Bad day to kill print in Detroit/Is there an e-reader future?

The irony gods were working double time yesterday. The biggest news day in Detroit for years (GM chairman axed, Chrysler and Fiat and big hoop news) was the day that its two newspapers ended their home delivery service and the web couldn't cope.

You can't make stuff like that up. The Gannett owned Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, owned by MediaNews Group, had until last week been landing on the doormats of Motor City residents like they have for years, but Detroit's two papers are in bad shape and costs had to be cut, bringing an end to home delivery.

Since 1990 Detroit News has seen its circulation tumble 64.4% and the Detroit Free Press 53.12%. Between them they have lost 660,000 plus copies and the future is grim; for the papers and the city so closely linked to the US car industry.

Then comes the brave new dawn of no more home delivery Monday and a hammer blow is struck at the city and at the American newspaper industry.

Such a juicy news day: The White House pushing out GM CEO Rick Wagoner; pushing for Chrysler to merge with Fiat; and Michigan State University basketball team making the Final Four.

It was a real D-Day of news, a real Day of Days, but nothing on the doorsteps. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News were sending readers online, but it is not the same for some.

One reader, Nancy Nester, 51, a program coordinator at a traumatic brain injury centre who subscribed to both papers for four years, told the New York Times: "This morning, I felt like something was missing. There was this feeling of emptiness."

Let's call it the print gap.

The thing is she didn’t go to the store and buy a copy as "I don't have time to stop at the store. That’s why I have home delivery".

Instead of home delivery on Monday, The News and The Free Press distributed half a million free copies of a condensed print edition before it is back to the 50 cent cover price today.

The two want people not only to go to the web, but to the e-editions of the papers. At the moment these are free, but soon e-editions will be for paying customers only.

I have never had much time for e-editions. I know there are some good ones out there, but the whole process of trying to reproduce a facsimile of a paper product online seems like a waste of time to me. I don' t like reading them (on a monitor at least). Give me the web or the real thing.

That said, maybe Amazon's Kindle will change that. Maybe there are those out there who will pay a subscription fee to read their daily newspaper on an e-reader. Even me, I could see THAT happening and I could see people parting with some cash and some cash is better than no cash.

Some people already like them that way, but with as many as 50,000 people trying to click on the e-editions in Detroit yesterday, five times as many as usual, the NY Times goes onto report that the computers "delivering the e-editions could not keep up on Monday morning, and many people were unable to load them".

"We had an overwhelming — literally overwhelming — number of people trying to get onto the e-edition site this morning, and it’s gratifying on one hand, but it slowed things down," said Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of The News, which is owned by MediaNews Group.

For one generation the jump to an e-edition is clearly too much, but for another there is always Jean-Luc Picard.

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When blogs grow up: HuffPo invests, but niggling questions remain

Big news at the Huffington Post with a $1.75m investment in investigative reporting signalling the continued expansion of blogs beyond linking and comment, but some are also wondering if this is at all connected to the thorny issue of content scraping and possible legal action?

Content scraping is where blogs take an excerpt, usually not toooo much, and link to the original post, but some blogs have recently been accused of whole sale content theft. That's taking not just the odd paragraph, but the the whole article. The Huffington Post is one of those blogs in the firing line.

MinnPost.com for one thinks the $1.75m fund for investigative reporting is window dressing for a site that could be sued for "oversharing others' work".

Oversharing is such a polite way of putting it. You have to wonder how much investigative reporting these ten people will do when some are freelancers and their job description will include short breaking news stories as well as longer pieces?

The alternative weekly the Chicago Reader was one of several papers to recently complain about the Huffington Post's practice of "oversharing".

"The Huffington Post's local 'aggregation wing straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission ('read the whole article'? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here's a screen shot since we're obviously about to ask them to take it down."

Film critic Roger Ebert was also a little hacked off with the Huffington Post and vocalised his discontent beneath the offending article:

"I would like to point out that this article rips off my actual article about the incident at rogerebert.com, and by adding all those 'he saids,' destroys the rhythm and form of my prose. Nor does the article even have the decency to link to mine, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to see that HuffPost stole it from me. Nor does it even say where I 'said' these things, but implies I said them to HuffPost. Arriana, I love ya, but this practice is immoral, and HuffPost practices it shamelessly."

