These are questions that Amanda Cox of The New York Times’ graphics desk asks herself on a regular basis. In a recent analysis of their popularity on social media, Cox tried to locate what makes a graphic popular.

1. “development.really.hard”
2. “big.breaking.news.big.breaking.news.adjacent”
3. “useful”
4. “explicitly.emotional…atmospheric”
5. “surprise.reveal”
6. “comprehensive”

Unsurprisingly “difficult” topics — mostly related to war, violence, climate change, and other highly complex issues — performed least well, but “takeaway” pieces with an obvious message also performed poorly as a class. In contrast, visualizations that requires extensive technical resources tended to perform particularly well, as did features Cox classed as emotional and useful — and, of course, those closely tied to breaking news.

In the wrap-up of her analysis, Cox considered the problem of indicating importance to the paper’s readership across platforms: “How do you signal that something is important? You do that by using the resource that is scarce.” In print, the Times can use scarcity to indicate importance by giving an important graphic a desirable spot on a “good page.” On the web, the equivalent scarce resource isn’t placement, but the allocation of valuable internal tech/development hours.

But that doesn’t mean the good people of BuzzFeed have forgotten where they came from — what community editor (and animals editor!) Jack Shepherd calls the site’s “bread and butter.”

The department devoted to creating this “old school” content is known as BuzzTeam. Their focus is anything shareable — lists, animals, nostalgia. The kind of content that BuzzFeed’s loyal readers have become hyper-familiar with. Many, in fact, have consumed so many such BuzzFeed posts that they’ve become adept at mimicking both their tone and their viral success.

Earlier this month, BuzzFeed’s editors took a step toward giving those faithful followers a little more of the spotlight they crave. Shepherd, along with a staff of four, now run BuzzFeed Community, a content-producing vertical of its very own, complete with featured posts by community members and a leaderboard with the latest on who’s posts are getting the most traffic, likes, comments, and badges. It’s a competitive place, and anyone can join and enter the fray.

Success generally comes to those who enjoy making post after post, learning the audience and predicting what they will like. Shepherd says active, productive, and successful communtiy members are the kind of people who are Internet-obsessed. “They’re aware of how long a particular image has been around, what its currency is, whether it will come back or whether it’s old,” he said, laughing. “They’ll always let us know. “

This community has existed since the early days of BuzzFeed. The site’s community moderator, Cates Holderness, was boarding and grooming dogs at a kennel in North Carolina when she first discovered the site. “After a long day at work, posting on BuzzFeed was both a creative outlet for me as well as a way to relax and have fun. I got great feedback from the other users, who were very supportive and encouraging.”

#FF —> @buzzfeeders, where the best of the @buzzfeed Community will be featured!

— Cates Holderness (@catesish) May 8, 2013

@catesish @buzzfeeders @buzzfeed You mean like @tonydac??? :D buzzfeed.com/tonydac/9-ways…

— Leslie Stewart (@darlingstewie) May 8, 2013

@darlingstewie@tonydac Yep! Exactly like that!

— BuzzFeed Community (@BuzzFeeders) May 8, 2013

@buzzfeeders @tonydac Tony is just so smart and funny. He was the first friend I had on Twitter and he is just an all around NICE GUY

— Leslie Stewart (@darlingstewie) May 8, 2013

#ff @darlingstewie thanks for being awesome! You’re so supportive and helpful! Internet!

— tonydac (@tonydac) May 8, 2013

@tonydac INTERNETTTT

— Leslie Stewart (@darlingstewie) May 8, 2013

Holderness got so good at making posts — and scoring badges from staffers — that she ended up talking with Shepherd about a job, and was eventually hired to manage and interact with the site’s growing commenter base. She says the Community staff spends a lot of time engaging with users, encouraging them to make more posts and awarding them various badges. But her greatest power is the ability to promote posts, placing them on the featured Community page, or suggesting them to the editors of other verticals. Holderness says the Community team reads every single post that’s made.

Now, partially in hopes of finding others like her, Shepherd has opened that community up. The CMS for community members was originally built to allow potential hires to make sample posts, he says. But what the new vertical offers, in addition to centralized Featured Posts and a way to view the Community contributions all at once, is a leaderboard. (At the moment, WhittyGolden is edging out swelldesigner for the top spot, powered by posts like “Ten American Idol Judges Whose Opinion You’d Actually Respect” and “Why It Would Have Totally Rocked To Be A Huxtable.”)

“Now they have a community board that also lets you see how you rank against other community members,” says Community member Alexa Westerfield, “so that brings out my competitive spirit.” That sense of competition is key, because along with the new vertical, BuzzFeed community members now also have a new currency for measuring how well they’re doing: Cat Power. (Not that Cat Power.)

“I know that on Reddit, people get really obsessed with how much karma they have. That totally works for them, but I don’t think that’s our model in any way,” says Shepherd. “Cat Power, actually, it’s kind of silly, but it actually correlates directly with an actual thing. The higher your Cat Power is, the more posts you can suggest to our community editors for consideration.”

Community users can create as many posts as they want, but they can only promote a few. The better their posts are, the more Cat Power they get, the more access to editors they have, which in turn means more promotion, audience, and views. Building a relationship with the editors can be lucrative — Shepherd says there’s an active freelancing network to pay users, and lately BuzzFeed fellowships have been given to frequent posters. Shepherd calls the new vertical “small scaffolding to help people naturally” ascend the steps of the hiring process — and he says the Community editing team will expand within the year.

Hundreds of applications for the @buzzfeeduk writer job. Best way to stand out from the pack: sign up + start posting buzzfeed.com/community

— Luke Lewis (@lukelewis) May 16, 2013

Those jobs are major incentives for BuzzFeed Community members. A cursory examination of frequent posters finds the vast majority seem to be journalism students, budding comedians, or both. Frequent users said that creating posts for BuzzFeed offers built in access to an audience of a size it would be impossible to reach otherwise. “I had a blog for five years that literally nobody read,” says Shepherd.

Writes Travis Greenwood, a top ranked Community member currently in marketing: “My community posts have been linked by National Geographic, Time, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Babble (a Disney property), ET.com, Complex, Fark, Mental Floss, Team Coco, IFC, Glamour, and dozens of other prominent sites (in other words, big, established editorial brands that probably wouldn’t give me the time of day otherwise). On a basic level, BuzzFeed is a marketplace of ideas and I want to compete in this arena. Pushing something onto the homepage is like jumping onto the diamond with the Red Sox (I’m from Boston).”

Of course, media companies hiring popular commenters as writers is nothing new. “We have a long tradition of hiring people who love the site and organically discover how to make really great BuzzFeed posts,” says Shepherd. And as Matthew Ingram wrote a few weeks ago, it’s happened at The Atlantic, Wired, and Gawker — and Gawker’s new Kinja platform seems expressly built for the purpose of surfacing talent.

Community members are also using BuzzFeed as an opportunity to learn about audience desires. They get access to a BuzzFeed dashboard that tracks tweets, links, and views, and, through editors, can have their success tracked by BuzzFeed’s algorithm.

“People love to see posts that reflect them or impact them. That’s just a rule of journalism,” wrote Austin Carroll. “As a journalism student, I do hope to get hired by BuzzFeed (currently that is in the talks of happening soon). However, I am mostly a narrative televison writer and therefore this experience has given me valuable insight into what people relate to, what they find funny, and what they want to talk about and share.”

So while they may be creating heavily branded and highly popular content for free, it’s not as though BuzzFeed’s Community users walk away empty handed. But what is BuzzFeed hoping to will come of the project?

“I would love to see a large core of users genuinely competing with the editors. It’s always the case with big sites, and it’s true for us as well, that the percentage of registered users versus the percentage of people who are dedicated and active — the latter is very small,” says Shepherd. “I would consider this to be a success if we got really good at focusing on that percentage and growing that and giving them the attention they wanted and mkaing it a good experience. Getting it to a point where they could kind of compete with the editors.”

I asked Shepherd whether they’re concerned about users repackaging staffer ideas, or vice versa. On Twitter, some voiced even more serious concerns.

Starting a pool: How long before BuzzFeed gets sued for something someone posts in its Community section?

— Nicholas Jackson (@nbj914) May 15, 2013

But Shepherd said, while Community wasn’t built to help editors pad the other verticals, if users end up making content that’s more popular than what staffers make, that’s all right. “Maybe from there,” he says, “there will be entirely new post types that we never thought of that really work because they’re being crowdsourced or being collaborative.”

Photo by Roger H. Goun used under a Creative Commons license.

With @gizmodo’s massive refresh, this feels obvious but worth saying:“Tech blogging”—as the genre was long defined—no longer exists.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

TechCrunch established the “tech blogging” form, when—after going with ~any~ start-up news—it launched a whole blog about phones in ~2006.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

50% start-ups, 50% phones. “Tech blogging” as genre. The NYT’s Bits—a tech blog! at the NYT!—opens shop in 2007: bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/bit…

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

Last Oct., @nicknoted complained about a “general dearth of news” in Gizmodo’s beat: jimromenesko.com/2012/10/15/gaw… Too few new phones, companies.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

(@alexismadrigal called & covered the *reasons* behind tech journalism’s demise all the way back in April 2012: theatlantic.com/technology/arc… )

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

Since spring of 2012, you could watch the tech beat break. What were business stories, media stories, policy stories were labeled “tech.”

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

Slow news day? This science story kinda sorta qualifies as “tech.” And, uh, hey! Here’s an architecture story that involves cell phones!

