’Loughlin moves out, having just assumed the president’s job in a exec-suite reorg at the Houston Chronicle.

Among the Times’ many options: a flipping-the-switch bet that would have it abandon some print to cut costs and become more heavily digital faster.

Ahead of still more staff cuts, the Times lost its change-oriented editor, Russ Stanton, in December — and then saw him hired by public-media mover KPCC as VP of content. Even a few years ago, that would have seemed a bizarre career move. The editor of The Los Angeles Times goes to lead the news effort at a local public radio station?

Yet when you compare the two enterprises — today — you see one in decline and one believing in its own upside.

Yes, The Los Angeles Times still has (today) 500-plus newsroom people, and KPCC can claim fewer than 60. But as the Times cuts, though, the Southern California Public Radio (SCPR) board has given the go-ahead to double its newsroom to more than 110 by July 1, 2014, needing to raise $24 million over four years to do it. Already raised toward that goal: $8 million so far. Already hired: 20 people in the last year. For 2012 alone, the plan is to bring in at least 13 more news positions — including producers, editors, bloggers, and hosts.

Those numbers are curious ones, but still seem small. Don’t, however, under-estimate SCPR president Bill Davis. Davis is a public media exec in the mold of his mentor Bill Kling, the Minnesota Public Radio visionary entrepreneur who first outlined how public radio could become public media and move into the local news vacuum. In fact, MPR, through its joint parent American Public Media subsidiary, is a sibling to KPCC.

Davis knows how to raise money, and he sees the journalistic devastation that’s enveloped his city. Add that energy and ability to the mix and the journalistic arithmetic begins to change. Five hundred newsroom people at the L.A. Times sounds like an army. Peel off the parts of that army that are devoted to sports, entertainment, and the production of content (as opposed to the creation of it), and you may be down to a couple of hundred who report the local news.

That local news — sans entertainment and sports — is what the expanded KPCC plan aims at. So let’s say that KPCC could get to 100 (Kling’s magic number) in the next several years, as public-spirited citizens (a la Philadelphia and Chicago?) chip in to create and sustain a local news alternative. Let’s say the Times continues to reel, run aground on the shoals of legacy costs, and its newsroom, already dispirited, trims down to 150 local news creators. As Rick Santorum said not long ago in Iowa: Ballgame.

Finally, let’s head to the border. There, the San Diego Union-Tribune, worth a billion dollars a decade ago, has been sold twice in three years. This time, local developer Doug Manchester bought it and promises to turn the newspaper of record in California’s second biggest city into a booster sheet. Across town, online startup Voice of San Diego — a California Watch affiliate which just had to cut staff due to budget cuts — has recently partnered with the local NBC station for news coverage.

Mix ’em, match ’em. It’s a Mating Game that seems like it could only come out of California.

California map puzzle piece image by Calsidyrose used under a Creative Commons license.

There’s a reason why The Onion’s recent HuffPo-tweaking satire — ‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine / Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine — resonated with so many reporters. “It’s because nobody wants to feel like a cog,” Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman told me. “I think it’s our fear as journalists that we’re turning into cogs of a machine.”

Lauerman referenced that Onion piece in a Tuesday blog post that outlined a simple yet fundamental shift in Salon’s approach: publish less, and focus instead on producing original, high-impact journalism.

The value of original reporting might be obvious, but Lauerman says he was shocked how dramatically this new strategy appears to have increased Salon’s traffic in December and January. In an industry that has at times begrudgingly hailed aggregation as essential (even central) to attracting the eyeballs and SEO necessary for journalistic survival, Lauerman found the opposite could also be true.

“It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. You’re spending a lot of time on someone else’s work. You’re more motivated when you’re pursuing your own work.”

In December and January, Salon published 33 percent fewer posts than it had in those same months the previous years — but it saw 40 percent greater traffic. Slashing the amount of content it published by a third, the site still logged record-high unique visitor numbers — 7.23 million at the end of January — and without any “big viral hits” that would have skewed the numbers, Lauerman said.

This isn’t just heartening from a business perspective, it reaffirms a principle that many journalists still hold dear. “Most people in our industry are dying to hear good news, particularly the kind that emphasizes our instincts,” Lauerman said. “Good work matters, and can be rewarded.”

Getting to this point has been “so organic” that Lauerman says he can’t say exactly where or how it began. He does remember the low-point that preceded Salon’s shift, and it involved — perhaps appropriately — Charlie Sheen and his very public meltdown last winter.

“I remember we had aggregated a Charlie Sheen story, and I saw it tweeted a lot,” Lauerman said. “It wasn’t a really interesting essay, just the latest news breaking. I saw TweetDeck, and I was watching all of our peers — either before or after us — tweet the exact same story. I thought, ‘This is how it ends. This is grim. We’re all just sort of regurgitating the same thing over and over again.”

Soon thereafter, Salon welcomed back founder David Talbot, who again became the site’s CEO last July. Talbot’s return marked another step away from aggregation. “It seemed totally logical to him, and he really wanted us to be ambitious and aggressive and break stories that really matter to our readers,” Lauerman said. “Focus less on doing pieces that could be found anywhere else.”

In other words, instead of racing to catch up on the same stories as everyone else, why not produce the stories that the aggregators will scramble to reproduce? Of course, not all aggregation is recreated equally. Value added from one news organization can advance a story in a critical way, as well as answer or raise important questions. Looking at the lifespan of a story (or a news organization), aggregation can also be an entry point — one that then naturally leads to original reporting.

“I thought, ‘This is how it ends. This is grim. We’re all just sort of regurgitating the same thing over and over again.”

But ultimately, Lauerman said, the time it takes to aggregate really well is still time away from original reporting. “It’s kind of the worst of both worlds,” Lauerman said. “You’re spending a lot of time on someone else’s work. You’re more motivated when you’re pursuing your own work.”

Salon isn’t abandoning aggregation entirely, but Lauerman can point to instances where he is proud of the decision to pursue boots-on-the-ground reporting instead. He sent reporter Irin Carmon to Mississippi to cover the personhood movement, which argues for a legal definition of life beginning at conception.

“A year or two ago we would have said, ‘Let’s stay on that and blog it, cover it form afar,’ and you could have done a fine job with that,” Lauerman said. Instead, Carmon returned to New York with “a totally original piece of reporting, and a great piece of journalism.”

“For an online site, it’s much easier to just blog at a distance,” Lauerman said. “Easier and safer. But I don’t think there’s any substitute for doing that kind of shoe-leather reporting.”

The fact that readers appear to agree with him is what’s shaping Salon’s identity going forward. In coming months, you can expect to see more resources devoted to Salon’s campaign coverage, new bylines from freelancers who can devote time to in-depth reporting projects, and a site redesign. Internally, the most immediate change — the one already underway — may be a sense of liberation. Lauerman calls the shift “piecemeal” and says it will be largely up to staffers to figure out how they can best contribute to the site’s evolving overarching mission.

“Steve Kornacki, for example, I can see the back of his head from where I’m sitting right now,” Lauerman said. “He’s a machine. He writes four or five times a day and they’re all thoughtful pieces. I don’t really want him to slow down unless he has a piece that he really wants to spend time developing. Then we’d have that conversation right away. Even a year ago, I think it would be hard for people to get the break they needed to write…For pieces that really take time, you’ve got to clear the decks, spend time working phones and log off for a little while.”

Salon may be bucking the aggregation trend, but it’s not alone. To take one high-profile example, the viral aggregator Buzzfeed had taken big steps toward producing exclusive content.

“People are coming to the same conclusions, and they’re the oldest conclusions in our business,” Lauerman said. “You’ve got to be original to really thrive. It’s the most honest metric of all.”

Charlie Sheen photo by Angela George used under a Creative Commons license.

One hundred Internet years ago, in 2010, Dan Sinker got together with Mozilla and the Knight Foundation to push more news organizations to embrace the open web. Five technologists were selected as News Technology fellows, charged with bringing the “show your work” ethos to traditional newsrooms across the country.

The fellowships are just getting underway, but now Sinker wants to solve a new problem: Suddenly news organizations are hiring coders, data visualizers, and product managers like crazy — The Washington Post alone has 17 openings in IT and engineering! — but there aren’t enough people to fill the jobs.

Today Knight and Mozilla announced a new name and expanded scope for the News Technology Partnership, reborn as OpenNews. The project will turn its focus more toward getting developers excited about newsrooms, not the other way around. There are plans for more hack days, a new website to share code and lessons learned, and new educational materials for the code-curious. The core function of the project, the fellowship program, will stick around, but Sinker said they are tinkering with the particulars of future fellowships.

“The big problem right now is, Where are the developers?”

“If you talk to some of the newsrooms that are ahead of the curve…the big problem right now for them is, Where are the developers?” Sinker told me. It’s barely a year-and-a-half-old phenomenon. “That is not a problem that is unique to news. It’s a problem that is unique to every single person that is trying to hire developers in 2012, including startups.”

Yeah, I said, but startups have the advantage. More money and sex appeal than newspapers.

“That’s probably a cop-out of an argument. I think if you look at some of the unbelievable talent that exists in news right now — people like Brian Boyer or all the people at The New York Times, you’ve got people who could be doing work and did do work in well-paying jobs at startups or in financial services or things like that,” he said.

“The argument for better-paying jobs is like, well, why does anyone become a journalist? Why don’t they all go into PR? They’re good at writing. They’re good at telling people things about things. Well, they do it because they want to do good. They do it because they want to change the world, and not just sell something.”

Sinker said he is borrowing from the success of the open-government movement. A lot more news developers today come from hack days than j-school, he said. Knight and Mozilla did host hack days last year, but those were more like meetups and brainstorms, Sinker said. What Sinker has in mind are heads-down coding marathons. He said OpenNews wants to sponsor more self-hosted hack days, as well.

The OpenNews team is also developing a new website, Source, to help support the news developer community as it grows bigger. Think Stack Overflow + GitHub for journalists. (Sinker DM’d me after this piece went up: “I’d say Source is less Stack Overflow + Github, and more Nieman Lab + A List Apart.”)

“You’ve got a ton of teams that are documenting their work. You’ve got a bunch of GitHub repos, you’ve got all kinds of action happening around it, but there’s no real center point,” he explained. “That was kind of the seed of Source, was, Man it would be handy if there’s a place you could go and just find out what’s going on in all of these teams.”

And Sinker is working with the Mozilla Learning Team to figure out how to inculcate new journo-hackers. “I think you see it a lot at a Hacks/Hackers meetup,” he said, “journalists who really don’t have a lot of web skills at all but they really want to learn it.” He is developing an online curriculum that would ease newbies into HTML, CSS, and data visualization.

Full disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The Internet may have disrupted traditional journalism schedules — no need to wait for the 6 p.m. news or the next morning’s paper — but that doesn’t mean timing doesn’t still matter. How many minutes pass before a reporter gets on the scene of breaking news. How much daylight is left between writing and an impending deadline. And maybe most importantly, when it’s time to publish. Timing can affect how broadly a piece is read, whether it leads coverage in other outlets, and whether it spurs investigation and legislation. The trick of timing is maybe even more crucial in the world of monthly magazines, where the time necessary to produce a story can be out of sync with both the regular news cycle and the day paper hits newsstands.

Yesterday GQ and Esquire published dueling stories online on Terry Thompson and his zoo in Zanesville, Ohio, the one that grabbed the world’s attention last October when the animals were set loose. I’d encourage you to read (or at least Instapaper) them both: Here’s Chris Jones’s “Animals” in Esquire, and Chris Heath’s “The Insane True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape” in GQ. These are the stories magazines are made for, probing and colorful, with a subject just familiar — and bizarre — enough that readers don’t have to spend much time recalling the basic facts. Both stories don’t officially hit newsstands until next week. But what makes this case interesting is that Esquire, in trying to get a jump on marketing the piece and put a little multimedia muscle behind it, may have tipped its hand a little early.

Sunday night, Esquire released a short trailer for Jones’ piece on Esquire.com. Less than a minute in length, the trailer combines audio from interviews and 911 calls with images from Thompson’s compound. It was a novel new approach to getting readers attention to a magazine story; it also didn’t hurt that the trailer was the perfect bite size portion for flittering around Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Speaking to Brian Stelter, deputy editor Peter Griffin said when editor-in-chief David Granger “remarked that the article ‘read like a movie,’ I said we should promote it like the action movie of the winter, so let’s do a trailer.”

A smart, fun, idea, but one that perhaps ended up costing Esquire a hint of exclusivity as Heath’s GQ’s story saw the light of day a few hours later. In response, Esquire posted its piece online, a decision that did not escape Jones’ notice:

Thanks to GQ posting their own Zanesville story, mine is now up: tinyurl.com/79mbd95

— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) February 6, 2012

Jones also tweeted that he and Heath stayed in the same hotel in Zanesville while covering the story, which means both had an idea the other was on the trail, but may have been uncertain when their stories would come out of the oven ready for readers.

@tommytomlinson: I found that fear of being embarrassed by a rival national magazine was an excellent motivator.

— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) February 7, 2012

Condé Nast spokesperson Corey Wilson told me over email GQ doesn’t typically publish stories ahead of the magazine online unless there are special circumstances. (Like, say, an interview with Katherine McPhee posted ahead of her show “Smash” debuting on NBC.)

The Internet, and by extension social media, have done a lot for making news organizations more transparent — sometimes willingly, sometimes not — about how they produce their journalism. But at a certain level, magazines are still behind a veil. Maybe it’s the culture that surrounds the world of magazines, or perhaps that, aside from the newsweeklies, many magazines rely on a mix of news and features each issue that isn’t easy to predict.