Arriana Huffington said in the press release about the investigative fund that it would provide "work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets", which is all well and good, but Gawker wonders how much experience these people will have in a post headlined 'Arianna Huffington Seeks Young Flunkies' where it reprinted a job ad for a managing editor, which is looking for two years experience in online news and a degree.

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Celebrities on Twitter, mostly fake

I blogged a couple of months ago asking why would you follow a celebrity on Twitter? No surprise, but the New York Times has a piece today revealing that many celebs don't twitter themselves, their PA's do it. So really why, unless you want to see Demi Moore's (authentically) Twittered arse, would you bother?

The New York Times has some great quotes in its piece today. 'Get rich or die tryin' rapper 50 Cent is one of those who Twitter, but, you know, don't "actually" Twitter.

@50cent has around 204,000 follows, but portentous tweets such as "My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends."

Errr word 50cent, get out of the tunnel dude – those are dark scary places which might account for the bullet holes in your body.

Those words come from Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper's digital empire. He apparently typed those words after reading them in an interview.

"He doesn’t actually use Twitter," Romero told the NY Times, "but the energy of it is all him."

The energy? Is that like the force? Is it like reading tea leaves? I'm guessing it is not an accurate science. Let’s face it, it never worked out that well for Qui-Gon Jinn.

Britney Spears who is much loved on Brand Republic (mostly I think by the IAB…who I think are under contract to blog about her once a week) recently advertised for someone to help her out on the whole 140 character content creation malarkey.

'Golddigger' Kanye West apparently has two bloggers working on his, errrm, blog. He told New York magazine that it's "just like how a designer would work". Okay Mr 'Stronger' whatever you say.

The New York Times piece makes a good point. I get why you need to have a ghost writer for your autobiography as that takes talent. Twittering or even blogging does not. And really, I have to ask two bloggers on your team? Okay so you are a publishing business, but don't dress it up as anything else.

It's the fakery that bothers me somehow. The purporting to be something that it is not. Twittering has to be the most extreme example of that – hiring someone to write constant updates about your life…which are not really your life, they are just *** that a PA makes up based on knowledge of their employer.

I can imagine 50cent has in the past come out with lines about being in a "tunnel that never ends", but seriously you might as well hook his account up to a random rap quote generator.

For the celebs who do Tweet, like Stephen Fry, then at least they are, you know, keepin' it real. Shaquille O’Neal (The Real Shaq) is a really keen Twitterer and recently promised fans he word Twitter live during a game. And he did in the third quarter.

Even I was impressed with that. He might not have said much but if you are an NBA fan then I get it. It would be like A-Rod or Derek Jeter Twittering from the dugout.

Like stars of entertainment you also have the stars of technology, I mean what do people make of Guy Kawasaki. The digital guru with his 80,000 followers has members of staff who also Twitter for him.

He's Guy Kawasaki the corporate entity? And as he says himself for "99.9% of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues" and the other bit "is a marketing tool".

I would say the personal marketing tool is much higher than 0.1% in some cases.

One of his Twitters is Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago, who says she has been considering getting more Twitter clients. I guess that means more Guy Kawasaki's. If that happens, this whole thing is seriously over.

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Amazon talking to Twitter? Really it should be buying Digg

There is speculation on Valley Wag about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos being in talks with Twitter. He's already an investor, but is Amazon looking to a future that might include buying into the real time web?

The Gawker Media blog says it has heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter about buying it. Bezos is already a personal investor in Twitter. His Bezos Expeditions and Spark Capital invested $15m last summer.

If it bought Twitter (which today is reported to be bringing forward plans to charge) you could see it integrating it possibly with Kindle as well as Amazon.com.

Valley Wag reports the Amazon/Twitter rumour in a post that is not chiefly about Twitter, but about Amazon buying social media news rating site Digg.com.

Not heard that one? No surprise, there have been no reports about this it's just that Valley Wag sees it as a perfect fit and is floating the idea. Its logic is pretty simple and goes like this: Digg needs to sell itself, it has a lot of traffic with very little revenues, but just how valuable is a site that rates?

Good question, I've always like Digg, but it is difficult to see its value. Buyers who have run the slide rule over the business, including Current and News Corporation, have decided that it is not for them. A  deal with Google fell apart for different reasons relating to questions of engineering.

