I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. I did, learning from smart people … here’s my weekly review, a few days late.

In Week-old news, I look at the biggest news involving newspapers, the internet and social media from the past week.

Google buzzes into social media: Search engine and online advertising giant Google upped its commitment to social media by introducing its own messaging service, Buzz. The service had some hiccups early on, including delayed messages. Critics were generally accepting of the new service, although many people were angered by the program automatically adding e-mail lists to the less-formal, and public, network. Mashable.com talked about privacy issues and also the service’s quick growth.

The Wall Street Journal explains more here and USA Today talked more in depth about the privacy issue.

New BBC director says get on board: The Guardian reported that Peter Horrocks, the new director for BBC Global News, told reporters and staff that they were to use social media more to help produce stories, saying its use was “not discretionary.”

MediaNews says it will grow traffic behind paywall: MediaNews vice president for content development, Howard Saltz, told Poynter Online’s Steve Myers here that the paper’s use of new content, some user-generated and/or geo-located, will allow the paper to increase traffic on the Web sites of two newspapers that will be testing paywalls for the company.

McClatchy CEO says no to paywall: TheNextWeb.com reported McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt  told attendees at an advertising conference that he did not support full paywalls, saying online advertising revenue would continue to grow. The comments came just a few weeks after Editor and Publisher reported that the company would experiment with a pay model on one of its Web sites. E&P reported Pruitt as saying the company would keep tabs on the issue and be ready to follow a successful revenue model.

Quick hits: Guardian newspaper editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger talked about possible revenue streams from Apple’s upcoming iPad tablet computer. … The Wall Street Journal reported that Associated Press stories were once again back in use by Google while terms for a new licensing agreement are worked out.

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In Week-old News, I look at the biggest news stories involving newspapers, social media and the internet from the past week.

Seattle Times makes announcement on debt: In a note to its readers, The Seattle Times announced it had reorganized its debt to secure the paper’s near-term future. In a business story on the company’s Web site, Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes wrote the paper had put up as collateral two of its South Lake Union properties, including the paper’s headquarters, to secure the restructured debt.

The report continued to discuss the staff reduction and other measures the paper has used to survive. The papers’ circulation has been boosted 32 percent, however, after the other main Seattle paper, the Post-Intelligencer, canceled its print operations in March of last year.

Publisher Frank Blethen said the Times did not make money in 2008 or 2009, but he was optimistic profitability would return as the economy improves.

MediaNews announces paywalls: Bloomberg reported Friday that MediaNews would roll out a paywall to two newspapers in a pilot program which, if successful, would likely be adopted at other papers in the company, possibly including the Denver Post.

Readers would have access to 25 “premium” articles a month before being charged an undetermined fee. MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic told reporter Greg Bensinger the premium content would include some columns and investigative reporting.

Lodovic wouldn’t say whether subscribers to the papers (the Chico, California’s Enterprise-Record and York, Pennsylvania’s Daily Record) would get the content for free or have to pay for an upgrade to see all the content.

MediaNews, whose parent company recently filed bankruptcy, is using Journalism Online LLC to help process the payments.

See more on the New York Times’ upcoming paywall, and on Newsday’s unique subscriber initiative.

Santa Barbara News-Press loses arbitration case: The Santa Barbara (California) News-Press was ordered to pay the legal fees of a former editor, The Associated Press reported.

Arbitrator Deborah Rothman ordered Ampersand Publishing, parent company of the News-Press, to pay $900,000 for the fees of former editor Jerry Roberts after the paper filed a $25-million suit against Roberts for defamation and breaking a confidentiality agreement.

The AP said a judge still has  to confirm or vacate the judgment.

Roberts quit his job in 2006 amid complaints that the newspaper’s publisher, Wendy McCaw, was interfering with editorial content. A following shakeup at the paper included many staffers who quit or were fired.

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In Week-old News, I look at the biggest stories from the past week that involve newspapers, the internet and social media.

Newsday’s numbers

Newsday paywall subscriber numbers draw ridicule: Executives at Long Island-based newspaper Newsday told staffers recently that its Web Site, Newsday.com, has 35 new subscribers to the site after implementing a paywall in October. The New York Observer’s John Koblin reports here that publisher Terry Jimenez told a meeting of newsroom employees of the low number for the $5-a-week plan, after which the reporter who asked the question clarified the number.