But like everyone else in the journalism world magazines have also been dragged into the new realities of online media, where websites need elements of timeliness, relevance, and stickiness, to be successful. Even as magazines face declines in print circulation and challenges for visibility online, it’s never been easier to promote their work and try to build anticipation around stories. Of course, readers today sometimes have little tolerance for anticipation, as we saw last year when Rolling Stone tried to tease its profile of Stanley McChrystal. The Internet wasn’t having it, and in the time it took for the piece to get on RollingStone.com, the magazine paid a price.

(For what it’s worth, as of this morning, Esquire’s winning the Facebook battle — 420 “likes” for its story vs. 296 for GQ’s — but GQ’s winning the Twitter battle 161-89.)

Think of Reuters Social Pulse as a social-media weapon for the C-suite set. That’s because the newly debuted dashboard is designed to make the world of social media less of a shiny toy and more of a daily intelligence tool.

Even as it tries to branch out to reach broader audiences through its news service, Reuters knows its core market is the business set — managers, officers, decision makers. Information is the core of Reuters’ business (even more so Thomson Reuters’) and Social Pulse is their newest attempt at creating a product that can merge their editorial vision and data proficiency. 

“We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with.”

Social Pulse mines things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Klout (we’ll get to that in a moment) to provide concise summaries of news, conversation and sentiment analysis as it pertains to leading companies. The proposed value proposition is in turning those social outputs — which haven’t always reached the corner office as much as the newsroom — into a refined and polished product, said Alex Leo, director of news product for Reuters Digital. “We wanted a social page that was more than trending topics, which are often ‘Rihanna nude,’ which isn’t something our audience necessary cares about,” Leo told me.

Social Pulse breaks down into three big components: the Hit List, a stock sentiment module, and the Reuters & Klout 50, a ranking of CEOs based on their social activity. The Hit List scans the followers of Reuters Twitter accounts (both official and personal) as well as their journalists to find which stories are getting the most mentions and aggregates the top news. (They use Percolate, the same company that makes Counterparties, the Felix Salmon/Ryan McCarthy joint, possible.) The stock sentiment tool, which tracks the mood around specific companies in parallel to changes in their stock price, is powered by a service called WiseWindow. Leo called WiseWindow’s approach to sentiment analysis more nuanced than most, thanks to a combination of keyword tracking, language processing, and predictive modeling. “They can tell the difference between you calling Mitt Romney mean, which is negative, and saying ‘Taylor Swift plays a mean guitar,’ which is positive,” she said.

And then there’s the Reuters & Klout 50, which resembles a yearbook of the most socially active CEOs in the country, featuring names like Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Oprah, Mark Cuban, Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, and Gawker’s Nick Denton, among others. On a daily basis the rankings will shift among a pre-set list of 100 CEOs, winnowed down to 50 based on their Klout. It’s like the CEO equivalent of NFL power rankings or Mediaite’s Power Grid, but based purely on social media acumen. Reuters hopes that competitive spirit will make it catnip for business leaders. It could also be a motivator, Leo said: “There are so many people and so many executives who have their toe in Twitter,” she said. “Some of them are using the social web effectively, and some are not.” (One would hope a CEO would be motivated primarily by factors other than an urge to out-Klout Kevin Rose, but who knows.)

Just as a marketplace developed around aggregating disparate news feeds, a new one is forming for services that can coalesce the raw noise of social networks. Like any good media company, Reuters has tried to be diligent in using the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and now of course YouTube to bring its journalism to new audiences and expand their brand. Social Pulse is an experiment in finding new ways to use these systems as more than just communication channels either in reporting or as solo products, Leo said. “We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with,” she said. “It doesn’t end here — if things are really popular on Social Pulse they will be added elsewhere.”

It also represents a way of bringing all of the company’s various social strands together into one hub. That is, other than Reuters one-man social-media hub Anthony De Rosa. The Reuters social media editor will also have a presence on the site offering up links, liveblogs and more, because, as Leo joked, “You can’t have a social part of Reuters without having Anthony be a part of it.” The man is, after all, the “undisputed king of Tumblr” — take that, Cats with Bread! — but there’s a reason the likes of De Rosa and Salmon have risen to prominence at Reuters: They represent a kind of bridge between what the media company was and what they’d like to become. Social Pulse appears to be another step in that, a way of amplifying and enhancing Reuters journalism for both their core and new audience.

“I wanted to make the Anthonys of the world happy and the wealth managers of the world happy, and everyone else in between excited,” Leo said. 

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report today that suggests Facebook users are not a uniformly active bunch. According to the study, the typical Facebook user gets more friend requests than she sends, is tagged in photos more than she tags, and has posts Liked more often than she Likes herself.

But wait — shouldn’t it all even out? After all, every friend request has a requester and a requestee. If a typical user is skews passive on Facebook, where’s all the action coming from?

The answer: a collection of “power users” who, according to the report, are becoming specialists of a sort. You know that friend who only posts tons of photos, or the one who goes on a Liking spree, or the one who seems to rack up an inordinate amount of friends? Yup, they’re doing the work for the rest of us. Even on a flat platform, behavior still moves toward a division of labor:

A proportion of Facebook participants — ranging between 20% and 30% of users depending on the type of activity — were power users who performed these same activities at a much higher rate; daily or more than weekly.

Essentially, in the funny parlance you could only get in a report about Facebook: “People are liked more than they like.” Some data:

Facebook users in our sample on average contributed about four comments for every status update that they made. On average, users make nine status updates per month and contribute 21 comments. Some 33% of Facebook users here updated their status at least once per week. Still, half of our sample made no status updates in the month of our analysis.

Discussion of social media circles around the word “engagement” — but even for many users of social networks, the experience is more about taking-it-all-in than about response and conversation. For a news industry with a long history of one-way communication, that might be a little…comforting? Facebook’s value, at least to media and other companies looking to tap into audiences, is that it’s a super-broad platform built for content and transactional activity. A link is posted; it’s rewarded with a like. A question is asked; it elicits comments. The Pew survey paints a picture where that action is less than reliable:

A third of our sample (33%) used the like button at least once per week during this month, and 37% had content they contributed liked by a friend at least once per week. However, the majority of Facebook users neither liked content, nor was their content liked by others, in our month of observation.

If Facebook activity disproportionately relies on a subset of power users with busy hands, that’s an opening for news outlets or individual journalists to fill that need. The conversation is far more distributed than it was pre-Internet, but it’s still not evenly distributed.

Pew says that Facebook comment-leaving is a bit more reciprocal than some other kinds of Facebook behavior:

More than half our sample (55%) commented on a friend’s content at least once in the month, and 51% received comments from a friend. A large segment of users, a little over 20%, contributed or received a comment every day. The average of 21 comments given on friends’ content was nearly identical to the average of 20 that were received. Again, there are some extreme users as well, about 5% of our sample contributed and received over 100 comments in the month of our observation.

Pew’s data is based on a sample of 269 Facebook users, initially identified through a random phone survey, but who then allowed Pew to track their trails on the site. While its findings may give a (slight) challenge to the idea that Facebook is a heavily engaged network where everyone’s sharing all the time, the report still found big, enticing numbers for any publishing looking to reach a big audience: The median user in their sample is within two degrees of separation (friends of friends) of 31,170 people on Facebook. (For one uber-connected user, that number was 7,821,772.) We already know Facebook is growing as a top referrer to many news sites, so what’s clear from this report is that they need to keep it up. If power users are the straw that stirs the drink on Facebook, then it’s more important than ever for journalists and media companies play an active role.

Meh button by Ken Murphy used under a Creative Commons license.

Twitter spells out its censorship policy: Just a couple of weeks after the SOPA/PIPA fight came to a head, Twitter pushed the discussion about online censorship a bit further when it announced late last week a new policy for censoring tweets: When Twitter gets requests from governments to block tweets containing what they deem illegal speech, its new policy will allow it to block those tweets only to readers within that country, leaving it visible to the rest of the world. Twitter will send notice that it’s blocked a tweet to the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects.

As the Guardian and The New York Times noted, much of the initial response among Twitter users consisted of complaints about censorship and the chilling of free speech in countries with oppressive regimes. The policy had critics elsewhere, too: BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin said “it’s hard to see this as anything but a huge setback and disappointment,” and the international group Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Twitter questioning the policy and urging the company to reconsider. And later, BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza pointed out that even though Twitter implied that it had already been blocking tweets at the request of governments (which would have made the new policy a reduction in censorship), it’s never actually done so — only in response to legal challenges on copyright issues.

But perhaps surprisingly, Twitter had far more defenders than critics among media observers. O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard put together the most comprehensive roundup of opinions on the subject, praising Twitter himself for “sticking up for users where it can.” Two free-speech advocates, Mike Masnick of TechDirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York, made similar arguments: When a government is demanding censorship, Twitter can either refuse and be blocked entirely in that country, or it can comply. Twitter, they said, has chosen the latter in as limited and transparent fashion as possible.

Others, like The Next Web’s Nancy Messieh, commended Twitter for shifting the censorship focus to the government — as Reuters’ Paul Smalera argued, the gray box noting that a tweet has been censored in a certain country is a black mark for that government, not Twitter. The broadest argument in Twitter’s defense came from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who, in addition to these arguments, also praised Twitter for its transparency and for allowing users an easy way to circumvent censorship.

Still others weren’t firmly on either side regarding the policy itself, but pointed to larger issues surrounding it. Media prof C.W. Anderson said that while Twitter did the best it could under the circumstances but showed it doesn’t have any values that override its place as a business: “non-market values are, in the long run, incompatible with the logic of the market, and what Twitter is trying to do now is reconcile what it believes with what the market needs it to do.” Tech pioneer Dave Winer called for people to learn to be able to organize themselves outside of Twitter’s infrastructure and the possibly of censorship.

In a pair of thoughtful posts, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram advised caution in trusting Twitter, recognizing that like Google and Facebook, it’s a business whose interests might not align with our own. The EFF’s York and Eva Galperin encouraged users and observers to keep a close eye on Twitter in order to keep them accountable for adhering to their professed beliefs.

Facebook goes public: Facebook’s much-anticipated filing for a public stock offering came on Wednesday, and The New York Times and Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land have the best quick-hit summaries of the S-1 document. The big numbers are mind-bogglingly big: 845 million monthly active users, $5 billion in stock, $3.71 billion in revenue last year, $1 billion in profit. Of that revenue, 85% came from advertising, and 12% came from the social gaming giant Zynga alone. (All Things D has the background on that relationship.) And when you average it out, Facebook’s only getting $4.39 in revenue per active user.

Aside from the numbers, among the other items of interest from the filings was its risk assessment — as summarized by Mashable, it sees slowing expected growth, difficulty in making money off of mobile access, competition from the likes of Google and Twitter, and global government censorship as some of its main risk factors. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders, annotated with delightful snark by Wired’s Tim Carmody, which includes the explanation of a company code Zuckerberg calls “The Hacker Way.” Forbes’ Andy Greenberg made one of the first of what’s sure to be many comparisons between The Hacker Way and Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram took note of the grandiosity of Zuckerberg’s stated mission to rewire the world.

Two main questions emerged in commentary on the filing: How much is Facebook really worth? And what happens to Facebook now? To the first question, as The New York Times pointed out on the eve of Facebook’s filing, the company’s massive net worth is a stark indicator of the booming value of personal data collected online. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum took the opposite tack, wondering why Facebook gets so little money out of each of its hundreds of millions of users before concluding that “Facebook is still a young business figuring out how to sell ads and figuring it how aggressive it can get without ticking off users.”

To the second question, Mathew Ingram noted that going public is usually a way for tech companies to get the financing they need to build up for some major growth — something Facebook has already done. So, he asked, is this just an attempt for Facebook’s employees and backers to cash out, and the end of the company’s most productive growth phase? Leaning on tech entrepreneurship leader John Battelle, Wired’s Tim Carmody and Mike Isaac reasoned that Facebook is mature enough already that in order to attain the growth it’s promising, it needs to be in the midst of some massive changes as a company. A couple of guesses at some of those specific changes: More ads and purchases of tech companies (Fast Company) and a big ramp-up in mobile ads (Marketing Land).

Murdoch’s candor amid scandal: The phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has continued to spread (rather quietly here in the States, but much more prominently in the U.K.), and it may have turned yet another corner with the arrest last weekend of four journalists from News Corp.’s Sun, significantly deepening the scandal beyond the now-defunct News of the World, where it began.

News Corp. has also turned over an enormous new trove of data which, along with the arrests, could begin to seriously threaten News Corp.’s other British newspapers, including the Times, according to the Guardian’s Nick Davies. British j-prof Roy Greenslade reported that many Sun staffers are worried that they may not be part of News Corp. much longer.

In the midst of all this, Murdoch’s feisty Twitter account continues unfettered, prompting praise from The New York Times’ David Carr for his refreshing candor. Mathew Ingram agreed that this “sources go direct” approach should be viewed as a boon, not a challenge, to serious journalism. The AP’s Jonathan Stray had perhaps the best summation of the relationship between sources using their own platforms and journalism: “When they want you to know, sources will go direct. When they don’t… that’s journalism.”

Reading roundup: It was a relatively quiet week outside of the big Twitter and Facebook stories, but there were still some cool nuggets to be found:

— Facebook’s relatively new Twitter-like Subscribe feature continues to draw complaints of rampant spam. Those criticisms have been led by Jim Romenesko, but this week the New York Daily News and Slate’s Katherine Goldstein chimed in, voicing concerns in particular about inappropriate comments directed toward women. Meanwhile, Mashable’s Todd Wasserman said Subscribe is ruining the News Feed.

— Big news in the journalism-academy world: Columbia and Stanford are teaming up to create a new Institute for Media Innovation, thanks to a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.