Valley Wag makes a cogent point: News Corp and Current looked at Digg as a media play, but community-generated sites like Digg aren't that advertiser friendly. It isn't really a media play although with News Corp's ownership of gaming sites like IGN.com, you can see what sparked the initial interest.

Digg is still hugely popular, but earlier this year visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time. Maybe no surprise Twitter is growing like wildfire. I thought recently that it had widespread, but not "mass" appeal, but as it permeates ever deeper into celebrity/popular culture that is probably not correct. Seeing Twitter in a headline is not a surprise. It is becoming common place.

I digress, Amazon's user reviews are a gold mine. Valley Wag quotes one unnamed study that suggests Amazon.com makes $2.7bn (yes billion) annually in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews.

I always check user reviews on Amazon and find them largely helpful. Was this review helpful it asks? Sure it was [click to vote].

If you look at it like that then it makes a really good fit. The system is very similar to what Digg does.

Valley Wag suggests that this could be a bonus when it comes to Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader as Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the web for the Kindle.

See where that's going? Would you make a micro payment for a really good piece of user voted content to read on the Kindle? If it had loads of Diggs? That would certainly cheer up magazine and newspaper publishers as they wrestle with how to find ways of charging for content.

Of course, Jeff Bezos could go crazy and do a three way Amazon/Twitter/Digg. Amazon can afford it.

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US newspaper crises accelerates as Senator bids to keep business afloat

A Democratic senator has launched a bill to help ailing US newspaper companies stay afloat as the crises in US newspapers gathers pace with hundreds more jobs lost and daily papers in more and more US towns become a thing of the past.

Senator Benjamin Cardin wants to allow US newspapers to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks. It follows similar suggestions by philanthropist Eli Broad who was talking about turning the Los Angeles Times into a non profit trust; and staff at the San Francisco Chronicle who were attempting a foundation bid in an effort to save the paper.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," Cardin said.

According to Reuters the bill has no sponsors, but plenty of interest within the media. In a week that saw another 500 plus job losses it is going to need more than that as it is abundantly clear that the declining fortunes of US newspapers is speeding up.

Hearst Corp, which last week closed the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is cutting 12% of jobs at the Houston Chronicle, which will affect around 200 staff. It follows the announcement that it might close the San Francisco Chronicle if it can't make significant cost savings. The Chronicle, which has a weekday circulation of 448,271, cut 5% of staff last year. Hearst also made 15% job cuts at the San Antonio Express-News.

The job losses in Houston follow the 272 at the Ann Arbor News in Michigan as the Newhouse-owned paper (part of its Advance Publications) is turned into the AnnArbor.com website, which will have "some original reporting", but with an emphasis on community forums.

The community emphasis is one of the three main US newspaper trends (cuts and closures and online-only publishing being the others) in what points increasingly towards a future US newspaper business that is much less about hard news (or any news for that matter) and more community, blogs and user generated content.

Elsewhere in Michigan Advance, The Flint Journal, The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times (141,000 on weekdays and 176,000 on Sundays) will cease being dailies and reduce publication to Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays only. The logic is pretty simple: those days account for 80% of ad revenue. The move will see sweeping job cuts with 35% of staff going, according to the New York Times.

Talking of the New York Times Company it has sold off one of its regional newspapers. The TimesDaily, in Florence, Alabama, has been offloaded to Tennessee Valley Printing Company, which owns the nearby Decatur Daily.

The New York Times owns 15 small to midsize dailies, mostly in the Southeast, and revenues for that group fell 14% to $384m. That is more than double the 6.2% fall the company's the flagship papers the NY Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Blog posts of the newspaper crises:

Last.fm introduces premium subscription model

The paid for content movement got another boost as Last.fm begins introducing a premium subscription model as it attempts to generate more revenues.

The CBS-owned music community first talked about the new service more than a year ago when it said users would get to stream more than three full tracks in a row under a subscription service.

According to Paidcontent, Co-founder Richard Jones has now confirmed Last.fm will from March 30 charge around £3 a month for the existing "Last.fm Radio. This is a catch-all term that refers to personalised, back-to-back full-track streams. The fees will initially apply everywhere except the UK, US and Germany or everywhere that it does not have a significant user base.