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

With @bldgblog & @paleofuture, @gizmodo enters (my fav) part of tech: gizmodo.com/new-faces-new-… Structure, history, ethics. Weird Techblogging.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

Tech journalism, ca. 2013: • SAME AS IT EVER WAS: Ars.• COVER WHATEVER MIGHT BE TECH NEWS: The Verge, &c.• WEIRD STRUCTURES: @gizmodo!

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

The death of Web 2.0-flavored techblogging is worth celebrating because—maybe—it’ll end the rampant ahistoricism of technology journalism.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

The best part of Web 2.0, of “social media,” of new(!) smartphones(!) was the rambunctious hope. But you can hope and know your own history.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

Media has a history & policy has a history & higher education has a history, all of them riven with tech—yay, cover them! When appropriate!

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 17, 2013

You could think of what he’s saying as the Revenge of the Liberal Arts Majors.

While we’re talking about multi-tweet runs, might as well link to Ben Mathis-Lilly’s defense of new media terminology.

Algorithms are increasingly invoked as powerful entities that control, govern, sort, regulate, and shape everything from financial trades to news media. Nevertheless, the nature and implications of such orderings are far from clear. What exactly is it that algorithms “do”? What is the role attributed to “algorithms” in these arguments? How can we turn the “problem of algorithms” into an object of productive inquiry? This conference sets out to explore the recent rise of algorithms as an object of interest in scholarship, policy, and practice.

If this interests you, I’d suggest following #govalgo on Twitter, checking out the proposed pre-conference reading list, and looking at the discussion papers submitted. One that stood out to me was Tarleton Gillespie’s “The Relevance of Algorithms,” which connects the idea that algorithms are “objective” to journalists’ conception of the same idea (emphasis all mine):

This assertion of algorithmic objectivity plays in many ways an equivalent role to the norm of objectivity in Western journalism. Like search engines, journalists have developed tactics for determining what is most relevant, how to report it, and how to assure its relevance — a set of practices that are relatively invisible to their audience, a goal that they admit is messier to pursue than they might appear, and a principle that helps set aside but does not eradicate value judgments and personal politics. These institutionalized practices are animated by a conceptual promise that, in the discourse of journalism, is regularly articulated (or overstated) as a kind of totem. Journalists use the norm of objectivity as a “strategic ritual” (Tuchman 1972), to lend public legitimacy to knowledge production tactics that are inherently precarious. “Establishing jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality is a claim to a special kind of authority” (Schudson and Anderson 2009, 96).

Journalist and algorithmic objectivities are by no means the same. Journalistic objectivity depends on an institutional promise of due diligence, built into and conveyed via a set of norms journalists learned in training and on the job; their choices represent a careful expertise backed by a deeply infused, philosophical and professional commitment to set aside their own biases and political beliefs. The promise of the algorithm leans much less on institutional norms and trained expertise, and more on a technologically inflected promise of mechanical neutrality. Whatever choices are made are presented both as distant from the intervention of human hands, and as submerged inside of the cold workings of the machine.

But in both, legitimacy depends on accumulated guidelines for the proceduralization of information selection. The discourses and practices of objectivity have come to serve as a constitutive rule of journalism (Ryfe 2006). Objectivity is part of how journalists understand themselves and what it means to be a journalist. It is part of how their work is evaluated, by editors, colleagues, and their readers. It is a defining signal by which journalists even recognize what counts as journalism. The promise of algorithmic objectivity, too, has been palpably incorporated into the working practices of algorithm providers, constitutively defining the function and purpose of the information service. When Google includes in its “Ten Things We Know to Be True” manifesto that “Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust,” this is neither spin nor corporate Kool-Aid. It is a deeply ingrained understanding of the public character of Google’s information service, one that both influences and legitimizes many of its technical and commercial undertakings, and helps obscure the messier reality of the service it provides.

The Tuchman reference is to Gaye Tuchman’s 1972 landmark piece “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.” The Michael Schudson/C.W. Anderson piece is “Objectivity, Professionalism, and Truth Seeking in Journalism” (2009). The Ryfe is David Ryfe’s “The Nature of News Rules.”

Unfamiliar with the Pi? The Model B Pi is a $35 computer that’s about the size of a deck of cards. It’s got an ethernet port, and you supply the hard drive in the form of an SD card, the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Now, for $35, you’re not getting a ton of horsepower, but for simple repetitive tasks it works great.

What kind of simple, repetitive tasks? Let’s pretend for a second that you wanted to set up a scraper that dumped data into a database every hour. Ideally, you’d have a server somewhere and you’d set up a task on it — I like using ‘nix’s cron for things like this — and off it would go, mindlessly gathering data for you and putting it into a database. You could then go about your life, stopping by from time to time to get that data and do whatever you’re going to do with it. So you ask newsroom IT for this and, of course, the answer is no. And no we won’t give you the money to run this in the cloud for a few bucks a month either.

Enter the Pi.

— It describes how Justin, a few years back, started an independent, no-revenue site called BPSsports that covered high school sports in the urban Boston public schools — something local media wasn’t particularly interested in covering. After building it up, it was scooped up by The Boston Globe, where it lives on as BPS Sports Blog at Boston.com, with Justin still serving as lead writer. It’s a nice example of the value of just starting something and of the opportunities that can open up.

Rice didn’t approach his innovative gig by knocking on doors in a traditional way. He nabbed it by doing the work of BPSsports himself, at first, creating a proof of concept that eventually paid off. He showcased the potential. He eventually reaped the rewards. In that, there’s a time-tested entrepreneurial tradition, but there’s also a takeaway specifically for writers looking to make their own beat, especially in an age of digital news.

“Just jump in and don’t hesitate,” Rice said. “If you truly want to occupy a new niche, then you’ve got to claim that niche as quickly as possible, before anyone else does. Throw up what you can, do as much as you can with it. If it truly is a niche, somebody else is going to be interested.”

— We know Justin around here — he wrote a four-part series for Nieman Lab on the impact of sports networks becoming their own media outlets way back in 2009.

— The story isn’t actually straight Forbes journalism — it’s part of its Forbes BrandVoice program that lets brands “post interesting and relevant content on Forbes.com while tapping into the social web through Forbes’ powerful, search optimized publishing platform.” So this piece was presented by…John Hancock, which I guess wants you to think of it whenever you think of urban high school sports? (James O’Brien is listed as the author.)

This is the happiest sort of sponsored content — the story has nothing to do with John Hancock and has seemingly no attachment to John Hancock’s business interests. (You don’t see that on all of John Hancock’s sponsored Forbes content — like a story about the wonders of homeownership or one about why you should “check in with your financial advisor at least once a year” about your 401(k).)

We hear about it when sponsored content goes wrong, and there are plenty of landmines that need navigating. But it’s also worth noting when sponsored content checks in as somewhere between “inoffensive” and “nice.”

Outrage at seizure of AP records: The journalism and media world was collectively seething in a way you don’t often see this week after the Associated Press revealed that the U.S. Department of Justice had secretly obtained more than two months of phone records from more than 20 of its journalists’ work and home lines. The government hasn’t publicly said what they’re looking for, but it’s widely believed to be part of their investigation into the leaker behind the AP’s story last year about a foiled Yemeni bomb plot. The two best explanations of the situation come from Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and Free Press’ Josh Stearns.

The DOJ has moved quickly to defend itself publicly (and to deflect some attention): It wrote a letter to the AP claiming it had the legal right to make the seizure, which drew an indignant response from the AP. Its head, Attorney General Eric Holder, held a press conference in which he emphasized the seriousness of the leak being investigated — and also told NPR he wasn’t sure how many times his department had seized such records of journalists. Holder also testified before Congress, and the White House pushed to revive a media shield bill that would require the government to notify news organizations before their records were seized, allowing them to fight it in court (with some exceptions).

New Yorker attorney Lynn Oberlander and Jeffrey Hermes of the Digital Media Law Project both reviewed the law behind the case, finding that while the DOJ might be able to argue for the legality of its actions, it probably violated its own (non-binding) policy for such seizures by not informing the AP beforehand or getting judicial review. This case, as Hermes argued, “called attention to the fact that the DOJ’s Media Policy has significant problems with transparency, accountability, and scope.” The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee marveled at the fact that the DOJ’s actions are probably completely legal, and warned of the implications for all cell phone and email users.

Other writers provided some historical context: The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple looked at a couple of past cases to illustrate the difference made when the government gives prior notice, and also examined the long-term effects of its 2001 seizure of an AP reporter’s records. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, meanwhile, noted how the DOJ has abused its supposedly careful process for record seizure in the past.

Journalists were virtually universally outraged, as The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson chronicled in a pair of posts. The DOJ’s actions were condemned as a violation of the freedom of the press in pieces from journalists and observers ranging from The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, Poynter’s Al Tompkins, Free Press’ Josh Stearns, and Slate’s Emily Bazelon. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, as is his wont, placed the seizure in the context of the Obama administration’s ongoing attacks on civil liberties, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sounded a warning to all of us about the privacy of the communication we entrust to third parties.

Marcy Wheeler of Salon broke down the administration’s rationale for the leak investigation, arguing that it was motivated by resentment at the AP for pre-empting a planned announcement, and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick concurred that it was driven more by embarrassment than national security concern. Reuters’ Jack Shafer explained why the government may not have been concerned so much about the AP story’s content as the potential damage from its source.

Snooping with Bloomberg terminals: The DOJ’s seizure wasn’t the only snooping story in journalism this week, though journalists were the offender rather than the victim in the other one. The financial news service Bloomberg came under scrutiny with reports that executives from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have confronted Bloomberg over reporters’ use of its terminals to track terminal usage by their companies’ employees. Reporters’ access to that information has since been cut off, but the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Treasury Department are all examining the situation. Not only that, but the Financial Times reported (paywalled; here’s The Verge summarizing it) that thousands of confidential terminal messages had inadvertently been available online for years, though they’ve now been taken down.

