The season’s upon us, as newspaper and media companies announce their second-quarter earnings. At least some of the companies will announce: fewer than used to a couple of years ago, as Tribune has gone private (and banko), metros like Philly and Minneapolis have moved to private hands, MediaNews releases less information than it used to, and Dow Jones’ results are less decipherable, aggregated within News Corp. news division results.

Still, Gannett — the largest U.S. newspaper company — leads off Friday. The New York Times Co. follows on July 22. McClatchy comes in on July 29. We’ll also hear from A.H. Belo, Scripps, Lee, and Media General, dates TBA.

Let’s get ahead of it a bit and see what we can look for in the announcements and what that will mean for the news industry. Let’s look at a newsonomics primer of this struggling industry as the rest of the economy haphazardly improves around it.

I could call this post “The Newsonomics of newspaper quarterly earnings reports,” but much better is the story of the moment: How much will newspaper companies tout — and how will the reduced-but-remaining corps of those who cover the industry report — how positive their dead cat bounce is. “Dead cat bounce” is a phrase you hear — confidentially — from some newspaper executives. It’s an old Wall Street term, observing that even long-declining stocks will bounce a bit sometimes.

Let’s recall that last year’s ad revenue results had all the spring of a dead cat — down some $10 billion and 27 percent. So take a dead cat and pump a little life in it, with things less worse than they were in the disastrous 2009 and you get a bit of a bounce — but not one to crow about. Unless, that is, you don’t have much else to crow about, and that’s that’s the predicament, circa mid-2010, of most newspaper companies. They don’t have a big, positive story to talk about.

So, consider this a parsing guide to what we’ll hear in the next month:

• How much was the second quarter down from 2Q 2009? First-quarter numbers were down largely in single digits, and that seemed a relief after comparable double-digit declines. We heard such CEO parsing as “improvement in comparables” and hopefully spun statements such as “Domestic classified advertising was just seven percent lower than March a year ago.” The problem: The rest of the economy, and even the TV and online ad economies, are all showing real growth — and taking market share from newspapers. Newspapers’ continuing inability to find real arithmetic growth doubles down on the theory that these revenue changes are more structural than cyclical — and that the Great Recession may have accelerated newspapers’ downward fortunes. Are there any positive growth numbers to report? Which categories may be turning positive — maybe national or retail display ads — as the sagging economy continues to plague the traditional classified strengths of auto, recruitment, and real estate?
• How much will the prepared remarks focus on cost or debt reduction and how much on revenue growth? Play Earnings Bingo and count the comments involving “debt reduction” or “cost restructuring” as compared to “growth.”
• How much of revenue is now coming from digital, and what’s the digital growth rate? Most newspaper companies increased their percentage of overall revenue attributed to digital to the 12-15 percent range in 2009 — but that was largely because print revenues dropped so precipitously. The news industry is becoming more digitally oriented, but still has a long way to go. Still, it’s a useful percentage to know; few companies report it routinely, but often mention it in Q&A. Most importantly, is the digital business growing, and at what rate, after being just north or south of flat in Q1? Such growth is key to these companies’ future.
• How much of that digital revenue is coming from digital-only sales? McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt was the first to make a point of digital-only sales, as it approached half of total digital revenue. Pruitt’s right; it’s an important barometer of where the business is going, not where it’s been. Since the mid-’90s, the industry has been overly reliant on “bundled” ad packages of print/online. Now as the digital marketing revolution matures, a number of companies — often spurred by the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium — are really pushing online-only packages.
• How much revenue is coming from emerging marketing services business initiatives? Tribune and Gannett are among the leaders at selling website building, search engine optimization services, and more to small and medium-sized businesses. Will we hear about this big new push — and how many dollars it is starting to drive?
• Is there any circulation revenue growth? Circulation numbers have continued to plummet, while newspaper companies have priced up substantially. The overall notion: Get long-standing, habituated print subscribers to pay more of the freight. For The New York Times, the strategy has worked and circulation revenue has continued to grow (up 11 percent in Q1). For other companies, Gannett (circ revenue down 5 percent) and Lee (down 4 percent), the math isn’t working as well. Pricing up and losing both revenue and circulation numbers that are the lifeblood of selling advertising is not the outcome desired. So watch circulation revenue numbers in the reports. If they’re still negative, that’d be an indication that newspapers’ circulation pricing power is waning.
• Do we hear any strategies discussed for the second half of 2010 or into 2011? Any iPad/tablet plans or development? The discussions surrounding the earnings calls can focus just on numbers, sometimes arcanely so, or get into actual strategies that may lead from the tepid now to a better tomorrow. How much strategy do these companies have and/or are willing to share with investors?