— Jay Rosen posted an inspiring interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Tracy Samantha Schmidt, gleaning some useful insights on how to nurture an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit within a large organization, rather than a startup.

— Megan Garber of The Atlantic presented the results of a Hot or Not-style study that determined what type of Twitter content people like. Here’s what they don’t like: Old news, Twitter jargon, personal details, negativity, and lack of context.

Rupert Murdoch photo by David Shankbone and original Twitter bird by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

But we get that news in different ways. Some turn to Twitter; others turn to email. Some jump right to their favored news site; others dive into RSS. It’s a matter of choice, but one that usually hinges on three important properties: timeliness, relevance, and readability.

When Jeremy Singer-Vine was building topheadlin.es, a mobile-ish news aggregator, this was the specific use case he had in mind. “For me, I was trying to think: What part of the day am I most wanting a different experience?” he said. “For me, it’s waking up in the morning and trying to catch up with whatever was happening.”

Singer-Vine is a programmer/reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and topheadlin.es is a sort of stealth experiment in mobile news and aggregation for the company. What it does sounds fairly simple: Every three minutes, it scans a list of 10 news sources and delivers the one top headline from each, in an unclothed layout best fit for a mobile web browser. The Journal is no different from other news outlets that offer a handful of device-specific apps for news, but in this case, Singer-Vine said, they wanted something that was specifically mobile and worked across devices. “We just wanted to experiment with the idea of doing something that wasn’t a mobile site but was mobile minded,” he said.

Sounds simple, but there’s an underlying issue under the hood. How exactly do you figure out, in code, the top headline in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and more? (That list also includes the Drudge Report, Vulture, ESPN, the Associated Press, ProPublica, and a smattering of regional papers, sports, and financial sites) In other words, how do you make an aggregator with a little more finesse?

“It aggregates news judgment,” Singer-Vine told me. “We’re looking at what are, in this case, homepage editors of big news sources think are the most important stories of the day or of the moment.” In the same way that services like News.me, Zite, or our own Fuego aggregate social news judgments (like Twitter patterns) or personal news judgments (like user behavior), topheadlin.es aggregates editorial news judgments.

Picking out a news site’s top story is an easy task for any human eye; most news homepages have a geospatial familiarity to them inspired by newspapers and bred further on the web. There is order, or at least a method, to the sameness that puts the top story in a given slot. That may speak to larger questions about design of news sites, but in this case was quite useful. What Singer-Vine did was create a way of IDing how those top slots are defined within a site’s underlying HTML and CSS and then create a rule for the app to follow when it looks for new headlines. So, for instance, topheadlin.es knows to look in the top-left corner of WSJ.com for the biggest story of the moment.

“Every site is designed differently, but within those designs they follow very consistent patterns,” he said. “We take advantage of those patterns to ID what is the top story.”

But another interesting thing happened in creating topheadlin.es: Singer-Vine inadvertently made a tool for gauging the diversity of news coverage. In a way, it’s flaw-as-feature. When topheadlin.es gives you 10 stories and five of them are about Mitt Romney winning the Florida Republican primary, that repetition isn’t exactly the most useful snapshot of news at that moment. But it is a useful sign of the intensity with which the collective news universe views one story as dominating that particular rotation of the daily cycle.

Singer-Vine said he’s still tweaking the app, and that “clumping” effect of getting the same story from different sites is one thing he’s looking to address. He also wants to see what a topic-based version of topheadlin.es would look like, with sports, money, and technology spun off into different bundles. For the time being, the project will likely remain a quiet side project; there was no official launch or announcement, and the project has spread largely through word of mouth from Journal employees, Singer-Vine said. Which more than likely means it’s picked up many of its eyeballs from heavy news consumers, the type whose media diet begins every morning similar to Singer-Vine’s. One goal for topheadlin.es to reach a broader audience is finding a way to appeal to readers who may not have as much zeal for keeping on top of the day’s news. Then again, there’s a growing market for compartmentalized, smartphone-friendly aggregators like Flipboard, Pulse, Zite and more. Singer-Vine thinks topheadlin.es can easily fit into that world.

“Even if you’re not news obsessed, it’s another way of watching the news, of bringing together disparate subjects,” Singer-Vine said.

Talk about a plum job: chief executive officer of The New York Times Company.

The Times is one of the most respected brands on the planet. It is a pinnacle of the news trade. It generated revenues of $2.32 billion in 2011, according to the latest quarterly numbers released this morning. It just announced it added 390,000 digital subscribers in 2011. (“At Almost 400,000 Digital Subscribers, Inside the NYT Pay Strategy, Year 2.“) It sits square in the middle of the planet’s media capital, New York. And yet its long-time CEO just parachuted out in a cloud of more than 20 million dollar bills, and few can come up with a shortlist of names who could, or should, take on the job.

It’s a plum job with a big pit in the middle: a pit of doubt, worry, and of straight-line arithmetic. Add up the Times’ last decade of financial woe, shared by its entire industry, and project it a little further forward, and a pit forms also in the stomach. Why would anyone want to take on such a job, and indeed, who might be among the few who have both the ability and the willingness, the courage, and the cunning?

The Times needs its next CEO to be transformational. He or she must see the set of the Times’ assets — print, digital, brand, and influence — fresh and new.

If these were the good old days, the Times could round up the usual suspects, the best operators in the trade. Newspapers, to their R&D-shunning discredit, have clung to those operational roots — the perfection of daily manufacturing of news and advertising — far too long. Those who have become the CEOs of other newspaper companies should be potential candidates, but they’re not. Most spend their days managing decline, so despite their knowledge of the trade, they’re not on the list.

Internally, a number of talented executives are is the midst of taking the business to the next level — witness the fledgling success of 2011′s digital circulation strategy. Despite the hoots and hollers from those in and around the industry, it’s a significant achievement, with about $86 million in annual revenue and little loss of traffic, as noted by Poynter’s Steve Myers. The potential of an internal appointment spurs two responses: (a) they would have done it already if they were going to do it, and (b) maybe they are going to do it, since they haven’t hired any top headhunter yet. The conventional wisdom is that no one appears to be sufficiently ready for the big job — but that’s always the case until someone moves up into the chair. As you peruse a beginning list of outsiders, consider how much safer — to Times culture — an inside appointment may seem, especially if a search process drags on.

It’s intriguing to speculate on that lack of perceived internal readiness. My sense: It’s as much about the landscape as the execs. The lesson for the Times here: It’s hard to focus both on operational excellence and transform the business at the same time. Yes, Times execs have been more change-oriented than their newspaper industry peers. Yet the underlying structure of their business — traditional advertising + tradition circulation, now applied more creatively — hasn’t changed. So at this particular moment in Times history, the unplanned departure of Janet Robinson, added to the contemporaneous retirement of long-time NYT digital business leader Martin Nisenholtz, produces a special moment.

The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in the obit. AP faces a similar tension as it seeks a successor for long-time CEO Tom Curley. Dow Jones, cushioned by parent News Corp.’s better-lined pockets, too, is finalizing its CEO search. Put them together, and it’s a signal moment for American news media, as three top positions open themselves up to possibility, and imagination, simultaneously.

The Times needs its next CEO to be transformational. He or she must see the set of the Times’ assets — print, digital, brand, and influence — fresh and new, and figure out how to more quickly multiply their value in a world in which digital advertising is surpassing print and “mobile” is turning the Internet into ubiquitous electricity.

The new CEO must also be tradition-respecting, understanding of the unique value of The New York Times in an American and global society itself in the midst of multiple transformations. The Times, as institutionally arrogant as it often can be, is important to the Republic. Let’s just take one recent story, the first in its iEconomy series, that illustrates the Times’ place in society. Ten days ago, the Times published “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work.” That story has driven a new national argument. It painted the reality, the complex reality, of Apple’s outsourcing to China. It moved the conversation beyond the banal, superficial political banter of the Capitol and the campaign trail.

The Times certainly wasn’t first to focus on the story. We’ve heard parts of it told in many ways for years. In fact, two weeks before the Times’ story, public radio’s This American Life aired “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” a searing on-the-Shenzhen-ground exploration of the issue. Given the program’s sensibility, it asked the question a little more piquantly — “Who makes all my crap?” — and let us hear the voices of actual workers. What’s significant with the Times’ story is its ability to change the national political agenda. That’s what great newspapers, and leading news media do, and what we need them to do more of. In a world of 24/7 political spinning and “debates” that could have been staged by P.T. Barnum, fewer (and here we could speculate about the future of the similarly family- and public service-directed Washington Post Co.) national news media now have the institutional weight and public-service willingness to slow the runaway train of self-righteousness.

Fewer media — an increasingly useful punching bag for Super PAC money — can be listened to when they say, Wait a minute: Let’s look at the facts. Only a few have the ability to say It’s complicated and have people listen and maybe act on those learnings. (Even Newt Gingrich, who’s built much of his campaign on media elite bashing, has fallen back on citing The New York Times — even when he sometimes should have cited others, including Reuters — when he wants to say something is important and true.) Yes, it’s a new ecosystem of news, one coolly able to incorporate both This American Life and The New York Times, Ira Glass and Jill Abramson, but one with as much need to prize the old as award the new.

Transformational and tradition-respecting. It’s a unique combination of traits befitting a unique challenge. Let’s look at the landscape of potential Times Co. CEOs — after consultation with a few people in the know, and with a nod to HBO’s “Luck,” let’s look at some candidates from realistic to whimsical. You decide which is which.

The outsiders

If the Times looks outside media as we know it:

What would Eric do? Google’s Eric Schmidt has already made his billions, and has returned CEO reins to Larry Page. He understands the value of newspapers in society and his company and the Times have formed numerous, stronger-than-newspaper-industry-average partnerships. Obviously, he’d bring deep tech roots and the top-of-the-industry relationships that could propel the Times into its next stage of life while preserving its principles. He knows advertising and analytics. He knows how to be CEO in a distributed power structure, as he shared duties in the Google troika of Schmidt, Page, and Brin; that’s akin to power-sharing with Arthur Sulzberger, who, of course remains chairman and the Times’ publisher. Have he and Arthur already talked? A long shot, but transformational and jaw-dropping, just the tonic for early 2012.

How about an old New York Times reporter with connections? That could be Steve Rattner, financier, dealmaker, pundit, and a Times reporter in his youth. He’s got a long, close relationship with Arthur. He is a player. But he’s got baggage, a Securities and Exchange Commission plea in a pension kickback case. A longer shot still.

In the trade

How about an erstwhile competitor? Former WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz has a to-the-point resume: deep editorial and business cred, premium ad and global experience, and he was in the paid-content trenches while the Times was first failing with TimesSelect. He and Steve Brill built, and continue to operate, Press+ since its 2011 sale to RR Donnelley.

Borrowing a page from magazines: Magazines have faced the same struggles as newspapers. In the process, they’ve washed out many an exec. At this moment, Hearst Magazines president David Carey is riding high, but the Condé Nast veteran has only been in that job for a year. Jack Griffin is in the media-advisory business after Time Inc. rejected the Meredith-successful transplant; his reinvention credentials are well established.

Borrow from the best: ESPN is among the leaders in the multi-platform, multimedia journalism business. President George Bodenheimer may be too great a reach; what about John Kosner, SVP and GM for print and digital media?

Anyone from the GAFA gaggle?

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are reinventing the current digital world. Sheryl Sandberg could be a natural. The Facebook COO’s well-monied resume — starting with Treasury (seven years), Google sales+ (six years), and Facebook (since 2008) — could rub off on the money-starved Times. She’s in the midst of a huge IPO, so the timing is of course problematic. Says one newspaper admirer: “She understands that ultimately content is what will make a platform successful and is methodically executing against that. She’s a huge consumer of news content and cares about journalism.”

Tim Armstrong looks, and speaks, the role, but the Times needs someone coming from a point of success, not struggle. For the same reasons, the Times can’t move on some with resumes that fit on the surface — old media experience, new media chops — but who instead of graduating with honors, left Yahoo and other places in shambles.

How about the Randys?

A host of Randys could be intriguing candidates.

Take Randy Smith, chief of Alden Global Capital. In 2011, he showed signs of wanting to roll up the U.S. newspaper industry (Europe in 2013?), trying to merge MediaNews with Freedom and staking out major Digital First territory, on the foundation of a John Paton-supercharged Journal Register. Now, though, it seems like he’s selling off his 30-percent stake in Philadelphia Media Holdings. If you want to invest big in the newspaper game, there’s no better place than the Times. And this Randy could inject his own capital.

Or Randy Rothenburg, Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO, and at the nexus of the digital ad revolution. A former Times technology editor, he boomeranged back to IAB, after Time Inc.’s culture (tough place) rejected him as a new digital leader.

Or Randy Michaels, former COO of the Tribune Company. He brought a little, well a lot, of levity to the Tribune Company, and Sam Zell’s boy genius could be ready for a revival after being sacked, by, well, a Times story.

Enough for my speculation, real or otherwise. Who’s your pick?

Reader comments at the Washington Post website have shot up 142 percent since the paper switched to the Echo platform in March 2011, according to Jon DeNunzio, the Post’s interactivity editor. The community is growing so fast that Post staffers will start getting more personally involved, starting now.

And not just the six people dedicated to comments full-time — the whole newsroom. “In recent weeks,” DeNunzio wrote in a blog post, “we have had more than 40 reporters post in comment streams, and that number will continue to grow.” Comments from post staffers are badged with “WP Staff” insignia, helping reinforce trust among readers.

It seems to defy conventional wisdom at many American newspapers, where reporters rarely appear in comments.

