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

According to some early data from Journalism Online, an e-commerce system of sorts that allows newspapers to charge their regular online visitors, suggest that the paywall may not be the kiss of death to ad revenue and traffic that some had predicted.

However, those newspapers that reported little impact from a paywall were those whose restricted access was only partial. Rather than locking down and charging visitors for all content, these newspapers had instead limited the number of articles that visitors could read for free each month, making it clear to their readership that most wouldn't be affected by the paywall restrictions.

"If you set this meter conservatively which we urge people to do, it's a nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come to your Web site," Journalism Online's Steve Brill tells The New York Times. Most papers, says Brill, set a limit on the number of free articles somewhere between five and 20 per month, and charged a monthly subscription fee from around $3.95 to $10.95.

The findings seem to support the argument that people are willing to pay for some online content, but not all of it. But it's unlikely to end the debate on how and if newspapers - not just the major dailies like The Wall Street Journal and The Times, but smaller papers like the ones in this study - can move from free to pay (or partial pay) without losing readership and revenue.

Photo credits: State Library of New South Wales, via Flickr

The Audit Bureau of Circulations announced major changes to the way it counts digital readership today that will likely affect media that still rely on print very favorably. The new rules will allow newspapers to count a single subscriber multiple times if he or she pays or registers to access content via a print subscription, website, mobile reader or e-reader edition, among other changes to the way digital access is counted.

Circulation was historically measured as the number of print subscriptions plus newsstand sales of newspapers, magazines and other publications, and was the basis for pricing ad space and attracting advertisers. However, this definition of circulation got murky as the Internet drew more readers away from dead-tree editions, making it harder for publishers to explain the size of their readership to advertisers.

The ABC, an organization that verifies circulation numbers of publications on behalf of advertisers, made the changes based on recommendations from a task force made up of its members and representatives from the Newspaper Association of America in order to "study the evolution of newspapers and the rapidly growing channels available to advertisers," who still pay much more for print ads even as more readers demonstrate a preference for digital formats.

Starting in October, publishers can claim another "paid subscription" for every reader who accesses content online at least once every six months, as long as the subscriber has to register to see the content or pays at least 5% of his or her print subscription cost in order to access the digital version. In October 2011, readers must access digital content once per quarter to count as a paid subscription, and in October 2012, readers must access digital content once a week in order to be counted.

The rapidly-scaling standard suggests newspapers are playing catch-up to monetize an audience that started migrating to the Web a long time ago. The Internet makes it possible to know more about your readers than ever before - how many you have, what they look at, and who they are - but the old circulation auditing system seems to be struggling to adapt to the needs of advertisers and media in a digital world.

Image courtesy ShironekoEuro

ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of The New York Times.

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?"

For users who don't own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don't mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can't fathom reading any long-form content on these screens.

Fighting Off the iPad

For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple's iPad ads and other promotional material) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions.

Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well - and that some of them will be available for free - the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today's traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead.

What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?

VCR Plus+ were the codes you used to need to videotape a television show. They were generated by Rovi (formerly Macrovision) and provided to the print media where they were published in the TV listings.

Indeed, television has already begun a migration to the Web. Google announced Google TV at I/O on the same day that the last VCR Plus+ codes reached newspapers. Online television site Hulu has been going for three years already.

The VCR Plus+ code disappearance is a rare convergence of, arguably, three different types of defunct tech: newspapers, video recorders and the codes themselves. Not many people I daresay will miss them. But what about the folks who took the time and extraordinary effort to master their use? Will there remain a small group of furious television watchers out there shouting, "They can have my VCR Plus+ code when they pry it from my cold, dead hand?"

Thanks to Larry Price for the tip

In an email to newspaper publishers, Google said that it is closing down the project and will instead focus on its publisher subscription service Google One Pass, according to the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix. The project was similar to what Google has done with books in scanning and archiving the world's libraries. It was an altruistic goal by Google but may not be a fit for its future that includes Chromebooks and Androids and apps.

Carioli postulates that the New Archive project was more cumbersome than Google had envisioned or that it got fewer page views than expected. The truth is probably in between somewhere.

In the end, it turns out to be a great deal for newspapers.

Carioli's thoughts:

"Are we mad at that? Ehhh, not really. The deal Google struck with partner newspapers stipulated that, somewhere down the line, a paper could purchase Google's digital scans of its content for a fee. That fee is now being waived, and Google is not only giving publishers free access to the scanned files, but also the rights to publish them with other partners. In essence, Google just scanned a huge chunk of the newspaper industry's valuable long-tail content, and then handed it to the publishers. (It's been a couple of rough years. We'll take it.)