The Observer goes on to discuss the cost of the Web site’s October revamping ($4 million) and how the paper’s staff has become increasingly disgruntled since the Dolan family bought the paper.

The low subscribers numbers were explained away by a spokeswoman who noted that readers with Optimum Online high-speed internet service, owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, get access to the Web site for free, as do subscribers to the paper.

Meanwhile, David Goetzl of Mediapost.com reported more numbers on Newsday.com’s performance here. The report said Newsday.com unique visitors dropped by 1.3 million in December of 2009 from December 2008, and total page views were 8.9 million fewer. The report says the drastic reader declines started in November, which executives previously claimed was due to hangover from the 2008 presidential campaign.

Newsday responds to criticism: After taking flack from critics about the subscriber numbers, Newsday editor Debby Krenek told Staci D. Kramer of Paidcontent.org here that because Newsday and cable customers can get access to the Web Site: “Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday‘s web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option.”

Cablevision’s President of Local Media,  Tad Smith, explained the strategy to the staff in a memo that Gawker.com put online here. In the memo Smith states: “Newsday’s web strategy has two parts: 1) to provide Newsday’s print subscribers with a rich web experience that goes far beyond what they can get in the newspaper alone, thereby motivating them to remain, return, or choose to subscribe to Newsday; and 2) to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”

Smith wants the paper’s focus to be on unique New York metro visitors and goes on talk about the Web Site’s performance: “Reported visitors in the New York metro area declined by a remarkably low 2 percent: from 657,000 in December 2008 to 643,000 in December 2009.”

More views on the paywall: Mark Potts takes a deeper look at the subscription methodology here. In his analysis, he describes Newsday’s unique factors, including geography and being owned by Cablevision. He says the paper isn’t concerned in the slightest with non-local readers. Potts ends his comments with a warning that the low subscribers should worry other papers investigating the paywall model, specifically naming McClatchy as well as the New York Times.

Also, Peter Preston reports from The Guardian here that the Newsday’s paywall model may be copied in the future by media conglomerates, including by Rupert Murdoch.

The paywall itself: If one believes a paywall on a Web Site is to serve one of two main purposes, maintaining/increasing revenue or maintaining/increasing customers, does Newsday’s paywall do either?

• Increasing revenue: The paper has added 35 subscribers since implementing the paywall. At $260 a year, that’s $9,100. With likely lower ad revenue from the less visitors (a reported 8.9 million fewer page views in December), revenue is bound to be lower. And Krenek claims the paper covers about 75 percent of Long Island households through Newsday or Optimum. OK, so for the other 25 percent of households on the island AND everyone outside the New York metro area, the paper has sold 35 subscriptions. That is an astounding low number no matter how it is justified.
• Increasing customers: Smith uses the phrase “remain, return, or choose to subscribe” for both Newsday and the high-speed internet access as reasons why online access would be a valuable addition for customers.

Does Smith really believe that more than a handful of people would subscribe to the paper for access to the Web site? How many people, who don’t subscribe to the paper, would be convinced to subscribe in able to get online access? What does Newsday.com offer so uniquely that customers can’t find it for free at other sites, without signing up for Newsday?

And for high-speed internet access, would customers “remain, return, or choose” Cablevision’s option instead of satellite or Verizon just for access? The vast majority of Long Island customers likely choose their service like everyone else … on speed, reliability and cost. Adding Newsday.com access is unlikely to be a deciding factor, especially considering, as Paidcontent.org points out, there is a “gaping hole in the wall called mobile.newsday.com.” That hole will only grow bigger as smartphones and mobile tablet computers, including Apple’s new iPad, gain marketshare of online usage.

If the two criteria above are the basis for using a paywall, I’m unconvinced that Newsday is benefiting from theirs.

What do you think of Newsday’s paywall …. and the 35 subscibers?

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Apple iPad and newspapers: One of the buzzwords from Apple’s announcement of its iPad tablet computer Wednesday is that it’s a “game-changer” for the newspaper business.