Last.fm like everyone else has been hit as online advertising as slowed and CBS wants to see some return on the £141m it paid for Last.fm in May 2007.

Paidcontent also says that when Warner Music Group did not to renew its deal with Last.fm in June this was partly because of disappointment at failure to introduce a subscription service. Although it does still have deals with Universal, EMI and and BMG.

The paid for content ball is certainly rolling. Spotify, which recently reached one million registered users since it launched last October, already charges 99p or £10 a month for a great library of music and shows that people are willing to pay for premium services.

With newspapers looking really seriously there is likely to be a significant announcement on this market in the coming months. A trickle and maybe then a flood.

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Free lunch is over says The Economist as Indy talks charging

In an editorial today The Economist joins the growing chatter that says the days of (entirely) free content are over. It does so as The Independent and The Times are revealed to be looking seriously at paid-for content.

In a piece titled 'The end of the free lunch', The Economist gives us this:

"In recent years, consumers have become used to feasting on online freebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, email and even speedy internet access. These days, however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but with layoffs and with announcements that they are to start charging for their services."

It seems, almost, to be describing the current situation, but then comes the punch line: that was printed in The Economist back in April 2001, but it is entirely applicable to where we are today.

Giving away content in the hope that advertising revenue will materialise later on has been hugely appealing to all, not least to users who have enjoyed free services. But as The Economist point out, with not enough advertising revenue to go around, the lessons of two internet bubbles have taught us that "somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch".

The paper concludes that the demise of a popular but unsustainable business model (of free content) now seems inevitable.

Time Inc has mooted charging as has The New York Times and the Guardian seems as keen as anyone. It is also being reported that newspapers including The Times and Independent are considering introducing paid-for content on their sites.

It will only take one or two, a little trickle, before it turns into a steady flow. In just a few short weeks the language has already started to rapidly change. As journalists lose their jobs and newspapers are threatened there has been a step change.

Gavin O'Reilly, the new chief executive of Independent News & Media told the Daily Telegraph that "it is obviously necessary".

No longer simply desirable or nice – but necessary. He added: "We have got to respect the value of our writers. There is a fine balance. I want to look at online in that regard."

The paper also reported that News International was looking to find its own paid-for model.

What will that be? People talk micro payments and subscription.

What I am completely convinced of is that no one in the wider world, outside of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, will be successfully able to charge for news.

News was and is even more so today a commodity. Valuable as it is, it is also too cheap and too easy to replicate to be charged for – except maybe in a historical archive – but increasingly I think that ship has also sailed.

It is the other content - the words, the insight, video and audio that cannot be replicated that demands some kind of premium price tag.

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Jade Goody and the reality TV PR bandwagon of death

Last year I said something pretty mean about Jade Goody and I'm sorry. I wrote she had PR cancer and then it turned out to be real. My bad, but even as she lies wasting away it appears the PR bit was right. I just read Shilpa Shetty is making a final dash to her bed side.

This is all kind of very sad and I know a lot of people have been moved by Jade Goody's plight.

Each day a new story appears about Goody's last days, but as we speed towards the end of this born and bred reality TV celebrity story it feels as if it is spinning out of control.

The lines between what is decent, dignified and acceptable and what is a PR money grabbing exercise are as blurred as 2am in an Essex nightclub.

I was listening to the Today programme this morning on R4. They had the story that Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who you will remember was branded 'Shilpa Poppadom' by Jade Goody in 'Celebrity Big Brother', has flown to Britain to "bid farewell to the cancer-stricken reality television star".

Are there not real people that Jade Goody can see? People who give a frak rather than a minor Bollywood star?

We're told that the two have become "good friends" since the whole racist incident and Jade Goody went to India last year and appeared on the Indian version of 'Big Brother' where she was fatefully told she was ill.

Shetty said: "All I can do is pray. I’m not giving up hope of seeing her one last time. I always want to remember Jade smiling, the feisty strong gregarious Jade, a true trouper."

The arrival of Shetty on the scene came as OK! yesterday published its "tribute issue" to Jade Goody. I thought you had to be dead to get one of those so people could remember you in a dignified fashion.