Image by Eric Skiff used under a Creative Commons license.

Are you ready to receive? That’s the question news company should be asking themselves this month, as the second half of the year — with its unexpected flow in mobile ad dollars — beckons.

The numbers are mostly anecdotal at this point, though as some of us forecast, tablets promise a new, significant source of revenue for the companies that are ready to play the tablet game, and play it well.

Among the early evidence, reported by AP’s Andrew Vanacore, are:

• $50 CPMs ($50 per each one thousand views) for USA Today’s iPad ad, as compared to maybe $10 for its web ads.
• Irrational exuberance! Brian Quinn, WSJ’s VP/general manager for digital ad sales, says overall ad spend is increasing because of the iPad version, not just switching dollars from one platform to another. “Out of the gate, there was an exuberance about this,” he says.
• Chase Sapphire, which is a New York Times iPad sponsor,  says its ads are getting a remarkable 15 percent clickthrough rate. That’s 150 times the rate of an average web ad.

Add to that the July 1 launch of Apple’s iAds, which will introduce ads within iPhone and iPod Touch (but not yet iPad) apps, and which will begin with $60 million in sales, with such companies as Disney, AT&T, and Best Buy participating. You can bet that when the program launches on the iPad, a vastly superior ad medium given the screen size, it will do well. Even just on the “phone” side of the business, the iAds launch should give Apple — and, importantly, apps — almost half of the mobile ad spend in the U.S.

Want a little flavor to understand advertiser enthusiasm? Check out this Steve Henn Marketplace report featuring a VP for The Gap. She’s near-ecstatic in describing her enthusiasm for the iPad/tablet as a way of selling stuff and gaining customer knowledge.

So, yes, maybe the iPad ad euphoria should come with a few grains of salt. But, still, the “multi-touch” immersive future, painted by Steve Jobs and talked up by the big digital ad agencies (themselves looking for new reasons to be in the supply chain) is upon us.

So, are publishers ready?

I had a conversation recently with someone who runs a digital division for a major newspaper group — smart guy, a pioneer in the field. I asked: “So are you working on an iPad app?” Answer: “We’ve looked at our logs, and we’re seeing increasing traffic from the Kindle, but not much yet from the iPad, so we’ll wait awhile.”

I felt a rant coming up, but suppressed it then and will channel it now: If not now, then when?

We can look at each of the major revolutions in digital news and commerce, and see how news companies responded.

Search. Late.

Paid search. Way too late.

Video. Late.

Social. Too late.

Mobile. Largely too late.

News companies have used old yardsticks to measure new technologies, and the results have been, predictably and disastrously, too little, too late.

Now with the iPad, the advent of tablets generally, and the invention of the app metaphor as a way of navigating the digital life, news companies have another chance. The newsonomics of tablet ad revenue are uncertain — will iAds simply flood the ad market with more low-cost ads, as developers happy to get any ad revenue price their ads low? — but the tablet offers the biggest do-over potential for engaging readers anew and re-engaging advertisers, at rates somewhere between the laughably low of the web and the near-impossible-to-sustain-long-term highs of print.

The digital division head told me that the logs told him that there was insufficient customer demand to justify investment in an iPad app. This, I think, is like managing by rearview mirror.

The whole metaphor of the iPad is the app; ask anyone who uses it, and they’ll tell you they are surprised how little they use the browser and use search. So if you are counting browser views of your website coming through the iPad browser, you have no idea how a reader might use your product if it were built to take full advantage of the tablet’s abilities. In addition, consider that the sale of iAds require an app — not a browser-available site.