The problem with any one device being hyped as a game-changer is you have to look at the industry first. Are newspapers even ready for a change?

What does the iPad do? It puts the internet in a convenient package. People who don’t have a laptop or smartphone yet now have another choice to access the web on the go at a decent starting price (The iPad starts at $499, $629 with cellular access). And sure, the touchscreen capabilities of the iPad are exciting, but here is what the device adds to the internet …. NOTHING. In fact, the iPad demonstrated Wednesday didn’t have Flash capabilities, reducing options for video, some advertising and other media.

But here’s the key for newspaper Web sites … the iPad is not a game-changer if they don’t have GAME.

Newspaper sites that are good, bad or ugly now will be good, bad or ugly in two months when the iPad is available.

What newspapers need to focus on is making better Web sites, with more content, photos and videos. Before worrying about how their sites will look on the iPad, newspapers need to be happy with how they look now. Then they can use that as a foundation for making content that is user-friendly and interactive with the iPad.

iPad revenue: I doubt the iPad will produce any significant revenue streams for newspapers. Many newspapers already have free or paid apps, and the iPad doesn’t change that. Even if the iPad becomes wildly successful, the revenue from paid apps is usually a minimal one-time fee.

Also, don’t expect PDF or e-edition subscriptions to be popular on the iPad. The viewing area is just too small. The 9.7 inch (diagonal) screen is more suited for regular web addresses than a mockup of today’s paper.

So what CAN the iPad do for newspapers? If the iPad takes off, and people use it as their mobile device of choice, then that will help newspapers because more people will be spending more time on the web. They won’t just use a computer at home or at work. They will use it everywhere. That means newspapers will have more opportunities to get more information about their readers and what they are doing (and where).

More consumers, more time on the web, more profit possibilities. That is what newspapers need to focus on.

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Comments appreciated.

In Week-old News, I look back at the week’s biggest news involving newspapers, social media and the web.

New York Times to start paywall in 2011:

By far the biggest news of the week was the New York Times announcing that the newspaper would start a metered paywall system in January, 2011.  Here’s the memo to staff via Poynter.

The brass said the Times would use an “approach that will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.”

Here is the Times’ story on its own paywall. It’s ironic that currently the page has an ad promoting a free service from the NYT and Linkedin.

The story contained a link to a Q&A about NYTimes.com, which tried to answer questions readers may have.

Here are the main features of the paywall:

• Readers will be allowed to see an unknown number of articles free each month. A flat fee grants unlimited access for a household.
• Subscribers, even for the Sunday paper only, will receive full access at no additional charge.
• Smartphones are covered under the fee, but e-readers may be charged separately.
• International fees will be the same as the fees U.S. readers pay.
• If someone sends you a link, you will be able to read it and not have it could against your free allotment.

That’s basically it. The Times didn’t say what the fee would be or how many articles would be free.

Industry experts have strong feelings about the plan. Jeff Jarvis blogged here about the paper charging its best customers, risking driving them away. Steve Outing, meanwhile, criticizes the paper here for announcing the paywall now but waiting a year to implement it. Jay Rosen focuses here on the linking issue, which allows readers to get the articles for free. In Rosen’s post, he mentions Felix Salmon’s post about the navigation issue. Steve Yelvington talks here about a point the NYT executives may not even understand.

The New York Times plan will continue to be debated, so read all about it and add to the discussion.

For more about paywalls in general, see my posts  here and here, and my two interviews with online newspaper editors here and here.

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In Week-old News, I look at the past week’s biggest news involving newspapers and technology related to newspapers.

Morris Publishing files Chapter 11: Morris Publishing Group, the owner of  the Florida Times-Union, Augusta Chronicle and 11 other daily newspapers, mostly in Southern states, said Wednesday it will  file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy within a week.

The plan, approved by many of the company’s creditors, seeks to cut debt of $415 million.

The company wants  a bond exchange that would end up canceling almost $180 million owed to creditors.

Denver Post owner to file Chapter 11:  Affiliated Media Inc. said that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the near future, it said Friday. Affiliated Media is the holding company for MediaNews Group, which owns The Denver Post.

