One early sign of this shift was the 2010 launch of paywalls for the London Times and Sunday Times. These involved no new strategy; however, the newspaper world was finally willing to regard them as real test of whether general-interest papers could induce a critical mass of readers to pay. (Nope.)

Then, in March, the New York Times  introduced a charge for readers who crossed a certain threshold of article views (a pattern copied from the financial press, and especially the Financial Times.) Finally, and most recently, were a pair of announcements last month: The Chicago Sun-Times was adopting a new threshold charge, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said that their existing one was working well. Taken together, these events are a blow to the idea that online news can be treated as a simple product for sale, as the physical newspaper was.

For some time now, newspaper people have been insisting, sometimes angrily, that we readers will soon have to pay for content (an assertion that had already appeared, in just that form, by 1996.) During that same period, freely available content grew ten-thousand-fold, while buyers didn’t. In fact, as Paul Graham has pointed out, “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either…Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.”

Commercial radio is ad-supported because no one could figure out a way to restrict access to radio waves; cable TV collects revenues because someone figured out a way to restrict access to co-axial cables. The logic of the internet is that everyone pays for the infrastructure, then everyone gets to use it. This is obviously incompatible with print economics, but oddly, the industry’s faith in ‘every reader a customer’ has been largely unshaken by newspapers’ own lived experience of the move to the web.

A printed paper was a bundle. A reader who wanted only sports and stock tables bought the same paper as a reader who wanted local and national politics, or recipes and horoscopes. Online, though, that bundle is torn apart, every day, by users who forward each other individual URLs, without regard to front pages or named sections or intended navigation. This unbundling leads to the odd math of web readership — if you rank readers by pages viewed in a month, the largest group by far, between a third and half of them, will visit only a single page. A smaller group will read two pages in a month, a still smaller group will read three, and so on, up to the most active reader, in a group by herself, who will read dozens of pages a day, hundreds in a month.

Against this hugely variable audience behavior, a paywall was all-or-nothing: “If you won’t give us any money, we won’t show you any ads!” Offered this all-or-nothing choice, most readers opted for ‘nothing’; the day they launched their paywall, the Times  of London shrank its digital audience from a large multiple of its print circulation to a small fraction of it. This isn’t a problem with general-interest paywalls — it is the  problem, widely understood before the turn of the century, and one to which there has never been a convincing answer. The easy part of treating digital news as a product is getting money from 2 percent of your audience. The hard part is losing 98 percent of your advertising base.

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.

The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying  to charge between 85 percent and 95 percent of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay.

Newspapers have two principal sources of revenue, readers and advertisers, and they can operate at mass or niche scale for each of those groups. A metro-area daily paper is a mass product for customers (many readers buy the paper) and for advertisers (many readers see their ads.) Newsletters and small-circulation magazines, by contrast, serve niche readers, and therefore niche advertisers — Fire Chief, Mother Earth News. (Some newsletters get by with no advertising at all, as with Cooks’ Illustrated, where part of what the user pays for is freedom from ads, or rather freedom from a publisher beholden to advertisers.)

Paywalls were an attempt to preserve the old mass+mass model after a transition to digital distribution. With so few readers willing to pay, and therefore so few readers to advertise to, paywalls instead turned newspapers into a niche+niche business. What the article threshold creates is an odd hybrid — a mass market for advertising, but a niche market for users. This is the commercial equivalent of the National Public Radio model, where sponsors reach all listeners, but direct suport only comes from donors. (Lest NPR seem like small ball, it’s worth noting that the Times ‘ has convinced something like one out of every hundred of its online readers to pay, while NPR affiliates’ success rate is something like one in twelve. Newspapers with thresholds now aspire to NPR’s persuasiveness.)

Paywalls held out the possibility, however illusory, that if all readers could be treated as customers, the organization wouldn’t have to pay much attention to them, except in aggregate. Threshold charges blow that up; a single fee-paying user will generate hundreds of times the revenue of the median, ad-viewing reader. This subjects the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? Here are some things that won’t: More ads. More gossip. More syndicated copy. This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric.

Celebrities behaving badly always drive page-views through the roof, but those readers will be anything but committed. Meanwhile, the people who hit the threshold and then hand over money are, almost by definition, people who regard the paper not just as an occasional source of interesting articles, but as an essential institution, one whose continued existence is vital no matter what today’s offerings are.