If this sentiment were uncommon, fine, but I fear it’s too commonly held. Wait and see. Wait — until it’s too late. That’s what I generally see happening among regional and local newspaper companies. They talk about early adopters and the high cost of a state-of-the-art iPad app, and most are waiting.

The big guys — what I’ve called the Digital Dozen — aren’t waiting. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, The Guardian, BBC, and AP are in the game — some with better apps than others — and all planning the next generation of products. We’re seeing impressive sales in the thousands for the WSJ paid app and can wonder about the applicability of Wired’s impressive sales of 73,000 (which are on a trajectory to beat print newsstand sales) to news and newspaper companies.

We’ve already seen a great separation in product development, audience engagement, and ad revenues between the nation’s and world’s biggest news companies — each with struggles of its own — and the other guys. Yet as they struggle, they’ve gotten most of the ad revenue smartphones have so far generated, as local news media has failed to get any revenue of scale. At this point, the iPad era looks like it the opening of an even greater divide among the largest media — and the rest.

[Ken will be on vacation the next few weeks, but back in July. —Josh]

There are no new ideas in the digital business, just ones recycled from earlier dreams — ones that vaporware couldn’t make work, but newer technologies can.

Take business directories, for instance. The idea built huge Yellow Pages businesses, businesses now mature and, well, yellowing. You know you need a service — fix a broken water heater, a sore tooth, a cranky marriage — and you knew where to turn; let your analog fingers do the page-turning. Classic, order-taking annuity business. The web comes along and the Big Yellows, SuperPages and dozens of others — huge and small — take the print Yellow Pages business online. Of course, they struggle with the new medium, adding not much value, and usage is low; business growth is challenged. Angie’s List, Yelp and OpenTable come along, eating away the edges.

Now we’re seeing a next generation, best symbolized by PaperG’s new PlaceLocal product. In a nutshell, PlaceLocal creates instant ads for a business, drawn from the best of the available information out there on the web — photos, user reviews, basic address, phone, hours, menus.

It gives publishers — TimeOut, Hearst TV, and McClatchy are three of the first companies testing it — the ability to create ads on the fly, spec ’em out and use their sales staffs to do the selling. Victor Wong, one of the young geniuses behind the PaperG’s innovation — its first product, FlyerBoard, simply updated for the digital age the old notion of the ubiquitous kiosk flyers found around college campuses — tells me he thinks PlaceLocal will be a bigger product. It should sell for a higher rate, and that’s what his publisher customers are hoping. Initial rates — we’re talking about smaller businesses which aren’t frequent advertisers — run in the hundreds up to a thousand dollars monthly. That $1,000 target would more than double the pricing of the FlyerBoard product, a key in PaperG’s growth plan as the company of a dozen plus leaves the friendly confines of New Haven for Silicon Valley North, San Francisco.

Why a higher rate? Well, it’s potentially a highly actionable piece of commerce. As the commercial world moves increasingly beyond online display ads (a fairly static category of spending), beyond paid search (where almost half of today’s digital ad dollars are spent), to cost per call and various flavors of cost per acquisition, a PlaceLocal-kind of product — expect many knockoffs — is well-positioned.

One big lesson here for everyone to get their heads around. This is commercial crowdsourcing. Why outsource the collection, organization and checking of “directory data,” as numerous Yellow Pages companies have done over time, when you can have the crowd do it — for free. It’s using the web, as a whole, to find, value, and associate commercial content. We can see roots of Google PageRank, Demand Media content organization and Yelp user reviews in the thinking behind the product.

Newspaper companies have cut the cost of their ad production markedly over the last several years, as they’ve outsourced to companies like 2adpro, Affinity Express and Express KCS, with much of the work done in India. Those companies have made it possible for newspaper companies to cut their print (and increasingly online) ad production — often at union wage — costs by 40 percent or more. Now, a PaperG comes along, with a new kind of disintermediation notion, replacing that outsourcing with websourcing. Of course, we don’t yet have an apples-to-apples comparison of the advertising done the traditional way — asking a business what they want to sell and creating the ad from there — vs. the web-scraping PlaceLocal will test out. PaperG takes a revenue-share percentage of the ad sold, so publishers will have lots of comparisons to make on ad quality, ad effectiveness, net profit, and the ability to sell new customers.