The prepackaged plan has been approved by the company’s creditors.

Company management said operations and employees won’t be affected by the restructuring, although management said business conditions would determine future layoffs.

For more, see Alan Mutter’s blog here.

E&P has new owner: In some good news for the newspaper business, longtime industry chronicler Editor & Publisher was  sold to Irvine, Calif.-based Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc..

Nielsen Co. had shut down web and print operations at E&P in December.

The trade magazine will resume monthly publication in February.

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Last week, @mediabistro asked followers to post haiku on their current view of the media landscape. See all the haiku here.

The results ranged from TMZ and Tiger Woods to newspapers, Web sites and Twitter.

My favorites included

Steve Smith’s fossils in newsrooms
can’t or just won’t change their ways
time for more coffee

Becky Chambers Hennessy’s Mull writer’s seascape.
Cloudless regatta Sunday.
Freelance skipper wins.

Tara Zucker’s Content needed now!
There is not time to proofing
Hurray and hit send

and

Alexandra Leh’s blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah

Three themes jumped out at me….

1. It’s a Web World: Several haiku were about news being 24/7, Web sites or being short and quick with the content. Others focused on newspaper and their Web sites … and the struggle of the transition.

2. Paying for content: There were also haiku on paying for content and how papers no longer dominate news, including

Michael Corones’ print once ruled the world
the dinosaurs did as well
look where they are now

3. Lack of jobs: Haiku were also written about freelancing and working hard for content. One writer talked about high salaries for bosses and another ended with “fries with that shake sir?”

The post was an interesting read with several funny entries.

My entry is near the bottom.

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In Week-old News, I look at the biggest news from the past week involving social media and newspapers.

Get your e-reader here!

Wow … If you love e-readers and happened to make it to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, then good for you. The list of e-readers introduced at the show is huge, but the ones that caught my eye  were the Skiff Reader, the Plastic Logic Que proReader and MSI’s dualscreen gem, although Engadget calls it netbook.

The MSI has two 10-inch screens, in color, so you could use one as a virtual keyboard and look at something at the other screen. That’s pretty cool. No pricing has been released.

The Que has a 10.7 inch screen and is powered by Barnes and Noble, with data via Wifi and/or AT&T 3G, depending on the model. The e-reader looks good in the Engadget video. But the prices ($649 or $799) may make you wish for a backpack full of heavy books.

The Skiff Reader looks similar to a magazine with its 11.5-inch screen and being only a quarter-inch thick. The Hearst device shows a newspaper front page in Engadget’s hands-on here.

No price has been set, but Sprint will provide the connectivity.

Although these devices look pretty good and will be useful, I think the prices, and black and white screens on most of the e-readers will leave the door open for consumers to jump to tablet computers and even projector phones to be able to read books and news content. See my ideas here.

Star Tribune lays off  about 30 people

The paper covering Minneapolis and surrounding areas said it was going to layoff  about 30 people while telling staffers that the news coverage would remain the same. See a blog from MinnPost.com here for the complete story.

The blog reported the paper is offering a buyout plan, but said layoffs would likely also occur, mostly among copy editors and photographers.

In a statement, senior editors at the paper would require some changes including:

“Reporters cannot turn in stories without running a basic spell check. Editors should have reporters read over every story they have edited. Photographers must turn in accurate cutlines that adhere to AP style.”

Editors also said “more stories will get fewer reads.”

Producing the same news content with fewer people is always difficult and often problematic. Good luck to those affected.

The Associated Press expands more into social media

The Associated Press announced the hiring of Lauren McCullough as manager of social networks and news engagement. McCullough will help reporters follow up on stories using social media as well as set standards for reporters using the tools.

This is a good move by the AP. Since many stories come to light in or are shaped by social media, more reporters using the medium will lead to more accurate accounts of daily news.

LA Times announces shutdown of press, layoffs of 80 people.

The Los Angeles Times will shutter its Orange County printing operations and add “LATExtra,” which will add late-breaking news to the paper.

The publisher said about 80 people will lose their jobs when the press closes.