In discussing why the most loyal subset of readers would pay for access to the Times, Felix Salmon described some of the motivations reported by users: “I like the product, understand the incentives involved, and want its production to continue” and “I feel that maintaining a quality NYT is immensely important to the country as a whole.” Now, and presumably from now on, the readers that matter most are disproportionately likely to score high on the God Forbid index (as in “God forbid the Sun-Times  not be around to keep an eye on the politicians!”)

The people who feel this way have always been a minority of the readership, a fact obscured by print bundles, but made painfully visible by paywalls. When a paper abandons the standard paywall strategy, it gives up on selling news as a simple transaction. Instead, it must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.

Thresholds are now mostly being tried at big-city papers — New York, Chicago, Minneapolis. Most papers, however, are not the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Most papers are the Springfield Reporter, papers with a circulation 20,000 or less, and mostly made up of content bought from the Associated Press and United Media. These papers may not do well on the God Forbid index, because they produce so little original content, and they may not find thresholds financially viable, because the most engaged hundredth of their audience will number in the dozens, not the thousands.

On the other hand, local reporting is almost the only form of content for which the local paper is the sole source, so it’s also possible to imagine a virtuous circle for at least some small papers, where a civically-minded core of citizens step in to fund the paper in return for an increase in local coverage, both of politics and community matters. (It’s hard to overstate how vital community coverage is for small-town papers, which have typically been as much village well as town crier.)

It’s too early to know what behaviors the newly core users will reward or demand from their papers. They may start asking to see fewer or less intrusive ads than non-paying readers do. They may reward papers that make their comments section more conversational (as the Times  has just done.) The most dramatic change, though, is that the paying users are almost certain to be more political, and more partisan, than the median reader.

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival.

Clay Shirky is a writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University (NYU) as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. You can follow him on Twitter @cshirky and on his blog.

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The fuss began in 2009 when the Courant, owned by bankrupt Tribune Co., appointed an “aggregation editor” to compensate for cuts to its local news desk. For several months, the Hartford paper took to siphoning stories from smaller competitors, including “North-Central Connecticut’s Hometown Newspaper,” the Journal Inquirer. The paper sued, saying its bigger rival had taken its stories about local water and education issues and “reproduced them in substance” on the Courant website, sometimes without attribution.

In its claim, the Journal Inquirer accused the Courant of not only copyright infringement but of stealing its news. This type of “hot news” claim was first recognized in 1918 when the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press could stop the International News Service from rewriting its accounts of World War I. The latter’s practice of wiring rewritten AP reports to the west coast sometimes resulted in the INS beating the AP to press on its own stories.

The hot news doctrine shrunk dramatically in the twentieth century but suddenly took on new importance last year after a New York court ruled that Barclays bank was entitled to stop a financial site, Flyonthewall.com, from reporting on the recommendations it sold to its clients. Numerous news organizations led by the AP filed court briefs to support the bank during appeal proceedings. The bank and the news outlets ultimately lost, however, after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling and set out a difficult five-part test that a company must pass to establish a property right in “hot news.”

The Hartford Courant aggregation case provided a new opportunity to test the boundaries of the “hot news” rules. The paper had argued that the Journal Inquirer’s stories did not qualify as hot news and that its aggregations amounted to “fair use” under copyright law. Those arguments will not be tested, however, because of the settlement, the term of which were not disclosed.

The episode attracted national attention in journalism circles and also resulted in the Courant publisher writing a letter of apology to the paper’s readers. The Journal Inquirer has a detailed account of the events and the settlement here.

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The new mobile initiative, dubbed “iCircular,” will start rolling out on Monday within the mobile sites and apps of the 40 newspapers.

The iCircular feature will be found within newspaper mobile apps on the iPhone. The feature will be available on other formats, such as Google’s Android, later on. It’s HTM5-based, so that will also be available on newspapers’ web and mobile wap sites and ultimately ease iCircular’s transfer to other operating systems. The app will be situated within a special “Deals” section on each of the newspapers’ apps and mobile sites. 

“It’s essentially an app within an app,” said Mary Junck, chairman of AP’s board of directors’ revenue committee and CEO of Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE). “We didn’t want to create an app separate from the newspapers. We wanted something that would be as integrated into the newspapers as a Sunday circular is in the print editions.”

Interestingly, the program is open to all newspapers, not just AP members, Junck told paidContent in an interview. “This is meant to address a problem and promote an opportunity for all newspapers,” she added.