A bit of background on Bloomberg’s terminals: They’re everywhere in the financial services industry, and they’re by far the largest share of Bloomberg’s revenue. Their primary purpose is to track financial data and news, but they can also be used to send messages, and its users’ login and customer service data is available to Bloomberg reporters. Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler downplayed what information reporters have access to through the terminals, but noted that they’ve used that data as a feedback to tailor their reporting since the early days of the company.

The Wall Street Journal’s William Launder went into deeper detail on the historical intertwining between journalists and the terminals’ financial data, and Quartz’s Zachary Seward gave a fuller picture of exactly what Bloomberg reporters can see regarding the terminals’ users. BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria reported that a Bloomberg anchor had been disciplined in 2011 for making on-air comments about using terminal data to track a source, and The New York Times’ Amy Chozick reported that Bloomberg reporters did talk about using terminal data to help break news. Nitasha Tiku of Gawker gave some more details about how the terminals were used in reporting and the information Bloomberg reporters store and share about their sources.

Some observers debated about how big of a deal this snooping was. Both Adam Penenberg of PandoDaily and The Daily Beast’s Stuart Stevens compared it negatively to News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal, but the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum and The Guardian’s Heidi Moore noted that reporters couldn’t get that much information from the terminals, and, as Moore argued, were simply mining data for any minute advantage in the same way their clients were.

The most insightful piece on the issue came from Quartz’s Zachary Seward, who wrote that the ability to see customers’ data was an open secret, a feature rather than a bug for a company built on a borderline obsessive culture of external secrecy and internal “transparency.” “Data comes into the company—as much as possible, from wherever possible—but it doesn’t leave because, at Bloomberg, information is money,” Seward wrote.

Former Bloomberg reporter Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D also detailed how deeply ingrained this surveillance is at Bloomberg, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon argued that Bloomberg’s terminal system is essentially a social network, where, like Facebook, users trade their data for the value the network provides. The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin wondered if Bloomberg’s model is ripe for disruption, and The New York Times’ David Carr tied together the DOJ and Bloomberg scandals, noting that spying is more of a two-way street than journalists like to acknowledge.

The struggle over online video: There were a few interesting developments on the online video front worth keeping an eye on this week: ABC announced that it would begin livestreaming its feed through its iPad and iPhone apps to users in the area of some of the local stations it owns. It’s the first time a network has offered any type of live mobile streaming, but it’s not as much of a step forward in accessibility as you might think: It’s only available to cable and satellite subscribers, despite the fact that it’s a free over-the-air signal.

GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers looked more closely at the technology behind live streaming and how it’s cleared the hurdles that have held it back in the past. He noted the ways in which the service contrasts with that of Aereo, the service that lets subscribers access streaming network TV on mobile devices, much to the consternation of media executives. Aereo, meanwhile, has simplified its price structure and is expanding from New York into Boston and Atlanta. CNNMoney’s Julianne Pepitone said despite the moves by ABC and Aereo, live online TV is still a ways off from becoming a reality for most people.

Elsewhere in online video, YouTube debuted its subscription channels last Friday, and as Peter Kafka of All Things D pointed out, it’s almost entirely devoid of both big-media players and YouTube-native stars. The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor questioned whether people will want to pay for what’s offered, and Janko Roettgers of paidContent argued that the key is finding content whose market neatly intersects with YouTube’s.

A new Strongbox for leaks: The New Yorker this week launched Strongbox, a method of securely submitting sensitive information to the magazine, designed by recently deceased digital activist Aaron Swartz and former hacker and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. It’s a pretty complicated process, involving the anonymity network Tor, encryption, and multiple computers and thumb drives. Poulsen explained Swartz’s role in creating the underlying code for the process, known as DeadDrop.

The most useful analysis of Strongbox comes from Source, where several journalist/developers discussed its advantages and limitations, generally finding it to be a helpful tool that’s nonetheless not silver bullet for security, and which may be too complex for many people to use. You can also see some early optimism about Strongbox’s viability in posts by the Village Voice’s Sydney Brownstone and Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with Timm calling it the most promising leak submission system since WikiLeaks.

Reading roundup: A few other stories to check out this week:

— Protests against the possible sale of the Tribune Co.’s newspapers to the conservative billionaire Koch brothers continued this week in Los Angeles, with another one planned for Orlando. Tribune Co. CEO Peter Liguori, however, tried to reassure employees that a sale of the papers wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi said stopping the Kochs from buying the papers is something unions should do, while Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon said their potential influence may be overblown.

— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported on surprising new research finding that 92 percent of the time spent consuming news is on legacy platforms — print, radio, TV — rather than computers or mobile devices. Mathew Ingram of paidContent contested the usefulness of the data in illustrating the current state of media consumption.

— At MediaShift Idea Lab, Brian Moritz gave four lessons for journalism students from his experiences at Syracuse working with the cutting edge of digital technology, such as drones, 3D printers, and immersive virtual reality tools.

— Finally, NYU professor Jay Rosen laid out a blueprint for a networked beat, focusing on how it might work at The Atlantic’s business news site Quartz. He also talked to paidContent’s Mathew Ingram about his ideas for how to rework the beat with the public at the center.

Photo of phone console at AP’s Washington bureau by AP/Jon Elswick. Photo of Bloomberg terminal by Ryan Wang.

Since then, Source has compiled a wealth of context and information, including a litany of responses from across Twitter. Today, Source contacted some experts for further exposition. Writes Jonathan Stray:

I am also concerned that the system may still be too hard to use. The Strongbox web service has a simple, clean interface — and bravo for that — but first the user has to get Tor running. In my experience, even savvy technologists vastly overestimate the number of people who can reliably complete tasks like “download and install this software.” If these users don’t also understand why such drastic measures are necessary, they will find ways to accomplish their goals with much simpler tools — like email. Strongbox cannot help users who are too frustrated to get it working properly.

And then, there is “the big question hanging over any secure dropbox,” writes The New York Times’ Jacob Harris: “Will you get any useful tips?”

The Tribune Company which houses the Los Angeles Times, The Balitimore Sun and The Chicago Tribune (along with many other local newspapers) is up for sale!

The Bad News: The only people who are bidding on it right now are infamous right-wing Billionaires, who are likely to pay something around a $660 Million pricetag to control a big slice of trusted news media.

So let’s pass the hat and raise $660 million ourselves!

Yes, we’re trying to make a point here. And yes, some might say we’re tilting at corporate windmills — but someone’s got to do it. We need to get the conversation on media ownership started. And what if by some freak miracle we do begin to approach the ridiculous sum of $660 Million? (That would be weird, but weirder things have happened – trust us.) What if we really do change the game of Billionaires vs. The Rest Of Us? It can’t hurt to try, can it?

In Short: This Could Be a Game-Changer. (Really.)

Newsweek.com will be entirely free at the start, but executives plan to eventually introduce a metered pay wall, in which frequent users will be asked to subscribe. All of the content will remain free to Newsweek Global subscribers.

No ads will appear on Newsweek.com during the beta stage of its life. When ads do become part of the mix, they will not look like the standard units promoted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, according to Mr. Shetty. Newsweek.com will instead adopt a sponsorship model featuring one advertiser in each article. “They’re going to be bold, beautiful, high-impact units,” he said.

In a year that was monopolized by the “Fifty Shades” erotic novels and their various knockoffs, e-book sales in fiction rose 42 percent over the year before, to $1.8 billion. Growth in nonfiction e-book sales was smaller, a 22 percent increase, to $484.2 million. E-book sales in the children’s and young-adult categories increased 117 percent, to $469.2 million.

The survey revealed that e-books now account for 20 percent of publishers’ revenues, up from 15 percent in 2011. Publishers’ net revenues in 2012 were $15 billion, up from $14 billion in 2011, while unit sales of trade books increased 8 percent, to $2.3 billion.

Quietly, very quietly, NewsRight — once touted as the American newspaper industry’s bid to protect its content and make more money from it — has closed its doors.

Yesterday, it conducted a concluding board meeting, aimed at tying up loose ends. That meeting follows the issuing of a put-your-best-face-on-it press release two weeks ago. Though the news has been out there, hardly a whimper was heard.

Why?

Chalk it up, first, to how few people are really still covering the $38.6 billion U.S. newspaper industry. Then add in the fact that the world is changing rapidly. Piracy protection has declined as a top publisher concern. Google’s snippetization of the news universe is bothersome, but less of a central issue. The declining relative value of the desktop web — where NewsRight was primarily aimed — in the mobile age played a part. Non-industry-owned players like NewsCred (“The newsonomics of recycling journalism”) have been born, offering publishers revenue streams similar to those that NewsRight itself was intended to create.

Further, new ways to value news content — through all-access subscriptions and app-based delivery, content marketing, marketing services, innovative niching and more — have all emerged in the last couple of years.

Put a positive spin on it, and the U.S. newspaper industry is looking forward, rather than backward, as it seeks to find new ways to grow reader and ad revenues.

That’s all true. But it’s also instructive to consider the failure of NewsRight.

It’s easy to deride it as NewsWrong. It’s one of those enterprises that may just have been born under a bad sign. Instead of the stars converging, they collided.