Sharon Waxman reported here the paper sold the late-night press run to the Wall Street Journal, so that the deadline for the Times’ front page will be 6 p.m., leaving the later news for the new section, which debuts next month. Other sections will also have earlier deadlines.

Waxman reports some newsroom staff are upset about the lack of late-night coverage on the front page, which could mean the WSJ and New York Times have more updated news on their covers.

If the 6 p.m. deadline is true for the Times, that is radically early for A1.

Even looking at just sports, almost no Dodgers or Lakers home game will be able to be on the front page. The Lakers, one of the NBA’s best teams, should go deep into the playoffs, most games of which are held in primetime.

What news caught your eye this past week?

********

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In Working with Social Media, I’ll  interview journalists to get their ideas on the changing face of news.

I talked with Jeff Hendrickson, the Interactive Media Manager at the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia to get his thoughts on his paper, papers as a whole and where the industry is headed. Hendrickson oversees the Presentation, Sports and Photo departments for the paper and  is responsible for increasing the McClatchy paper’s online audience and revenue.

The paper’s Web Site is here. The paper’s Twitter account (with almost 15,000 updates) is here.

Tell me more about your paper … what’s your circulation and competition?

We roll out about 50,000 on Sundays and 40,000 during the week. Print-wise, from a news perspective, we have very little local competition. We have a couple of weekly newspapers that are hanging on, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution no longer sells or delivers to our market.

But, as a news operation, we’ve dealt with a lot of the same issues as other folks around the country. We’ve seen the number of people in our newsroom, as well as our newshole, get smaller. When we arrived (in Feb. 2005), I was working in a newsroom like no other I’ve ever worked in. We had at least 12 people who had worked here more than 30 years. We were an older, established newsroom with people who knew how to cover the news and the community. Well, in the five years since I’ve been to at least 10 retirement parties and have seen the newsroom change, mostly for the better.

Newsrooms and newspapers, as you said, have undergone tremendous changes. Can you recap what went right and what went wrong for your paper in 2009? And what two or three things are your main focus in the next six months?

What went right in 2009? We survived. Is that an appropriate answer? We became, I believe, smarter about what people want. We, as a newsroom, continued to evolve our approach to news in that we’re telling stories people want and not just stories we think they need. That’s a huge thing that is, hopefully, happening across the industry. I would have reporters come up to me with a breaking news story and say “I’ve got a story that’s gonna get a lot of hits.” We’d talk about the story and then, before we’d post it to our site, I’d ask the reporter if he or she really believes people want this story. It’s a good exercise and one where you can learn a lot, on both sides of the coin. I learn more about our community and reporters learn more about how people get their news online.

But, as for a review of the year, we got quicker with stories online, we became better with video storytelling and we did better with teaching our entire newsroom some of our online tools and expecting them to use them. Our entire pay and incentive situation is based on interactive performance.

Reviewing what we did wrong is a bit more difficult. We made, at least in my belief and I better believe it since I was part of the process, the correct decisions regarding personnel departures. We have not created another developer position and I believe that will cause us problems this year.

Going forward, my thoughts are focused on mobile and using social news streams, which can certainly overlap. We need to develop ways to improve our news for mobile and improve our revenue plans with mobile. That said, social news streams on mobile are also an area I believe we need to focus our news and revenue eyes upon.

Tell me more about  news people want vs. what they SHOULD know. Does there need to be some kind of balance? Or, in the near future, will sites only give readers what they want, regardless of real-world importance (i.e. President’s death, etc.)?

What types of training did you do for online tools? Any off-site at conferences, etc? Can you give a bit more detail on your pay structure (Is it reporters, ad people, etc.)? How common is it?

I believe there is a giant overlap of what people want to know and what they should know. People want to know if their taxes are going up, they want to know if the mayor is taking bribes and they want to know about crime in their area. These aren’t the problems. We’re still going to cover and write about things people should want to know about. But we need to be more concise and do a much better job of letting people know WHY they should care. That’s the key, I believe. People, at least a huge percentage of people, still want direction in getting news and information and we, as an industry, have the ability to reach all of those people. We just need to do a better job of thinking about the best way to tell those stories. I don’t believe we’ll ever get away from telling stories that are important, but we also shouldn’t just let entertainment, political and sports blogs come in an eat our lunch from an audience perspective. Admittedly, it’s becoming more and more difficult to explain to people the importance of elections in Turkey or human rights violations in China.