Launch partners include the New York Daily News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Company’s Boston Globe, Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle, Cox Media’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AH Belo’s The Dallas Morning NewsTribune Company’s Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune,  and other representatives of nearly every major newspaper company. (The whole list of iCircular newspaper launch partners.)

The idea offers newspapers a chance to make sure they don’t lose the last important revenue stream aside from circulation dollars. For instance, the notion that Craigslist has killed newspaper classified revenues tends to have been overblown, but not by much. Clearly, newspapers were always in a position to head off the disintermediation wrought by Craigslist and other online listings sites.

These days, the rise of daily deals sites threatens to take away that last vestige of healthy advertising revenue, which is already facing some declines due to falling newspaper circulation. In its recent tally of ad spending in the first half of 2011, Kantar Media said that “free-standing inserts” fell by 6.4 percent.

The AP estimates that at launch iCircular will reach 5 million users, allowing newspapers to quickly broaden the 80 million newspaper readers who get pre-print circulars already.

But will it work?

“We’re not sure what we’re going to find from this test, but we’re going to be looking closely at several things in particular,” Junck said. “We’re going to be interested in seeing the audience numbers for iCircular and how often the deals are used. The newspaper partners have all agreed to do heavy promotion for this.”

In an interview with paidContent, Jeffrey Litvack, the AP’s GM’s/global product development, suggested that iCircular’s success may be rooted in what has propelled the daily deals space so far. “Most people find ads annoying, but circulars are ads that consumers seek out—it’s the ultimate opt-in,” he said.

About 20 national retailers are part of the launch, including jcpenney, Kohl’s Department Stores, Kmart , Macy’s, Staples, Target, Toys “R” Us, Walgreens and Walmart. Regional and local stores, such supermarkets and electronics stores are also participating.

“For retailers, they’re encouraged to sign on since they’ll be able to attract customers to local stores by automatically delivering geo-located deals and special offers nearest to the consumer,” Litvack added. “For smartphone users, iCirculars improves on the print coupon by letting them create shopping lists, as well as connect to social media and store loyalty card information. It’s simply more of what people already like and use.”

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Those aren’t the economics of online, where advertisers pay only for the readers who see (or click on) their ads, and where abundance robs publishers of pricing power over their once-scarce inventory.

My favorite illustration of this is the Star Ledger killing its stock tables in 2001, shaving $1 million of costs and losting only 12 subscribers.That means that prior to this, the paper was spending $83,000 per reader to hold onto them. Papers had been scared of losing one reader because, in their economics, every reader was equally valuable. But no longer. I keep urging papers to calculate the net future value of readers and decide who’s worth keeping and serving and who’s not, economically speaking.

The Tribune is losing much money on every one of those Groupon readers — not only the lost retail value of every discounted sale but also the fact that the paper no doubt was already published at a lost — that is, it costs more to produce a copy than its sold for because each reader is valuable to advertisers. But is she?

What the Tribune is also trying to do here is hold onto its critical mass. When its Sunday circulation falls below a certain level, certain lucrative advertisers — coupon and circular advertisers — will stop using papers as their means of distribution. That will be a kick in the kidneys almost equal to the creation of craigslist and it’s coming any day. In fact, it’s already starting … that, surely, is why the Tribune is so desperately trying to hold onto every reader.

But those economics will quickly disintegrate. Watch it happen….

Jeff Jarvis is author of What Would Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Do? and blogs about media and news at BuzzMachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor and a partner at Daylife, a news startup. He writes a new media column for The Guardian and is host of its Media Talk USA podcast.

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CNN wrote that the tablet is more of a concept than an actual product at this point, but it’s believed to be a serious project. The idea would be to partner with a wireless carrier on a data plan and try to court new subscribers or re-up existing subscribers by giving away the tablet. “If it turns out to be a failure, it’ll be a fantastically interesting failure,” one anonymous source told CNN.

It will also be a colossal waste of money for a company trying to emerge from bankruptcy. Crowd-pleasing tablet design has really only been nailed by one company, and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) used much of what it learned from the iPhone in creating the iPad. Other Android competitors simply haven’t been able to match the iPad the way they were able to match the iPhone, and even though this is still a brand-new market it’s hard to imagine that a media company has the design knowledge and insight to make a dent in the tablet market.

Tribune owns several major U.S. newspapers, such as its namesake in Chicago and the Los Angeles Times. It’s currently in bankruptcy court, and has been most notable over the past couple of years for its boorish corporate culture, which led to the demise of former CEO Randy Michaels and the rise of current CEO Eddy Hartenstein, who is said to be the driving force behind the tablet. Philadelphia Media Network is trying a similar idea to get more people interested in the Inquirer and the Daily News, according to CNN’s report.

