Queue up the “eBay Song” by Weird Al Yankovic. … An eBay oddity landed in my inbox today in the form of a Google Alert e-mail that I have set to watch for when my name turns up in articles, blogs, etc. Included was a link to this page on eBay where an online bookseller has two copies of my 1996 trade book, “Newspapers and New Media,” for sale with a Buy-It-Now price of $118.64.

The amusing thing to me (well, actually, it’s just sad) is that the small advance and piddling royalty checks I received over the years from the publisher for that thin (67-page) title made it, I think, the single project in my past with the lowest payout per hour of work.

Thanks, Google Alerts, for reminding me of an ancient bad career decision. … It’s amazing, isn’t it? The crap you can buy on eBay?

Recently, I’ve been noticing new iPhone apps coming to market that are adopting interesting business models. Generally, they can be categorized as using the “freemium” (or semi-freemium) model; i.e., they give away some valuable content and entice you to upgrade for more and better features.

1. This American Life iPhone app. … This app costs $2.99 to purchase, and what that gets you is well worth that small amount of money if you’re a fan of the public radio show (as I am):

• All of the This American Life radio broadcasts from the most current to the program’s beginning in 1995, which are streamed to your phone. (In other words, you need to be in range of a cell-phone tower or wi-fi network.)
• Easy search for old programs, including by contributor (e.g., David Sedaris, John Hodgman, et al).

The premium part of the model is if you would like to “own” any episode. You can download any program to your iPhone or iTouch (via Apple’s iTunes) for 99 cents, which you might want to do for a favorite episode to keep, or if you want to listen to several episodes on a car trip where you’re not likely to experience quality (or any) streaming.

This app is a great example of selling an app for a modest one-time fee, but also having a recurring revenue stream from the app. In this case, This American Life can make money from it’s 15-year archives with no work involved other than promoting the app to iPhone/iTouch owners.

2. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2010 iPhone app. I only downloaded this app to my phone to look at the business model, not the female models. Swimsuit 2010 is a mobile version of the infamous SI annual Swimsuit issue of the magazine, featuring photos and videos.

This is a full-on freemium app, since it’s free to download to your iPhone/iTouch. That gets you only the basics: single swimsuit photos of several (but not all) SI models, and several 1-minute videos.

SI (and Apple) will get your money if you want more. (No, I did not pay for the upgrade.) For $1.99, paid from within the app, it is upgraded to see multiple photos of all the swimsuit models, and all the videos.

Which model (business, that is) should you choose: Free download with paid upgrade from within the app? Or paid download with much more given away free, but upgrades still sold within the app?

I think it depends on your audience. This American Life is a great radio program with a small but dedicated audience. SI’s controversial annual Swimsuit Issue is a mass-market offering worth $1 billion-plus in revenue for the publisher.

It’s in SI’s interest to get the limited app on as many phones as possible, and hope that lots of them will spring for the $1.99 upgrade. (A few days ago, the Swimsuit app was seeing a 7.8% paid-upgrade success rate.)

For This American Life, its loyal fans are more likely to pay the $2.99 both to show support for the program, and because what you get for that price is pretty darn nice for the show’s fans. (I didn’t hesitate to buy the app when I first saw it promoted.) I’m betting that the show will make more money by asking an up-front fee for the app than if it gave it away free and upsold the content.

For SI, I believe it will make more money giving away the sparse free app and selling upgrades than if it tried to charge an upfront fee for the app.

I’m not sure that we’ll ever know in these two cases, but I’d like to see some research on most-lucrative mobile app charging strategies for content. Indeed, I hope to be doing that at the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder before too long. (Hint, hint… need funding.)

While I’ve mentioned it a time or two on Twitter, I haven’t written much about the Digital Media Test Kitchen, which the University of Colorado School of Journalism & Mass Communication and I are building. Recently, I got the go-ahead to open up the website and blog for the Test Kitchen and start to spread the word.

Please do take a look around and tell me what you think of our mission and early research and development projects.