We put our section editors, and most of our reporters, fairly deep in our publishing tools. We expect them to maintain their sections online as they do in print. We expect reporters to add links and online only content with all stories in the newspaper. We’ve worked with McClatchy Interactive to do some onsite training to help folks understand the technical stuff. We’ve been lucky in that we have a solid group of people in the room, some editors and some reporters, who truly “get” the concepts we’re preaching and understand we have the ability to reach the entire world, not just our circulation distribution area.

All of our newsroom employees have online goals. Those include creating a certain number of breaking stories, videos, online-only content, slideshows, etc. We’re also judging people based on the number of unique visitors their work brings to our site. It can be a tiring task because (for) each newsroom evaluation (that) comes across my desk, I meet with the executive editor and the employee’s editor to talk about their success. I don’t believe it’s a common practice but I believe we’ll see more and more of this approach in the coming years. There has to be a balance between quantity and quality, but we also believe we need to be rewarding the people who are bringing the most to our site.

Speaking of sites, what do you think are the best newspaper Web sites now? And why?

Listing some of the top newspaper sites is always difficult because each person looks at things so differently. I like the Houston Chronicle because it acts like a Web site and not a newspaper. In our company, McClatchy, I believe Fresno does nice work and it’s really hard to leave out the New York Times and the Washington Post (but that may change, they just let go of much of their online staff) because I believe both places do tremendous work with long-form non-narrative story telling and they do it well. On a smaller side, I have been a big fan of the fun and video work that was done at the Roanoke Times. The approach they took to their TimesCasts (Most recent one here) was great. It was probably a bit too much fun for most newspaper Web sites, and certainly too much fun for a lot of publishers, but I really admire what they did and still try to do.

Talk about your paper’s E-edition. Did you have a part in starting that? What does your daily paper paper cost and why is a daily E-edition $1.50? How successful has it been?

I wasn’t part of the initial team but I’m part of it now.

Our daily print rack price is 75 cents. The e-edition is $1.50 because we figure most people are buying a single copy while they’re traveling or something like that. Subscriptions to the e-edition are much more affordable and we offer deals where people can get a Sunday print subscription and a daily e-edition.

Since I wasn’t involved in the start-up, I’m not sure what success is supposed to look like, meaning I don’t know what the goals were. The interesting thing about e-editions is that those count toward circulation numbers and that is the biggest benefit. The thing we all need to keep in mind when we’re talking about pricing for online is that we’ve always been an industry that has its revenue success based in advertising and that, I believe, is where we are going to succeed going forward.

As technology has brought e-readers and now projector phones and tablets, do you think they help newspapers survive as an entity? And what about actual paper? When do you think most newspapers will be paper-less?

I’m not one to say e-readers are the solution or that they’re useless. I believe it gives people more choices, which is what innovative technologies have done over the past several years, and people can choose what works best for them. Some people may be more comfortable with the e-reader because it feels more like a book or the actual newspaper while others will lean toward a tablet or something. I’m excited about tablets and I’m excited to see how they evolve this year. My wife got some books for Christmas but I know she would rather read books on the Kindle app on her iPhone. (She’s read 12 books on her iPhone in three months.) All of these devices will give people more options to get news and information.

The iPhone, which is essentially a mini-tablet, has changed the way people view smart phones and changed the way I viewed mobile. Whatever the device or format, I do believe mobile is the future. Will it save newspapers? We’re going to have to get an ad revenue model in place before we begin to discuss that solution. Audience isn’t really our problem right now, it’s revenue and trying to figure out how to monetize (to use a word I dislike) our current, growing audience.

I do believe the daily newspaper will be a thing of the past in the next five years. The Sunday paper will probably stick around for a longer time. Right now the business model to have 60 pages, or whatever, of newsprint delivered to your door each day doesn’t seem to be sustainable. It takes a lot of people to get that information to the public and not many of those people have anything to do with the information that is on the pages. I hope the printed newspaper sticks around for a long time but I know we need to be working toward the day that it doesn’t.