If a media company manages to be the first to convince people to actually use an Android tablet, then an entire consumer electronics industry should hang its head in shame. Luckily for them, this is never going to happen, as the chances of getting the public to carry around multiple tablets—one for the local news and one that does everything else about 10,000 times better than the local news tablet—are about as good as the Chicago Cubs, formerly owned by the Tribune, have winning of the World Series this year.

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Housed in the same Third Avenue Manhattan offices as Smith Management, Alden is a relatively new fund, organized in 2007. Newspapers and other media companies are a major part of its portfolio but it has also bought shares of financial companies like Citigroup and the debt of third-world countries.

So who is Randall Smith and what does he want with all these newspapers? If he has ever given an interview, I couldn’t find it. Nor could I locate a published photo of Smith or his exact age (roughly 68, I think). Unlike Angelo, Gordon, an earlier leader in distressed newspaper investments, Alden allows website access only to customers.

The man behind a rising tide of private equity newspaper company investments and takeovers has kept from the public eye even the barest information about himself and his companies.

However, as an investment banker with 45 years experience and a pioneer of so-called vulture investing, Smith has left a few tracks.

A 1987 Time (NYSE: TWX) profile reported that he is a graduate of Cornell University with a Wharton MBA, who started his career with Bear Stearns in 1967. He started his own company, the first of many, in 1985.

Randall Smith has been an investor in news media at least once before, when his younger brother Russ and partners launched the New York Press in 1988. The Press offered tough competition to the Village Voice, with free distribution, while the Voice was a paid publication. (It switched to free in 1996.)

When the rivalry was at its peak in 1999, Voice writer Cynthia Cotts produced an acid profile of the brothers, headlined “Vulture Press.” She concluded by quoting an acquaintance saying, ” ‘Randy is so rich he’s the kind of guy who divests himself every couple of years,’ so he doesn’t make the lists of the world’s richest people.”

Russ Smith, a conservative libertarian, for 20 years wrote a weekly column, “The Mugger,” which often ran to more than 10,000 words. So in the Smith family, there is one brother who won’t stop talking and one who is publicly mute.

(Neither Smith returned calls asking for comment.)

Under the circumstances, one can only infer what Alden likes about the news industry and what next steps in its strategy may be.

I found a hint in the April 2010 issue of Alden’s Monthly Update to clients, which found its way onto the Web. A commentary explains the importance of “industry themes” to the Alden portfolio “because individual companies in the same industry usually face similar economic drivers.”

When investor and analyst opinion goes sour on an industry because of poor financial performance, the commentary continues, “this bias can create significant buying opportunities, and it is one that we look for in industries that are on our distressed radar.”

This investment philosophy helps explain why Alden also owns a $143 million position in Gannett (NYSE: GCI), smaller stakes in A.H. Belo (NYSE: AHC), McClatchy (NYSE: MNI), Media General (NYSE: MEG) and Journal Communications (NYSE: JRN). And it has taken positions in Sinclair Broadcasting, LIN TV, Nextstar, and Canadian company, Postmedia.

It aimed last year to take private Emmis Communications, a radio company, but the deal collapsed when Alden pulled out, leading to suits and countersuits.

I spoke by phone this week with Dean Singleton, longtime chairman and CEO of MediaNews, whose company was partially taken over by Alden in January 2011. Singleton remains there, as a new board of directors searches for a new CEO; when they find one, Singleton will then become Executive Chairman advising the company on strategy.

Singleton said that he has “enormous respect” for Smith and others at Alden. “It’s very clear that Alden has faith in the future of the business and so do I. They believe that at today’s valuations, newspapers are a good long-term investment.”

Singleton declined to comment further on Alden’s principals or whether the fund would try to consolidate its newspaper holdings. But Singleton, who built his company over decades with acquisitions, said his own view is that further “consolidation will play a big role” in the industry’s recovery and way forward.

Any time you put together two companies, there are management efficiencies that add value, he said, “and if they are in the same geographical area, there is an opportunity to share operational expenses and create value that way.”

Indeed, MediaNews has been the first and biggest proponent of newspaper clustering. Most recently it has been among the first to have one publisher or editor oversee several newspapers, to treat groups of newspapers as a single entity for totaling audited circulation, and to create merged or outsourced copy editing and design desks.