My Newsonomics Law 9 — “Apply the 10-percent rule; the heavy lifting of journalism can be aided and abetted by smart use of technology” — comes into play here. Sometimes it takes 10 percent of the effort it used to to create news products — through smart aggregation, for instance. In this commercial case, we’re seeing a different twist on the 10-percent rule, and one that bears watching as city-based news and entertainment operations look for new revenue streams as the older ones morph rapidly.

Ah, the Dream of the Wilting Flowers. Like many web dreams, premature, premature, premature…and then, maybe soon, pop. A sensation, with lots of dollars involved. Our best current example: Steve Jobs’ “invention” of the iPad, which of course was dreamed up in quite similar forms, decades before, in the fancies of Alan Kay and Roger Fidler, among others.

It’s all timing, right?

So it’s a good time to get a sense of what’s happening in local mobile commerce among news companies.

A friend visiting the exhibition hall at the NAA Orlando convention in April told me he’d been besieged by mobile commerce vendors. Then there’s the group (mobile commerce) grope, symbolized by the Groupon craze. Get a whopping good deal — but only if you can get enough of the crowd to go along with it as well. Of course, iAds are on the horizon, with Apple offering a sweet-smelling twist on walled-garden marketing pitches. Google’s AdMob — the leading mobile ad network — just got the thumbs-up from the FTC and has launched AdWhirl, its open-source (take that, Apple) “mediation layer” to facilitate mobile commerce. You can’t stay on top of all the mobile-marketing plays these days, no matter how much you try.

Let’s look at newspaper companies and what they’re doing with mobile commerce. Talk about timing: When Dan Finnigan ran Knight Ridder Digital a decade ago, one of his favorite mantras was the Dream of the Wilting Flowers. As in: It’s 4:30. You’re driving down the street. Your phone knows where you are, of course, and coming up, on the right is a florist…with a perishable commodity, flowers that will be worthless within 24 hours. Your “smart” phone, knowing where you are, who you are, your flower-buying habits, and maybe your spending proclivities, sends you the florist’s coupon for half-off, if you stop by within the half-hour. Satisfied merchant, satisfied customer, a perfecting of supply and demand.

It’s still a great vision, with a new generation chasing it, and getting closer. Talk to newspaper companies, though, and you’ll hear the answer is “we’re not yet there.” Closer, but not quite there.

Bill Ganon sees that wilting-flower dream, but he’s drilling down into something more basic: mobile sales training and the establishment of mobile pricing standards and analytics. Then, maybe by the end of the year, he says, the location-aware capabilities of smartphones may start to smell the daisies.

Ganon is the general manager for local market development for Verve Wireless, and Verve is the newspaper industry’s biggest mobile play. Spurred first by AP investment and partnership in summer 2008, many newspaper companies have turned to Verve for mobile content and, now, ad solutions. Verve now powers more than 400 mobile news sites for newspaper and broadcast companies including MediaNews, Hearst, Belo, McClatchy, Freedom, and Lee.

Verve is making a new ad push, after seeing its first forays fall flat locally. That push is predicated on scale. Its network — the Blackberry has just been added to the iPhone, with Android and iPad applications on the way, says Ganon — has grown dramatically. Year over year, for April, it has grown to 8.9 million uniques (from 2.9) and 130 million page views (from 51 million).

When Ganon — a veteran of old media sales at Newsweek and Sunset, as well as eight years with Qualcomm — took over local sales eight months ago, he found a ragtag group of local mobile efforts. Now, as Ganon describes his work, we can see the emerging newsonomics of local mobile pricing. As the mobile commerce world explodes, Ganon is focusing on the basics. He says Verve can now count 75 local sites beginning to make consistent sales, up from around 20 when he came on board. The basics of the push:

• Training: Verve’s local market sales team of four is spending lots of time training newspaper and broadcast sales staffs on how to sell mobile. That’s reminiscent of the ongoing training done by Lem Lloyd’s merry band through the Yahoo-powered Newspaper Consortium. (In fact, with all the Yahoo, Verve, and marketing-services training ongoing, I’d wager that newspaper sales people have gotten more training in the last two years than in the previous two decades.) Verve’s training focuses on taking the mystique out of mobile: “Advertisers don’t like stealth solutions. They like to know what’s behind the curtain,” says Ganon.
• Pricing: Ganon urges a $15 CPM (cost per thousand) floor for selling mobile. With that guideline, he says Verve-powered sites are averaging $19 CPMs, which would be about twice the average of what news sites on getting on the desktop web. Says Ganon: “This is your time to define metrics.” In other words, try to establish a price, not allowing prices to fall to low single digits as inventory is sold by middlemen, as has happened in the main digital business. Right now, most newspaper companies can count no more than five percent of their digital revenue, coming from mobile. Most of that total — maybe $100 million — is going to bigger, national brands like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. That’s out of maybe $500 million involved in mobile advertising overall in the U.S.
• The Pizza Sale: Salespeople are being trained to sell the crust (a banner ad), the sauce (a landing page, tailored to action off the ad), and the toppings (call-to-actions, whether “click to call” or map directions). Pricing is still impression-based, though, Verve sees cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition offers down the road.

What’s apparent is how early we are in local mobile selling — and how far away it is today from adding appreciably to news site revenues. The deals are small, and even the best-performing sites can count no more than 20 advertisers, with most having far fewer on their sites at any one time.

And the Dream of the Wilting Flowers? Ganon says Verve should be able to add in location-aware selling, maybe by the end of the year, but he believes that it “will be a major breakthrough.” So, 2011, maybe. When that breakthrough comes, the big question is who will benefit most: the local newspaper and broadcast companies, or Apple, or Google, or Yahoo, or maybe Verizon or AT&T?

Ask Walter Sanchez, publisher of BQE Media in Brooklyn and Queens and a Verve client, and he’ll tell you it’s an uphill climb. I met Walter at a recent New York Press Association conference, and his marketing efforts were way ahead of the curve, among publishers. He’s busy selling social sites, SEO, SEM, and mobile sites, he’s proud of getting such small businesses as Beach Bum Tanning sold on mobile ($500 a year for a landing page and 3,000 short-text messages). But he’ll tell you that most local merchants are indeed still mystified by the web, and they’re slow adopters: “When those 21-, 22- and 23-year-olds start buying their own businesses, in a few years, then, we’ll see real adoption.”

Yahoo’s purchase of Associated Content, for over $100 million, seemed to come out of the blue. Actually, though, it didn’t. Yahoo made a foray at buying Demand Media two years ago, but the parties couldn’t come to terms. At that point, Demand’s model seemed to make sense, but hadn’t matured to a point of conventional-wisdom validation.

We’re now at that point: The well-dissected, advertising-drives-content Demand model is at the center of Demand Media, AOL’s Seed, Examiner.com and Associated Content. The Newsonomics of content arbitrage that I wrote about for the Lab a month ago is a certified phenomenon; the conventional wisdom is that these algorithm-driven, user-gen-aggregated, SEO-augmented, metrics-monitored businesses are at the center of a new way to produce “content.” Not news, mind you, but newsy content, some of it wonderfully useful, some of it wince-worthy. News content is far too costly to produce, doesn’t produce enough of a long-tail and doesn’t link that easily to commerce — the buying of stuff that fuels advertising.

The newsy stuff, though, is an annuity. That’s an interesting term, used by Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane, when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. An annuity. That’s a business made from the long tail. Pay for something once — and not much; in the case of Associated Content, $5 to $30 per piece — and monetize it forever. That’s why the evergreen content encouraged by the Associateds and Demands runs to “How to Teach Your Dog Sign Language,” and “10 Surefire Tips on Selling Your House at a Competitive Price.”

It’s content written for search engine optimization (good piece on SEO ascendancy Monday by the Times’ David Carr). It’s also, to put it simply and directly, ad bait. Ad bait of the kind that newspaper ad directors could only dream about over the decades, the kind they gained with advertorial sections (wedding guides, personal finance sections) as journalists — can you imagine! — wrote stories about what they thought was newsworthy. The hubris — and sometimes, good news judgment.