NewsRight emerged as an Associated Press incubator project. If you recall the old AP News Registry and its “beacon,” NewsRight became its next iteration. It was intended to track news content as it traversed the web, detecting piracy along the way (“Remember the beacon”). It was an ambitious databasing project, at its peak taking in feeds from more than 900 news sites. The idea: create the largest database of current news content in the country, both categorized by topic and increasingly trackable as it was used (or misused) on the web.

AP initially incentivized member newspapers to contribute to the News Registry by discounting some of their annual fees. Then a bigger initiative emerged, first called the News Licensing Group (NLG). The strategy: harness the power of the growing registry to better monetize newspaper content through smart licensing.

NLG grew into a separate company, with AP contributing the registry’s intellectual property and becoming one of 29 partners. The other 28: U.S. daily newspaper companies and the leading European newspaper and magazine publisher Axel Springer. Those partners collectively committed more than $20 million — though they ended up spending only something more than half of that before locking up the premises.

Renamed NewsRight, it was an industry consortium, and here a truism applies: It’s tougher for a consortium — as much aimed at defense than offense — to innovate and adjust quickly. Or, to put it in vaudevillian terms: Dying is easy — making decisions among 29 newspaper companies can be torture.

It formally launched just more than a year ago, in January 2012 (“NewsRight’s potential: New content packages, niche audiences, and revenue”), and the issues surfaced immediately. Let’s count the top three:

• Its strategy was muddled. Was it primarily a content-protection play, bent on challenging piracy and misuse? Or was it a way to license one of the largest collections of categorized news content? Which way did it want to go? Instead of deciding between the two, it straddled both.
• In May 2011, seven months before the launch, the board had picked TV veteran David Westin as its first CEO. Formerly head of ABC News, he seemed an odd fit from the beginning. A TV guy in a text world. An analog guy in a digital world. Then friction between Westin and those who had hired him — including then-AP CEO Tom Curley — only complicated the strategic indecision. Westin was let go in July, which I noted then, was the beginning of the end.
• Publishers’ own interests were too tough to balance with the common good. Though both The New York Times Company and AP were owners, it was problematic to include feeds of the Times and AP in the main NewsRight “catalog.” The partners tried to find prices suitable for the high-value national content (including the Times and AP) and the somewhat lesser-valued regional content, but that exercise proved difficult, the difficulty of execution exacerbated by anti-trust laws. Potential customers, of course, wanted the Times and AP as part of any deal, so dealmaking was hampered.

Further, all publishers take in steady revenue streams — collectively in the tens of millions — from enterprise licensors, like LexisNexis, Factiva, and Thomson Reuters, as well as education and copyright markets. NewsRight’s owners (the newspaper companies) didn’t want NewsRight to get in the way of those revenue streams — and those were the only licensing streams that had proven lucrative over time.

Long story short, NewsRight was hobbled from the beginning, and in its brief life, was able to announce only two significant customer, Moreover and Cision, and several smaller ones.

How could it have been so difficult?

It’s understandable on one level. Publishers have seethed with rage as they’ve seen their substantial investment in newsrooms harvested — for nothing — by many aggregators from Google to the tens of thousands of websites that actually steal full-text content. Those sites all monetize the content with advertising, and, save a few licensing agreements (notably with AP itself), they share little in the way of ad revenue.

But rage — whether seething or public — isn’t a business model.

Anti-piracy, itself, has also proven not to be much of a business model. Witness the tribulations of Attributor, an AP-invested-in content-tracking service that used some pretty good technology to track pirated content. It couldn’t get the big ad providers to act on piracy, though. Last year, after pointing its business in the direction of book industry digital rights management, it was sold for a meager $5.6 million to Digimarc.

So if anti-piracy couldn’t wasn’t much of a business model, then the question turned to who would pay to license NewsRight’s feed of all that content, or subsets of it?

Given that owner-publishers wanted to protect their existing licensing streams, NewsRight turned its sights to an area that had not well-monetized: media monitoring.

Media monitoring is a storied field. When I did content syndication for Knight Ridder at the turn of the century, I was lucky enough to visit Burrelles (now BurrellesLuce) in Livingston, New Jersey. In addition to a great auto tour of Tony Soprano country, I got to visit the company in the midst of transition.

In one office, older men with actual green eyeshades meticulously clipped periodicals (with scissors), monitoring company mentions in the press. The company then took the clips and mailed them. That’s a business that sustained many a press agent for many a decade: “Look, see the press we got ya!”

In Burrelles’ back rooms, the new digital monitoring of press mention was beginning to take form. Today, media monitoring is a good, if mature, industry segment, dominated by companies like Cision, BurrellesLuce, and Vocus, as social media monitoring and sentiment analysis both widen and complicate the field. Figure there are more than a hundred media monitoring companies of note.

Yet even within the relatively slim segment of the media monitoring space, NewsRight couldn’t get enough traction fast enough. Its ability to grow revenues there — and then to pivot into newer areas like mobile aggregation and content marketing — ran into the frustrations of the owner-newspapers. So they pulled the plug, spending less than they had actually committed. They decided to cut their losses, and move on.

Moving on meant making NewsRight’s last deal. The company — which has let go its fewer than 10 employees — announced that it had “joined forces” with BurrellesLuce and Moreover. It’s a face-saver — and maybe more.

Those two companies will try to extend media monitoring contracts for newspaper companies. BurrellesLuce (handling licensing and aggregation) and Moreover (handling billing and tracking) will make content available under the NewsRight name. The partnership’s new CAP (Compliant Article Program) seeks to further contracting for digital media monitoring rights, a murky legal area. If CAP works, publishers, Moreover, and BurrellesLuce will share in the new revenue.

What about NewsRight’s anti-piracy mandate? That advocacy position transitions over to the Newspaper Association of America.

NAA is itself in the process of being restyled into a new industry hub (with its merger and more) under new CEO Caroline Little. “As both guardian and evangelist for the newspaper industry, the NAA feels a tremendous responsibility to protect original content generated by its members,” noted Little in the NewsRight release.

What about the 1,000-title content database, the former AP registry that had formed the nucleus of NewsRight? It’s in limbo, and isn’t part of the BurrellesLuce/Moreover turnover. Its categorization technology has had stumbles and overall the system needs an upgrade.

There’s a big irony here.

In 2013, we’re seeing more innovative use of news content than we have in a long time. From NewsCred’s innovative aggregation model to Flipboard’s DIY news magazines, from new content marketing initiatives at The New York Times, Washington Post, Buzzfeed, and Forbes to regional agency businesses like The Dallas Morning News’ Speakeasy, there are many new ways news content is being monetized.

We’re really in the midst of a new content re-evaluation. No one makes the mistake this time around of calling news content king, but its value is being reproven amid these fledgling strategies.

Maybe the advent of a NewsCred — which plainly better understood and better built technology to value a new kind of content aggregation — makes NewsRight redundant. That’s in a sense what the partners decided: let the staffs of BurrellesLuce and Moreover and smarts of the NewsCreds make sense of whatever newer licensing markets are out there. Let them give the would-be buyers what they want: a licensing process to be as simple as it can be. One-stop, one-click, or as close as you can manage to that. While the disbanding of NewsRight seems to take the news industry in the opposite, more atomized, direction, in one way, it may be the third-party players who succeed here.

So is it that NewsRight is ending with a whimper, or maybe a sigh of relief? Both, plainly. It’s telling that no one at NewsRight was either willing or able to talk about the shutdown.

Thumbs down to content consortia. Thumbs up to letting the freer market of entrepreneurs make sense of the content landscape, with publishers getting paid something for what the companies still know how to do: produce highly valued content.

You can’t think about Bloomberg News without understanding that this is the ecosystem in which it exists. The journalists there create some excellent work on topics that have nothing to do with financial markets — but their bread and butter, their raison d’etre is to be one more thing that makes the Bloomberg terminal something that financial professionals can’t afford not to have…

Which brings us back to the events of the last few days. The practice of letting journalists access information about when subscribers had logged in and what broad categories of data they accessed pits the two imperatives of Bloomberg’s strategy against each other. On the one hand, it wants to do everything it can to ensure that its reporters are drumming up information that the competition isn’t. On the other, anything that discomfits the subscribers who are paying the bills could endanger the whole enterprise.

Author Chris Dannen conflates quality with length, which is problematic, but the traffic metrics are nonetheless interesting, as is the discussion of how to build a more adaptable CMS.

Matt Thompson, a name likely familiar to Nieman Lab readers or future-of-news watchers, is helming the effort. As manager of digital initiatives (“and mischief,” he adds), Thompson has been a part of a number of new endeavors at NPR, including Project Argo. What makes Code Switch unique, Thompson said, is that it promises not only to jump headlong into discussions about race and culture, but also find draw new voices into the mix. “We’re seeking to reach and bring into the conversation more and more people who are, by dint of demographics, somewhat younger than the population as a whole and are more likely to be using mobile technologies for more of their media consumption,” Thompson said.

When I spoke to Thompson, we talked about the development of the Code Switch team, it’s mission, bridging the worlds of audio and digital, and how NPR is moving into the world of mobile. Here’s a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.

In 2010 alone, doctors wrote over one billion prescriptions to Medicare patients. Further exploration of the rapidly expanding Medicare drug system will dovetail nicely with ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs project, which tracks how much private doctors earn from pharmaceutical companies.

We believe any successful media company in this age must have multiple revenue streams. In our early years, we were 100 percent reliant on issue advocacy advertising, mainly in print. That worked very well for us, and still does. But a growing newsroom must be supported by a growing business, so we have introduced events and subscriptions over the past 36 months. We still get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, with online ads growing the fastest. But we project subscriptions will account for 25 percent of our revenue this year and close to 50 percent by 2016, providing the company a nice, sustainable balance. The beauty of subscription revenue is that it’s predictable and not dependent on broader economic and market trends. Like clockwork, more than 95 percent of Pro subscribers renew each year and the few that drop are usually members of Congress who lost reelection or companies that went out of business or merged. In almost every case, Pro subscribers often add new verticals — or more users — to their package each year.

