The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT's existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.

In addition to forgoing Apple's revenue share, the HTML5-based app, which looks and feels a lot like a native tablet or smartphone application, has the advantage of being accessible from a range of devices and much easier to update. It also enables them to build out sites with the kind of responsive design techniques utilized by publications like the Boston Globe.

Mobile and tablet development is only going to increase in importance for publishers in the future. With this acquisition, FT can continue to enhance its existing mobile apps and use the development talent at Assanka to help build out future initiatives on various devices.

Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.

Digital Tools Fit For a News Publisher

CloudMine, one of the companies enrolled in the incubator, is a mobile backend-as-a-service provider for developers. It offers a pay-as-you-go API that hooks into their hosted server-side platform, freeing developers up from having to code custom backends. Why would a newspaper company have any interest in the success of such a tool? In PMN's case, a service like this could aid the company's ongoing efforts to bolster their mobile products and tablet strategy. Last year, the company made headlines by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with specialized news-reading apps for the Inquirer and Daily News. It was a bold move for a print media company, even if its earliest iteration was largely based around print-to-digital shovelware.

An even more obvious choice for a newspaper is SnipSnap, a smartphone app that lets consumers scan printed coupons to save and redeem later. SnipSnap CEO Ted Mann, a veteran of the newspaper industry, left his position as Digital Development Director at Gannett New Jersey last year to launch the startup. Today, Mann returns to the newspaper world, however temporarily, as he and his team set up shop in the Inquirer building. They will work alongside the newspapers' digital sales team, although SnipSnap is not officially a product of PMN.

Those on the editorial side will have the opportunity to collaborate with the folks working on ElectNext, a Web app that helps voters choose the best candidate in an upcoming election on the local, state and federal levels. The app works by asking users a series of questions about social and political issues and then matches them with the appropriate candidates.

Rebranding the "Newspaper"

Beyond the nature of the companies being incubated, there are few other obvious reasons for a newspaper company to make a move like this. For one, it serves as a marketing tactic to help rebrand a print publisher as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy multimedia company. By selling news-reading tablets and housing tech startups, PMN can paint itself as a media organization of the future rather than a soon-to-be relic.

Another formerly bankrupt news company, the Journal Register Company (now known as Digital First Media), is taking a similar approach this year by launching a tech incubator of its own, which will be geared toward startups specializing in advertising, editorial content and audience development. Like PMN, this move helps Digital First Media find innovative potential future partners and fits in with a larger strategy of rebranding itself for the twenty-first century.

PMN's experiment may be the first of its kind at a big city daily newspaper, but its not the first time that any publisher has tried incubating startups. Hearst and Conde Nast have both launched digital products built by in-house startups, some of which have nothing to do with the publishers' traditional businesses.

A few years ago, moves like this would have been seen as particularly revolutionary and forward-thinking. Today, they're still smart, but are more about survival than thinking ahead. As print revenues continue to decline, traditional news publishers desperately need to find new ways to both build their audiences and monetize their efforts in a way that can make up for the cash they keep hemorrhaging on the print side. The Web has made the former significantly easier than the latter.

Incubating tech startups may not lead to an explosion in revenue overnight, but it's a smart step in the right direction. As PMN CEO Greg Osberg said during a presentation at Temple University last year, "I want us to find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com." In time, revenue growth is more likely to come out of innovative efforts like these than from clinging to print and milking hideous Web banner ads for every last nickel.

Newspapers and Startups: A Two-Way Incubation

The intimate relationship PMN is establishing with local startups serves not only to fuel the growth of those new companies, but it may also help adapt the culture within the host organization itself. A lot of "future of news" types like to talk about how old media companies should adopt a startup culture if they want to survive. As anybody who's ever worked at a legacy media organization knows, that's far easier said than done.

Having had no other choice, PMN has already started the process by making moves like this, merging its newsrooms and demoting a top editor that they saw as not being digital-savvy enough. What better way to encourage a startup culture than by bringing startups down the hall from the newsroom?

When Apple changed their subscription rules to require that publishers fork over 30% of the revenue generated from apps sold in the iTunes store, many media companies played along, hoping that making their content available on iOS devices would help them survive the transition from print to pixels.

So how's the HTML5 experiment going? Pretty well, it turns out. The publication is now getting more traffic to its tablet-friendly Web app than it saw on the old native applications, according to Reuters. The newspaper company said that's it now seen over 700,000 visitors to the Web app.

Just as with native apps generally, people who read the Financial Times via the Web app from their smartphones and tablets are more engaged than users who visit the publication's desktop website.