Apparently not as OK! has a deal with Jade Goody's people (Max Clifford) to get first dibs ahead of rivals. Apparently they did really well out of the wedding issue with bumper sales. Imagine what they will get if they beat everyone to the death/tribute issue.

There will be acres of more coverage. It will be well read I am sure. Jade Goody is doing much of this to ensure that her two children are provided for. Surely they are now. It feels like the cameras should be turned off, but there appears no chance of that.

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This is not a newspaper website

A sad day for newspapers as Hearst closes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and takes it online, but what it plans online, with efforts to create a community title, could be the model for the future.

I blogged last week about the woes of the top 25 US newspapers and how the future is shaping up to become local or hyperlocal with the New York Times joining established community sites.

Now as Hearst today prints the last copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that vision takes on a new impetus.

In its press release, Hearst is quite explicit in its goal of not attempting to transfer a newspaper online, but rather crafting the remnants of it into a new type of digital business serving smaller groups and people and advertisers (a new digital sales team of 20 has been taken on for this task). Possibly even a role for niche paid for content.

The way the New York Times put it was that the Seattlepi.com will more resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper - as the political blog is another that expands locally.

Part of this crafting is about economics pure and simple. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had 165 editorial staff and the Seattlepi.com will have 20. This will be a mixture of traditional reporters, bloggers and columnists, but those staff writers will be far outnumbered by as many as 150 reader blogs, community data bases and photo galleries.

Those reader blogs will be further supplemented by the blogs and forums that already exist in the community and Hearst made the point that it will be "linking to the great work of other websites and blogs in the community".

The same is true of the New York Times experiment, its community blogs launch into neighbourhoods already well covered by existing blogs.

The community based future of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is likely to be repeated across America and elsewhere in the coming 18 months as more newspapers go under.

Jeff Jarvis writing in the Guardian yesterday called hyperlocal "the elusive golden fleece" and said it represented a new collaborative, as opposed to competitive, era for local newspapers.

In the case of Seattlepi.com and the experiments of The New York Times, the hope is that by providing the platform readers and community groups will provide much of the content and the impetus to take such hyperlocal projects forward.

This is the end of an era, but what beckons could be a vibrant age of digital community websites, which are different from the newspapers that came before them in how they are produced and how they are consumed.

There are other really interesting experiments taking place that provide pointers to how this community future might look. Nonprofit journalism enterprise MinnPost.com, which describes itself as part of the "new economic model for high-quality local journalism", has launched a drive for microsponsors for one of its most popular sites the BrauBlog. Almost 130 people have donated a total of $2,575, which will be doubled by a matching gift from The Harnisch Foundation.

With so many regional newspapers and jobs going in the UK it s a model that has merit on this side of the Atlantic as well. Almost 60 UK newspapers closed during 2008 and almost 400 jobs have been cut in the last two weeks with 1000 in total gone since last summer.

This led Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, to today call on the government to relax merger restrictions on regional media groups and allow them to consolidate to obtain sufficient scale, but it might take something more radical than that.

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Gunning for the glossies, Shortlist talking about women's title?

What a week for Shortlist Media, the publisher behind the eponymously titled free men's magazine. It reported hefty pre-tax losses of £2.7m, but has also been reported it is to launch a long talked about free women's magazine. That's very encouraging to hear, but probably less so if you're the editor of a glossy women's title.

According to a story in Campaign this morning, which is scant on detail, the title will be an upscale weekly women's magazine to rival glossy titles such as Grazia. It will be aimed at affluent ABC1 women in the 25- to 40-year-old age bracket and will focus on celebrity and fashion. No news there, that's exactly what you would expect.

The Campaign story said the title will launch later this, but Shortlist Media chief executive, Mike Soutar, has since told Press Gazette that although a number of ideas were being considered nothing was decided, which suggests various ideas are being shopped to media buyers to see what they would really go for.

"It's a rumour that's been kicking round," Soutar told Press Gazette, "I was first phoned about it a couple of weeks ago, but our position is we have no imminent plan to launch. We're only 18 months old, trading well in very difficult economic conditions. It's very flattering the industry thinks, after 18 months, we're in a substantial enough position to think about launching something new."

