That finding is just one of a number of interesting statistics in this report that details a dramatic transformation underway right now in media.

• 75% of newspapers now accept comments on articles, up from 33% in 2007.


• 100% adoption of RSS. All but three of the papers offered feeds in 2007 already, but this is a remarkable change in news delivery none the less.


• 92% of the newspapers now include buttons to bookmark articles in social bookmarking systems like Delicious or Digg, up from 7% in 2006.


• The brief experiment with required online registration is over. The number of websites requiring registration to view most content (free or paid) has decreased to 11%, compared to 29% in 2007 and 23% in 2006.


• 20% offer chatting options and 40% now offer SMS alerts.

What It Means

Mainstream news will never be the same again. You can now talk back to it, take part in it and interact with it along with countless other sources of information. Just as no software company can produce content or code as well as a world of users and developers collaborating can, so too can newspapers no longer keep us sufficiently informed all on their own. It's nice to see they aren't trying to anymore. These are changes for the better and show that while old media institutions are struggling to hold on to revenue in the face of the internet challenge, the fight is also doing them a lot of good at the same time.

You can read the full report here.

Photo: "Sharing a Paper" CC by Flickr user Pingu1963

Newspapers are not taking this shift in news consumption behavior lying down. The Chicago Tribune reports that five major US newspaper publishers are considering forming a joint online ad network. Gannett Co., Tribune Co., Hearst Corp., Media News Group and Cox Newspapers are in talks to form an ad sales consortium that would, according to a Tribune source, capture seven of the top ten US newspaper markets.

Cox and Hearst say that talking to the Yahoo! rivals does not signal a rift with Yahoo!. An unnamed executive at one of the Yahoo! alliance papers seemed to indicate that while papers may be pleased with the Yahoo! partnership, they're not opposed change. "Fundamentally, there is a need to make it easier to buy ad space on our Internet sites," said the executive. "Yahoo still has the best technology platform. But why shouldn't the newspaper industry have its own [ad sales] firm? Don't you want to get out and tell your own story?"

Even though we mostly consume our news on the web, a lot of us here at RWW still love the printed paper, but given these numbers, it is hard not to think that the printed paper as we know it today will soon be a thing of the past.

Image used courtesy of Flickr user Matt Callow.

Murdoch, who grew a small city newspaper into a media conglomerate that now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox News Channel and Sky Broadcasting, Dow Jones & Co. and the social network, MySpace, knows a little something about the media industry.

He doesn't believe that the internet will be the death of newspapers at all - it will only transform them. He called the doomsayers who predict the Internet killing off newspapers "misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity." He believes they are missing the fact that the online world is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. And it's filled with news-craving consumers. People now are "hungrier for information that ever before," he said. "Readers want what they've always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future."

The news of the future may not come in the printed paper format anymore, Murdoch admits. In the coming decades, he too expects some newspapers to lose circulation. But as those numbers die down, others will increase. Online news sources will grow and grow. The circulation gains he expects will be not only through web pages and RSS feeds, but also email that delivers customized news and ads to our mobile devices.

"In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over," he said.

But what will this new online model for information delivery look like? Murdoch mentioned The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, both papers he owns, as examples of those that managed to obtain large, online readerships. With the WSJ specifically, Murdoch made note of its plans to offer three tiers of online content: free news, a subscriber-level service, and a third "premium service" of reader-customizable "high-end financial news and analysis."

Will this tiered content model fit all, though? We think it may be too soon to tell. We're already seeing other initiatives to help "save journalism" arise that use a new crowd-funded model where micro-donations sent in through the internet help pay the reporter's salary.

Two such experiments in crowdfunding are Spot.us and Representative Journalism, both which are testing this concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, and Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.

Meanwhile, we're seeing papers in our hometowns shift coverage locally to combat the online threats. What once was a throwaway community circular is now being revived as a lightweight way to ingest your local news. That model may succeed as well.

What's more, the internet may allow for more than one business model to succeed here. However, only time will tell which ones really work best.

In some respects, though, the new Kindle (which will, after all, see its debut at a college) is probably geared more towards the textbook market than the newspaper business. For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion which was about a third of the total market for educational and professional books.

As Larry Dignan points out in detail, if Amazon could sell electronic versions of these textbooks for cheaper than a college bookstore, it could cut the incentive for students to buy used books, even as it cuts out the option to sell new copies back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

Newspaper

As for saving newspapers, hopefully, the papers that are said to be launch partners for the new Kindle, including the New York Times, will realize that they can't just recreate an electronic copy of their morning papers and hope that it will be successful. After all, the main reason why newspapers have lost their must-read status is that most of what's printed in the morning is already old news.