"They are consuming about three times as many pages through the app as they are through the desktop in an average visit," Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, told Reuters.

When you use the FT Web app from an iPad, the experience comes pretty close to mimicking that of a native news app. It's pretty light on the slick, animated type of UI tricks that tablet apps often have, but you can do things like swipe your finger right and left to navigate the paper's different sections.

It's still pretty early in this battle. For media companies deciding how best to allocate their budgets for their mobile strategies, the experience of the Financial Times provides an early indication that developing cross-platform Web apps can pay off.

Fifty six percent of the 726 respondents go online for news once or twice per day, 26% visit three sites, and 24% visit four or more sites. The survey also found that men were more likely than women to visit multiple sites.

Ongo reports that 37% spend between 15 and 30 minutes daily reading news online, 26% spend between 31 minutes and one hour, and 21% spend 15 minutes or less. These times were self-reported by survey participants.

According to a spokesperson for Ongo, the survey referred broadly to "sites," "news sites," and "websites" throughout the survey, and it did not ask specifically about native news applications, as opposed to Web content. It did cover content accessed on tablets and mobile devices as well as desktop/laptop computers.

Some 500,000 pages have been digitized thus far, and beginning this fall, this material will be available online. By then, the British Library hopes to have over 1.5 million newspaper pages available.

According to The Guardian, the project is a partnership with Brightsolid, an online publisher and owner of several family history websites, including ancestorsonboard.com and Genes Reunited.

Copyright Problems Persist with Digitization Efforts

Despite the British Library's vast collection of newspapers, the issue of copyright is still complex. Initially, the British Library intended to focus solely on pre-1900 newspapers so as to avoid the issue, but it's in negotiations with rights holders to move forward with 20th century content.

Last year, when the British Library began its digitization efforts, James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp (and Rupert's son) blasted the project, warning that public bodies were increasingly "treading on the toes" of commercial media organizations. He said that the digitization efforts were "not simply being done for posterity, nor to make free access for library users easier, but also for commercial gain via a paid for website."

At the time, Murdoch was very critical of Google's digitization efforts too, and as the Google Books settlement (or rather, the recent ruling to throw out the Google Books settlement) demonstrates, there are still many obstacles in the digitizing archival material - whether it's by public or private institutions.

But once you click on that 21st article, you'll have to pony up a new subscription fee for online viewing - $15 per month for access to the website and a mobile phone app, $20 for Web access and an iPad app, and $35 for an all-access subscription plan. If you're a subscriber to the paper version (remember paper versions of newspapers?), this digital access will be included.

Are People Willing to Pay for Digital News?

"A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web," said The New York Times Company Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., calling the move an "investment in our future." The new revenue sources will help the newspaper maintain its "journalistic mission and digital innovation."

Despite Sulzberger's contention that people are now willing to pay for digital news, a recent Pew study found that few people do. Only 18% of respondents in its most recent survey indicated they'd be willing to pay $10 a month for online access to local news. The New York Times can't really be described as a local newspaper, of course, but it remains to be seen if people are willing to pay $15 for a digital subscription.

Is $15 Too Much?

And as news hit this morning about the NYT paywall, many have balked at the $15 fee. Dave Winer wondered why there wasn't something more offered to online subscribers. "Wouldn't it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?"

Currently, what's offered - other than online access, of course - is the promise of helping the newspaper survive. Indeed, in its announcement of the paywall this morning, The New York Times says that, "the fragile condition of the industry has left newspapers with few other choices." What choice will you make? Will you subscribe?

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb and The New York Times are syndication partners.

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

But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School's Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.

Using Localeaks, you can send an anonymous tip, including a file, to over 1400 newspapers in the U.S. through one online form. Choose your state. Choose the newspaper. Enter your information and submit your anonymous tip.

Once a file is submitted, the newspaper will receive an email, alerting them to the tip. The newspaper then needs to reply that it's interested. Then a temporary secure file transfer is established. This last step isn't automated yet, according to Matthew Terenzio, Web Development Director at The Hour Publishing Co and one of the members of this project. The best way to do so, he says, would be to have the encryption software - the open source GnuPG in this case - set up on the newspaper's end. "It is unlikely that most would have it yet," says Terenzio, who says he's working on helping some newspapers set up their own drop-boxes to avoid this step.

But an increasing familiarity with encryption might just be in more newsroom's future, particularly if the number of "local leaks" continue. After all, as Terenzio notes, "the people formerly called the audience and the sources, are setting the pace of change, not the news organizations."