It’s those algorithms and deepening technology under content, under advertising and under the matching of the two, that drives this Yahoo/Associated Content deal. Over the last several years, Yahoo has built an advertising targeting platform on acquisitions (Right Media, BlueLithium) and its own development, leaving the paid search business to Google and Microsoft. That platform is all about matching up content, web users, and advertising messaging. Yahoo has fine-tuned it, though it’s always a work in progress. It’s brought in partners (including half of U.S. newspaper companies) to gain more inventory and identified its future along those user/content/advertising lines.

The next step: Gain lots more content to sell ads against. Yahoo can do that several ways: organic growth; more partnerships; bringing more content under its own brands, on its own site. The Associated Content buy meets that third goal. The $100 million purchase price buys the annuity, lots of ad-bait content to feed the ever-smarter ad engine.

Here’s the best part: margins. When I asked Patrick Keane, who will apparently be joining Yahoo as part of the deal, how much of Associated’s revenue derived from selling ads on its own site and how much from partner sites to which it licensed the cheap user-gen content it aggregated, he didn’t want to talk percentages. He did acknowledge that more than half, though, came from the Associated site. And Keane liked it that way. Why? “The margins are a lot better,” he told me.

That’s a simple statement, but one driving much of the new digital business. Revenue and profit growth are going to get tougher for such big companies as Yahoo and Google, and it’s a big challenge for the new independent AOL. One way to boost dollars is to boost margins. That means transacting more business on your own site — where you don’t have to share revenues with other sites, other content owners.

I’ve tracked Google’s progression along those lines. Go back to 2004. Then, Google reported that 49 percent of its revenues were coming from affiliate sites, as it offered its technologies to help affiliates make a few bucks. That was the high-water mark of affiliate earnings, by percentage. In 2009, the affiliate percentage was down to 30 percent; 66 percent of revenues come from Google’s own sites. Over time, it has smartly directed more and more traffic to stay at its owned websites — its time-on-site has increased consistently — and monetized that traffic, without having to share revenues. In part, that’s contributed to its amazing profit growth, a banner $6.5 billion in profit, up $2 billion year-over-year, in the terrible-for-everyone-else 2009.

Yahoo breaks down its revenue into “owned and operated” sites and “affiliate” sites, though its trend lines are less easy to see. Clearly, though, the push toward O&O revenue is a key one, and one that the Associated purchase reinforces.

What might that push mean for Yahoo’s affiliates, especially those in the Newspaper Consortium, which have gladly used Yahoo ad technology to better their ad rates in selected topical areas? It’s hard to see how it is good news. The Associated content aims at many of same topical categories that newspaper sites target; so the industry looks like it has gained new competition — competition owned by its partner.

Maybe more significantly, Associated is welcomed on the Yahoo site by Matt Ledma, Yahoo VP for local. “We feel that a contributor-driven model is absolutely part of the future of media,” Idema told Reuters. User-gen content can be topical — travel, health, pets, you name it — and it can be local. Local user-gen is the territory voraciously being chased by Examiner.com. Looks like Examiner may have a new competitor in the pro/am, user-gen local space: Yahoo.

These — Yahoo, Associated, Examiner, Demand — are the companies showing aggressiveness today, leaving one question for the moment: Where are the legacy news-producing companies, those who have long created the features-like content in this picture — and why haven’t they bought these startups or built similar models?

AppleMania meets Rummy’s oft-noted trilogy of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns this week. The iPad is finally here.

Predictably, opinion is widely split on the impact of the tablet on future of news publishing. We don’t know enough, in truth, to ground any certainties. We can, though, start pecking away at it. Here’s a start. One way to assess the new is to connect it to the old.

So let’s build on the traditional cost-and-revenue structures of newspaper operations. I recall the floor-by-floor layout of the Pioneer Press, in Saint Paul, in the ’90s, a time our staff still filled almost all the floor space.

Bottom floor: HR and Finance. 2nd floor: Circulation. 3rd: Production. 4th: Marketing. 5th floor, advertising. 6th and 7th, newsroom. 8th, Exec suite.