For a newspaper on Kindle to be successful, the Kindle version of the paper would have to be updated continuously throughout the day, just like the paper's web site. However, the fact that papers are clamoring for a larger version of Kindle so that it would be easier to replicate the feel and layout of their dead-tree editions makes it likely that the large-screen Kindle, if it turns out to be real, will see the same subscription model for newspapers where a new copy of the paper will be downloaded automatically once a day.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Munoz.

The partnerships, which are currently based around job classifieds with Yahoo!'s HotJob's service, allow newspapers to greatly expand their audience. "Most newspapers' web sites reach between 10 and 20 percent of their audience in their local market. Yahoo!'s reach in the same audience in local markets is 70 to 80 percent," Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo! marketplaces, said at a conference this week. The alliance will expand to search advertising on the newspapers' websites later this year, and display advertising during 2008.

While Google's DoubleClick acquisition will give them access to industry-leading software, Yahoo!'s strategy of partnerships with premium media properties gives them access to top dollar advertising space. JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan upgraded his rating of Yahoo! last week in large part because of these partnerships.

And the tie-ups don't have to stop with advertising and classifieds, according to analysts. Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence told Red Herring, "Social media, community tools, shopping, and maps mash-ups could all be tapped into. Newspaper sites could really benefit from these tools." These alliances could really help push Yahoo!'s non-search products to a wider audience, and in turn ultimately help their overall brand (including search).

What are your thoughts? Can alliances with newspaper publishers and other media sites help Yahoo! take on Google in advertising? Or will Google's search dominance equate to continued dominance of the online ad market?

Indeed, the state of the newspaper industry has become so dire that U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced a bill on Tuesday that would grant non-profit status (and the tax breaks that come with it) to ailing newspapers to give them a chance to restructure their business.

Image credit: Trulia blog

Shutting Down the Presses

In the last couple of weeks, a growing number of newspapers have moved their businesses completely online. Just last week, the Seattle P-I announced that it was going to become an online-only publication with a reduced staff (and the latest data shows that the traffic on the site has actually gone down since then).

Laying Off Journalists

The New York Times, sold its venerable headquarters in a lease-back deal earlier this month and will now cut about 100 non-union, non-newsroom jobs. Last year, the Times already cut 100 of its 1332 newsroom jobs. This week, the company also announced that it also plans to cut salaries by 5%. The Houston Chronicle just laid off 12% of its staff - and the list of papers that have ceased publication on the Newspaper Death Watch blog continues to grow.

Note: we mistakenly reported that the times had laid off 100 newsroom workers this week, however, the Times only cut non-newsroom staff this week - most of the cuts in the news division happened last year and the Times actually promises that it will not lay off anymore newsroom staff this year (which, given the current situation, might be overly optimistic in our opinion).

The Breaking Point: Are We There Yet?

One thing is clear: a lot of newspaper are about to hit their breaking point. While there was already a trend towards online publications, the current economic climate is only accelerating this process. Gimmicky experiments like a custom newspaper that readers can print at home will do little to reverse this trend. Indeed, while some forms of printed newspapers (think free, fully advertising-financed newspapers distributed at train stations in Europe, for example) will most likely continue to be around for a while, the future of the industry is clearly online.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user purdman1.

Investigative Journalism?

Survey respondents claimed that there had been an actual increase in investigative efforts, despite theories (see Nick Carr, for example) that the web would cleave entertainment news ad revenue from the investigative journalism it has long subsidized.

Respondents reported a decline in institutional knowledge but an increase in use of the web for research. Web publishing included, the editors report that they are publishing a greater quantity of stories than ever before - but with fewer editors watching those stories for quality.

The Rise of Local News

Newspapers are increasingly delegating national and international coverage to the biggest news organizations among them. Local news is where local press shines. While that makes sense, we wonder whether the rise of location-aware computing devices could lead to a shift in even local advertisers and be the last nail in the coffin after Craigslist.

There may be other ways for even local news to be monetized, though. How many online news organizations make their biggest money from events? Newspapers could certainly organize sponsored events concerning topics of local interest. While that's one interesting idea, there are probably a limited number of viable ideas to keep the revenue flowing long term.

This is What Change Looks Like

The fast paced firehose of the web seems to beg for shallow, poorly edited reporting - but perhaps things are just changing. We don't write in Old English any more, either.

Here at RWW, many of us love the print newspaper and don't want to see it go away. We'd also like the newspaper companies to stop delivering giant piles of paper to our houses each morning, though.

