http://www.wordsdepot.com/Article/Arlesey/228883

http://informativesource.com/business/attleborough.html

http://www.nashobalocalfirst.org/business-finance/personal-finance/taking-a-cash-advance-using-an-absolutely-painless-process

http://www.ionizeroasis.com/pages/Alkaline-Water-Systems-and-Hard-Water.html

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1043-something-to-crow-about

For example, I for one would pay to know why there wasn’t a Congressional investigation when Dick Durbin said the banks owned the Senate. So what did “news” find out about it?

How is it that banks refuse to reduce ANY principal to modify a mortgage for the homeowner (who may have spent $100K or more in payments), but then immediately sell the home at a 30% or 40% after foreclosing? That’s a story I would pay for.

And what, specifically, happened to the TARP funds that banks received? Why aren’t reporters staked out at banks instead of Tiger Woods’ house?

In another example, after more than an hour of searching to find out what the average Chinese worker makes, I found two bits of information: they made $160 a month in March 2006 (BusinessWeek) and are down to $146 per month in February 2009 (Reuters). But along the way, I came across dozens of “news” articles about how Americans needed to adjust to global competition.

When news is helpful to the people you want to sell it to, that’s when it will be profitable. So long as news is mostly gossip and surface reports that generate more questions than it answers, few will pay you.

I think what newspapers should be doing is (1) setting up an unpaid registration wall, (2) offer registers user profiles complete social media integration through APIs, (3) putting something in place to mine that data, (4) exploring how to use first-click-free from Google to drive registrations, (5) diversifying their ad revenue model,and (6) using the user-data they accrue through free user profiles to offer advertisers better targeting and ROI.

It’s not exactly rocket science. After all, newspapers are in the content production/dissemination business first and foremost. There’s no reason why they have to be tied to charging for that content. Content technology has hit a point where there is no need to charge for content because there are few barriers to publishing, so revenue models have switch to being completely ad-supported. And ad technology is at a point where if you have the data, you are in a great position to offer advertisers of all sizes something that can suit their business goals.

This is a really smart piece. I’ve been thinking the same thing lately — ie., how our plan has changed the more we spoke to publishers and the more we did other research. I’d like to think that’s a compliment. (I used to tell people that when we published the first issue of the American Lawyer i thought it was the best thing since Gutenberg [sp?], but once we absorbed reaction to it and published the second issue, i went around hiding copies of the first one because i thought it was so inferior.)

Similarly, i’ll bet you that some of those 16 dials on our Reader Revenue Platform will be discarded a year from now as being hindsightedly stupid or unrealistic. The problem is that today we don’t know which ones. But we’ll learn. We’re trying to create a whole new busines model, so we’d better be prepared to learn.

As for your questions about our 1,200 Affiliates, as I’ve explained, they don’t want to announce anything unless and until they launch to their customers, so that they can communicate directly with them rather than via some press statement we make about them and the others. Your skepticism here grows out of the one really dumb thing i did early last summer, when i promised various reporters that we’d announce our first group of 500. After having a conversation with the first publisher to get his approval for that kind of press release and he asked why he would let us announce his affiliation before he had a specific plan to announce to his customers, I realized, as a former publisher, that this was a hopelessly myopic approach.

So, as our Affiliates launch, you and everyone else will hear about them at the same time their customers do.

Best regards,

Steve