So in a tablet world, what’s the impact on the major cost and revenue divisions of the news enterprise, knowing that HR, finance, marketing and executive suites have already seen their own slimming-downs and won’t be much affected?

Let’s start with the newsroom and with “production.” The traditional newsroom provides the meat-and-potatoes of the tablet experience, the text-reading experience. Yes, the iPad should turn “e-readers” and “e-editions” into trivia game answers. Most publishers look at their first tablet products as lite versions of what’s to come, incorporating a few gee-whiz features to salute the innovation. In those first versions, content production doesn’t need to change much.

Soon, though, it will. News companies will need to hire up and skill up — designing, creating and presenting reader-pleasing content. That’s enough of a challenge for monthly and weekly magazines; for dailies, it’s truly a transformative process. Dozens of newsrooms have incorporated videographers, design-savvy producers, and social net masters into workflow, but even in those newsrooms, the resources aren’t sufficient to create the truly new product the tablet enables — a product worth consumers paying for. Then, there are the hundreds of newsrooms who have relatively few of the skills they need at all. Newsroom (and Production) Net: The tablet demands new investment, mainly in new hires, somewhat in new training. With papers still in cutting mode, where will the money come from?

Circulation: It’s an accident of timing that the tablet launch coincides with the Year of Experimenting (Perhaps Dangerously) with paid content. Journalism Online’s Press+ system will soon test niche play from prep sports to obits to metering schemes of several kinds. The New York Times is neck-deep in its begin-metering-in-early-2011 plan. News Corp is erecting walls, the latest around the Times of London, as it just announced a paywall there to go up in June. Yet the timing of the iPad launch means that tablet economics will inevitably color – and may drive – paid content plans.

The Apple model, in a sense, just sets a new cost-of-distribution. While web distribution has been free-plus, the cost of Apple distribution — if you charge for news products — is a predictable, and seemingly stable 30 percent. Just give me 30 percent off the top, says Steve Jobs. Ironically, that 30 percent isn’t far off from the costs of physical distribution for newspapers.

With many news publishers planning on charging for iPad apps (though free, lite apps-as-teasers will probably be near-universal), we see the model of tablet “circ” emerging. Publishers look at the Guardian example (charging about $3.75 one time for its iPhone app), and have two reactions:

— Wow! They got 100,000 people to pay in just a couple of months!

— One-time sales are peanuts. We’re going to charge ongoing subscription rates for our apps/news products. Right now, each edition of a magazine is a separate app, as the Apple store is architected.

So, almost overnight, we’ve got a new model of paid content and supplier/distributor business model. The content company gets 70 percent; the distributor (Apple, first at least and foremost at least for now), gets 30 percent. That’s the inverse of the detested, standard Amazon model, 70 cents to Amazon and 30 to the publisher.

What might be the impact of such a split? Well, let’s estimate that The New York Times serves about 75,000 customers with its Kindle product, a nice little niche. The price is $13.99 a month. That’s $168 a year. With the standard split (the Times may do better), that would be $50 a year to the Times and $118 to Amazon. That would be $3.75 million a year for the Times (and $8.85 million to Amazon).

If the split were 70/30, the numbers would be reversed, netting the publisher another $5 million a year. That’s not huge money, but we can see how it would scale over time, as is clearly the intent with Wall Street Journal’s new $17.99 iPad product.

Now, Apple-delivered apps will not be the only way to monetize content, but expect to see the approximate 70/30 split become a model, a good starting point.

Circulation Net: News and magazine publishers now see a second digital revenue line. It’s 70 percent of X (the retail price) multiplied by Y (volume of sales). As news companies reinvent not only products, but new business arrangements with the distributors of the day — from Google/Amazon/Yahoo to Comcast/AT&T/Verizon — expect to see the Apple model invoked as “fair.”

Advertising: Early returns have been blockbusters — big advertisers like Chase supporting the New York Times iPad launch and watchmaker Hublot subsidizing two months of the FT product, for instance — and that buoys hope. At launch, iPad advertising is like Triple A office space in the city; it’s the new shiny, slick must place to be.