“There’s a school of thought in the newspaper world that since we buy ink by the barrel, then we ought to let readers have their say without our trying to have the last word,” media watcher Dan Kennedy told me. “I think that mentality has crossed over into online comments. I don’t know how many newspapers actually forbid their journalists from jumping into the comments, but I think it’s fair to say that many of them discourage it.” (And many journalists don’t need any encouragement to avoid diving in — they’re happy to stay above it all.)

“The interactivity team here started taking a more active approach to getting reporters into the comments late last year because we were pretty sure it could help the comment threads — and the journalism,” DeNunzio told me in an email.

“We have not run into ‘cultural issues’ in getting participation — it’s been really gratifying.”

He continued: “I think reporters have gotten involved because they understood that there was value in doing so…We have not run into ‘cultural issues’ in getting participation — it’s been really gratifying, really, to get so many positive reactions from our colleagues.”

For example, in a front-page story in December, Donna St. George reported that black students in the D.C. area were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites. That story attracted 3,736 comments, more than 2,000 of those by 9 o’clock in the morning.

With prodding from the interactivity team, St. George struck while the iron was hot. She began engaging commenters directly and by name. She posed follow-up questions. The rapid-fire debate made the comments section something of an online chat. At one point, St. George invited one of the researchers quoted in her story to join the discussion, figuring he was better equipped to answer some questions than she.

St. George reflected on the experience in a blog post:

Afterward, our online engagement team thought this set-up might be a model for future stories: Why not bring some of the people behind our journalism into the reader discussion that typically follows publication? That way, our readers gain access to people with whom they don’t ordinarily get to exchange ideas. It might deepen the experience of reading and commenting; it might enrich the back-and-forth.

For my story, I’d say it clearly did.

By getting involved, reporters can also help fend off rumors, speculation, and flame wars. Last week the Post covered the guilty plea of former Marine Corps Reservist Yonathan Melaku, who shot at the Pentagon and other military buildings in 2010 while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” according to federal prosecutors.

So…yeah, you can imagine that comment thread.

Reporter Josh White posted this five hours after his story went up:

Thank you all for reading and commenting. As the issue of religion has been raised here numerous times, I wanted to provide some additional information I was able to find this afternoon:

Melaku’s defense attorney told me today that Melaku’s family is of the Coptic Christian faith and that they were stunned to learn of the crimes and any connection between their son and Islam or jihad, as there were no overt signs to them that he had any involvement with it whatsoever. It is unclear to everyone I have interviewed — prosecutors, police, Melaku’s attorney — why exactly he was shooting at the buildings or wanted to deface the gravestones or what led him to that point. It is possible that only he knows that. We will continue to post and publish new information as we get it.

“He also mentioned a story,” DeNunzio recalled of White, “in which the commenters had assumed the subject was black. He responded in the comments saying, in essence, ‘Not that it matters, but the subject was white.’ As you can imagine, that really helps stop a whole vein of racially-tinged comments.”

The Post is making other changes to its comment-moderation workflow. DeNunzio said they will reward high-quality commenters with badges (a feature launched last spring) more frequently, ban the trolls more aggressively, and bulk up the list of terms that gets a comment auto-deleted. The interactivity team also created a dedicated email address, comments@washingtonpost.com, for readers to direct questions (Why was I deleted?) and complaints (n0m3ercy is breaking teh rules!).

The impact of these changes — the quality of the dialog — can be hard to measure. One metric to watch might be whether the number of “flagged” and auto-deleted comments goes up or down in the next few months. Nevertheless, the tone of a discussion softens up a lot when humans get involved.

“I can say from personal experience that when I have gone into threads to explain how our comments work or help users with questions/issues they might have, the tone changes simply because the user realizes someone from The Post is listening,” DeNunzio said.

The Guardian is launching a new experiment in video, partnering with video company Condition One to release full-immersion travel guides. Don’t just read about life in Shibuya — stand in the middle of it!

David Levene’s Tokyo, released as part of the Guardian’s Tokyo travel guide, offer what you might call a 180-degree look at the sights of Japan’s largest city. Of course, good video aims for an immersive experience, a combination of shots, pacing, and editing that gives viewers a sense of a place just short of smelling the air for themselves. But in this case, the guides go further: Through Condition One’s technology, iPad users can tilt, pan, and pivot in their surroundings. What the tech does, essentially, is let a viewer figure out what’s happening just off frame, either to the side or above the camera.

Which can be kind of handy for a travel video, offering up a kind of live-action Google Street View effect, where you can get a handle not just on what you’re looking at but its place in larger surroundings. Condition One was originally conceived by documentarian Danfung Dennis to create video from areas of conflict. But as the Guardian’s experiment shows, it’s a product with broader applications for other kinds of journalism.

Over gChat, Guardian travel writer Benji Lanyado told me city-guide videos felt like a perfect fit for a technology aimed at giving people a richer viewing experience: “Immersive, armchair travel.” Once you get past the basics of “how much will this hotel cost,” what most of us want in city guides is a general sense of what a place is like.

Levene’s four videos are relatively brief (the longest maxes out at 2:50) that give glimpses of daily life, like the bustle of the Shibuya street crossing or a ride on Tokyo’s Metro. As the video rolls, a viewer gets the sense they’re on foot and can look wherever their eye takes them — say, a billboard on a skyscraper overhead, or a man dressed in a panda costume just out of view. (An image that, by itself, justifies the technology.) Using a limited license on the Condition One software, the Guardian was able to have the video shot and edited (in Final Cut Pro, Lanyado says) before sending it off to Condition One for encoding. Lanyado wasn’t able to tell me much more about the process, but it’s been reported that most Condition One videos are shot using video-capable DSLR cameras. The videos live on their own branded channel within the Condition One iPad app, which has several other videos, including a look at an Occupy D.C. protest from The Washington Post.

The viewer doesn’t have total freedom — you can’t look behind you, for instance, and you’re can’t just glance some interesting cross street and decide to wander down it. But you do get to take in as much scenery as the normal field of vision allows. “We’re in a recession…I can’t afford to go to the Solomon Islands,” Lanyado said. “But seeing some immersive video of the Solomon Islands could certainly help scratch the itch.” Think of it as a digital world’s fair.

The videos are part of a broader experiment by the Guardian in what a truly interactive city guide could look like. One other cool bit they’ve added to the guide is a history of video games and gaming culture in Japan, supplemented with playable versions of classic games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. Yes, as of today, you can chomp ghosts at your desk at work through a British newspaper. It’s all part of the Guardian’s push toward increased experimentation; you may be familiar with some of their other efforts like nOtice and Guardian TagBot.

Like all of the paper’s beta projects, Lanyado said the Tokyo videos are there to elicit a response from viewers, to see if it’s something worth taking further. Using Condition One could make a lot of sense for news organizations who want to get more out of their video features, and giving viewers a way to engage with their media in new ways could be a good investment. Of course, investment is the right word when talking about video — multimedia projects can be costly for newsrooms, but they can also generate a return over a longer period of time than a straight news story. (Presumably, interest in Tokyo street pandas will only increase over time.)

The tech requirements for the full experience — an iPad plus the Condition One app — will probably limit the audience for this experiment initially. But in the meantime, Lanyado said, the paper is invested in trying new things. “I can’t see us reaching some kind of perfect way to deliver news any time soon,” Lanyado said. “So in the meantime we need to experiment as much as possible to find out what works, and what doesn’t.”

Data nerds from government and academia gathered Friday at Northeastern University to show off the latest version of Weave, an open-source, web-based platform designed to visualize “any available data by anyone for any purpose.” The software has a lot of potential for journalists.

Weave is supported by the Open Indicators Consortium, an unusual partnership of planning agencies and universities who wanted better tools to inform public policy and community decision-making. The groups organized and agreed to share data and code in 2008, well before Gov 2.0 was hot.

Think of Weave as more programming language than app. It powers websites such as the Connecticut Data Collaborative and Rhode Island’s RI DataHUB. The newly relaunched MetroBoston DataCommon, a project of eastern Massachusetts’ regional planning agency, really shows off the software’s power. There, users can upload their own datasets (Weave claims to be able to handle virtually any format) or browse sample visualizations (e.g., Children in Families Below Poverty).

Data is linked, which means you can view the same datapoint from many angles. Drag your cursor across a few dozen cities and towns and watch as those data are simultaneously illuminated on a histogram and a scatter plot. Add another datapoint to find correlations or trim the data to create subsets. The software keeps track of state, which means you would be able to visually undo and redo changes and save that series of steps as an animation. The end result, powered by Flash, is easily embeddable into a web page.

The software reminds me of SPSS, from my college poli sci days. But unlike SPSS, Weave is free (as in beer and in speech), and it’s web-native. Weave’s creators want to liberate data. It’s not that data isn’t already out there. (You can browse thousands of datasets on Data.gov.) It’s that data is not easy to parse and consume. Spreadsheets and PDFs are nothing if you don’t know how to read them, and tools are useless if you can’t afford to buy them.

Georges Grinstein, a professor of computer science at UMass Lowell, develops Weave with a team of some 20 students. He hopes journalists can use the software to build better visualizations.

“The whole purpose of making a newspaper’s visualization highly interactive is you could look at that data and say, ‘Yeah, but‘,” he said. If a reporter presents a conclusion from data, a reader should be able explore more data to challenge that conclusion, he said. Sure, news organizations publish interactive infographics, but they are interactive only insofar as they were designed. With Weave, a single visualization lives in a bigger, more collaborative and connected universe of data.

The Boston Foundation, a major funder of the DataCommon website, will begin offering Weave training for Boston-area journalists in the coming months. Journalists are encouraged to file bug reports and feature requests to help improve the software.

The winners will pair up with “incubator” stations across the country for up to a year and share in $1.25 million to experiment with new kinds of journalism.

As I wrote in September, Localore is meant to reinvigorate the experimental spirit of public media that can get lost in day-to-day newsgathering. The mandate was to create place-based projects that would stir up engagement in specific communities — hence the name, Localore.

“It riffs off of this sort of contemporary notion of ‘locavore,’ which says, ‘Pay attention to where you’re getting your sustenance’,” said Sue Schardt, AIR’s executive director, at the time. “Localore, likewise: Pay attention to where you get your news, where your stories come from — source them close to home.”

In tiny Paonia, Colo., producer Julia Kumari Drapkin will work with KVNF-FM to create a crowdsourced reporting project called iSeeChange, which draws on citizens’ everyday observations about the weather to build a narrative about climate change and its impact on local ranchers and coal miners.

At KUT-FM in Texas, Delaney Hall proposes Austin Music Map, a documentary series revealing the “third places” where musicmakers meet and perform. The project will culminate in a music festival.

At Twin Cities Public Television, Ken Elkund plans to create a participatory “alternate-reality” game that asks the community for solutions to the high-school dropout crisis. The game will focus on a fictitious character named Edwina, whose interactions with other real-life participants will shape the game’s outcome.

Todd Melby will work with Prairie Public Broadcasting to report from the oil patches of North Dakota, producing multimedia portraits of workers joining the drilling rush and the families they leave behind. Melby plans to map active oil wells and produce data-driven reporting.

AIR posted details about all the projects on its website.

The organization said it received applications from 130 producers, who tended to be under 30, white, and not already employed at a station. Seven of the 10 stations selected are in major markets.

Several winners will work with new-media startup Zeega, a team building dead-simple software for interactive, media-rich, pure-HTML5 stories. (The Zeega team emerged from AIR’s last big big initiative, Makers Quest 2.0.) Zeega’s Kara Oehler wrote last week for PBS MediaShift:

We believe firmly that great storytelling and storytellers should drive the design and development process. As opposed to traditional software development that begins with generic specs, we’re committed to building out Zeega’s core features through real projects tied to real producers, communities and users. And importantly, as opposed to just ending up with a bespoke mix of technology experiments after Localore ends, these projects will make a lasting contribution to the tools for public media.

Zeega’s source code will be made open-source and rigorously documented, Oehler said.

It will be up to stations to decide what to do with producers and their projects at the end of the funding term. AIR hopes the projects will lead to a permanent expansion of R&D at stations.

Altogether AIR raised $2 million for Localore, which comes from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the MacArthur Foundation, the federally funded National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wyncote Foundation.

Google, social search, privacy, and evil: Two weeks after Google raised the ire of Facebook and Twitter by privileging Google+ within its search results, engineers at the two companies (plus MySpace) came out with a sharp response: A browser bookmarklet not-so-subtly titled “Don’t Be Evil,” that removes the extra weighting Google+ results get in the new Search Plus Your World feature. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has a thorough explanation of what the tool does, and search veteran John Battelle described what this “well-timed poke in the eye” means within Silicon Valley.

Some tech bloggers agreed with the sentiment behind the new hack: PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy said Google needs to acknowledge to its users that it’s no longer presenting unbiased and objective search results, and her colleague MG Siegler and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber argued that Google’s big problem isn’t ethical but practical — it’s damaging its product by making results less relevant.

Others didn’t see Google as the villain in this situation: Tech entrepreneur Chris Dixon argued that Twitter is asking for a sweetheart deal — top Google search rankings for their information without giving Google firehose access to it. Om Malik and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pointed out that Facebook’s record in putting user needs before its own gain is pretty spotty itself. Danny Sullivan proposed a truce between Google, Facebook, and Twitter based on making users’ public information public to any search engine, treating social action as proprietary and profiles as search metadata, and making contacts portable.

Google fueled more suspicion of evil later in the week when it announced a new privacy policy that will unite its tracking of users’ behavior across search, Gmail, YouTube, and Google+ — a change users can’t opt out of. TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon explained the reason for the move: Google’s trying to improve the quality of its social data to compete with Facebook’s growing pool.