Clearly the formula works. Week in and week out, Shortlist appears and does so with some really good stories and great covers. I haven't read today's, but stuffed the cover with a pic of Pete Doherty lighting a cigarette from a burning acoustic guitar into my bag. Pretty striking.

They've shown they can do it, but to go and launch in blood curdling recession takes some balls as magazine and newspapers fall left right and centre, including those in the female market like Eve, with others cutting staff.

When Shortlist media announced its results Soutar (if you have never seen him explain the magazine you must check this video) said the venture had a three-year plan to make profit and was on track to meet this target.

If you can lose £2.7m and be on target and expand in a recession things are not as bad as the top numbers might suggest, but it will come down to what advertisers will put money into. Soutar said told Media Week he had been expecting greater losses. "But we beat our original forecasts. We are well set to hit our targets in the next 12 months."

Interestingly, Soutar said that Shortlist "had been a contributor" to Arena going out of business.

I think he's probably right, what then does the launch of Shortlist for women have in store for women's magazines? Those overstaffed glossies are already suffering and with the entrant of a free player, women might start cutting back on what they buy. If they do that then other weaker magazines in the women's market will go under (as Eve has done).

Okay so if not a women's magazine what other titles could Shortlist launch? What other areas are ripe for expansion in the free magazine market considering that the sport category is already taken? Film or maybe food? Food could really be a dark horse. That's our guess.

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Would you buy a failing newspaper?

Serious question as there is more talk about saving US newspapers and turning some of them into non-profit foundations. Staff at the San Francisco Chronicle are talking of a foundation bid for the paper (sort of like the Guardian) in an effort to save it with names like Craig Newmark floated as buyers/investors.

News of the San Francisco Chronicle follows similar talk earlier this week from philanthropist Eli Broad about the Los Angeles Times, whose owner Tribune is in trouble.

Broad said that the US can't afford to lose good newspaper journalism, but added a caveat which was that he wasn't sure that the Los Angeles Times could "be a national paper, or have the same aspirations it once had".

Basically Broad is talking about reduced circumstances. About once great newspapers no longer being so great; local rather than national, which will certainly be the case with the Chronicle or any other paper that someone tried to save.

Broad also said (and it is a stumbling block for all) that "no one has figured out a good business model as of yet. Newspapers ought to be owned by foundations, not look for great financial returns. If several foundations are involved there is likely to be journalistic freedom".

Let's face it, the same thing could happen in the UK to the Independent. You could imagine people trying (and sadly failing) to save it in the not too distant future.

The Indy of all papers is in serious trouble. Sales of the Independent News & Media title were down 18.41% year on year to around 205,964 copies,

San Francisco Chronicle journalists are trying to talk investors into buying the foundering daily newspaper and restructuring it as a non-profit, according to the SF Appeal.

Apparently journalists would invest some of their own cash, a California Media Workers Guild representative at the San Francisco Chronicle told the Appeal, but even after a heavy write down from Hearst's 2000 price of $660m they would need some serious money.

Gawker took at guess at who might buy the paper:

Old San Francisco money: if anyone is going to put cash into a hemorrhaging newspaper it is local billionaires.

New dotcom money: Seems a long shot, but maybe in a crazy moment of retroness those rich Google types might go for it. Maybe not.

Craig Newmark: is another the gossip site raises. The San Francisco-based Craigslist founder is a bit more altruistic than many of his Web 2.0 generation. Besides, with Craigslist he helped kill the newspaper market, so let's face it he owes them. But even with his many millions he would need help from fellow multi millionaires. Craigslist makes around $100m a year, but the Chronicle is losing $50m.

Maybe predictably Gawker concluded that the outcome is more likely to be "it makes little sense to invest in fixing the old problems of a dying industry when you can net much more glory or profit starting from scratch".

But who would enter a dying industry from scratch when the problem appears to have been is in the basic maths?

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How much more would you pay for your newspaper?

How much more would you pay for your newspaper? Would you pay £1.50? What if that were linked to online content as well? Maybe, after all, you get a lot of content for very little money.

I was thinking this as I started writing a blog post this morning (Would you buy a failing newspaper?) about efforts in the US by journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle to save their $50m a year loss making newspaper and turn it into a foundation. It is a long shot as no one has a good business model. I had pretty much finished that (so that's my 1,200 word blogging marathon over), but when I then read some comments that Lord Bell, chairman of the UK's Chime Communications, made about newspapers in the UK this morning.