Kurtz’s rare accountability: Media critic Howard Kurtz’s status was pretty well settled by the end of last week after his disastrously erroneous column earlier in the week — he was fired by The Daily Beast, but still in good standing as host of CNN’s Reliable Sources. Kurtz allowed himself to face a 2-on-1 grilling by NPR’s David Folkenflik and Politico’s Dylan Byers, summarized well at Mediaite.

Hardly anyone watched it, but a number of media observers found the Kurtz’s apology (he called his work “sloppy and inexcusable”) and interview significant — Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon offered a good rundown of some of their opinions. Several of them still had lingering questions after the episode: Sharon Waxman of The Wrap was unimpressed with what she saw as a thin response to questions, writing, “Merely repeating an apology and stressing one’s sincerity is not a ticket back to play on the journalism field.” Variety’s Brian Lowry found it jarring to see Kurtz immediately return to his perch as the media’s ethical cop, and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized him for refusing to apologize when his error was first found out.

The interview also addressed another aspect of Kurtz’s story — his role at the Daily Download, a little-known website which he mentioned and appeared on often. Before and after his firing, Daily Beast staffers voiced concerns that he was devoting too much energy to the site. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone said Kurtz downplayed his role at the site in the interview, in which he said he’s only a contributor. The Washington Post’s Wemple examined Daily Download founder Lauren Ashburn’s increasingly ubiquitous role on CNN, and both Calderone and Northeastern professor Dan Kennedy questioned the Knight Foundation’s decision to award the site a grant in 2011.

Other saw something noble in Kurtz’s show on Sunday. Several commented on just how remarkable and rare it was to see a critic and pundit willingly subject himself to such scrutiny: CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis hoped it would become an example for journalists who make high-profile mistakes, and Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times suggested that “as social media and the online world have made our errors more visible than ever, such directness just might make the difference in gaining and maintaining the public’s trust for the future.”

Salon’s Alex Pareene also marveled at the rarity of Kurtz’s questioning, but also contended that the extent of the consequences Kurtz will ultimately face is mere embarrassment, thanks to his elite status. Still, Time’s James Poniewozik saw the fact that Kurtz faced any sort of consequences as surprising, as he wished for other pundits to be held to similar public scrutiny when they get things wrong.

Politico tries a paywall: Politico, one of the most influential non-legacy news orgs in the U.S., joined the paywall brigade this week with its announcement that it would test a metered pay plan for its site. Politico will test the plan out on readers in six states (sorry about that, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming) and outside the U.S., experimenting with various prices and meter limits.

The announcement emphasized that Politico’s leaders aren’t sold on the paywall model, but want to try it out because they believe their audiences are more likely to pay than they had previously thought. They also said it’s “highly unlikely” they’d try out a paywall in Washington, D.C., where their advertising-and-traffic-based model is working well. As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted, Politico also ventured into sponsored content on its homepage for the first time this week.

Elsewhere in paywalls, the Lab’s Justin Ellis reported on tweaks The Dallas Morning News is exploring its (currently relatively hard) paywall — possibly a metered model, or time-limited access. He also gave some details of how The Boston Globe used its free/paid two-site strategy to cover last month’s Boston Marathon bombing. And blogger Andrew Sullivan provided another update on his pioneering pay model, reporting that he’s expecting to fall short of his $900,000 annual goal and is brainstorming about new sources of income to add.

Big guns line up against Kochs: The campaign to keep the conservative billionaire Koch brothers from buying the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other Tribune Co. newspapers has been building over the last couple of weeks, and it came to a head this week. As The New York Times reported, 10 public employee unions sent a letter to the company’s largest shareholder, Oaktree Capital Management, threatening to press to withdraw Oaktree’s pension fund assets if the deal went through. The two top leaders of California’s legislature also objected to the sale.

The Guardian reported that more than 250,000 people have signed a petition, organized by the Courage Campaign and the liberal blog Daily Kos, to urge Oaktree not to sell to the Kochs. Public sentiment hasn’t been voiced nearly as strongly in Chicago, where only a couple dozen people turned out to protest Thursday in front of the Tribune’s offices, as Crain’s Chicago Business observed.

A number of conservatives, of course, saw the outrage over the Kochs’ potential ownership as myopic concern over a newspaper that hasn’t played it straight for quite some time: Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and the Washington Times’ Dorian Davis questioned what exactly constitutes objective coverage for those objecting to the Kochs. Zócalo’s Joe Mathews said that while he doesn’t support the Kochs, he thinks their ownership of the Times could be positive for the city, as it either provides a check against the city’s establishment or implodes and prompts L.A.’s most ambitious journalists to create better alternatives.

Reading roundup: A few other stories going on during this slow week in media:

— News Corp. posted good results in its quarterly figures this week, though Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo said the numbers also emphasized why News Corp. is headed for a corporate split (helpfully diagrammed by Quartz’s David Yanofsky) later this year. Meanwhile, its New York Post is attempting to reduce 10 percent of its staff through buyouts, and News Corp. shareholders continued to call for Rupert Murdoch to resign.

— The Royal Charter that had been proposed to set up a stronger regulatory body for the U.K. press has been tabled while politicians talk to newspaper editors about their alternative proposals for the plan. The plans saw a breakthrough a few days later when the papers agreed to drop their right to veto appointments to the new commission.

— Gittip’s Chad Whitacre made some waves this week by requiring that journalists’ interviews with him be live-streamed and posted on YouTube. He blogged about the experience and the nature of collaborative journalism, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram wondered why more journalists don’t open up the interview process to the public. Meanwhile, Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark delineated the difference between journalistic transparency and translucence.

— A few great data journalism resources: PBS MediaShift offers useful summaries from two data journalism events, one from Italy and the other from West Virginia. And University of Nebraska professor and PolitiFact vet Matt Waite wrote a thoughtful post at Source on turning stories into data, not just data into stories.

— An anonymous newspaper ad exec explained to Digiday just how much trouble the industry is in, and TVNewsCheck’s Randy Bennett offered newspapers’ woes as a caution for local TV.

— Finally, Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen issued a thought-provoking call for a prophetic, apocalyptic journalism to fit our apocalyptic times.

Photo of Koch Brothers kennel from 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest by Caroline Schiff Photography used under a Creative Commons license.

An editor or writer who gets to file her copy into the system and forget about is an editor who is being alienated, in the most Marxist possible way, from the fruits of their labor. That journalist has lost contact with his or her consumer. Editors need to help craft the way their content gets presented to their readers. They themselves don’t have to be designers, coders or even, strictly speaking, ticket-moving product managers. They do need to have a seat at the same table as those other people, and explain the way their content will be most valuable, come to consensus, and then work with those other colleagues to help spec out, design, build and release the code that can bring that value to the reader.

The positioning line of Ebela is “Ami Amar Mato” (“I am what I want to be”). This mirrors the psyche of India’s new generation, which is bold, colourful, positive, young–at-heart, free-spirited, forward-looking, and brimming with energy.

MOM I’VE TOLD YOU A MILLION TIMES MY DIARY IS PRIVATE SO DON’T FUCKING READ IT AGAIN PS THANKS FOR CLEANING MY ROOM IT LOOKS NICE

— Luke (@StereotypeLuke) March 24, 2013

But that wasn’t always the case when it came to personal journals. At least, not according to Lee Humphreys, a communications and media researcher at Cornell.

Humphreys led a conversation this week with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective on historicizing social media practices. Humphreys argues that, through journals and diaries, people have been recounting their daily activities and reflecting on them for much longer than Twitter and other social media platforms have been around.

But through her research, Humphreys found that it’s only been in the last hundred years that journalling has come to be considered a private practice. In the late 19th century, she says visiting friends and relatives would gather together and read each others diaries as a way of keeping up to date and sharing their lives. Journals were also kept in early American towns to mark and record important events: weddings, births, deaths and other events of community-wide importance.

“You don’t get a real sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century,” Humphreys told the Cornell Chronicle in 2010, “so it makes perfect sense that diaries or journals prior to that time were much more social in nature.”

At Humphreys’ talk on Tuesday, some suggested that the advent of Freudian psychology — or perhaps the mass popularization of the novel — had contributed to this inward turn by America’s diarists. As the profession of journalism began to rise at the beginning of the 20th century, the independent writer was becoming increasingly self-reflective, creating the expectation of privacy that we were familiar with prior to the arrival of the Internet. But Humphrey is arguing that before we had a mass media, there was a system of personal writing that looked like a slower, more loosely networked version of Twitter.

people want to make twitter their diary but isn’t a diary suppose to be private?

— #slick (@rickstayslick) May 7, 2013

The similarities between Twitter and historic trends in diary keeping don’t stop there, according to Humphreys. She points to a surge in the popularity of pocket diaries, which, like Twitter, restricted the number of words you could write due to their small size, but also made them mobile. With 60 percent of tweets now being written on mobile devices, according to Humphreys, as compared to around 14 percent when she conducted the study in 2008, trends in Twitter behavior are in fact reflecting historical trends in self-reporting. So even the practice of making notes about your daily activities as they are happening isn’t a new behavior.

A second study Humphreys conducted revealed even more lessons about our drive to create personal records. Using the diary entires of a soldier in the Civil War, which he dutifully copied and turned into letters home, and the personal blog of an Iraq War soldier, Humphreys explored the reasons people feel compelled to record the events of their lives.