The obvious question here is, as Mathew Ingram framed it, will all this information sharing be good for users, or just Google’s advertisers? Gizmodo’s Mat Honan led the way in charging the latter, saying that Google is taking away the user control that helped form the cornerstone of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch and Christopher Dawson of ZDNet argued the opposite, that Google is only simplifying its privacy policies, something that should be easier to understand and maybe even more helpful for users.

Danny Sullivan’s response was mixed, as he pointed out both potential benefits and concerns for users. That ambivalence was shared by Wired’s Tim Carmody, who concluded that Google is not evil, but “something else, something more than a little uncanny, something that despite conjecture, projections, fictions, and a combination of excitement and foreboding, we haven’t fully prepared ourselves to recognize yet.”

Elsewhere in the Google empire, Google+ announced a change to its real-names-based policy, allowing “established pseudonyms.” ZDNet’s Violet Blue noted that the allowance of pseudonyms is still quite limited, and Trevor Gilbert of PandoDaily said this change is probably related to Google+ pseudonyms’ value in Google’s new integrated social search function. Adam Shostack of Emergent Chaos argued that the initial insistence on real names was a big part of Google+’s disappointing start, and the AP’s Jonathan Stray wondered why Google is so insistent on real names in the first place.

JoePa’s death and breaking news accuracy: We saw an interesting case study in breaking news, accuracy, and Twitter last weekend when the death of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was falsely reported Saturday night by a Penn State student news site called Onward State, then spread across Twitter. (Paterno died the following morning.) Jeff Sonderman of Poynter put together a useful Twitter timeline of the mishap, which prompted an apology and resignation by the site’s managing editor, Devon Edwards, though he’ll stay on staff there. Some other news organizations that repeated the error, most prominently CBSSports.com, published their own apologies, too.

The following day, Onward State explained how the error occurred — one reporter got an email that turned out to be a hoax, and another reporter was dishonest in his confirmation of it. Daniel Victor of ProPublica gave a more detailed account with some background about how the site has combined reporting and aggregation. Poynter’s Craig Silverman gave a parallel explanation of how the AP decided not to run with the report.

Silverman also reviewed the aftermath of the erroneous report, concluding that journalists are too focused on the benefits of reporting news first, without looking enough at the risk. He chastised CBS Sports for not crediting Onward State with the scoop, but then passing it off on them when the story was shown to be false. Sports blogger Clay Travis said CBS’ dubious behavior — particularly running with an unconfirmed bombshell report without linking to the source — was a function of “search whoring,” a tactic he said is running rampant in sports journalism.

GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram went easier on Onward State, saying their process wasn’t much different from that of established news orgs and praising them for their quick corrections and transparency. King Kaufman of the sports site Bleacher Report may have drawn the simplest, best lesson out of all of this: “Only report what you know to be true, and tell your audience how you know it.” And while writing about an unrelated story, the Lab’s Gina Chen gave some other tips on bringing clarity to breaking news in a real-time environment.

Lessons from the SOPA/PIPA fight: The web declared victory last Friday in the fight over SOPA and PIPA with the postponement of both bills, then shifted promptly to postmortem mode for much of this week. Talking Points Memo’s Carl Franzen had a great account of how all this happened, and New York magazine’s Will Leitch said this was a seminal moment in the ascendancy of the web’s ethic of collaborative creation above Hollywood’s traditional gatekeeping model.

On the What It All Means front, one post stands out: Renowned Harvard network scholar Yochai Benkler’s seven lessons from the SOPA/PIPA fight, in which he explained the tension between Hollywood’s desire for increased copyright control and freedom of the web that gives rise to the networked public sphere. Last week’s events, he wrote, gave a glimpse of the power of that networked public, which he argued is more legitimate than the power of money: “if the industry wants to be able to speak with the moral authority of the networked public sphere, it will have to listen to what the networked public is saying and understand the political alliance as a coalition.”

Several others, including the Guardian’s Dan Gillmor, also warned of the entertainment industry’s lust for control and the copyright fights that will continue to flow out of that desire. NYU prof Clay Shirky argued this point most forcefully, cautioning us not to underestimate how far the industry will go to regain its control, and Instapaper founder Marco Arment told us not to underestimate how much the industry loathes assertive users: “They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money.” Venture capitalist Fred Wilson was more positive in his assessment of what’s next, urging the entertainment and tech industries to come together under a set of shared goals and principles.

Reading roundup: Several other ongoing discussions were still on slow burn this week. Here’s a quick review of those:

— New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane issued his formal follow-up to his much-maligned “truth vigilantes” column, saying that he’s okay with the Times doing routine fact-checking and rebutting of officials’ false claims in news articles, as long as it does so very carefully and cautiously. Brisbane also stated his case on CNN’s Reliable Sources, and NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos examined the issue as well. Voice of San Diego, meanwhile, published its own manifesto for truth vigilantism.

In other fact-checking news, Politifact, still smarting from the controversy around its Lie of the Year choice, faced renewed criticism over its rating statements in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union as only “Half True” despite also saying they were factually accurate. That earned blowback from economist Jared Bernstein, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and others. Politifact revised its rating to “Mostly True,” but Maddow wasn’t satisfied, saying to Politifact: “You are undermining the definition of the word fact in the English language by pretending to it in your name.”

— Textbooks for Apple’s newly updated iBooks platform are flying off the digital shelves, though concerns about rights issues are lingering. John Gruber explained how different Apple’s proprietary file format looks depending on where you’re coming from, and Cult of Mac’s Mike Elgan argued against Apple’s rights critics. Here at the Lab, Matthew Battles said it’ll take a lot more than Apple to fix what’s wrong with education publishing.

— A Pew report found that tablet and e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holidays. As The New York Times explained, growth was particularly strong among women, the wealthy, and the highly educated. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber wondered if the gift-giving bump is really as good as it seems for Apple and Amazon.

— A few interesting pieces on online sharing: Reuters’ Felix Salmon reflected on how it will disrupt the web’s traditional model, and Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman wrote a guide to making news content shareable. The Lab’s Justin Ellis also gave some engagement tips based on Facebook data, and ProPublica’s Daniel Victor looked at the viral success of images on Facebook. Researcher Nick Diakopoulos crunched some New York Times numbers to see what news gets shared on Twitter.

— Finally, a couple of enlightening exit interviews with Raju Narisetti, who is leaving The Washington Post’s top digital post for The Wall Street Journal: One at the Lab and another at Poynter.

Photo of Joe Paterno statue by Penn State used under a Creative Commons license.

Just what I want to read and just what I have time to read.

It enables one to keep abreast of the times without wasting a lot of time reading a whole column to obtain a single fact.

Sounds a bit like an online aggregator, doesn’t it, pulling a few salient points from much longer work? One more:

Your magazine is concise and to the point. It represents five good magazines in one.

These are, in fact, a series of subscriber comments sent to Time magazine in the weeks following its launch on March 3, 1923.

This past weekend, I was out with a friend who happens to be a former editor at Time. We were analyzing the current state of the news media in light of recent developments, including The Huffington Post’s plans to launch a 24-hour live web TV network and Buzzfeed’s aggressive push into politics. These organizations — often lambasted for aggregating other’s content while producing little of their own — are repositioning themselves with new strategies, with more room for distinctive, often original content.

My friend argued this was nothing new. Henry Luce’s Time started as a full-fledged aggregator almost 89 years ago.

A quick visit to the library confirmed his statements. Sure enough, all 29 pages of the black and white weekly — its signature red-border cover not yet developed — were packed with advertisements and aggregation. This wasn’t just rewrites of the week’s news; it was rip-and-read copy from the day’s major publications — The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York World, to name a few.

Today, of course, Time, between print and online properties, reaches a global audience of 25 million; it employs celebrated journalists and editors, and it remains among America’s preeminent journalism institutions.

Using history as our guide, we shouldn’t be surprised in the recent developments at the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed — nor should we be surprised when, in the coming months and years, other sites disdained by some make similar moves. These are organizations beginning their march up the value chain — beyond LOLcats to politics, beyond aggregation to original content, beyond cheap to upmarket.

My friend is right: This is entirely predictable, and furthermore, precisely what disruption theory predicts.

Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption, first described in the seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, argues that this pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field start at the low end, establish a foothold, eat away at the customer base of incumbents — and then move up the value chain. It happened with Japanese automakers in the 1980s, who started with cheap subcompacts and moved up to making Lexuses. It happened in the steel industry, where mini-mills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry’s giants. In the news business, newcomers do this by delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. They also create new market demand by engaging new audiences. (A 17-year-old may not read The New York Times, but they may stumble upon Buzzfeed to see that viral cat video.)

Herein lies Christensen’s critical point, and one that media companies should not forget. Because new-market disruptions initially attract those that aren’t traditional consumers of The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, these incumbent organizations feel little pain or threat. So they stay the course on content, competing on “quality” against these new-market disruptors. Meanwhile, the disruptors, once they establish themselves at the market’s low end, move into the space previously held by the incumbents by producing cheaper, personalized content. It is not until the disruption is in its final stages that it erodes the position of the incumbents. This is the definition of the innovators’ dilemma.

There are two critical points to be made. First, the aggregators of today will be the original reporters of tomorrow. Those of us who care about good journalism shouldn’t dismiss the Buzzfeeds of the world because they aren’t creating high-quality reporting. Their search for new audiences will push them into original content production. Buzzfeed may be focused on cat videos and aggregation now, but disruption theory argues that content companies like it will move into the realm of the Huffington Post — which in turn, has already indicated its desire to compete more directly with The New York Times.

Second, and perhaps more important, is that despite the obituaries for quality journalism, we can take comfort in remembering that we’ve been here before. We need look no further than that same 1923 volume of Time magazine. Under a passage entitled “Machines Do It“:

“The public,” says Mr. Bliven in effect, “is always asking about Newspaper morals. But equally important with newspaper morals is newspaper intelligence. And both of them are changing drastically, dangerously, because of mechanical progress.”

Mr. Bliven is Bruce Bliven, at the time former managing editor of The New York Globe and soon to become editor of The New Republic. Bliven’s quote wasn’t given in an interview with a Time reporter. It was a rip-and-read from an article Bliven had written in that month’s Atlantic Monthly titled, “Our Changing Journalism.” Time’s report went on for several more paragraphs, summarizing and quoting.

We’ve been here before. The question is not, how aggregation is ruining journalism, but how traditional journalism will respond to the aggregation.

MinnPost, the nonprofit regional news site in Minnesota, ended 2011 in the black for a second year in a row, according to its annual report published today. Its year-end surplus — a bit more than $21,000 — isn’t exactly retire-to-the-Caymans money. But in a sector where so many nonprofit news outlets are struggling to find sustainability, the four-year-old operation is demonstrating that it can support itself.

MinnPost makes money from public radio-style memberships, advertising, grants, and events, including its annual MinnRoast. CEO Joel Kramer told me he is most pleased with the growth of individual and corporate support, which now represents a majority of the revenue pie, about $815,000. Grants made up about a fifth. Altogether, MinnPost raised $1.5 million.

Kramer said he expects foundation money to shrink to 10 percent of revenue, but that’s a projection, not a goal.

“We’re happy to get all the foundation support we can get, but our long-term goal from the time we launched was to become steadily less dependent on foundations,” Kramer said. Foundation money is more volatile; the money usually comes with strings attached and an expiration date. And as MinnPost enters its fifth year in operation, it’s no longer really a startup. “Many of them are more excited about you if they see you as asking for seed money, startup money, early-stage development money,” he said.

MinnPost in 2011 also opened up the option for donors to auto-renew their membership. (Inertia is a powerful force for donor retention!) About 700 of MinnPost’s 3,300 donors are now sustaining members, he said. Individual gifts start at as little as $10 per year and go as high as $25,000 a year; the typical donor gives $100 to $150 per year, he said.

“A visit by a Minnesotan, a page view from a Minnesotan, is worth far more than us than a visit or a pageview from elsewhere.”

As far as how many people used the site versus how many supported it, Kramer said there are a few ways to slice the numbers. “It’s not meaningful to make the denominator unique visitors,” he said, because that number includes hundreds of thousands of people who land on MinnPost from a search or a link but are “not really interested in MinnPost.” Kramer’s preferred denominator is people who visit MinnPost at least twice per month, which is roughly 55,000. That means 6 percent of MinnPost users are contributing members. Kramer wants to see that rise to 10 percent.

For comparison’s sake, the site most similar to MinnPost is probably Voice of San Diego, which had its struggles in 2011. The organization laid off four people at the end of last year, saying it raised $1.1 million but spent $1.2 million. VOSD projects its revenue will fall in 2012.

And as I wrote Tuesday, the more government-and-policy-focused Texas Tribune raised $3.71 million but ended 2011 in the red. (It expects to be break-even or better by year’s end.)

Traffic to MinnPost.com grew, too. Pageviews rose 20 percent over the year before. The number Kramer prefers, though, is visits from Minnesotans: 3.7 million in 2011, versus 2.8 million the year before.

“Our advertisers and sponsors, what they’re interested in is communicating with Minnesotans. Also, our donor base overwhelmingly comes from Minnesota,” Kramer said. “So we actually believe, strategically, that a visit by a Minnesotan, a pageview from a Minnesotan, is worth far more than us than a visit or a pageview from elsewhere.”

Those figures come from Google Analytics and publicly available Quantcast data, he said. The brief and very brief presidential campaigns of Rep. Michele Bachmann and Gov. Tim Pawlenty might have given MinnPost a boost.