"One of the great problems of the newspaper world is they've never charged the right price for their product, they've always relied on subsidising the consumer price with advertising revenue."

It all comes back to price. The Independent and the Financial Times both already cost £1 and The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph all cost 90p and will likely rise to £1 before the Summer.

But rather than rising by 10p to an even £1, why not go higher to reflect the true value of what it is you are buying.

And what you are buying is this, products with around 100 pages including the ads and content in the case of The Guardian and The Times. You could argue that as a reader of either or any of those titles you also have an additional and extensive web resource.

It is perhaps the failure to link the cost of the two in any way that has led us in part to the situation where we now find ourselves in, which is namely an industry desperately searching for answers to stay in business without having to seriously reduce the quality of the product to do so.

Would a significant price rise in the cost of a newspaper help that situation? Granted it would raise more cover price revenue, but it might drive away readers if the price point becomes too high.

One could imagine that if The Guardian suddenly put up its price to say £1.50, it might drive people to flock to its website, which is currently free.

Like many newspapers and magazines, The Guardian rather wishes that its very good, but highly costly website wasn't free right now.

Earlier this week, Guardian News & Media's managing director, Tim Brooks, at the FT's Digital Media Conference said his "wish this year" would be that "the New York Times would put up a pay wall, then we could achieve all our objectives".

He was followed by Ann S Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc, thinking aloud who said the US magazine giant is considering making its most successful titles Time.com and People.com subscription based.

Maybe not this year, but probably next there will be some kind of charging for newspaper content online. Maybe it will be micro payments, maybe subscription or some other combination of a pay wall.

I like the idea and have no idea if it has legs of linking the paper product to the online product. If your newspaper was £1.50 and also gave you everything free online that has to be worth something. I'm not sure everyone would as our latest BR Video, which asked people if they would pay for online content, indicates.

I have no idea how you would do this. Maybe via printed codes, maybe I don't really know, but if a reader buys a copy of the Guardian, do they then also get access to some or all of that the online content? Someone suggested you get access for the week so maybe differential pricing. Monday is web day, yes the paper costs more, but it gives you access to the website for a week.

Maybe it is too costly or unfeasible, but as Lord Bell pointed out today the maths are wrong and subsiding newspapers via advertising is a strategy that only works in a booming market. Once that market starts to shrink call Houston as you have a serious problem.

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Time Inc considers making its top sites subscription based

The debate over paid content is steadily growing. Today Ann S Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc, says that the US magazine giant is considering making its most successful titles Time.com and People.com subscription based.

In an interview in the Daily Telegraph today Moore told the paper that current round of cost savings and restructuring plans did not deal with the fundamental issue facing traditional media groups worldwide – how to make money from the internet.

The latest entrant into the paid content debate follows, New York suburban tabloid Newsday saying it will charge for content and the Guardian's Tim Brooks at the FT's Digital Media Conference saying that if he could get his "wish this year it would be that New York Times would put up a pay wall, then we could achieve all our objectives".

Moore said she thinks it is time for Time Inc to sit down and seriously ask the question what is the model for the future of content. She said that group would "have to figure out a way to have paid content in the future" and that it is considering making its most successful websites, such as Time.com and People.com, subscription-based.

"Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me. I say, 'Kids, your food is not free and your cars are not free, your clothes are not free. Good information costs money. Someone has to pay for the Baghdad bureau'," Moore told the paper.

Like most people in the media business Moore says she does not know whether online subscriptions will work, but knows alternative revenue streams have to be tried.

Her comments follows the piece in Time by Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of the magazine, who proposed a plan one-click micro-payments system. Her comments appear to demonstrate the business very publicly thinking aloud to extend the paid content debate.

"I don't know what the business model is, but we are going to start pursuing it. People pay for the Wall Street Journal online," Moore said.

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Paid for content high on Guardian wish list

It is is probably on everyone else's in the newspaper industry as well, but Tim Brooks has raised the flag today at the FT's Digital Media Conference in London.

It looks like the place to be today and Tim Bradshaw (who is doing some good Twittering from the conference - @tim) is reporting Brooks saying that if he could get his "wish this year it would be that New York Times would put up a pay wall, then we could achieve all our objectives". It is as we already know on the mind of the New York Times, so who knows.