Primarily, she says, people journal as a way of strengthening “kin and friend” relationships. The soldier in Iraq, referred to as DadManly, originally began his blog as a way of keeping in touch with all of his family members at once. Charlie Mac, the Civil War soldier, exhibits a similar desire for communication and relationship maintenance by sending home a faithfully transcribed (we assume) copy of his diary. Both men, Humphreys says, described experiencing profound frustration and anxiety when the medium through which they communicated was disrupted, whether by an Internet blackout or a rainstorm that dissolved parchment and delayed the post.

The writings of Charlie Mac and DadManly shared another important similarity: Although both were writing for ostensibly private audiences, there was an implicit understanding that their words might someday reach a wider audience. When DadManly saw web traffic from strangers, he began to increasingly write about his political views on the war, providing what he believed to be a unique perspective of support at a time when very few journalists in the traditional media felt the same way.

Charlie Mac also had reason to believe his diary letters were being shared with an audience larger than the one he was directly addressing. In fact, he sometimes included parenthetical addresses to specific individuals, should they happen to come across the documents. But there was also a real possibility that his war correspondence would be picked up and reprinted by newspapers. (Or, as it happened, compiled, archived, and read by researchers hundreds of years later.) After the war, he ended up becoming a journalist at The Boston Globe. What more apt analogue to the media of today than a world in which one’s personal commentary on current events is so appreciated that they can be transformed into a lifelong career?

During the course of Charlie Mac’s budding career, he would have observed the budding of what we consider the traditional media hierarchy. Information would increasingly begin to flow from the top down, rather than be gathered voraciously from amateurs in the field. He would see news brands begin to shape and control narratives, and come to exist in an information system with less and less emphasis on personal interactions.

Of course, what we’ve seen in the decades since the dawn of the digital age is just the opposite. Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.

Personal diarists are not only comforted by recording and sharing their experience, Humphreys says, but they are empowered by claiming their own narrative. She suspects it was for this reason that so many 19th-century women kept journals — in the hopes that they and their families would be remembered. Her point takes on contemporary significance when she points out that Twitter is more popular among African-American and Hispanic youths than among whites.

The most powerful argument for Twitter as a force of erosion of the public media is not, as we hear so often lately, that it feeds the fires of rumor and speculation. The argument that Twitter is facile is much more potent — that Twitter users are self-obsessed, that a minute spent tweeting is a minute wasted, that Twitter is the digital embodiment of the general degradation of intellectual society — many of the same arguments made a decade ago about blogging.

This is what I ate for breakfast… Greek potatoes, orzo, Greek salad, dolmades, and OJ. #Hmm yfrog.com/nxfktoej

— Miss Illinois (@StaciJoee) March 28, 2012

I’m going to be a total blogger today. This is what I ate for breakfast. LOL http://yfrog.com/h2tovdrj

— Holly Becker (@decor8) February 20, 2011

What Humphreys has found, instead, is that if we are all navel-gazers, it’s not Twitter that made us that way. And further, that we are tighter-networked, faster-responding, further-reaching navel-gazers, with a richer media experience, than ever before.

Image by Barnaby Dorfman used under a Creative Commons license.

Here is how the experiment will work: Readers overseas and in six states will be required to pay for our content after consuming a set number of pages of it, much like they do when visiting The New York Times, The Boston Globe and scores of other news sources. We will experiment with a few different price points and page limits to find the sweet spot for our readership. We chose smaller states, spread across the country, so our experiment captures any regional trends and also limits any potential loss of traffic to the site. This will last at least six months, so we have a large enough sample to appraise the results.

The decision to test a broader subscription model represents a shift in our thinking. As recently as a few months ago, we thought it was premature for POLITICO to start asking readers to pay for content, outside of Pro. But, it is increasingly clear that readers are more willing than we once thought to pay for content they value and enjoy. With more than 300 media companies now charging for online content in the U.S., the notion of paying to read expensive-to-produce journalism is no longer that exotic for sophisticated consumers. This is a very promising, if uncertain, trend in our country. The collective decision by media companies to give away for free a product of high value and high cost will go down as one of the worst, self-defeating moves in the history of industry. Thankfully, there are some signs this is changing.

For the record, they haven’t said which six states will get the stiff-arm. (Update: The list is out: Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Sorry, Cheyenners and Amesians, Albuquerquers and Biloxians.) As Sam Stein jokes:

who will move to another state for free politico? RT @mlcalderone: Politico testing metered paywall in six states: politi.co/11VCAen

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 9, 2013

Longtime paywall watchers will remember that The New York Times tested its paywall in Canada in 2011 before bringing it to the U.S. of A.

Also worth noting that the Politico memo falsely claims The Boston Globe has a metered paywall. It doesn’t.

It’s a season of new product launches, but you have to roam around the country and the world to find them. You have to look for the niches they’re trying to serve. These launches tell us a lot about the emerging digital news economy and the new building blocks that form its foundation.

Our journey takes us from Washington, D.C. to Singapore to Raleigh and back again to D.C. Publishers — and broadcasters — are basing these new businesses on a set of surprisingly similar features.

In D.C., Atlantic Media — in the beehive of activity that is its headquarters in the Watergate Building, overlooking the Potomac — is putting the finishing touches on its latest launch: Defense One. The new digital-just-about-only product will debut this summer, Atlantic Media president Justin Smith told me last week.

Defense One aims to disrupt a set of incumbent defense-oriented publications: Jane’s, Gannett-owned Defense News, and Breaking Defense, among them. Atlantic Media believes it’s found an opening — a wide one — to exploit.

“We saw a gap,” says Tim Hartman, president of the Government Executive Media Group, the Atlantic Media brand under which Defense One will take flight. The company believes It may offer a market as much as three to seven times greater than Government Executive itself, a 40-year-old title that has largely made the transition to digital.

Hartman says the understanding of the opportunity popped out of strategic planning that began two and a half years ago. Quartz, the business site launched last fall (“The Newsonomics of Quartz’ business launch”) was the first new product to come out of the work. Defense One is the second. A third one will likely launch within the next two years, says Hartman.

If analytics derived from Government Executive’s audience and usage provided the notion, in-depth interviews with 40 defense sector players filled in a roadmap. The company conducted initial hours-long interviews with them, and then returned to a number of them for second or third talks as plans solidified.

Over time, Hartman says Defense One’s staff size will be similar to that of Quartz — about 18-20 in content creation and production. While the company is looking for a top editor, Hartman says its editorial mandate is clear: “an orientation for the future.” That’s what industry leaders want, a sense of what is more likely than not to happen tomorrow, and why.

Much of Atlantic Media’s sales, marketing, analytics and financial functions can be leveraged to support the new product, minimizing what would be similar expense for a one-off start-up. Also like Quartz, it is going free, looking to marketers to make it profitable. It isn’t just an ad play. Rather, it looks to an emerging model of higher-end sponsorship and content marketing — with the important adjunct of events marketing — to propel it forward.

Its offer to marketers will follow the playbook of what Atlantic Media’s half-dozen other publications (The Atlantic, The Atlantic Wire, The Atlantic Cities, Quartz, National Journal, Government Executive) now offers. It’s on-site sponsorship/share-of-voice placement, content marketing, and marketing services aid and placements and sponsorship of physical events.

That events business rides right alongside inclusion on its websites, providing marketers with a brand association that fluidly moves from online to off and back. It’s a strategy now well-employed in D.C. — also exploited by Politico and The Washington Post — and among events leaders like The Texas Tribune. Atlantic Media has turned events into a potent, higher-margin revenue source, now accounting for around 16 percent of revenues.

Even before Defense One’s product launch, it is well along in lining up speakers for its first event in November.

Atlantic Media targets influentials. It is a term you hear often in conversation with the company’s president, Justin Smith. Quartz targets business influentials. Government Executive and National Journal target government influentials. Now Defense One targets national security influentials. It’s a spin on the Meredith marketing positioning I noted a couple of weeks ago, as that company morphed from a women’s magazine company to a company expert at marketing to women.

“It’s really a B2B model,” says Smith, explaining in a few words much of Atlantic Media owner and chairman David Bradley’s plan to double company revenues and profits within five years. The best B2B companies deeply know their audiences and then plan numerous touchpoints to yield revenue. If they are number one in their field, they reap the benefits.

There are a lot of influentials in this world. The trick is in picking the right targets.

Seeking influentials across Asia

That’s who HT Media, publisher of a leading national Indian daily (the Hindustan Times) is targeting in Singapore. Mint is HT Media’s business newspaper, now six years old and published in eight Indian cities. The paper was cofounded by Raju Narisetti, who has since done stints at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and was recently named senior vice president and deputy head of strategy for the emerging, separate News Corp.

For Mint and its digital Livemint, a highly readable, authoritative business news source, finding growth included finding influentials abroad and expanding upon its mission to be “a fair and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian dream.”

One month ago, it launched MintAsia in Singapore. Its targets: the large Indian expat business community. There are 4,500 Indian-owned companies in Singapore, which is fast becoming the multinational business center for its region. MintAsia is also aimed at those multinationals, for whom better knowledge of India, its economy, and its policies are central to their own growth plans.

The new MintAsia is both a weekly newspaper published on Fridays and a website. About a quarter of the weekly content is originated for the Singapore market — largely produced by Mint’s India-based staff of 140, with stories like “Top 10 Indian Health Startups” targeted for the strong health care business sector of Singapore. The rest of MintAsia’s content is chosen from Mint’s stream of web-first and daily print content. HT is sending a former head of ad sales to head up the MintAsia operation, and has employed a handful of Singapore locals to deal with circulation and logistics.