Users can continue to search digitized papers, according to Search Engine Land. The Phoenix was unsure if Google would continue to scan microfilm and newspapers that publishers had sent in to be archived but had not yet been finished.

Image: The Lewiston Daily Sun, Oct. 29, 1986

That's according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has just released its latest report on the "State of the Media." The study finds that, "By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010," but that improvement did not extend to one important sector - newspapers - which continued to see a decline in revenues, readership and newsroom jobs.

The report points to another milestone in 2010 as well: For the first time, more money was spent on online advertising than on print newspaper advertising. Online advertising overall grew 13.9% to $25.8 billion in 2010. Ad revenue at newspapers, however, fell over the same period by 6.4%.

The declining revenue and subscriptions for newspapers have resulted in many closures and layoffs. Indeed, newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than they were in 2000. But according to the survey, most Americans don't seem terribly concerned by the loss of this news source. Twenty eight percent said the loss of their local newspaper would have a major impact on their ability to keep up with local information; 30% said it would have minor impact and 39% said it would have no impact.

In a report that accompanies the State of the Media report, Pew finds that more people are turning to their mobile phones for local news; 47% of Americans report they get at least some local news from their cellphone, although their interests seem to be in information that's practical and in real time: weather and restaurant information, for example.

Interestingly, while nearly half of Americans say they get their local news via a mobile device, just one in 10 use an app to do so. And of those, an even fewer percentage pay to use those apps. This raises questions for the news industry as it's unclear whether people are willing to pay for online content, even if their local newspapers disappeared.

Nonetheless the Pew Research Center insists that, "Local news remains the vast untapped territory." "While local has been the area of greatest ferment for nonprofit startups," reads the report, "no one has yet cracked the code for how to produce local news effectively at a sustainable level."

Photo credits: Flickr user Daniel Blume

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.

Calling it the Ben Franklin Project, the company tried open source for a month. Things went so well it decided to make it permanent and company-wide for its 18 daily newspapers and their websites.

Newspapers have seen a sustained drop in readership, and therefore in revenues, over the last half-decade. The ability to cut cost on something as elemental as production, by dropping expensive proprietary software, is exciting. But so is watching a company in an allegedly change-resistant sector see the light bulb go off over its head.

"The Ben Franklin Project not only proves that websites and newspapers can be freed from the restraints of legacy, proprietary publishing systems, but also heralds the potential of an open and transparent news-gathering process. The Project allowed audience members to help shape editorial story budgets through crowd sourcing."

Ben photo by Mark Skrobola

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?

According to ChangeWave, iPad owners mostly use their devices to surf the Web (83%), check email (71%) and use apps from the app store (56%). About a third of iPad owners use their tablets to read e-books.

Focus: E-Books, Newspaper and Magazines

Among those respondents who already owned an e-reader, the Kindle is still the most popular device (62%). After just a few weeks on the market, however, the iPad already registered a 16% share in this survey, which puts it far ahead of the Sony Reader family and Barnes & Noble's Nook.

A lot has been written about how the advent of e-readers, the iPad and similar tablets will change the magazine and newspaper industry. While the exact extent of the iPad's influence on these industries still isn't clear, it's worth noting that iPad owners are far more likely to use their tablets to read newspapers and magazines than those who own any other kind of e-reader.

About half of all iPad owners read newspapers on their tablets and more than a third read magazines. For other e-readers, these numbers hover slightly above 10%. This low number doesn't come as a surprise, as these devices were clearly designed as e-book readers and don't offer a convenient way to read newspapers on the Web. Even on these devices, however, the number of people who use them to read newspaper and magazines has almost doubled in the last few months.

Many fear that putting content behind a paywall will just drive readers to other sources, but perhaps the Times' approach will help to combat that issue.

The announcement is light on details of the actual plan, such as the number of free articles, how much the subscription will cost or precisely how it will work, but one thing is for sure - New York Times readers are going to have to pay to play. The company's press release does tell us, however, that subscribers to the print edition will continue have access to the online edition.

Notably, the Times' model intends to "provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web," according to the release. Acknowledging the nature of the Web, while trying to retain a profit, and hopefully keep paying hard-working journalists, sounds like a good method to us.

The move is something we've all seen coming, as more and more newspapers have shut down in recent years. By mid-2009, more than 100 newspapers had been shuttered with a number stopping the presses and going online-only in an attempt to remain in production.

As with most things of this nature, only time will tell if this new model will work. What do you think?

To read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of newspapers' struggle in the 21st century, check out our Newspapers and Journalism archive.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.