One goal for 2012: Improve the stickiness of the site, Kramer said. (The average MinnPost reader views two pages per visit.) MinnPost is moving from a proprietary content-management to Drupal, an open-source CMS, which will free up developers and designers to make user-facing improvements more quickly.

Let’s elevate, for a moment.

Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet.

The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global.

The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning.

As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:

• The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well.
• If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year.
• Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall.
• The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion“), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S. product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India.

This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles.

For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:

• Google: 54 percent
• Apple: 54 percent
• Facebook: 38 percent
• Amazon: 46 percent

Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers.

Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.)

It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market.

There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies.

You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues.

News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live (“The newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature.

A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

Those are three of the takeaways from some new data that Facebook just released on the use of its Subscribe feature —  the social network’s way to let journalists and readers connect without broaching the knotty issue of “friending.” Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik and Betsy Cameron write: “People discover journalists to subscribe to on Facebook through their friends in News Feed; Facebook search; our “people to subscribe to” recommendations engine (which shows you who your friends are subscribing to and recommends journalists based on your interests); and other organic discovery mechanisms, such as simply seeing who your friends have subscribed to.”

But onto the stats, specifically, the ones that stick out about what content journalists are posting:

• About a quarter of posts by journalists pose a question to readers, a tactic earlier Facebook research substantially increased engagement.
• Posts that include both links and a little commentary or analysis generated about 20 percent more clicks.
• Ask for it: Language like “read my story” or “check out my interview” bumps up engagement (clicks, likes, etc.) 37 percent.

The post also outlines some fuzzier numbers on how content types and styles can increase engagement:

Commentary and analysis on current events and breaking news receives 3x as many likes and 2x as many shares as the average post. Also, highlighting controversial stories on debatable subject matter can double the number of likes and shares the post receives.​

Reader shout-outs can increase in feedback by as much as 4x. Also, asking for recommendations can lead to a 3x increase in comments.​

In-depth analyses on global issues can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and 2.5x increase in shares.​

Powerful photos can yield an increase of a 2x in engagement (likes, comments and shares). Also, behind-the-scenes photos resulted in up to a 4x increase in engagement (likes, comments, shares).​

What else works? Being funny: “Humor in posts or a humorous picture can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and almost 5x increase in shares. Humor often shows the lighter and more personal side of the journalist, which is likely why it results in higher engagement.” Go check out Facebook’s post for more details and data.

I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate.

In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now journalists need to imagine what it’s like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what medium or format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ.

Let me give an example to illustrate my point. My family and I were driving back north from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about halfway through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip when suddenly traffic stopped. We tried to find a AM radio station to figure out the cause of the delay — and how long it might last — but we couldn’t find one for that area.

So we turned to Twitter. As my husband drove, I typed I-81 into the search field and instantly found tweets about the delay and — even better — descriptions of what the road was like miles ahead of where we were. These were real-time observations from motorists — hopefully from passengers, not from drivers tweeting behind the wheel. I continued to monitor Twitter throughout that harried night, which included multiple stoppages on I-81, including one caused by a massive pileup that came after we passed through that stretch of roadway.

A few aspects of this example are notable for journalists.

• We were relying on tweets mainly from “regular folks,” not journalists. A few television and radio stations were tweeting, and a highway-safety Twitter account was quite helpful. But a newspaper was noticeably absent from Twitter until the next morning, when a traditional news story was posted. The news story was helpful to fill in the blanks of the night, but as a news consumer what I really need was information in the moment. What was most helpful were the tweets from local motorists who offered suggestions for alternate routes to bypass I-81 for a stretch, or tweets that explained at what milepost marker traffic was flowing again. That way, we would know when an end to the waiting was in sight (or not.)
• The most frustrating part was not knowing the local geography. People would tweet that I-81 was bad in a particular town. But, not being from the area, I didn’t know if that town was in Virginia (where we were) or another state where snow was falling along I-81 — or if it was ahead of us or behind us. In some cases, it was an easy problem to solve: I switched to the maps app on my phone and searched for the town. But sometimes this was futile (towns too small to show up on the map, tweets contained local nicknames instead of town names) — and it was always an extra step. I could sometimes figure out where people were tweeting from based on their Twitter accounts — but honestly, that was too much work. I needed information fast, with as little effort as possible, to figure out whether a tweet about “bad roads” on I-81 would pertain to the part were were going to be hitting soon.

For journalists, this example offers two lessons:

• Pause a moment from writing your story and let your readers know what the heck is going on now. The massive pile-up was certainly a major news event for this community, and it sure deserved a traditional story in print and online. But communicating the story in the moment is the most important part of your job in the middle of a breaking news situation. I was thankful for the non-journalist tweeters — but I would have loved more official information in tweets from more news organizations.
• As they say in real estate, the key issue is location, location, location. Whether you are tweeting about a massive pileup, slick roads, or just a road stoppage caused by construction, include location information. I know traditional AP style rules dictate that the state name should not be used when writing about the community where the news organization is located, under the theory that people already know where they live. But this rule should not apply to social media or online news, where people from outside your community may be using your information. Having a “VA” somewhere in the tweets I was reading about I-81 would have simplified my efforts to figure out which tweets applied to the stretch of road we were driving on and which did not.

For journalists, the best way to figure out what information readers need from you when you are covering an emergency is to imagine yourself in their position. In my example, imagine yourself craning over your smartphone trying to find out what’s going on, as your tense spouse tries to keep the car on an icy road and your two children sleep in the backseat, blissfully unaware of any trouble. What information would you want and how would you want it in that situation? Then give that to your readers.

American Public Media’s nine-year-old Public Insight Network now claims more than 130,000 sources — that is, ordinary folks across America (and as of November, South Africa) who contribute their personal experiences to PIN’s massive database. It’s a gold mine for journalists reporting stories about, say, families facing foreclosure in San Diego or business owners deciding when to hire in St. Paul. As it describes itself:

Every day, sources in the Public Insight Network add context, depth, humanity and relevance to news stories at trusted newsrooms around the country…

Using our industry-leading platform, journalists and citizens reach beyond pundits, PR professionals and polemics to inform themselves and each other, strengthening the communities they serve…

Thanks to our technology, editors, reporters and producers can quickly find and learn from thousands of people who have experience or knowledge on a story we are covering. We call this the Public Insight Network, and it relies on everyday people — our public sources.

The problem is, most of PIN’s rich data is going to waste. “One of the things we learned early on,” said Linda Fantin, director of the PIN initiative, “is the amount of intelligence and amazing insights and stories that people have shared with us quickly overwhelm a journalist’s ability to get that information out there.”

So APM, as part of its unflagging hiring spree, is bringing in journalists to help turn more of the data into stories. While PIN will continue its primary mission serving 60 newsrooms, the new team will generate original reporting. And they’re starting without a distribution plan, or even a defined medium — radio? print? Tumblr? — hoping to let people drive the reporting and story forms.

“How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance?”

PIN is full of “unstructured data,” as Fantin calls it, “that’s never seen the light of day, because most traditional story forms are about quoting three or four people and getting a lot of context, and the rest of it is kind of buried in the reporter’s notebook.” What if, instead of three or four people, you could talk to a thousand people?

The team’s upcoming first project is an election-focused, month-long “virtual road trip,” asking Americans how their expectations and values have been tested or changed and whether presidential candidates reflect those values. Journalists will follow the established PIN model: The network puts out queries to its pre-existing sources and encourages new people to participate with a simple web form. Sources who can answer a query from experience are asked to fill out a questionnaire and, if willing, agree to be interviewed on the record.

The reporting is “a little different than certainly a lot of the reporting I’ve been involved in for 35 years,” said Jacqui Banaszynski, the recently hired editor of PIN’s reporting efforts. “As we report, we’re going to constantly go back into the network and talk to people and ask questions, and we’re going to let the discovery process help us keep determining where the story goes.” It’s journalism as a process, not a product.

And Banaszynski hopes to find a news outlet to pick up the work — be it a print partner such as The Washington Post or The Charlotte Observer, one of many participating public radio stations, or someone else. For now, the reporting will live on a Tumblr blog called Dispatches from the American Now, which is launched today. The PIN website is being reconfigured to serve more as a news site.

“At first that was a frustration for me, because when I do journalism I like it to actually go out into the world,” Banaszynski told me. But now it’s liberating, she said. Banaszynski and Fantin have deep newspaper experience; others on the team contribute radio skills. “We’re going to let our skills determine how we’re going to tell the story, as opposed to taking a story and shoehorning it into an existing frame.”

PIN has also hired two reporters and an engagement editor; the team is now hiring an associate editor and, soon, an additional journalist to focus on the results of news games such as APM’s Budget Hero.

Fantin said PIN’s new emphasis on process journalism ties in nicely with its recent acquisition of Spot.us, David Cohn’s platform for crowdfunded reporting. Individual journalists who raise money for stories will now have access to the Public Insight Network.

“One of the ideas we’re kind of toying with is a notion of funding a query,” Fantin said, as opposed to a story. “A journalist puts together a set of really interesting questions, and a community says…’we would love to see those questions put out to knowledgeable people and hear back what they have to say.’” The difference is the journalist has not decided ahead of time what the story is, because the questions could yield unexpected answers.

Fantin said traditional news operations are built on a model of scarcity: A small number of people have the information that a large number of people need. She hopes PIN will change that paradigm. “How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance? How do you have more voices shape the story, help you know where to go, and even help vet some of the assumptions that you’re making?”

Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online’s two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta “with notebook in hand.”

But that was the apex. Prodigy’s membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans.

Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse — and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL’s proprietary service irrelevant. But it’s hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess.

At the time of Access Atlanta’s launch on Prodigy in March 1994, AJC technology columnist Bill Husted interviewed Internet analyst and provocateur Josh Harris about the newspaper’s moves. Harris believed the paper was on the right track, though he sensed (probably correctly) the lack of organizational urgency regarding the venture.

“In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’” Harris told Husted. “This project was cigarette change for Cox. I don’t think they believe in their guts, or their wallets, in what they’ve done. In time, they’ll see what a smart move they made.”

“In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’”

Harris was right. Even though partnering with Prodigy was a bad decision, investing serious money in a unique electronic identity was a smart move. In some ways, the Journal-Constitution’s digital rise and fall mirrors that of the San Jose Mercury News, which Michael Shapiro wrote about in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Merc started out on AOL but quickly abandoned it to build its own website, Mercury Center, which quickly became one of the indispensable sites for Silicon Valley — but then crested and cratered along with the rest of the newspaper industry.

The Journal-Constitution had a number of smart people pushing it forward, including director of information services Chris Jennewein, who left Atlanta to perform a similar role at the Mercury-News, and webmaster Chad Dickerson, who is now the CEO of Etsy. The AJC and Cox had enough clout within the news industry for their executives to be able to persuade other papers, including the Los Angeles Times and Newsday, to make similar deals with Prodigy.

And they had enough clout for a Cox executive, Peter Winter, to become the interim CEO of the New Century Network, the industry’s abortive 1995 attempt to form a web cartel and control access to their journalism. But the collective was sunk by the inability of all the principals — including Cox, Knight-Ridder, Advance, Tribune, Times Mirror, Gannett, Hearst, The Washington Post Co., and The New York Times Co. — to agree on strategy. The failure of the New Century Network prefigured the web woes that each company would experience in the decade to come.

The idea of digital newspapers had been around for a long time. Going back to the 1970s, decades before Craig Newmark started Craigslist and eroded newspaper dominance in classified advertising, newspaper companies realized that their business models depended on preserving their monopoly on classifieds — and they were afraid that a new competitor could weaken that position through a new technology.

So, in the early 1980s, the Associated Press led a number of newspapers (including the AJC) in an 18-month experiment in digital newspapers hosted on an early version of Compuserve.

But not many people had access to modem-enabled personal computers in those days — Compuserve had around 12,000 subscribers across the country — and the low audience and difficulty of using the cutting-edge technology paradoxically led most of the newsmen to affirm, rather than challenge, the status quo. “They perceived it as less of a threat after having been party to it,” said Henry Heilbrunn, an AP executive who led the experiment.

Chris Jennewein was an early advocate for the Journal-Constitution’s digital future. In the late 1980s, he started working on audiotex and videotex, two technologies aimed at combatting the informational time lag associated with a daily newspaper.¹ The first was an automated system of phone numbers that would allow users to call for up-to-the-minute stock prices, sports scores, and weather reports. The second was a primitive dialup system that would allow them to check out news archives and the next morning’s classified ads.

Beginning in 1990, the AJC dialup service was called “Access Atlanta,” and rather than following the phone company’s paradigm of per-minute pricing, they charged a flat $6.95 a month for it. (That was the same price that they would charge four years later, when they launched on Prodigy.) In the meantime, flush with cash, the company was in the mood for experimentation. “[It’s] a classic skunk-works venture,” said Cox executive vice president Jay Smith in 1993. “We put our toe in the water.”

The technology was ahead of the consumer base, but that was fine with Cox. “Archives, movie reviews, primitive email, primitive chat, and we had, most interestingly, the business section up early at 9:00 pm the evening before,” Jennewein told me. “I think at the height we had 600 subscribers.”

In late 1992, the AJC decided to move Access Atlanta from an in-house operation to a third-party service. Cox looked around and even considered purchasing Prodigy, which was number-one at the time, with more subscribers than either Compuserve or AOL. Prodigy also offered the newspaper a far larger cut of subscription revenue than AOL was willing to offer, and far greater flexibility for the paper to create its own branded version of Prodigy’s software.

Access Atlanta was a proprietary service on a proprietary service: Subscribers could pay either the standard $6.95 a month, or if they subscribed to Prodigy for $9.95 a month, they could add Access Atlanta service for an additional $4.95 a month. But while the service itself was getting appreciative nods around the news industry, Prodigy’s growth was already stalling.