“The whole idea is to leverage our strength,” Sukumar Ranganathan, Mint’s editor, told me in Delhi. “For Singapore, it’s marginal costing.”

So, its costs are small, and its potential gain — in revenue, in branding, and in influence — is large.

Its business model is au courant. MintAsia is an all-access, print + digital product. It’s printing 3,000 copies to start, with a goal of reaching 10,000 within a few years. By branching out of its home market, it is not only testing a pay strategy; it’s a pay strategy that greatly exceeds what it can charge in its home market. India is just about the only major nation not suffering from the worldwide newspaper turndown. Advertising is growing robustly, and circulation is holding as well. That’s what adding millions of literate, better educated, striving-into-the-middle-class citizens a year will do for you.

But Indian dailies are among the cheapest in the world. Mint daily costs four rupees per copy — seven cents American! An annual subscription will set you back 500 rupees, or about $9.26.

In Singapore, Mint Asia costs six Singapore dollars, or US$4.87. Buy a year of print with access to the LiveMintAsia, and the price is 180 Singapore dollars or US$146. (Its paywall is now a hard one, but will go metered, powered by Press+, next month).

So we see minimal costs, good ramping all-access circulation money, and two other familiar streams of revenue: advertising targeting the financial and other needs of Singapore-based Indian influentials and events. MintAsia’s formal launch comes on May 28, when it hosts a conference in Singapore that includes the head of the Indian equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That event already has two paying sponsors; more sponsored events are in the works.

As with Atlantic Media, the niche strategy is more than a one-off. Hong Kong may be the next logical market, with other Asian markets farther down the list. If Mint moves into those markets, it will likely proceed much as it has in Singapore — checking its data for critical masses of likely readers and then following up with in-person visits to new cities, talking to to the influentials about influential publication potential.

Seeking influentials in North Carolina

Back in Raleigh, North Carolina, the WRAL’s TechWire product isn’t new, but its paywall is. It is certainly one of the first paywalls put up by a broadcaster, though in this case, Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) digital market leader WRAL isn’t putting one up on its main site — it erected its paywall on its technology vertical about a month ago. It follows the paywall paradigm, with a couple of twists.

TechWire charges $24.99 for an Insider annual membership, which includes numerous industry events and other discounts. Until May 16, the annual price is discounted by half. It also offers monthly passes for $2.49 and day passes for 99 cents.

So far, WRAL general manager John Conway says he happy with the early results. Most subscribers are opting for the annual plan; unique visitor and pageview loss has been minimal for the site that’s recently averaged 125,000 unique visitors a month, the majority of whom are local. His goal: get 5-10 percent of those uniques paying for something.

The paywall is powered by Amsterdam-based Cleeng, a paywall provider whose clients include Epicurious, DailyMotion, and now, TEDMED, and which offers an architecture that works well with video content access control.

TechWire offers a hard paywall, with first paragraph offering for free on staff-written stories. (AP, Bloomberg and other non-local content makes up 50-60 percent of the site, and that remains accessible.)

Seeking influentials in D.C. politics

Up the road and back in D.C., Politico continues to build on its impressive Pro line of products (“Politico Pro grows into 1,000 organizations, moves into print”) — following the influential methodology. Roy Schwartz, the company’s chief revenue officer, now counts seven Pro products. Three of these — finance, tax and, interestingly, defense — debuted last September. They followed energy, health care, and technology, all launched in February, 2011, and transportation, which followed a year later.

These Pro products, too, borrow from the same marketplace understandings that drive Atlantic Media and Mint. In Politico’s case, it’s working richer veins of revenue. Politico Pro now claims more than 7,000 users, across more than 1,000 organizations.

Politico sells institutional subscriptions, on a largely per-seat basis, to groups within each niche that want an insider’s time and knowledgable view. Politico takes in mid-four digits a year for each subscriber, with pricing variable by niche and what the market will bear. It also sells sponsorships into the Pro products, the same kinds of marketing that funds its free Politico site. Then those sponsors’ reach is further extended — at an additional price, of course — into events. Last year, Politico hosted 90 events. On its roadmap, it makes sure that each of the Pro verticals will host an event a quarter. It’s sponsorship-fueled, value-added-to-membership relationship marketing.

Schwartz says the events are free to attendees and strive to match the allure of the Pro coverage. “It’s about convening thought leadership. What we find interesting, our audience finds interesting.”

So what do you do when you’ve bound together targetable groups of influentials? You put together an Influencer Upfront. On Wednesday, Politico hosted its first Influencer Upfront.

The upfront was a day of presentations, editorial and advertising, to significant advertisers. Politico is borrowing a page from the long-standing TV network upfronts, events held to showcase shows and sell fall ad campaigns in the spring. Digital upfronts are becoming all the rage, as this spring saw several in New York City’s, including one sponsored by Digiday.

Lessons learned

It’s no accident that each of these four newer products all touch business audiences and markets. The truism hold: It’s easiest to make money where money is changing hands. Make yourself an effective intermediary, and you can grab a little of it as it moves. It’s easiest to see these opportunities, clearly, in and around business. It’s an in-the-know kind of market, and it’s one — because of scale — that national publishers are now tending to exploit first.

Can it work regionally? Can regional newspapers find big enough niches to replicate this model? If I were a regional publisher, I’d be doing a whiteboard exercise bouncing off these emerging influentials models.

Among these four newer products, we can see the emerging new rules of publishing creation. Among them:

• Critical mass enables growth. Niche product creation that builds on existing company infrastructure, knowledge and marketplace learnings is the cost-effective way to go. Each of these companies adapted what they learned to these new launches. Politico’s seven Pro products illustrate this most clearly; Atlantic Media’s cousin-by-cousin launches put a parallel spin on the notion. (Intriguing side note: Politico owner Robert Allbritton put his once-core TV station holdings on the market last week, saying he wanted to further invest in and around Politico. The “around” could include replicating the Politico business model in a new coverage niche.) This is a new power of incumbency. It’s not the ownership of a printing press, as it was for newspaper publishers in the old days.
• Analytics leads the way; in-person follow-up seal the deal. You may have an intuition about a new market, but checking it out — doubly — is essential.
• Help your audience deal with future and present shock. Covering a sector is one thing; covering in a way that embraces — and tries bring a bit of order to — the multiple change issues of any audience is another. That’s an aspirational and competitive editorial positioning, but we can see ongoing examples of it in the work that Mint, Quartz, and Politico already produce.
• Events are emerging as both a vital new revenue source and an almost counterintuitive high-touch part of the mostly digital business mix. HuffPost Live, Google Hangouts, and assorted other ways to assemble online community are great experiments and promising tools, but old-fashioned in-person events are gaining strength as we all go more digital. That’s an important learning about the value of relationship, and how to reinforce it, even in the age of MOOCs.
• It’s not print or digital. It’s digital and print, suited to audience reading habits — which of course are a moving target. Influentials, like all of us, toggle between the two.

Photo of Singapore skyline by Thibault Houspic used under a Creative Commons license.

He also uses an unusual lens of Bible theory to analyze the ability of the American media to report on what he sees as a collapsing nation. Jensen says we need to do away with the “royal,” top-down, control heavy media, and replace it with a “prophetic” media:

Brueggemann argues that this isn’t about intellectuals imposing their views and values on others, but about being willing to “connect the dots”: Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us. When the dots are connected, it will require naming the defining sins among us of environmental abuse, neighborly disregard, long-term racism, self-indulgent consumerism, all the staples from those ancient truthtellers translated into our time and place.

None of this requires journalists to advocate for specific politicians, parties, or political programs; we don’t need journalists to become propagandists. Journalists should strive for real independence but not confuse that with an illusory neutrality that traps mainstream journalists within ideological boundaries defined by the powerful. Again, real independence means the ability to critique not just the worst abuses by the powerful within the systems, but to critique the systems themselves.

Jensen’s point of view is unusual, but his argument — that we may be at a point where traditional journalism operating in the existing systems of power is no longer an effective media — is worth reading.

BuzzFeed’s not alone in wanting to promote their community (and create a farm team of potential writers), Gawker’s new Kinja system (now up on all the Gawker sites) is also designed to bring content from readers out in the open.

But March acknowledges that, especially in the digital age, there’s risk inherent in trying to become the fastest gun in the breaking news business. “That is the occupational hazard,” he says. March speaks from experience: He was working at Sky News during the 2005 London bombings. “It started off as an explosion in an electrical fault,” he says now, “and we all know what that turned into.”

The Boston Marathon bombings last month served as another reminder of how quickly misinformation can travel in a world of instant publishing. Thorough and reliable sourcing takes time, and while the papers of record focus on assembling traditional articles, less trustworthy sources take to tweeting with the slightest of substantiation.

UPDATE: Reports of at least 12 dead, dozens more injured in Boston Marathon explosions nyp.st/ZlWY9t

— New York Post (@nypost) April 15, 2013

But March believes he’s come up with a reliable newsroom solution. The ITV News homepage is a live-streaming, reverse-chronological feed (much like Twitter) in which ITV editors publish everything from stories of a few paragraphs in length, to merely a sentence or two. “While we will not compromise accuracy for the sake of speed, the beauty of our structure means you don’t have to have over-heavy mass stuff to publish,” March says. “We can publish just one line, and we will make sure that line’s right, and use all the normal journalistic conventions of sourcing, just like a 24-hour news channel would do.”