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 idea here, as the company's CEO Jim Pitkow told us last week, was to test whether it would be possible to reach out to these site owners and get them to either take the content down or license it without having to resort to suing them immediately. Attributor set up a two-step gradual response process, where site owners were first contacted directly and simply asked to take the pirated content down. Then, if these site owners did not react, Attributor sent a second warning notice to the site owners. In addition, the company also contacted both the advertising networks that hosted ads on these sites and the major search engines that included these sites in their index and asked these to block them from their services.

Attributor gave site owners two weeks to respond to both messages. At the end of this process, 75% of copying sites agreed to either take the content down voluntarily or to pursue licensing agreements.

It's interesting to see how effective Attributor's efforts were - even without resorting to legal actions and sending content removal notices to hosting companies. By getting the advertising companies to take their ads down from the offending sites, the pirates no longer had an incentive for keeping the content on their sites.

In this post we'll look at how some of the leading newspapers are using iPad, what the user experience is like, and what could be improved still. We'll specifically look at WSJ, NYT and Newsy.

The default front page of the WSJ app immediately shows that the WSJ has thought a little outside the box in making its iPad edition different from the print and website editions. It offers up two versions of the paper: a daily one and a "Now" one. The "Now" version is updated with breaking news coverage throughout the day. It also features "top article picks from Journal editors." Users are invited to choose one or the other as their default version when they open the app. Both versions offer a mix of content from the print and online versions of WSJ.

As well as two versions of the paper, the WSJ iPad app has three useful sections: My Watchlist, Saved Articles and Saved Sections (the latter is only available to subscribers). It should be noted that the WSJ iPad app offers only limited content and features to free users. Subscribers get the full experience for $3.99 per week. A good portion of the content of the iPad app isn't available to non-paying users.

From a user experience perspective, the WSJ iPad app is very slick. The now familiar 'swipe' and 'pinch' iPad functions are deployed smartly and the only new thing users need to learn is that pinching returns them to the section homepage.

The New York Times

In contrast to the WSJ and many other newspapers with iPad apps, the New York Times offers only a limited amount of content in its iPad app. Called NYT Editor's Choice, the app features "a selection of latest news, opinion and features" from the venerable paper.

The NYT app has been heavily criticized for its lack of content. Gizmodo argues that the NYT's deal with the Amazon Kindle could be a big factor behind that decision. Politics aside, what is the user experience like?

The app is divided into sections: 6 content ones (News, Business, Technology, Opinion, Arts, Features) and one for video content. The first thing that struck me about the app is its relatively small default font. There is an option to select a larger font, but - like some of the Zinio magazine apps I profiled yesterday - one can't magnify the content. The content also has few images. Navigating the app is via the same swiping motion in WSJ, but it felt clunkier.

The video section was good, but (you guessed it) there wasn't a lot of content.

Overall, the NYT iPad app is rather disappointing from a content perspective - and just average from a user interaction point of view.

Newsy

The fact that both WSJ and NYT offer only limited free content on iPad surely leaves room for other companies to innovate. And that's exactly what video news service Newsy has done. It was probably the first iPad app that I used regularly, when I bought the device.

Newsy creates short video summaries of daily news. They're presented by people who wouldn't look out of place on the E Channel. Each clip runs from 2-5 minutes and is comprised of commentary based on TV news networks, news web sites and (refreshingly) blogs. They're concise summaries of the news of the day, taken from sources across the Web and other media.

I often watch Newsy on my iPad during my lunchtime - it sure beats watching midday TV! Here's an example clip, about the iPad's WiFi problems back in April:

iPad Newspapers Lite on Innovation Currently

There's no shortage of newspapers that offer iPad applications, many of them with much more free content than WSJ and NYT. However the sector is ripe for innovation, which is what apps like Newsy and Flipboard are doing.

Over time, newspapers will add more interactive features - video, infographics, slideshows. Much of the type of content that the Wired iPad app is experimenting with.

Newspapers could also do a lot with personalization on the iPad. Every newspaper reader (obviously I'm referring to older generations - joke!) has their favorite sections. But more than that, newspapers should offer in-depth news coverage on topics of interest to individual readers. It could even be esoteric content that doesn't often make the print edition due to space restrictions. The iPad is a Web-connected device after all, so it could theoretically pull down any content from a newspaper's archives - in the case of WSJ and NYT, those companies have decades of content that could potentially be accessed by iPad users. Imagine reading a news story about the BP oil spill, and wondering what other oil spills there have been through history - why not scroll through the WSJ or NYT archives on that topic within your iPad.