One reason is that, unlike those of America Online, Prodigy’s executives wouldn’t allow unmoderated bulletin boards, requiring that every user comment be edited before it was published. Another was Prodigy’s retail strategy, influenced by its corporate parents, Sears and IBM. Unlike America Online, which targeted computer manufacturers to install AOL software on new computers and flooded mailboxes with a seemingly infinite stream of AOL disks, Prodigy sold its software in stores — and separately branded Access Atlanta software was also sold for people who didn’t want to subscribe to Prodigy. Retail was hardwired into Prodigy’s corporate culture. As Fred Lowy, who headed the Access Atlanta team over at Prodigy, explained to me: “The hidden agenda was always to promote IBM and Sears.”

“I was thinking, ‘Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.’”

As the first paper on Prodigy, the AJC had an incentive to try to get other newspapers to join the service, so that more readers would want to subscribe. Cox moved all the papers it owned over to Prodigy and also worked on persuading selling other newspaper companies to join them. They were successful with Times-Mirror, which owned the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. They had been on the cusp of a deal with America Online, but switched to Prodigy after a successful eleventh-hour pitch by Cox.

Cox, Times-Mirror, and Prodigy soon formed what they called a “newspaper alliance,” in which Cox and Times-Mirror would get a cut of the proceeds whenever a new paper signed up with Prodigy. But the partnership was already nearing an end. When Access Atlanta was launched in March 1994, its publisher, David Scott, announced his hopes of obtaining 10,000 subscribers by the end of the first year and 40,000 by the end of the third. It reached the first milestone, announcing its 20,000th subscriber in August of 1995. It awarded twenty free months of service to the lucky 20,000th customer, Seth Ehrlich.

It never reached a third year, though, and Ehrlich never got all twenty months of service. Prodigy had fallen behind Compuserve and AOL by late 1994, and subscriptions had plateaued for both Prodigy and Access Atlanta. Finally, the Journal-Constitution moved Access Atlanta off Prodigy and onto the free World Wide Web in late 1996.²

Before that happened, the newspaper had very little content on the web. The Access Atlanta team was kept separate from the web team, which maintained a barebones placeholder at www.ajc.com that linked to several other websites the newspaper created, like a baseball-focused one called fastball.com. The newspaper also maintained other sites that it didn’t link on its front page, including a Southern humor site called yall.com and a sex humor site called brazenhussy.com.

Chad Dickerson was hired out of college in 1995 as a webmaster for all the newspaper’s content that was not on Access Atlanta, and he could see that restricting online access to proprietary subscribers was limiting growth. “I had just turned 23,” Dickerson told me. “And I was thinking, ‘Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.’ That was what motivated me to get them out of this stranglehold.”

At that point, the newspaper started putting its content on accessatlanta.com, but the site was maintained more as a neighborhood and lifestyle portal rather than as a breaking news site. So, in 1998, the newspaper launched AJC.com as its news site, and ever since then, the newspaper has operated both accessatlanta.com and AJC.com.

After spending most of the decade selling subscriptions for its online content, the newspaper offered its web content entirely free. But the newspaper was still so overwhelmingly profitable that the change in online revenue streams hardly made a dent — and hardly mattered. And that was hardly surprising, said AJC.com editorial director Hyde Post. “How many folks are willing to think, ‘I’m gonna make a decision that’s gonna cost me $100 million on the newspaper side, in the hope that I’ll get it back in five years on the other side’?”

“I think the industry could see the future, but were not prepared to take the risks,” said Heilbrunn, the former AP and Prodigy executive. “The newspaper industry looks at itself as a local franchise with a local brand, but isn’t willing to step out of that particular perception so that it invents Monster.com for employment ads or Zillow for real estate. There were a lot of opportunities for individuals or industry to do these things.”

Though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly paper, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today.

Access Atlanta was a way to re-imagine the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a new platform, but it could never replace the print newspaper’s revenue stream. “Except for the forward-looking groups, it was the old railroad paradigm,” said Fred Lowy. “‘We’re not in the transportation business, we’re in the railroad business.’” And that applied all the more to advertising revenue. Dating back to the 1970s, newspapers thought they were in the classified ad business, when they were actually in the much broader business of serving their communities by connecting people with the information, news, products, and services that they wanted. Cox made a few savvy investments in the new world order, such as founding AutoTrader.com. But neither Cox nor its competitors made those types of moves with any kind of urgency.³

Back when Cox was flush enough to afford spending money on a skunkworks, Access Atlanta could be brilliantly innovative. But when it became clear that the market had shifted, the Journal-Constitution was caught on its back heels, and it didn’t have the same financial cushion as before to continue to innovate from comfort. And though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly published by the AJC, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today, so that as of this writing, it does not even have a Wikipedia page.

The Journal-Constitution could not predict the changes in their business that the Internet would bring about; few did. The newspaper industry failed to take advantage of Web 1.0, and a decade later, it failed to take advantage of Web 2.0, standing by as social media redefined how people learned what was happening in their communities and in the world. If large news organizations want to survive the next wave of technological change, they will need to do more than just dip their toe in the water. They will need to dive in.

1. Videotex was another of the great technology misses of the decade, though it only failed in America — the technology caught on with teletext services in the UK and elsewhere. But despite a well-funded Knight-Ridder videotex system called Viewtron, which was finally shuttered in 1986 after costing its parent company $50 million, videotex never gained traction in the United States. It required users to have dedicated terminals, which none but the furthest-out of technology futurists were likely to purchase.
2. In 2003, the Journal-Constitution launched a free weekly paper to compete with Atlanta’s main alternative weekly, Creative Loafing. It’s also called Access Atlanta, and it’s co-branded with the website, which is now a joint venture between the AJC and the WSB radio and television stations.
3. One company that did succeed is Norway’s Schibsted Media Group, a media conglomerate that maintained its dominance in classified advertising by investing heavily in the 1990s. It’s the subject of a Harvard Business School case published in 2007.

On Aug. 13, 2011, Rick Perry delivered a gift to the Texas Tribune: The governor announced his candidacy for president. Two days later, reporter Jay Root would break the story that Perry had backpedaled on his controversial effort to vaccinate girls against HPV. Root’s story was viewed about 150,000 times in total in 2011 and generated the biggest-ever traffic day for the online startup.

“There’s no question Rick Perry was good for business,” said Trib CEO and editor Evan Smith. “Even if his presidential campaign wasn’t successful these last five months, we were.”

In 2011, the Tribune’s second full year in operation, the website served 5.2 million unique visitors, up from 2.2 million the year before. The plurality of those visitors came from Austin, but out-of-staters in New York and Washington represented the fifth and ninth most represented locales, respectively. The site’s list of most viewed stories for 2011 is chockablock with Perry, Perry, Perry.

The governor has been well known to Texans for the past 11 years, but less so elsewhere. Suddenly, the Tribune’s deep well of local knowledge had found national relevance. Tribune reporters could “explain and demystify him for the rest of the country, including for the national press,” Smith said. And Smith knew his audience at home would not be satisfied by wire copy and good aggregation. “There’s nothing that Texans hate more than non-Texans explaining the world to them. So it made a lot of sense to have our guys on the road.”

Putting their guys on the road — at various times, four reporters (including another following Rep. Ron Paul in New Hampshire), a photographer, and a videographer — was costly. (The Trib’s total staff headcount is 30.) Smith estimated the campaign coverage cost about $5,000 per week, once you add up the cramped Southwest flights, the motel rooms, and the midnight meals. And those expenses were not included in the 2011 budget.

“The fact that we’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean we get a friends-and-family rate,” he said. But it does mean Smith could turn to donors for help. The Tribune raised just under $300,000 specially for Perry coverage, he said. All together the Tribune raised $3.71 million in 2011, almost double the year before, and spent $4.01 million; Smith projects the Tribune will be in the black at the end of 2012. The Tribune posts all of its financials online.

Smith said the Tribune did nothing unusually innovative in their Perry coverage, at least by their standards — just more (“covering the waterfront, flooding the zone, and assorted other journalistic cliches,” he wrote in a New Year’s recap post.) The data journalism team created an interactive Perry tracker, showing where the candidate had been and where he was headed. And a landing page — er, vertical, I guess — called Perrypedia aggregated their own stuff — videos, narrative stories, campaign finance reporting — as well as material from some national sources.

A partnership with The New York Times, now into its second year, paid off too. Dozens of Tribune articles about Perry appeared on nytimes.com and in print; one article made it to A1, above the fold, Smith points out. The Times also prints Tribune articles in its Texas edition twice weekly.

Even though Perry’s campaign is over — and was more or less dead for some time before it became official — Trib traffic is still exceeding expectations. Smith projects January 2012 traffic levels will beat last January’s by 70 percent. “When you have a spike in traffic for a particular purpose, when that purpose dissipates, and you resettle, you resettle at a higher plateau than you did before. And I think that we we’ve certainly seen is that we’re resettling at a higher plateau.”

Photo by Gage Skidmore used under a Creative Commons license.

Raju Narisetti does not seem like the kind of guy who settles. “I’m a big believer in newsrooms being in a permanent beta stage,” he told me recently. His Twitter bio hits inspirational notes (“Everything seems impossible until it is done”), but until a few days ago, it also included a sentence inspired by the French Revolution: “So follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die advancing.”

Others can parse whether his most recent move — from managing editor of The Washington Post to managing editor of the WSJ Digital Network — counts as an advance, a retreat, or something else entirely. Narisetti, 45, is a Wall Street Journal alum and will help fill a void created with Kevin Delaney’s departure to The Atlantic.

Narisetti arrived at the Post three years ago to integrate its digital and print teams, which were literally separated by the Potomac River. “It was fairly traumatic, not in a bad way, but we changed our entire publishing system for print and online, we redesigned the website, we redesigned the newspaper, we physically emptied the newsroom and redid it and put everybody back in,” Narisetti told me. “We changed the overall structure of the newsroom. In all this we ended up reducing our workforce by close to 200+ people.”

He was hired three years ago to integrate the digital and print teams, which were literally separated by the Potomac River.

“So yeah, we put the Washington Post through a lot of change. And to be where we are now, where we had a record for the year in digital, an all-time record, entering a presidential election year, makes me feel good that it has gone well.”

Narisetti has said his singular goal was to bring Post journalism to as many readers as possible. With that came a “culture of measurement,” he says, gauging success by pageviews and time on site. Maybe not something a lot of print journalists want to hear — and probably one of the reasons Narisetti found some naysayers inside the Post and many outside (his words). The paper’s ombudsman went so far as to suggest Narisetti’s digital team was “innovating too fast.” And a disgruntled Post staffer came out of the woodwork — anonymously — to complain to Jim Romenesko:

He may have had great ideas, but you have to judge him by the end results: a desktop web site that loads too damn slow, has video that doesn’t work on an iPad and can’t present a mobile version of a story to a mobile device; a mobile site that lacks an article-search function and won’t display story comments; a series of mobile apps that function like packaged versions of the mobile site; the Godawful mess that is [content-management system] Methode that caused some of these issues.

Narsietti also wants to be judged by the end results, he said: “A single newsroom serving audiences across multiple platforms and breaking all-time records in page views, unique visitors, visits to the site and time spent on site is what the Washington Post newsroom is today—all measurable, all audience-focused data points not just some anecdotal talking points is what the Post is today.”

In 2011, the Post’s website saw a record number of pageviews, 26 percent more monthly unique visitors year-over-year, more video plays, more stickiness, more repeat visits, and, with the launch of iPhone and Android apps, 70 percent more mobile visits over 2010, according to internal Omniture data. He acknowledged, however, that the Post missed some goals, including growing its local audience, by a considerable margin.

Narisetti wrote in an email:

I am happy to take ownership of both success and problems, both of which we have plenty and always will. [...] Like many traditional media companies, the Post is also finally recognizing that the future will play out at the intersection of Post journalism and technology, in creating great “experiences” for readers. And its journey of not treating technology as a service function but as a strategic partner to news, something I have flagged for a while, has just begun and will succeed. Finally, I would have actually tried to move faster than we have. Big established newsroom cultures can get into trouble when we focus on the rear-view mirror and only talk of how far we have come.

“He was not afraid of hurting people’s feelings and that’s a good thing,” publisher Katharine Weymouth told a Post reporter. “He’s a change agent.”

In January 2009, Post Editor Marcus Brauchli created a system of dual managing editors: Narisetti ran the editing staff, producers, photo desk, social media people, and graphics and design teams, while his counterpart Liz Spayd ran the reporters. The dividing line between their jobs was job function, not medium.

Narisetti assigned “innovation editors” to the desks — sports, opinion, politics, the investigative team — for day-to-day and medium-term projects. Over the last few months, Narisetti has assembled a small, centralized team of digital project managers who focus on bigger-picture, sitewide projects. That team’s first product was the @MentionMachine, which gulps data from the Twitter fire hose and the Post’s own Trove APIs to track which candidates are talked about most in a week. The goal, he said, is for replicable innovation, code that can be re-used for other stories, not one-off projects.

The most aggressively digital-focused people might criticize a structure that includes distinctive digital editors instead of integrating digital into all jobs in the newsroom. Narisetti acknowledged that, but called it a transition. “At the beginning of our evolution to become a single newsroom, we did specifically need innovation catalysts in each of the groups because the groups that are print-focused are probably not digitally focused. So they needed somebody who understood what digital can do for their piece of content.”

Narisetti said he is leaving the Post amicably and sees the Wall Street Journal gig as a new challenge. There he’ll be responsible for WSJ.com, SmartMoney.com, MarketWatch, and foreign-language editions of WSJ.com.