Declining revenue and staff is probably not good for any institution, but the editors interviewed by Pew said their remaining staff is fired up with competitive enthusiasm. That's something that's been missing in the newspaper business for awhile.

These are changing times, clearly, and we believe that news is just one of countless industries that will be upended by the changing web. For a look at one way newspapers might thrive in these times, check out our coverage of the Guardian's recent acquisition of leading business blog PaidContent.

Photo: 60's Paper by Flickr user DaisyBush, proof again that vapid reporting is nothing new.

Newspapers have always looked for alternative distribution mechanisms, and Popular Mechanics reports that as early as in 1939 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tested the idea of electronically sending newspapers to customers' homes. Martin Langeveld discusses the history - and failure - of personalized and faxed newspapers on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog in some more detail.

Giving Readers a Choice

MediaNews' Peter R. Vandevanter, however, seems completely unmoved by the earlier failures of this idea. In an interview with the New York Times, he argues that "individuated news" - MediaNews' trademarked term for this idea - will give readers the ability to "decide what they want to read and on what platform." Of course, readers already have this choice, and, in large numbers, they have made the choice that print is not the medium they are interested in. We also can't imagine that too many readers would want to have yet another printer at home that is dedicated to nothing else but printing the morning paper.

As Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News argues, all newspapers have to do is simply provide readers with customized feeds for their online readers. Then, if you really want to print your individualized newspaper, you could just use a free tool like FeedJournal  - and you don't even have to put yet another proprietary device into your house. Of course, if you already use Google Reader and you want a magazine-style feed reader that you can use to read on your screen, Feedly is the way to go.

CC-licensed image of dead trees used courtesy of Flickr users piglicker.

At the same time, Murdoch also dismissed Amazon's Kindle, because he doesn't want News Corp to cede its content rights "to the fine people who created the Kindle." During a Senate hearing about the future of the newspaper industry yesterday, the CEO of the Dallas Morning News announced that Amazon will take a 70% cut of the newspaper subscription revenues from the Kindle. Those numbers do, indeed, seem rather outrageous, though some might argue that the 30% the newspapers will get from Amazon is still more than the zero dollars they are getting from people who read the paper without the Kindle.

Interestingly, though, while Murdoch heralded the return of paid online newspaper subscription, News Corp also proudly announced that the Wall Street Journal's free iPhone application has been downloaded over 360,000 times. And that app, on a device fully controlled by Apple, gives users all of the WSJ content for free without the need for a subscription.

Senate Hearing

Yesterday's Senate hearing on the "Future of Journalism" made it clear that there are quite a few newspaper companies who would like to go back to charging for their content (while lobbying for tax breaks at the same time). Google's Marissa Mayer and Arianna Huffington managed to put some of the newspapers' hyperbole into some much needed context (Huffington's testimony starts at around 58min here). They argued that while the age of the printed newspaper may be coming to an end, journalism itself will blossom in the future, and that online publishers can indeed make money from their online content by smartly monetizing their traffic (and those who don't want their traffic to come from Google can just add a line to their robots.txt file anyway).

It's Not About the Future of Newspapers - It's about Journalism

We also think that it is important to move away from the question of how we can save the newspapers (easy answer: we can't). Instead, the more interesting question is how we can save good, in-depth, investigative journalism. There are clearly no easy answers for how to save the newspapers and still be able to finance good journalism, and we have doubts that charging for online access is a viable model. Users have clearly voted against this, and even if a paper wanted to charge, users could just head to another paper that decided to go with an advertising-based revenue model.

Since ProPublica announced this policy, articles from ProPublica journalists have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and online publications, including USA Today, Politico, Salon, The Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Albany Times Union.

To some degree, ProPublica models an approach that could eventually help newspapers to stay afloat by pooling resources and making stories available across a wider network of papers.

ProPublica and Citizen Journalism

Just this week, ProPublica also launched a new citizen journalism project, the ProPublica Reporting Network, that invites citizens to "commit acts of journalism." As its first mission, the ProPublica is asking people to "adopt" a stimulus project and monitor it. Essentially, this project crowdsources investigative journalism, and given the scope of the stimulus bill, this might just turn out to be the only effective way of monitoring the efficiency of a project of this size.

Will More Projects Follow this Path?

It would be nice if other non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting would adopt similarly liberal licenses, though for now, we think this is a great start. If you are aware of similar projects, please let us know in the comments.