Take, for instance, today’s news that Sir Alex Ferguson was retiring as manager of Manchester United. Rather than update a single story as tidbits and comments come in, ITV posted it in 49 (at this writing) separate updates — some no more than a single photo or statistic or tweet — all grouped together in a scrollable set, but also interwoven with other stories on the news homepage.

That sort of approach is becoming more common on a huge story like Ferguson’s retirement — for instance, the BBC had an analogous liveblog today. But ITV takes the atomized-stream approach on stories with fewer moving parts: a ship crash in Italy, say, or reaction to an immigration proposal.

ITV has reporters in 10 bureaus, nine regional and one national. They give their editors access to information as they have it, and it’s the responsibility of the editors to make it live as soon as possible. That’s how ITV became the first British publication to publish the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death — with a tweet that linked to a short story on their site. Says March: “What we’ve got now is a very fast and agile machine.”

In its first year of operation, that machine has worked pretty well. The site’s unique views in January were up a whopping 518 percent year over year, with a record total of 3.9 million visits. March was promoted from head of ITV’s digital news and sport divisions to overall online director a few months after the new site’s launch.

Happy birthday @itvnews online. One year and 28m unique browsers later, we should celebrate! (drinks are on @julianmarch )

— William Owen (@wdowen) March 19, 2013

While the unique numbers are impressive, returning views are also an important figure. Almost 60 percent of ITVs visitors are returning, which, he says, “indicates to me that we are growing our fan base.” Monetizing ITV news was never the goal — building a respected digital news brand for ITV was. (ITV has seen “double digits earnings growth” for the last three years in a row.) Those new fans are an essential part of what March calls a “reach and reputation” strategy. (Although, having accomplished that goal much faster than he expected, March says he would consider commercializing the site to some extent — perhaps with post-roll video ads.)

If March was surprised at the extent of the site’s success, then upper management was shocked, he says. Even after months of prototyping, March says the board was still not convinced that responsible journalism could be done in this format. “I do remember some very interesting board-level presentations where people didn’t necessarily understand that we could do this quite easily,” he says. Their concern was that there wouldn’t be enough support to do reporting 24 hours a day. But the way March saw it, the existing staff was already doing enough work to make his vision a reality: “All you’re doing is surfacing the news as you go along.”

March says the bosses at ITV weren’t fully convinced that a live streaming homepage could work until they saw the numbers. The original design was meant to give priority to what March calls “skimming,” or reading behavior that is more akin to scanning the headlines than reading a full length investigation. For that kind of behavior, March says, “the combination of mobile and social is dynamite.”

ITV news doesn’t expect readers to linger on its pages, but to toggle back and forth between social sites as often as they need new information. They get about 35 percent of their traffic from social media — Facebook and Twitter, but also sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon — and 40 percent from mobile. It’s the mobile traffic that most excites March and makes him feel confident that readers are using the site the way he expected them to. “The way forward for us is mobile first,” he says.

March made a good bet on the stream metaphor, but it’s been a lot of work. He spent the better part of the last year and half flying around the country helping reporters adjust to the new newsroom structure and workflow. Early on, March realized he wanted to take advantage of the existing 10-bureau structure in a way that allowed regional reporters to focus on breaking stories while editors made sure that the most interested audience, be they national or local, got the right kind of context.

“We took it one step further within those regional newsrooms in that we smashed down the silo between the digital and TV part of the operation,” March says. “That was really the biggest part of the mindset change that we had to affect to make this project successful.”

But while the national ITV news desk is acting as an aggregator, it’s a much different process than copying and pasting content, which March says “destroys” SEO power. ITV will also often include tweets from prominent figures in their stream, or links to stories from other sources.

“We see that as part of the job of modern digital journalism, which is as much original content as contextualization among others,” he says.

But the biggest part of the success was the enthusiastic adjustment of ITV’s reporters, says March. “Their competitors were doing stuff in digital media which was surpassing what they were doing, or what they could do, and they really, really wanted to do the same. Journalists are journalists at the end of the day. That’s the reason I didn’t become a spy — journalists can’t keep secrets. You’ve got a great scoop, you want to break it. You don’t want to wait until 6 p.m. It played into their natural journalistic instincts.”

Of course, journalists also instinctively want readers to have access to the most important story of the day, not just the most recent — to have bring editorial input into story ranking and presentation, something the reverse-chronological stream format deemphasizes. “Coming to the site is a bit like flicking on a 24-hour news channel,” March says, “You’re not necessarily going to be on the top story when you flick on the telly.”

To combat this, ITV has incorporated highlight windows at the top of the front page that can point the reader to the headlines — or headline — of the day or a larger news project. March says the four windows can be used to link to articles, updates, or a themed stream, making the page more dynamic. They also use a tagging system that allows readers to view “microsites” based on regions or specific stories.

March says that, while the atomized stream is gaining in popularity, he hasn’t seen as many of his competitors build similar feeds as he would have expected. There are some key examples in North America — WorldStream (The Wall Street Journal’s reverse chronological video stream), Global News’ recently relaunched homepage, and Boston.com’s “Your Town” pages, to name a few. March also points to Summly, the startup recently purchased by Yahoo that shrinks longer articles down to a more consumable, bite-sized posts. But at the same time, March says he realizes there’s a market for more than one kind of news online.

“There’s always going to be The Economist kind of depth versus the breaking news,” he says, which is how March knew over a year ago that he couldn’t compete head on with outlets like BBC, CNN, and Sky. Blogger Martin Belam wrote in 2012 that, in breaking news situations, it’s usually impossible to tell the leading competitors apart. You can look at a traditional news site during a disaster, he wrote, and then “return half-an-hour later, and it was impossible to get a view of what had changed.”

With an approach like that, says March, “we wouldn’t have made any impact.” So instead, in hopes of building a reputation, he turned the entire process on its head and gave readers direct access to updates as they come in. “I think it’s being marked,” he says. “Fortune favors the brave.”

You can see the new look here and read about its features here. Three quick thoughts:

The rise of the scroll

Compare the new site to its predecessor and one thing becomes clear: Everyone’s becoming more comfortable with scrolling. The old mobile site only took up about two screenfuls on an iPhone; the new one, on first load, takes up 14. (That screenshot on the right is only about one quarter of the full mobile homepage.) And if that’s not enough, you can keep loading more stories in an infinite scroll.

It wasn’t that long ago that news companies were hesitant to put significant content “below the fold” — the old newspaper metaphor moved from newsprint to screenfuls. The BuzzFeeds and Snow Falls of the world have taught publishers to think of scrolling less as a hindrance and more as a useful, tactile part of the content consumption experience.

For a long time, mobile content experiences were built around the idea of restraint — slow bandwidth and less powerful processors, yes, but mostly the constraint of user time. “Mobile” became shorthand for “30 seconds of attention while you’re waiting in line somewhere.”

But as devices and networks improve — and, more importantly, mobile moves from being an edge case to just how people get the Internet — publishers are getting more comfortable with offering a less abbreviated experience on phones. We’re getting closer to content parity. NPR’s intro blog post also notes:

Visitors entering our site through the mobile homepage will now have access to story comments, advanced searching and extended NPR listening opportunities, such as NPR Music’s First Listen series.

That makes sense — the more people use smartphones as their primary Internet device, the more they’re going to want to do things like leave comments — things that might have previously been considered something they’d go their laptop to do.

The move to responsive

Despite the web design world’s headlong push into responsive design, NPR (like the Times) isn’t quite there yet. Like the Times’ new mobile site, the NPR site’s homepage does adjust based on device width, but only from tablet to smartphone sizes — the desktop site is still separate. (Play with the width slider here to see how it reflows at lower device sizes.)

However, unlike the Times, NPR’s article pages — where the vast majority of its traffic lies, one assumes — are fully responsive. (Again, check it out. iPads get the smallest version of the desktop layout; anything smaller gets the smartphone view. Reduce the pixel width from 768 to 767 to see what I mean.) The Times still uses separate m.nyt.com URLs on mobile stories.

The URL of the mobile homepage doesn’t sell it’s mobile-ness: Rather than npr.org/mobile or mobile.npr.org, it’s npr.org/home. That interesting (lack of) distinction is explained by this note in the intro post:

What’s next: This new homepage for phone-size screens is the first step in creating a fully responsive NPR front page that will work for people using a wide range of devices, from phones to tablets to desktops. Stay tuned.

That makes sense — the desktop NPR homepage is one the last relics of the old look; the mobile homepage looks much more like the recently redesigned article pages than the desktop does. Here’s NPR Digital senior project manager Patrick Cooper:

@jesselansner @dan_munz Yup, we’re doing it iteratively. Blogs in Oct, all stories in Dec/Jan. Next: rest of HP + section fronts.

— Patrick Cooper (@btrpkc) May 8, 2013

Homepages, with their myriad modules and ad units, are a much harder job, responsively speaking, than article pages, which usually can be reflowed into a smooth column of text without too much difficulty.

The question of ads

One thing I didn’t see anywhere in the new mobile site: ads. (Maybe they’re there somewhere, but I didn’t see any on the couple dozen pages I checked out.) Ads appear on responsive pages only when they’re on screens 1000px wide or wider — below that size, they disappear. (See what I mean here by dropping the width slider.) Ads in responsive design are problematic, just as ads on mobile devices in general are problematic. But it’s an issue that NPR — like other news organizations — will have to figure out if they want to benefit from the (massive, irrevocable) shift to mobile devices.

Who did all this work? Some credits in this tweet:

More on HP: This amazing work made possible by @lindamood, @slobodianux, @btrpkc, @jypyk, @mxpf, @sstroud and and co. You guys = inspiring.

— David Wright (@dwjr) May 8, 2013