“To talk about print and online integration now feels a little bit like Web 1.0, I think, been there, done that in some ways. It has become a baseline rather than actually the goal,” he said. “To me the biggest challenge going forward this year and beyond is, How do you integrate technology and content? Because I think that’s going to be the defining characteristic of successful media companies. Can you create engaging news experiences that create loyalty and engagement?”

Thinking about the sheer volume of information — stories, images, videos, data — available from The New York Times can evoke a simultaneous glee and terror. Skimming Times Wire gives you an idea of the hundreds of pieces of content they produce each day. For readers, it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg thing: Yes, on a day-to-day basis you have access to the news and a decades-spanning archive, but you’re not seeing anything close to all of it.

The task (or, more accurately, one of the tasks) for beta620, the Times experimental projects group, is to find a better way to make the newspaper’s information more readily available — both to readers and to the Times itself. Their latest stab at the problem is something they’re calling Deep Dive, a project that aims to give readers a richer, more nuanced understanding of stories.

Deep Dive uses the Times’ massive cache of metadata from stories to go, as the name suggests, deeper into a news event by pulling together related articles. So instead of performing a search yourself within the Times and weeding out off-topic results, Deep Dive would provides readers a collection of stories relating to a topic, based on whatever person, place, event or topic of their choosing. So let’s say you’re interested in protests in Yemen, with Deep Dive you could use an article from nytimes.com as a seed and let the system collect a history of previous items relating to news from the region.

It’s a novel project, still just in demonstration phase — one that aims to let the Times put its extensive archives to better use, but also to create a different experience for consuming news. David Erwin, a software engineer with beta620, said they began building Deep Dive to address problems they were having in following the life of a single news story — and the realization that they were in a position to do something about that. “It kind of came organically from a need that we felt ourselves to better understand what was going on as well as an expression of the potential of in our data and technology,” Erwin said.

What’s interesting about Deep Dive? At least three things:

The use of the Times’ rich metadata

Deep Dive relies on the extensive tagging system the Times uses for all its stories and makes the Times Topics pages possible. As part of the editing flow tags are applied to stories by editors or producers, with suggestions provided by an internal algorithm. Deep Dive looks for connections among topics, so in the case of our Yemen story, it would likely find other stories on protests in the Middle East.

At the moment Deep Dive is limited to topic tags, which are mostly broad terms like “Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )” and “Demonstrations, Protests, and Riots.” That means that that Yemen story connects with stories in on protests in Egypt and Syria, not more stories about what’s going on in Yemen. Erwin said they hope in the future the system could incorporate other factors to make connections through semantic data, editorial data, or time elements. The Times’ metadata is likely the richest of any news organization.

Part of the challenge will be to figure out what level of specificity readers want in a dive — how related they want their stories to be. In other words, does someone “diving” off a story about Italy’s debt crisis want more stories about Italian politics? The Euro crisis in places like Greece or Spain? The state of the global economy? How do you weigh an older story that’s spot-on versus one that’s breaking now but slightly more off-topic?

“What Deep Dive does it brings you some of the relevance of the topic as you’re reading the article itself,” Marc Frons, the Times CTO for digital operations told me. “So you’re immersed in a topic and you’re going further in. You don’t have to leave the page, which I think is very powerful.”

The user interface

What Frons is referring to is Deep Dive’ unique interfact, where the related articles flow into the same frame as the main story when selected. You need never leave the page; jumping backwards or forwards in articles all happens in the same space. That’s a departure from the pageview-driven way most news sites are designed. But Deep Dive’s UI matches its underlying thesis: that individual articles are really pieces of a larger story, told in pieces over time and across bylines and datelines.

Frons said the design is just one possible look for the project and not locked in. Still, the design in some ways aligns with Times Skimmer and Times Reader, which may be why Frons sees a future for it. “To me, this sort of notion you have to click and go to another page and wait for the page to load is something that is going to seem very quaint in the not too distant future,” he said. “It’s probably going to seem like using the international operator to place a call to France.”

Saving your “dives”

More interesting, Deep Dive will also allows users to save their “dives,” which would be constantly updated with new articles. While there are plenty of tools that let a person tailor what news they read online, they’re often based around broad categories (like sports or politics), keyword searches (like Times email alerts), or social networks. What Deep Dives promises is an alert more directly based around a specific developing story — story in the “Arab Spring” sense, not story in the one-specific-article sense. Erwin said the idea is to create a personal news experience that will provide contextual information and be consistently updated. “It basically allows you to keep up with your interests over time by providing custom feeds of articles as they are written,” Erwin said.

But beyond those elements, the real promise of Deep Dive, though, is that it continues to show the Times’ flexibility in providing different ways for different kinds of readers to access its content. For some, the blog-style Times Wire, with its constant reverse-chronological updates, will be perfect. For others, a quick skim of the front page of nytimes.com, with its added editorial judgment about what’s most important at the moment, will work better. Grazers and hunters come in a variety of forms, and the Times is trying to better use the enormous amount of work it generates daily to reach as many of them as they can.

“The reader who wants to dive into a topic and better understand an article in the context of a story isn’t really reading the news in the same was as a reader who is browsing current news,” Erwin said. But the audience that wants to pull back the curtain on a story exists, the Times is seeing it, Frons said. There are heavy users — often subscribers — but also others like researchers and professionals who consume a lot of content from the Times, he said. But the lines between heavy users and casual browsers can often blur, and the reader who stops by the Times for a Newt Gingrich story might wind up looking for more context, Frons said.

“What Deep Dive and some of the other things we’re thinking about do is make it almost easier to serve both people at once,” he said.

It could also be a method of converting those browsers into heavy users — making the grazer a hunter. The ability to save dives — or as Erwin says, “putting a pin in a progression of articles along a certain story” — could be useful when you’re trying to follow a story but then miss the latest developments because you didn’t check nytimes.com on a given day. Another thing beta620 would like to explore is the idea of sharing dives among friends, Erwin said.

It may be some time before Deep Dive is ready for the spotlight, both Frons and Erwin say its likely to stay in the experimental stage as they try and refine the product, especially to make its ability to find commonalities between stories more granular. Frons said it’s too soon to know how something like Deep Dive would be affected by the Times paywall, but ideally it would be available to all readers whether or not they’re subscribers. “Now that we’re a paid site we really want to build things that encourage the subscriber to use the site more and encourage people to subscribe by giving them dynamic and innovative features,” he said.

Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world.

Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders.

It’s done that by not following the rules: It has a nearly impenetrable paywall, no social media presence, no multimedia, and only rare use of links. It doesn’t cover crime and barely covers sports and entertainment.

However, it delivers up-to-the minute coverage of business, city hall, and the provincial legislature via the web and apps for iOS and BlackBerry. It scoops its news rivals almost daily and has won loyal readers through dogged combing of public records and often by prying into the personal lives of the province’s movers and shakers.

The site is based in Halifax, the capital city of Nova Scotia, a province of just under a million people in Atlantic Canada. Ask 10 people on the street about AllNovaScotia and it’s likely eight will say they’ve never heard of it.

“I think it might be nine people,” says Parker Donham, a former journalist for the now-defunct Halifax Daily News, communications consultant, and blogger. “But the one who did would be an assistant deputy minister or a regional manager. Between people paying for it and a limited amount of advertising, they’ve got a business model that seems to work.”

“On the whole, I think they are the paper of record now,” adds Donham. “I don’t think there are many serious business or political people who don’t see that every morning.”

AllNovaScotia has 5,950 subscribers, whose monthly dues generate 80 per cent of its revenue. The site doesn’t come close to having the broad appeal of its 137-year-old print competitor, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, which has a Monday-to-Friday circulation of 108,389. Three people with different email addresses can share a $30 a month subscription, but they can’t pass the stories on to anyone else without some effort. The publication — produced by a staff of 14, 11 of them reporters — is locked down in Flash, making sharing usually a cumbersome ordeal of cobbling together screenshots. No sharing buttons here.

A representative for 5,200 small- and medium-sized businesses in the region says AllNovaScotia’s influence among her association’s members is narrow but strong.

“I would suspect that most have never heard of AllNovaScotia,” says Leanne Hachey, vice president of the Atlantic Canadian chapter of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “However, among those with some influence over politics or public policy or government relations, everybody knows about AllNovaScotia and everybody, as far as I know, pays very close attention to it.”

In many ways, AllNovaScotia is similar to Statehouse News Service, the Massachusetts online outfit that offers “gavel-to-gavel coverage” of state government for lobbyists, government officials and business people. However, AllNovaScotia’s approach is both broader and spunkier.

The guts of each edition are development permits, court documents, and land transfers — and the stories of triumph and failure inside them. One January issue was a typical mixture of hard news and betcha-didn’t-know information about the province’s movers and shakers. The 25-story edition included:

1. a scoop that a local mall would host the region’s first Apple Store
2. an alert that a buyer had been found for one of the province’s struggling paper mills
3. an exposé in text and photos of the $7.6-million Florida mansion purchased by the owner of one of the region’s largest companies
4. profiles of three new partners at one of the city’s leading law firms
5. an obituary of a small business owner and minor-league hockey supporter

The news site appeals directly to the province’s tight-knit and family-oriented business community, according to Kevin Cox, AllNovaScotia’s former managing editor, who retired in June.

“The strange thing was they liked to read about other people within their circle. Not in a satirical way…but in a serious way,” says Cox, a former Globe and Mail reporter who still writes commentaries for the site, but who is now studying to be a United Church minister. “How do the Fountains spend their money? How do they make their money? Who did they give it to?”

As it turns out, the Fountains, one of the province’s leading philanthropist families, spent a chunk of their money on a surprise appearance by crooner Tony Bennett at their Dec. 10 Christmas party. The lead story in AllNovaScotia’s next issue detailed the lavish event, Bennett’s set list, and the who’s-who-of-Nova-Scotia guest list.

This focus on people and their wealth makes AllNovaScotia a different beast from typical business coverage that focuses on companies. People’s names are bolded in stories, frequently paired with their corporate compensation and the assessed value of their house. An almost-daily feature is Who’s Suing Whom.

“We wrote about property. We wrote about local stocks. We wrote about the old families,” says Cox, of his time managing the site beginning in 2004. “We wrote about the big business deals and the little business deals. We wrote about the breweries and the coffee shops. Some of it was micro-news that no one else was paying any attention to.”

The character of the site can be attributed to its creator, David Bentley, who co-founded a gossip publication called Frank Magazine in the 1980s. Frank is an irreverent print and online journal that chronicles everything from local celebrity divorces, petty scandals and social faux pas. Many in this conservative province read it, though fewer would admit it. Bentley had started a separate newspaper a decade earlier that would become the Halifax Daily News. That paper, a scrappy tabloid that became the first Canadian newspaper with a website in 1994, folded in 2008, two decades after Bentley sold it.

Bentley, who no longer operates Frank, says AllNovaScotia’s readers are business people, government officials, academics, and health-care administrators. They are people who need to know what’s going on but who also read the publication “just to keep an eye on who’s in the courts and owing people money.”

Cox says AllNovaScotia writes about personal lives of the province’s business elite if it affects the way that business is run.

“Just because you’re Colin MacDonald of [seafood giant] Clearwater doesn’t mean we’re not going to pry a little bit to see what’s underlying the value of that stock or the lack of value of that stock. And it’s not to say that we won’t pry into people’s personal lives,” says Cox.

That approach hasn’t rankled MacDonald, chairman of the international shellfish company that does about $300 million in business annually. Clearwater received extensive coverage by AllNovaScotia in 2011, when it was the target of a hostile takeover.

One AllNovaScotia story in August, headlined “Colin Goes Fishing,” asked whether “the most committed Clearwater founder was losing his passion” after MacDonald went salmon fishing in Newfoundland during the takeover challenge.

MacDonald stated in an email that AllNovaScotia “provides me and I suspect other business leaders with a real-time heads up on what is happening in the business community” — an advantage over other news media in the province, which he said are slower and “lacking the business focus and insight.”

In reaction, the Chronicle-Herald played catch-up in 2011, launching a rival morning business newsletter and hiring additional business reporters.

But a major component of AllNovaScotia’s success is style, not just substance.

“We speculate about an awful lot of stuff — this could happen; that might happen,” says Cox. “We write about it with a certain amount of self-righteousness that a lot of business publications won’t take to.”

How much of this style can be attributed to Bentley’s roots with the gossip magazine Frank?

“I think a substantial amount,” adds Cox. “We’re criticized harshly in the [local] journalism school for using anonymous sources, because we do. But we have people who talk to us who won’t talk to anyone else. If they’re going to give me the legitimate news and I can verify it somewhere else, I think that’s my job to get it out there.”

For Bentley — who co-owns AllNovaScotia with his daughter, the publisher — “getting it out there” simply wouldn’t happen without the site’s uncompromising paywall.

“We’ve got to do that, otherwise they won’t buy the bloody thing,” he says flatly. “Our competition is people who want to read it for nothing. That’s the great big overarching thing that attempts to suck our blood every day. It sounds a bit paranoid. But that’s the problem.”

The result, says the consultant and blogger Donham, is a web site that would appear not to get the Internet at all, by today’s online news norms.

But that’s fine with Bentley. He knows what his content is worth to his audience — in contrast to many media excutives who “think what they’ve got is more valuable than it is.” He acknowledges the value of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings, but insists, “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it.”

Even so, he cautions against viewing AllNovaScotia as a model. “This thing has been going on for 10 or 11 years. It’s one little place,” he says. “What sort of success is that? It’s not as though it has taken off like wildfire and spread across the continent, has it?”

Note for transparency: Cox is a sessional instructor and colleague of mine at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.