At the April 2005 ASNE convention in Washington, D.C., there was a lone voice who seemed to “get it.” Surprisingly — or so I thought at the time — that voice belonged to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, who this week announced his intention to embrace paid content across his digital empire, stood in front of the gathered U.S. editors in 2005 and gave them a pretty good assessment of where the online news world would head:

… we have to refashion what our web presence is. It can’t just be what it too often is today: a bland repurposing of our print content. Instead, it will need to offer compelling and relevant content. Deep, deep local news. Relevant national and international news. Commentary and debate. Gossip and humor.

Some newspapers will invest sufficient resources to continuously update the news, because digital natives don’t just check the news in the morning – they check it throughout the day. If my child played a little league baseball game in the morning, it would be great to be able to access the paper’s website in the afternoon to get a summary of her game, maybe even accompanied by video highlights.

But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

Murdoch, the 2005 model, believed the key to the future was audience growth and online ad revenue:

We’ve spent billions of dollars developing unique sports, news and general entertainment programming. We have a library as rich as anyone in this world. Our job now is to bring this content profitably into the broadband world – to marry our video to our publishing assets, and to garner our fair share – hopefully more than our fair share — of the advertising dollars that will come from successfully converging these media.

Someone whom I respect a great deal, Bill Gates, said recently that the internet would attract $30 billion in advertising revenue annually within the next three years. To give you some perspective, this would equal the entire advertising revenue currently generated each year by the newspaper industry as a whole. Of course, all of this could not be new money. Whether Bill’s math is right is almost beside the point. What is indisputable is the fact that more and more advertising dollars are going on-line, and we must be in a position to capture our fair share.

The full speech is here.

At a recent symposium sponsored by The Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, a panel of esteemed news pros wrestled with the topic of what would happen to community journalism in a major city should its newspaper go dark.

It may not have been planned that way, but the event offered several opportunities to answer that question through the coverage of the event itself.

First, there’s the coverage from the big local paper, The Baltimore Sun:

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The Sun, in an uncanny demonstration of the symposium’s hypothetical premise, was a no-show, reporting-wise. And, yet, somehow, the story got out.

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The next time anyone in the employ of a newspaper company — or anyone blogging here on Nieman Journalism Lab, for that matter — throws up their hands in despair and cries, “I’ve run out of revenue ideas,” I suggest we all return to this list of ten entrepreneurs and idea-generators who do not yet qualify to drink legally — or even drive a car in some cases – who have launched new, growing businesses that are actually making money.

It’s Fresh Faces in Tech: 10 Kid Entrepreneurs to Watch (actually, its 12, but who’s counting?), most of whom are still teenagers.

Take, for instance, twin Chicagoans Ashton and Ryan Clark, serial entrepreneurs at the ripe age of 20. One product in their portfolio, “We Park Chicago,” sounds like an idea that could have hatched from the Trib guys at RedEye. Except it didn’t.

Since launching their first web site in 1999, the siblings have created nearly a dozen web businesses that sell everything from consumer electronics to shoes to tickets—even parking spaces. Never mind that the Internet was supposed to usher in an age of disintermediation. The Clarks have found their calling serving as intermediaries between online consumers and manufacturers and wholesalers.

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In Baltimore next week, The Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland will ask the  uncomfortable question: What happens to journalism if the the local newspaper ceases to exist?

The panel, moderated by Merrill’s Kevin Klose, is scheduled to include both the current editor of The Baltimore Sun and his immediate predecessor, the publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American, a television investigative reporter, and blogger, consultant and media entrepreneur Mark Potts, who joked in an email that he’ll be in the role of “Mr. Non-Traditional Media,” representing all things independent and hyperlocal for the evening.

Why is Potts the lone representative of potential new directions, especially in a city with a fair number of emerging media operations?  Sandra Banisky, Merrill College’s Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism, answers vie email: “I didn’t want to have to choose among local bloggers, so I went with someone national, who could speak about hyperlocal efforts around the country. But, I certainly hope local bloggers and founders of community websites attend and join the discussion.”

Indeed, the goal of the event is not to focus solely on the troubles of one city — Baltimore — but to imagine what comes next in a city with a troubled newspaper (which is to say, nearly any city). Again, Banisky: “We’ll be talking about all metro areas and the future should the traditional big reporting engine — the newspaper staff — shrink to nothing or go away altogether. Can newspapers be nimble enough to adjust sufficiently? If not, where does the reporting come from? How will we know what’s going on in government, businesses, schools? So: Seattle, Ann Arbor, Tucson, Boston, Baltimore — all cities are looking at the same issues.”

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According to the Financial Times:

“When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.”

Setting aside the “should we or shouldn’t we?” questions biting at the ankles of Paid Content, let’s stipulate, for the moment, that eventually we’ll all pay in some way for news content. It’s a big assumption, currently untested in a major market. But making that assumption prompts what, I think, is a more interesting question:

Is news content gasoline, or is it bottled water?

That is, is online news a necessary commodity that people will begrudgingly pay for, because they have to, or is it a necessary commodity that’s packaged in a way that finds a happy and willing customer base?

The growth of bottled water in the past decade — a commodity available free pretty much everywhere in the developed world — is the story of consumers willingly shelling out real dollars in exchange for convenience and branding. Can the news industry — which also sells a largely commoditized product — learn anything from the success of Aquafina and its ilk? Why is it that consumers cheerfully pay more for thirst-quenchers than we do for the fuel that moves our vehicles and our economy?

Such a freeing of virtual pocket-change has been suggested within the news industry to be an iTunes challenge: If people will pay a buck for a song, surely they’ll pay a few pennies for the sweat and shoe-leather of America’s newsrooms.

But news, like gas and water both, is a consumable: Once it’s used, it’s used. Unlike a song on iTunes, yesterday’s news report is not a moment to be savored over and over throughout the years. Which is why the bottle water example is so intriguing.

Presumably, the same people buying water by the half-liter are spending the same disposable income on the latest digital Green Day single. Yet, almost universally, when asked, they say they won’t pay for digital news content at any price.

So what have Pepsi and Coke — both huge water-bottlers — figured out about selling packaged commodities that the collective minds of the newspaper industry have not? How do you sell something when so much of it is being given away for free?

I recently ran across a compelling tale of a reporter in the midst of wrenching change at a once-great American newspaper:

Every eye in the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten the word. Except they weren’t called pink slips anymore. Now it was an RIF form — as in Reduction in Force.

They all felt the slightest tingle of relief that it hadn’t been them and the sightest tingle of anxiety because they still knew that no one was safe. Any one of them could be called in next.

I met no one’s stare as I passed beneath the Metro sign and headed back into podland. I moved into my cubicle and slipped into my seat, dropping from sight like a soldier diving into a foxhole.

It goes on from there to tell what happened in the two weeks after he was given his walking papers.

The only thing is — it’s all a complete and utter fabrication. Keep reading »