The simplest way to describe what the Test Kitchen is about is to emphasize how we are bringing together Journalism students and faculty with their colleagues from Computer Science and Business (and likely other disciplines as well in the future, depending on the project), as well as outside partners, to address the problems of journalism and the news sector and invent new solutions.

Our three primary areas of interest are news business models, new techniques for journalism, and new technologies for news.

The first Test Kitchen project is under way, and focuses on how to present in-depth (a.k.a., enterprise and investigative) news on the small screen of a smart-phone. This is a collaboration with I-News, the non-profit Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network. No, we don’t expect many people to read or view an entire investigative reporting package on an iPhone, but we do want to figure out how to make the limited time you spend on your phone reading and interacting with in-depth journalism a good experience.

I see our project team’s mission as helping news providers (old and new) make the right transition to the mobile platform, and not repeating the news industry’s big mistake when it moved from print to web (i.e., a “shovelware” approach to content rather than taking advantage of what the new medium of the web made possible).

I’d love to hear your ideas for future Test Kitchen projects that will move news forward. (Idea submission form.) And I’d like to hear from media and technology companies about possible collaboration. And, oh yeah, I’d be especially eager to talk with potential additional funders and donors to support the Test Kitchen in combining the ingredients of journalism, business, and technology to create more new recipes for reinventing news for the digital age.

I’m fond of trying out new technologies and digital services, and I’m often willing to use this blog as a sandbox. So today I’ve installed a new add-on to my blog called Insight App, which allows readers to highlight text and then easily rate it or comment on it, for everyone to see. With photos, like the sample one I’ve included with this blog item, you can click on the little blue icon added to the photo and then you’ll get the various options for rating or leaving a comment.

You probably recognize this photo. Use your mouse to hover over the photo, then click the little blue icon and rate or comment on the famous image.

For now, I’ve only installed Insight App on my article or “single-post” pages, so to try it out please click on the headline for this item (if you’re on my main blog page); if you came directly to the article opage, then the functionality should be visible to you now.

So, what you can do is highlight some text, then you’ll see a small icon in the lower left of the screen, which when clicked gives you various options for leaving your mark or thoughts attached to this blog item. I have the ability to customize what gets asked, but for now it’s just the default options.

I’ve turned off comments on this post so that you can comment using Insight App instead, and tell me what you think of it.

At first glance, I found it a bit confusing, but then grasped the interface. What do you think?

I do think that it’s about time that we got beyond the standard user comments at the end of an article and tried something more sophisticated. It looks like Insight Apps is trying to do that, so give it a workout during its beta testing period.

(Note: After publishing this item and playing with the feature some more, I found the interface for adding my comments and ratings a bit clunky and not intuitive enough. And the default ads are kind of annoying; if I took the trouble to sign up with Insight Apps and got better matched ads and some money-share from the deal, I might not mind so much. The concept looks promising, but I think it needs some tweaking.)

Within reports of MediaNews Group about to institute a metered paywall at a couple of its newspapers by May is something disturbing. This excerpt is from a Bloomberg report about the newspaper chain’s plans:

“The newspapers, in York, Pennsylvania, and Chico, California, will give users free access to as many as 25 ‘premium’ articles monthly, after which they’ll have to pay an undetermined fee unless they subscribe to the print newspapers, said MediaNews President Joseph Lodovic. Premium content may include certain columns and investigative reporting, he said.

“’Most of our content will remain free,’ Lodovic said yesterday in an e-mail. ‘Once subscribed, the reader will have access to all premium across MediaNews Group.’”

I’ll buy the idea of calling investigative reporting “premium content”; it’s the most important journalism produced by most newspaper companies. But I take issue with adding “paid online” to that description.

So the Chico Enterprise-Record publishes a blockbuster investigative series uncovering, say, that private contractors are dumping waste into the lake that supplies most of the city’s water while city officials look the other way because they’ve been bribed. That’s a story you would want every person in Chico, and the state for that matter, to read.

But, no, you’ll have to pay for that if you’ve gone over your free web article quota.