Brooks is right in that someone has to jump and it has to be someone big with momentum that can take others with it - rather than, you know, someone not so big, like Newsday because as bold as that move is the concern there is that no one will follow unless it has timed its move perfectly (and Newsday might just be riding the tip of the curve).

Bradshaw also tweeted saying there was enthusiasm from the FT and Guardian for micropayments, but both feel unlikely to happen this year. See above and the New York Times.

The FT's John Ridding made the comment that the media industry has done a lousy job in pricing its content making newspapers cheaper than coffee, but in that there is also a solution. If newspapers are already cheaper than coffee then make make online news really cheap (as opposed to really free) and then someone, somewhere, someday might make some cash.

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How US newspapers are failing and the local future

The stark facts are that of the top 25 US newspapers 21 have seen their circulations fall since 1990 and only four have seen it rise. Most of those falls have been in double digits and 10 have seen it fall by around 40% or more.

Take a look at the list for yourself. The four titles in bold are the only ones to see their circulations rise - in the case of Arizona, the rise there comes from its status as the fastest growing (retirement) state in the Union. This is a list of an endangered species and while you might be able to save the whale it is unlikely that anyone on this planet will save most of these print dinosaurs.

1. Wall street journal :+8.34
2. USA Today +60.64%
3. Los Angeles Times -38.22%
4. New York Times -9.72 %
5. New York Daily News -42.37 %
6. Washington Post -20.22%
7. Chicago Tribune -28.43%
8. Newsday, Long Island 47%.
9. Detroit Free Press -53.12
10. San Francisco Chronicle -39.7
11. Chicago Sun-Times -40.6
12. Boston Globe -37.86
13. New York Post -22.58
14. Detroit News -64.4
15. Newark Star-Ledger -33.59
16. Houston Chronicle +1.41
17. Cleveland Plain Dealer -28.62
18. Miami Herald -49.14
19. Minneapolis Star-Tribune -20.88
20. Dallas Morning news : -14.75
21. St. Louis Post-Dispatch : -37.03
22. Boston Herald -53.33
23. Orange County Register : -33.19
24. Rocky Mountain News : -40.26
25. Arizona Republic +9.26

Of the list we already know the Rocky Mountain News has closed, with the San Francisco Chronicle in the firing line. The Seattle Post Intelligencer doesn't quite make the top 25, but that is likely to close in days.

Some of the falls are so dramatic pushing 50% plus. In the cases of Motor's city's two papers , Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, which have lost 660,000 plus copies the future is looking very grim as the US car industry crumbles.

The Miami Herald (down almost 50%) is another. Its current sale around 210,00 is identical to that of the Rocky Mountain News closed by EW Scripps.

The report in Ad Age comes with another in the US mag that asks the question what will replace the crumbling US newspaper market? The industry is casting around looking at ideas (including charging subscriptions/micro payments) and one answer could be (as it appears any solution will involve a patchwork of new ideas rather than one single beam of shiny white saviour type light) some kind of new local digital journalism witnessed by a raft of start-ups.

Last week, the New York Times and a high-ranking Google executive launched rival what are being dubbed "hyperlocal" news websites for communities in the New York and New Jersey area.

The New York Times start-up, The Local, will feature posts by New York Times journalists and community members about everyday life in the neighbourhoods of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene in the borough of Brooklyn, and Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange in New Jersey.

They join the more established like San Diego News Network and in New York Baristanet and Brownstoner.

The Huffington Post has launched its first local site beginning with Chicago and it Is rumoured to be buying local news aggregator Outside.in from founder Steven Johnson following its $25m of funding from a Silicon Valley investment fund at the end of last year.

The idea is not totally new, it has been tried in print before, but the second wave of community focused activity is digital, which with lighter overheads could point to a viable business model. With more regional newspaper jobs going in the UK today, with 150 lost at Northcliffe and Archant's Eastern Daily Press, it is something that has as much relevancy in the UK.

However, whether any of these sites can build sustainable online ad models is the $64,000. Ad Age reports that Brownstoner founder Jonathan Butler laid off his only employee in December when real-estate advertising crumbled.

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