It's a story that we may see more and more often in coming months and years. The newspaper industry is changing radically and in many cases contracting. There are a lot of possible explanations and quite a few likely consequences to consider. Today, instead of discussing those in our blog post - we want to turn the microphone over to the good folks at the Rocky. They've produced a very moving 20 minute video about how it feels and what it means to lose their jobs and newspaper. The staff has put that video on the top of their front page, we've embedded it below.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

We'll miss the newspapers that disappear for their civic responsibility, their breadth of coverage, their budgets for investigation and their physical form. It's nice to hold a physical newspaper, it's nice to visit a news website of general interest and it's nice to think of the time-honored role of the news reporter with notepad in hand. As part of the world of new media online journalism, we don't wish newspapers harm at all. We recognize how much we have to learn from the people behind them. We hope that knowledge can live on.

For more on this general topic check out Newspaper Death Watch, Online Journalism Blog and Poynter.org. Thanks to NPR's Andy Carvin for pointing us to the Rocky's important video.

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

The New York Times has taken a lead in bringing newspapers into the digital landscape over the past year. In 2006, the company launched its specialized RSS reader built on the Microsoft WPF platform, but it was this past fall that things really started to heat up on the digital side of the Times.

The paper put out a Facebook application, which has been a modest success with about 1,500 daily active users. They followed that in October with the controversial decision to put reader comments on the main page of the paper's web site.

In November, the Times took Techmeme full on by launching its own news aggregator powered by the Blogrunner technology it had acquired. Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year," NYT Tech Editor Saul Hansell told us at the time.

Then in January, the company made an investment in Wordpress, the popular blogging engine that powers their own blogs.

Conclusion

An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.

"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."

The New York Times seems to understand that. Says Aron Pilhofer, the paper's interactive news editor, the goal of an API is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

Image: Nigel Parker, Microsoft NZ

Read/WriteWeb covered the NY Times Reader back in August, noting that it works online or offline - and is probably best suited to a portable computing device like a laptop or tablet. It also aims to be a mix of the print and Web reading experience. With big media publications, where content is read every day and often on public transport like trains and buses, the user experience is considered to be key. Microsoft believes the WPF technology provides a better experience than with browser-based News Readers (like Google Reader or Bloglines). Many people would debate this, pointing to the increased convenience and portability of browser-based solutions. Nevertheless, this news today shows that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into bringing big media companies on board and using WPF instead of browser technologies.

Nigel Parker from Microsoft NZ has checked out all the new readers and notes that Forbes is the only one not to ask for user registration. He says that registration enables newspapers to deliver targeted advertising:

"By providing a reader with a richer user experience the papers are able to request an identity (people are used to providing this for client applications like itunes, IM and email). The advantage here is that the papers are able to deliver more targeted advertising to their readers. Forbes appears to have gone against this trend and provide the data to the reader (no identity required)."

He also says that Times Reader is the most feature rich of the 4 current products - with advanced search, note taking, emailing and saving or articles. Although he points out a neat Daily Mail accessibility feature called "Speak this article".

Overall, desktop RSS Readers are a tough sell in the current environment - where Google Reader and others have proven that a lot of 'magic' can be done with the browser in web-based Readers. Microsoft's WPF news readers may well be just a white label solution for newspapers and big media, rather than showing the way for generic RSS Readers. Still, that is a big market in itself.

Google added a number of interesting features to Google Image search lately, including the ability to filter pictures by style and color. Now, this new Google Labs project can also find similar images. In our tests, this worked quite well and this new feature should make it easier to find just the right image. Though, for now, it seems like only a select number of images feature the "similar images" link.

Google News Timeline

The more interesting new project, however, is News Timeline. Google Labs already featured the ability to add timelines to your search results and Google News features some basic functions for restricting results to certain dates, but the News Timeline, as the name implies, focuses on news stories and represents a major step forward for this feature.

Users can choose to display the most important stories about a topic by day, month, year, or decade. Most importantly, it is also easy to restrict searches by the type of source, including blogs, newspapers, news photos, and Wikipedia, or the type of content, including music and artwork. Interestingly, some of our searches for blogs also included a number of results from public twitter profiles.

The new News Timeline also features relevant photos and YouTube videos, which play right in the timeline interface. Interestingly, you can also choose from a number of features, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, though the selection here is currently limited to only two newspapers and a handful of magazines and blogs. The timeline will also include media files from Freebase.

A New Look and Home for Google Labs

Google Labs now features a new interface and it also finally has its own domain at Googlelabs.com and an RSS feed. Google has clearly taken to the 'labs' idea and after using it for Gmail and Google Code, it seems like it is ready to roll it out to a broader audience.