I get it. MediaNews Group needs the money, would like more people to go back to paying for print editions, and is putting an online price tag on its best, “premium” content.

Really, I have no issue with news organizations charging for premium content or services, if they can figure out what they’ve got that’s not available elsewhere for free, a couple mouse-clicks away (which is a big if).

Unfortunately, lumping investigative journalism into the paywalled content pile is against the interests of the newspaper’s community.

How about if newspaper publishers decide to go with web paywalls (not my idea of a good strategy), they at least exempt investigative journalism in the interests of an informed citizenry?

This is a quickie. … With all the fuss this week made over the New York Times’ decision to develop and implement a metered paywall on NYTimes.com in 2011, my favorite line comes from a colleague who shall remain unnamed:

“Maybe the NYTimes is much more clever than we think. They say they are going to implement a metered paywall in 2011 in the hopes that some other news site will then do it first thinking that if the NY Times is going to do it then it must be a good idea, and the NY Times can see what happens while they sit out 2010.”

If any traditional news publishers are still thinking that the Apple tablet — finally, it has a (strange) name, iPad — points to their salvation by bringing a new business model, they’ll likely be proven wrong.

No doubt, the iPad is an incredible, slick piece of technology. It’s not the “Jesus Tablet” that many of us hoped for (no camera?! no multi-tasking?! no Flash support?! it won’t answer my prayers?!), but maybe by version 2 or 3, it’ll get there. But even if the iPad fairly quickly evolves to be the kind of market pleaser that Apple’s iPhone became, I don’t think that it really changes things profoundly for news companies.

If you watch Apple’s slick video introducing the iPad, much is made that this is “the best experience ever created” for surfing the web. Fair enough. I’d love to have an iPad for when I want to read news on the web (and a lot of other things); my laptop would get much less use.

But does this mean that I’m suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. I’m always surprised when I open my browser history and see how many sites and media brands I’ve hit on any given day.

So if Rupert Murdoch or any other publisher puts up a mandatory paywall to keep me away from their news content on the iPad, I will move on to a similar site that’s free. If NYTimes.com decides to strengthen its proposed porous paywall by the 2011 implementation, then there’s WashingtonPost.com, which will receive my loyalty.

Am I a cheapskate? Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each. There’s too much free choice, and I’d prefer to support the news and media brands that I like best.

So, if NYTimes.com had a premium membership that gave me special privileges, but all its web (and thus iPad-viewable) content remained free to those who chose not to pay, then I’d probably pony up in order to show my support for the New York Times, since I admire its quality journalism, read its content regularly, and want it to continue. The key for me is that what brands I will pay to support, when it comes to commodity news, will be a voluntary decision on my part.

There are so many pointers to the diminishment of news brands, though the owners of those brands don’t want to see it. We’ve seen the “atomization of content” as the news story gets tossed around, linked to, and sometimes goes viral via Twitter, social networks, search engines, and news aggregators. Just as iTunes killed the music CD and reintroduced buying single songs, our new digital ecosystem is doing the same for news stories as it emasculates old news brands.

I used Personalization in the headline, and now I’ll finally get to it. For me, news personalization offerings to date have been unsatisfactory. Sure, I can spend some time setting up, say, an iGoogle personalized page and fill it with news (and other stuff) that I want. But it and the other solutions I’ve seen just haven’t grabbed me. I get plenty of serendipity in my news consumption, but it’s not because of any personalized news service, it’s because of pointers to good news content from the people I follow on Twitter and my Facebook friends, and the blogs I read regularly (or stumble upon). Article continues below photo…

My iCurrent personalized news: Many news brands, not just one

However, I recently tried out a private beta of iCurrent, a personalized web news service that I think is pretty darn close to having what could become my home base for news. Just this week the California company opened up a public beta, so you can try it out. iCurrent also has an e-mail component (which I find to be weak in its current state), and an iPhone app is coming soon.

I’ll write another blog item another day about iCurrent with more detail, but here’s the thing that makes it stand out: iCurrent is to news as Pandora is to music. (In fact, they share investors.)