Let us know in the comments what your favorite iPad newspaper apps are. Also, what features would you like to see in these apps?

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by NYT, although not on the iPad. Image credits: ReneS.; stevegarfield

Links to read the full story launch a fully capable built-in browser, or you can chose to open the story in Safari. The app supports iOS 4 app switching, so you won't lose your place. You can also chose to email or copy the link or save it for later to your Instapaper account.

The Good: I really like the idea of stumbling onto news, and the ability to quickly scan headlines about a given topic without knowing the source eliminates our media loyalties. Searching works pretty well for both broad searches like "technology" or more specific ones like "iPhone app development." Results were relevant and from good sources.

One small feature also makes digging deeper within topics easy and unobtrusive to workflow within the app. If you search for "baseball" and then remember you want to read up on the Red Sox, you can start a new search from the "baseball" search results page. The app then provides a link to return to the previous search, letting you pick up where you left off. It's a small feature but it goes a long way.

The Not So Good: Accidental News Explorer (which, let's be honest, could use a better name) is beautifully minimalistic and feels "newspapery" with its grey color scheme and serifed fonts, but it also leaves much to be desired. I really would like to see the ability to save searches into a list of favorite topics implemented in a future version of this app.

This could take the app to the next level and make it far more powerful by allowing it to curate a list of news at the intersection of my various interests. I would love to be able to select a few topics and set this thing on shuffle. That would truly make it the Pandora of news. StumbleUpon, which just went mobile with iPhone and Android apps, is a better solution for that at the moment.

For version 1.0, this app is pretty solid if you enjoy browsing for news. Most of us, however, are very loyal to the news outlets we most trust, and breaking that habit can be difficult. $1.99 could be a bit of a barrier to some as well, but if you want to mix up your news consumption, I recommend giving Accidental News Explorer a look.

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

What's the new trend among legacy media? Why it's none other than Tumblr.

As noted in a Business Insider article Friday, several outlets of traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) are suddenly popping up all over Tumblr with their own pages. Newsweek seems to making great use of the platform by posting mainly photos, and quotes - two of the most shared forms of media on Tumblr. The New Yorker also recently joined the service, sharing mainly videos and photos, including high-resolution images of their popular artistic covers.

The venerable New York Times has even jumped in the mix, though its account is so far empty, save for a single post announcing more content is "coming soon." The Business Insider article lists several other traditional media outlets providing sharable content with fans on Tumblr, including Life Magazine, The Travel Channel, The Today Show, Elle, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and several others.

If anything, these new additions to the Tumblr ecosystem provide a human face through which the various outlets can communicate more freely with their readers. Newsweek has been discussing rumors about its impending purchase on the Tumblr, and many of the sites seem perfectly content with posting material would think would be found objectionable on the main homepage or in print.

So is Tumblr the next big thing for traditional media outlets? From the looks of it, the large media outlets seem pleased with the service and the kinds of interactions it allows for. It would not be surprising to see Tumblr become the third common place aside Facebook and Twitter for media organizations and corporate brands to further reach their audiences.

"Over the next five years digital technologies will progressively increase their impact across all segments of entertainment and media (E&M) as digital transformation continues to expand and escalate," a press release from PwC said Tuesday. "The uncertain economic background has done nothing to slow the pace of change, which has been far quicker than predicted 12 months ago. It is clear that the consumer is firmly in the driving seat of these changes."

According to the report, increased access to broadband has played a large role in helping boost online ad revenues. The Wall Street Journal reports that broadband penetration in the U.S. nearly doubled from 34% in 2005 to 64% in 2010 thanks partly to $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money put towards expanding broadband access. Additionally, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that global consumer spending on Internet access will increase from $228 billion 2009 to $351 billion in 2014.

It was only a matter of time until online ad sales outpaced those of print, and once they do, they will only continue to gain momentum. Legacy media are driven by numbers and are slow to change their ways, and thus have not thrown their entire weight behind online initiatives. When the scales tip over to online advertising in the next year, those that have been reluctant to embrace new and online media will be forced to allocate additional resources to the winning market.

The ultimate demise of print media is still many years away, but it is pretty clear that ad revenues are slowly dropping away. It will take one of the predominant newspapers ceasing to print physical copies to set off the domino effect that will likely follow, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon. While newspaper ad revenues have been falling, they've been leveling out, and a balance between print and online is likely to exist for several years before print entirely fades away.