Let’s talk more about your job as it relates to online — or the day newspapers no longer include paper. You said your job now includes “finding ways to increase our audience and revenue.” Coming from a newsroom perspective, is there any potential for conflict of interests?

Certainly. But I’m a journalist first and I probably always will be. When situations arise, as they have at every job I’ve had in my career, you always have to make decisions based on your ethics and your ability to live with yourself. If I’m true to myself on the decisions I make in potential conflict of interest situations, I believe I’ll be OK. The day where I’ve been too uncomfortable has not come yet.

Expand on a buzzword about newspaper Web sites … paywalls. Your paper charges for
E-editions but the site itself is free. Do you see a paywall for your site in the future where some or all of your content is via subscription only? Do you think paywalls are the future, or do you see other revenue streams maturing so paywalls become unnecessary?

This can be a sticky one… Newspapers have traditionally not charged for news content but news content is a commodity that we only “own” until we share it, kind of like music. Once we share the news anyone can, and often does, take that content and pass it along. Is what we do so unique in nature that the reader/user/viewer couldn’t wait or find an approximation elsewhere? No media outlet, TV, bloggers, etc., give the context and insight that newspapers give. But these other sources do have, often times, the same basic information. More so, imagine this scenario: a paper charges and a paying user takes the content and sets it free online in their blog or a TV station/site takes the content and sets it free for the world to see.

I guess this is a long route to the answer that I don’t believe paywalls will or should be in our future. There is content online that people will pay to see, but do we produce that type of content? That’s the question the publishers, editors and newsroom folks need to ask themselves. I believe that people pay for the convenience of the printed paper … The paper, the ink, the delivery to their house, etc. … Paying for individual stories, or content as a whole, is another story. Big stories in the paper, at least in my experience, don’t always equate to big stories online. That said, I won’t be surprised at anything that happens… Paywalls, subscriptions, micropayments. I just don’t believe it’s a good idea.

Thanks for your time, Jeff, it’s been fun. As a former sports editor and a Dallas Cowboys fan, what will be the final score of the Super Bowl?

OK, it’s Jan. 6. In August I predicted a Cowboys-Chargers Super Bowl, which amazingly doesn’t look nearly as stupid now as it did then. If those teams make it, then I’ll say Chargers 28, Cowboys 24.

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In Week-old News, I review some of the biggest recent media stories, especially if they pertain to newspapers.

The Washington Times cuts deep in bid for  … more focus?

The Washington Times made headlines again this week when it cut 40 percent of its staff, including all staff photographers and the entire sports department. The graphics and Web departments were also heavily impacted. The last sports section was Friday, after the paper already had published its last Sunday edition on Dec. 27.

Management said the paper, founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon,  will focus on business and politics. The plan was put this way:

“Our market-based, forward-looking plan is both a response to the recessionary economy, continued downward financial pressures on the news industry and our transition into a 21st-century multimedia enterprise,” President and Publisher Jonathan Slevin said in a statement.

Most newspapers are having issues with the economy, but they are not cutting out entire sections.

Strangely, the publisher said the paper would still do some sports features.

Why? You don’t have a sports section. No one is going to come to your paper, or Web site, for sports. If you’re going to close down an entire section, it makes no sense to continue to carry that news, especially if it’s not written by a trained sportswriter.

And with no staff photographers for  the paper’s local coverage, which is being drastically reduced, the chances of having enough quality photos for any local breaking news they do cover are slim. Unless the Times has a deal with competitors, those papers can restrict usage of any photograph they choose  by the Times.

At a time when local news is more important, photos and videos are vital to a Web Site, The Washington Times is making an unconventional, to say the least, move toward a more-focused paper.

More content is needed, not less.

Can a newspaper get some of that content from stringers or readers? Sure, but the best work will continue to be done by seasoned professionals, ones who can get to the heart of a story because it’s their job. Putting up lesser-quality content will lead to a gradual decline of the Web site, and, in a major market such as D.C., other sites will step up to take the place of the Washington Times.

Learn more about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the marriage practices of  his Unification Church followers from a Washington Post article here.

Fly on the news.

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