With Pandora, you pick a musician, song, or genre that you like, then the application selects similar music that it thinks you might like. Pandora learns what you like as you click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a song that’s playing; it lets you tell it to stop playing a particular song or artist. It’s dead-simple to create new channels of music. Most importantly, it makes complicated personalization technology super-easy to use.

ICurrent applies Pandora’s model to news. Initially you choose a few topics of personal interest, but then as you use iCurrent over time, it learns what you want to see. Like Pandora, stories that it selects for you have an up and down arrow to click, if you want; click the up arrow and you get a few choices about what you’d like to see more of — simply “more like this,” or more about specific components of the story that it’s filtered out.

iCurrent’s homepage also devotes 2/3 of the space to your personalized news, and the other 1/3 to important news that everyone should know about (Haiti, Afghanistan, top political stories, etc.).

We’ve been talking about personalized news for a long time; you may remember “The Daily Me” project from MIT in the early 1990s. It’s taken a long time, but I think technologists are close to getting personalized news right.

So, back to the iPad. Assuming I get one (oh, I’ll probably succumb), I doubt that my behavior toward news using it will be much different than it is on my laptop. I’ll bounce around from story to story, not always aware of the news brand that’s hosting a specific story.

From what I’ve seen of iCurrent, it could be a great news home base for my iPad usage.

The iPad, it seems to me, leaves news publishers in much the same predicament as the PC web. Their content will become more and more atomized, especially if — as is my prediction — personalized news advances to the point of real value and Pandora-like simplicity.

The trick to survival for many news organizations in the digital world, then, will be in figuring out how to monetize their content as it flies the coop and first shows up in a consumer’s news stream outside of the news company’s property line. This issue will be as critical to solve on the iPad and like devices as on the PC web.

One last point: The iPad does represent an opportunity for news companies to develop apps that iPad users can buy. Just as selling apps for the iPhone has become a massive business, this will probably repeat for the iPad. I would suggest to (non-niche) news providers that they’ll have an easier time selling specialized applications than selling content. I’ve written this before, but consumer psychology favors spending money on things you can keep (an app, a song) than commodity content that is viewed but once then forgotten.

If I had an iPad, an app I’d pay for: iCurrent. I wouldn’t be paying for the news content, but rather for the convenience and value that a really good personalization app would provide.

Yeah, I know, that’s not what journalists want to hear.

So the long-awaited (well, at least by many of us media geeks) decision by NYTimes.com has been announced. And the winner is:

THE METERED PAYWALL!

According to the Times’ own report, by Richard Perez-Pena:

“Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”

That doesn’t sound like the more nuanced approach to a metered paywall that I espoused on this blog yesterday. Then again, if it won’t be implemented till 2011 (!), there’s still time to create a system that’s less black-and-white and makes more sense.

Until I get a chance to quiz one of the Times execs on this decision, I’ll withhold judgment. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks (to me) on the surface.

But there’s one quote in Perez-Pena’s piece that drives me up the wall. It’s from Janet Robinson, New York Times Co. president and CEO:

“There’s no prize for getting it quick. There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”

Sounds reasonable, you say? NO. … NYT has been studying this issue for a year; now it will take another year before finalizing and implementing the metered paywall. This is yet another demonstration of the newspaper industry’s conservative nature which has served it so poorly over the last decade and a half (since the first web browser was unleashed on the world).

Let’s see … one year. In the Internet age, the change that will likely occur on the technology scene — which will impact all media publishers profoundly — is probably going to be more than in what we saw in the entire decade or the 1970s or 1980s.

A big theme for 2010 in media will be mobile smart-phones and portable digital tablets; newspaper companies better have that figured out soon. (Perhaps NY Times Digital, with its large technology development staff, is well on its way.) But the Times is still mucking around with the details of its website metered-paywall decision and needs another year? Oy!

There are many things killing off the newspaper industry, and this is one of them. You’ve got to move faster, folks.

“New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers,” said NYMag.com’s Daily Intel in a Sunday report.