As the shine wears off a bit, it’s likely to become a great test ground for a new merger of brand and performance advertising. Brands love the idea of owning their own tablet experience, directly embedding themselves into customer experience, given the multitouch capabilities, video, and social upfront natures of this new platform. Connect that to direct-response advertising (glossy magazine with built-in wifi), and you’ve got all kinds of opportunities for engaging customers and watching the resulting metrics, minute by minute. Branded premium pricing may mate with AdWords performance-based pricing; who knows what the offspring will look like?

The first advertisers are the big national ones, and they in turn will want to associate with products that best use the new medium — the better to attract the kind of customer they want: leading edge, willing to try something new.

Ad Net: Tablet-based advertising should add, unexpectedly, to top line revenues in the second half of 2010 and more strongly in 2011. Expect though, a big split here: those companies I call the Digital Dozen, the 12-15 companies with national and global publishing reach and resources, will be the ones to create the best out-of-the-box news and magazine products – and they’ll be rewarded with a small surge in ad revenue. Those unable to play at a significant level will in turn reap few rewards.

Phil Balboni launched GlobalPost in January 2009, just as many news companies were further reducing international reporting. He acted on a forty-year-old idea he’d had about bringing back global news to American audiences — and had seen that the ability of Internet efficiencies now made it possible. GlobalPost is his second career; he founded and ran the award-winning New England Cable News (NECN) business for many years. Now he can look out on the harbor, where clipper ships came in, and beyond, to his growing network of more than seventy correspondents working around the world.

Q: How did your cable news experience inform your GlobalPost plan?

A: There are quite a few, seminal lessons learned from NECN. First, the enormous value of more than one revenue stream and not being solely dependent on advertising.

The most important thing I did on the business side of NECN was throw myself totally into building distribution and selling the network to cable systems — always for cash and never for free. This generated over time enormous growth in steady, reliable revenue that was recession proof and not subject to the ups and downs of the ad market. In my final year, thanks to new contracts with new distributors like Verizon, we were headed toward a double-digit net revenue increase from license fees. Second, the essentiality of intelligent cost control.

Finally, quality works. In journalism, this is generally not believed and, therefore, virtually all media companies chase the largest audience with the lowest common denominator content. We started with a determination to be the high-quality provider of local news on television in New England. We also knew that we would never be the most viewed station with the highest ratings. We created our entire operation and our entire business to be able to be successful as a high-quality provider of content and to live happily with the smaller number of people who wanted an intelligent news product.

Q: What’s the moment when the lightbulb went off on how dramatically this new digital business of journalism would be radically different from legacy media?

A: For me, it was probably the fall of 1997, when we launched necn.com as the first all-video-news web site — perhaps in the world, certainly in the United States. There were probably not more than a couple of dozen broadband connections in the Boston metro area, but we believed in the promise of digital, of being interactive, of letting people have what they wanted in the order they wanted it, and only what they wanted.

And then I saw how slowly this built, how long it took for people to catch on to the power of the web to deliver video, but we never doubted that we were doing the right thing, and today the power of video has swept over the Internet.

Q: What have you learned about the role — and economics — of bloggers that surprised you?

A: I am constantly amazed at the enormous scope of blogging and the immediacy of its viral power. I would never have expected it to have come this far but it has, and shows no signs of any significant slowdown. To the contrary, the economics are generally not there, and blogging is not of great interest to advertisers. There are certainly some exceptions, but I don’t see this changing much. It is more of a social networking and intellectual engagement tool than an economic one.

Q: Is this “freelance stipend” model a big part of journalism’s future? [GlobalPost correspondents are generally not full-time employees; they're paid a regular stipend as freelancers in exchange for a set number of pieces a month.]

A: I do believe that it will be a meaningful part of the future for journalists as the large and well-endowed media companies disassemble. It puts the burden on the journalist to cobble together the means of his or her support, but, on the other hand, it offers more freedom, more flexibility, and more creativity than being yoked to one entity. We do hope, and expect, to reward the best of our correspondents with compensation that will look more and more like full- time payment. That depends on our overall economics, of course, but it is part of the game plan for GlobalPost.

From Newsonomics by Ken Doctor. Copyright 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.