The reader in Contra Costa, Calif., Singleton told me, doesn’t really care where the paper is printed, who delivers it at 5 a.m. or “whether the ad production is done in Contra Costa or India.”

Singleton has also been comfortable through the years partnering with Gannett and other companies, in one instance running several papers for Hearst, which also made a big investment in MediaNews.

So I agree with Martin Langeveld and other analysts who speculate that MediaNews is the logical launch pad if Alden moves to consolidate its newspaper holdings.

That is an “if.” Alden might choose not to consolidate and simply sit on investments it believes will appreciate.

My wild guess: Watch for the MediaNews CEO search to end with Journal Register CEO John Paton (whose experience includes investment banking). Paton has transformed Journal Register to digital first, and that aligns with MediaNews’ likely direction. Journal Register and Media News can be merged—perhaps with Freedom too, if the Alden guys can figure out a fair price to pay themselves.

Randall Smith may feel fresh pressure to get just a little transparent and go public with a charm offensive as his company becomes a bigger ownership force.

Keep in mind, though, that the distressed investment specialists have a stomach for risky positions most investors won’t go near. Even the most experienced specialists don’t succeed with every pick. Alden, for instance, showed an appreciation of more than 187 percent one year and 3 percent the next, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) reported last fall, as its play on distressed financial institutions fizzled.

So, flattering as Alden’s courtship of the industry has been to date and likely as it is to continue, newspapers could get dropped in a heartbeat, as did Emmis, if fundamentals take another dive. Randall Smith knows the game plan—but he isn’t saying.

Rick Edmonds is media business analyst for The Poynter Institute, where he has researched and written for the last 10 years. Poynter is a school dedicated to journalism excellence.

Although the U.S. Court of Appeals panel in Philadelphia upheld most of the FCC’s 2008 media ownership order, it objected on procedural grounds to the rule relaxing cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in local markets. The panel said the FCC failed to meet notice and comment requirements mandated by federal law.

The decision was a rejection of former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s 2007 effort to soften media ownership restrictions that had been in place for over three decades. It’s the second time the court has stymied the FCC on this issue: in 2004, the court rejected then-Chairman Michael Powell’s media-ownership plan, also designed to relax the rules.

The appeals court left most of the other rules contained in the 2008 order intact, including restrictions on the number of TV and radio stations one company can own in a given market. The panel also admonished the FCC for failing to put enough analysis into a rule designed to promote broadcast ownership by women and minorities.

The FCC’s attempt to relax the local market ownership restrictions has been fiercely opposed by public interest groups such as the Media Access Project and Free Press, both of which praised the decision as a victory for consumers and a defeat for proponents of media consolidation.

“Today’s decision is a sweeping victory for the public interest,” Corie Wright, policy counsel of Free Press, said in a statement. “In rejecting the arguments of the industry and exposing the FCC’s failures, the court wisely concluded that competition in the media – not more concentration – will provide Americans with the local news and information they need and want.”

John Sturm, president of the Newspaper Association of America, an industry trade group which supported easing the restrictions, described the ruling to Bloomberg as “very disappointing.”

But FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a fierce critic of media consolidation who opposed the 2008 rules, called the decision a “huge victory for the millions of Americans who have gone on record demanding a richer and more diverse media.”

“I am pleased that the 2008 newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule, which would have opened the door to more consolidation and less news, has now been returned to the Commission,” Copps said in a statement. “The rule and the process that brought it forth were highly inimical to media democracy.”

The ruling is yet another legal setback for the FCC. Last year, a federal appeals court struck down the agency’s indecency rules only months after another court said it lacked the authority to enforce its net neutrality rules. The FCC must now change the cross-ownership rule as part of its quadrennial review of media ownership if it wishes to contest the court’s decision.

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Michaels, who was named CEO of the entire company shortly after, left the bankrupt company amid a management meltdown following a series of articles by the New York Times’ David Carr that painted a scandalous picture of the company’s culture.

New COO for LAT Media Group: Hartenstein, who was appointed by the Tribune’s board to his new post, will keep his LAT Communications position in addition to taking on the larger role at the Tribune. He’ll be managing both jobs with help from Kathy Thomson, appointed today to the newly created position of president and COO of the LAT Media Group.