I’m not sure whether to believe the story or not, but since there’s no definitive word from NYT executives yet, let’s play along and pretend this is an accurate report: NYTimes.com this spring will launch a “metered” web payment system, where readers can sample X number of free articles before being asked to subscribe.

If that’s true and the system is as simple as that — “Dear loyal Times reader: You’ve read 10 articles for free this month; to read more, sign up for a paid subscription” — then it’s a bad decision. TechDirt minced no words with its story: “NY Times Apparently Planning To Commit Suicide Online With Paywall.”

Or go read Jeff Jarvis’ take on his BuzzMachine blog, where he states the obvious problem with the metered approach to web news content:

“They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least. … Why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me.”

But we’re talking about the most revered newspaper in the English-speaking world, and it’s not staffed by dummies. I would hope the Times leadership learned from the unsuccessful TimesSelect partial paid-wall experiment. The Times is a general-interest newspaper with a global reach and global influence; it would be foolish to turn away loyal online readers unwilling or unable to pay U.S. prices that aren’t realistic in some economies (e.g., India, the Middle East), not to mention invite other news organizations to take over their mantle as most influential news brand by not locking most of the world out.

I don’t know what decision NYT executives will announce, but if they go the metered paywall route, I can only hope that they get it right. While I continue to think that a voluntary membership model that gets paying members special privileges and commercial offers from advertisers is a better way to go, if metered paywall is the decision, then here’s what it should look like to have a chance of succeeding:

• Allow several free article views per day before a reader hits any kind of paywall. Ten articles per month and then a paywall, as the Financial Times’ website offers, is a non-starter for NYTimes.com and will result in unacceptable advertising losses for NYTimes.com as site traffic drops.
• This makes way more sense than the FT.com model, because for heavy users of NYTimes.com, they will see the paywall or alternative offer every day. FT.com users hit the paywall once per month at 10 articles, then most will not come back. FT.com can afford not to care, because it’s after business people who can afford to pay for FT’s specialized business and financial news coverage. It’s not after a massive audience the way NYTimes.com is (or should be).
• Give the NYTimes.com user who hits the “paywall” after, say, three or four stories in one day several options for continuing to read. Offering only the option of subscribing is, and I can’t think of a better word, dumb.
• What should the options be?
  1. Subscriptions for unfettered access, offered in various terms: monthly, 6-month, annual, lifetime, etc.
  2. A day-pass rate ($1 or $2?) for those wanting more but unwilling to commit to a subscription.
  3. Adjust the day-pass (and subscription rates) based on the country of the reader (determined by IP address). While a day pass to NYTimes.com might cost $1.50 to North American online readers, the price should be, say, the equivalent of 25 cents for readers in India where the standard wage is far less than in the U.S.
  4. Offer an alternative to paying for a day-pass: View a 30-second video commercial, which can’t be skipped or fast-forwarded, for a blockbuster ad or a targeted ad based on what the site knows about the reader. Or, assuming NYTimes.com has good targeting ability (possible with non-paying subscribers because the site makes everyone register), let the user take a market survey for an ad client who’s paying a premium; then give the reader a free day or week-long pass to unlimited articles.
  5. Offer the special membership I mentioned above as an option. This might cost more than a subscription, but would include extra goodies such as free or discount tickets to newsmaker events, and lucrative discount and free-offer deals from participating advertisers (e.g., two-for-one dinner or theater-ticket offers each month). The membership would also include unfettered access to the full website with no reading quotas.
  6. Offer something for those not willing to pay but who still want more. This might be a partial wall, where after viewing three NYT stories on one day, subsequent stories show only the first three or four paragraphs of a story — followed by the list of options above. I’d add even one more in this instance: a micropayment for, say, 25 cents to view the rest of the article (if it’s article No. 4 read by the user that day and they want to view the whole thing).
  7. Allow paying members of voluntary content-donation networks special access. Let’s say that I, a paying member to the Kachingle multi-website donation service, visit NYTimes.com and click its Kachingle medallion, indicating that I support NYTimes.com and some of my $5 a month paid to Kachingle gets proportioned every month to NYTimes.com based on my usage of the site. Perhaps for Kachingle member-supporters of NYTimes.com, the daily free-article limit becomes 10, or 20, rather than three, before the paywall and other options are shown.
  8. Establish some sort of convenient system for libraries and schools, so that users of public computers don’t run into annoying paywall barriers.
  9. Finally, use the paywall strategy for special events or promotions. For instance, right now the NYTimes.com metered wall could be set at three free articles, then the top offer for continued access to more full Times content for the next week is to make a $10 donation to Haiti earthquake relief, or a $5 donation for two days of full access.

In general, I’m against paywalls for general-news websites, for reasons that I and many other digital-media pundits have expressed many times over. But that’s a black-and-white view, and I think there are shades of gray that might work, as I’ve outlined above.

So … Dear Bill Keller and NYT executive team: Please don’t blow it with a restrictive metered paywall that will damage your brand’s influence and bottom line. If you’re dead set on the metered paywall model — and I still have hope that you’re not — then at least implement it intelligently.

I can’t say I’m surprised that Denver-based MediaNews Group (well, technically its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc.) has said that it will file for bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal has a report on the latest newspaper-industry dour development, pointing out that the Hearst Corp. has $400 million in equity and debt tied to MediaNews, “and the investment will be wiped out by the bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.”

MediaNews is likely to survive, but not without some unfortunate consequences for its newspapers. From the WSJ article:

“(MediaNews Group CEO Dean) Singleton also said cleaning up the company’s debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation, which some people in the industry say would help publishers stay afloat by creating stronger, more efficiently run groups of papers. Others are less sanguine about the benefits of consolidation.

“People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews’ paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc.”

In other words, yet another newspaper-company bankruptcy means that more muscle will be cut from newsrooms (the fat’s already gone) and communities will be more poorly served in the consolidation that’s necessary for industry survival.

We’ve seen plenty of awful things happen to newsrooms, and now we’re seeing things like copy editors being considered for elimination to save money. (E.g., Star Tribune.)

The newsroom cuts keep coming, and as newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy owned largely by the banks that held their debt, a return to strong staffing levels and higher quality is unlikely anytime soon. (And why would advertisers return to that?)

So, it looks to me like now is a great time to be in journalism!

I’ve said that a few times recently when speaking to groups of college journalism students, and while I’ve gotten some nods of agreement, I’ve seen more heads shaking and puzzled expressions. But here’s what I mean:

Newspapers across the land are declining in quality, and lacking in coverage of their communities. A retired university journalism department head just today wrote this to me in a private e-mail about his local paper, owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S.:

“Today’s [newspaper name redacted] is a bulletin board of one-paragraph meeting and event announcements, with canned features from other [corporate parent redacted] papers, local columns by city and county functionaries, booster pieces by c-of-c officials, religious claptrap by evangelists, columns on how and why to clean up your garage, pet care, etc. People who want to announce weddings and funerals are charged by the column inch, and the practice of depth reporting is a distant memory.”

I don’t see a way out of this for local and regional newspapers owned by large media companies. Do you? So newspapers will likely continue to decline, while simultaneously, new digital news entities (for- and non-profit) will continue to increase in quality. After all, the newcomers don’t have massive debt to worry about or expensive presses to maintain; digital publishing is cheap in comparison.

And, of course, many of the new news entities emerging are run by the talented journalists laid off by the once-great newspaper companies. So new news providers’ quality will continue to improve.

The problem for all the new-comers to the (reinvented) news game is the lack of a clear business model to support quality journalism in sufficient quantity. But I’m more confident that they can figure that out than I am in the newspaper industry figuring out the digital business model while also handling the collapse of their legacy business.

“New” news media rises as the old falls. MediaNews Group’s troubles are only the latest to open up more opportunities for the new news eco-system to develop.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, if you can stomach the chaotic environment. It’s a lousy time to own an established news media business if you’re still in love with its outdated business model.