Thomson is returning to the LAT after serving for the past 18 months as VP, Business Operations at Qualcomm’s FLO TV. She was chief of staff at LAT from September 2008 to 2009, joining LATMG from Energy Innovations where she was the company’s COO and after spending 15 years in a variety of positions at DirecTV (NYSE: DTV). She will report to Hartenstein.

Will Zell remain?: Last fall, Michaels stepped down a few days after the resignation of former Clear Channel alum Lee Abrams as Tribune’s chief innovation officer. Carr’s stories in the NYT described a “shock jock culture” at the Tribune. The pieces stung and the board eventually felt that the sordid goings on distracted the company from its attempts to resolve its bankruptcy, which is still going on.

The Executive Council was put in place to run the company upon Michaels’ departure. In addition to Hartenstein, the other four-members of the office of the president included Tony Hunter, president and publisher of the Chicago Tribune Media Group; Nils Larsen, Tribune Co.‘s chief investment officer; and Don Liebentritt, chief restructuring officer. Now that Hartenstein is taking charge, the Executive Council is being disbanded.

“The board feels strongly that it is in Tribune’s best interests to have one person providing strategic vision and day-to-day direction for the company and its employees as we prepare to emerge from the Chapter 11 process,” said Zell in a statement. Now, as the company prepares to exit Chapter 11, which has dragged on for more than two years, the speculation as to how long Zell will remain as chairman will likely ramp up again as well.

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The service, dubbed Live Stream, has been tested with launch partners The Tribune Company and Australia’s Fairfax Media. It got its big debut last week when the NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) made use of the live video from the Royal Wedding in the UK, even though the New York Times has not officially signed on as a regular client. (Though the NYT is considering doing so, one source told paidContent.)

For the past few years, Reuters has been working to build up its multimedia offerings on both the general news and financial professional sides. Video has played a big part in that.

Most recently, the company a deal to distribute paparazzi-style video site Hollywood.TV’s content to its clients. Before that, for the more professional, not-necessarily-financial market oriented users, Reuters introduced a Rocketboom-like video series.

And to make sure that it hasn’t forgotten its roots, a year ago, Reuters unveiled “Insider,” a VOD platform intended only for investor-audience subscribers.

“We don’t have a one size fits all model,” said Chris Ahearn, president of media, Thomson Reuters. “Most of our clients have different needs. They are thinking about their web presence in a different way, and video is a big part of that. But unlike broadcast operations, they don’t have video from around the world that’s easily accessible. It’s something we’re making widely available. I think it’s fair to say the US market has been dominated by one provider for a number of years and our clients have said, they want additional services and more content and more flexibility.”

That other “provider” Ahearn was referring to is the AP, which has found itself increasingly challenged not only by Reuters, but by Bloomberg as well. To beat back those threats and maintain its position among newspaper and other outlets, the AP has also moved aggressively into video and multimedia.

Among the services the AP has offered in recent years is AP Live, a packaged player offered to websites that’s themed to major events, such as the Oscars, Fashion Week, the royal wedding. It’s also overhauled its video production in HD, to make it more attractive to TV networks. For years, the AP online video news service has been embedded in hundreds of newspapers’ and other members’ websites as part of the Online Video Network, which completed a switch to a new platform at the end of March.

As for Reuters, it’s planning still more video offerings over the next few months.

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Since leaving Disney more than five years ago, Eisner’s investments have included digital content studio Vuguru, trading card company Topps, and the ill-fated Veoh video site. Eisner was most recently in the news over the summer, when he was mentioned as a possible successor to Tribune Chairman Sam Zell, although he later downplayed that possibility.

Eisner and Diller go way back. According to this Eisner biography, Eisner worked at CBS (NYSE: CBS) shortly after graduating from Denison University in 1964. Unhappy with the job, Eisner sent around his resume and received one response. It was from a man named Barry Diller, who brought him to ABC. The two men also worked together at Paramount Pictures in the 1970s, where Diller was chairman and Eisner was president.

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One of the interesting things about the comScore numbers is how little difference there is between the top three site networks. Yahoo is 178.8 million, followed by Google with 178.5 million and Microsoft has 176.7 million. Facebook still has a ways to go to catch up, but it’s continuing to grow tremendously, hitting 153 million last month, way ahead of AOL’s 110 million uniques.

On the advertising front, Facebook’s strength showed itself elsewhere as it crossed into comScore’s top 10 for the first time in January with a 72.3-percent reach.

Looking towards the end of the comScore top 50 most visited sites, Huffington Post, a relatively new entrant to list was at 41, while Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX). hit 44. Release