Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has sold off its $38 million stake in newspaper publisher Gannett Company and purchased $23 million worth of shares in the Dish Network, according to SEC filings. CNN Money notes that Berkshire Hathaway remains the largest outside shareholder in the Washington Post, which Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently acquired for $250 million.

The app represents a big bet on technology by parent company Gannett which, like other newspaper chains, is on borrowed time as it tries to solve the digital dilemma before its traditional print ad earnings collapse once and for all.

The company’s gamble comes in the form of a bespoke content management system that lets editors tailor content specifically for a mobile audience rather than simply slinging content from the USA Today website. In practice, this means shorter and snappier headlines and choosing hard news stories in the morning and then more visual, feature-like fare for later in the day. The move coincides with a mass reader migration to smartphones and tablet devices.

“We’re starting to think of these as products that should be actively programmed rather than taking things that were produced for another medium,” said Gannett’s Chief Digital Officer, David Payne. He added the process gives USA Today editors more levers to pull in serving mobile content and interjects a new human element to the curation process.

As for the app itself, it’s attractive but hardly a knockout compared to the mobile sites of digital natives like The Verge or the Atlantic’s Quartz:

And then there is the revenue question.

The market for online display ads is suffering from a supply glut and collapsing prices, meaning publishers like USA Today must find other revenue sources and find them soon. Payne says video ads, which pay much better, will be a cornerstone of the site’s approach to expanding its ad offerings. Specifically, the plan is to intersperse more videos among USA Today‘s text and photo content — a plan that will be easier given Gannett’s multiple broadcast properties.

Finally, Gannett’s 80 or so regional newspapers will be plugged into the new content management system, meaning it will be easier to pluck and share content from across the USA Today and other sites. The regional papers are also part of a major paywall experiment in which Gannett is testing which paywall schemes work best in various places. These opportunities for scale and curation may let Gannett unlock other business opportunities.

Overall, Gannett came into the digital era with a weak hand. But sound management (the company is posting respectable numbers) and bold bets on tech like this one could help the USA Today enjoy a second act in coming years.

Ongo was founded by former eBay and PayPal exec Alex Kazim and aimed to aggregate news while charging for some content from big newspapers. NYTco’s Martin Nisenholtz described Ongo as a “Hulu of news.” But as Nieman explains, the pricing scheme was confusing:

A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post and USA Today — but only “Top Stories” from Reuters, “Selected Content” from the Financial Times, and “Picks” from The New York Times. If you wanted to add more publications beyond the core offerings, those came at significantly varied prices — 99 cents a month for Slate, Salon, or Engadget; $3.99 for the Christian Science Monitor; $9.99 for the Chicago Tribune or The Miami Herald; either 99 cents or $14.99 a month for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, depending on how much of it you wanted; and so on.

Some of the content that Ongo charged for was free on the publisher site. And to further complicate things, the New York Times launched its own paywall in March 2011, just a couple months after Ongo opened for business. At launch, Ongo charged $6.99 per month for a subscription; that cost was later lowered to $1.99, but it wasn’t enough to save the site.

Ongo’s closure leaves RR Donnelley’s Press+ as the largest standing paywall solution, with around 350 publications using the service. Press+ cofounder Gordon Crovitz recently proclaimed to the Wrap, “Paywalls won’t save news publishing by themselves, but…it’s the single biggest new source of revenue for papers.” But Ongo’s failure suggests paywall implementation may be best left to individual papers — and that readers don’t want to pay for an aggregation site.

The paper announced the changes today. Website visitors will be able to read 15 stories per month for free before the paywall kicks in. They will be charged an introductory rate of 99 cents for the first four weeks; thereafter, the paper will charge $1.99 per week for a website-plus-Sunday-print-edition package and $3.99 per month for website access only. The LA Times says the digital subscription also includes “retail discounts, deals and giveaways.”

Kathy Thomson, president and COO of the LA Times Media Group, says the company “priced the digital subscription with the Sunday newspaper at a lower rate because they are complementary products.”

Access to the paper’s website through mobile phones and tablets remains free for now, but that will change in the future.

In a cost-cutting move, a new weekly lifestyle section launching March 10, “Saturday,” will combine the health, food and home sections, and “those sections will phase out as stand-alone portions of the paper by March 3 but will remain available online.”

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the LAT has an average daily circulation of 572,998 (down 200,000 from two years ago, says the LAT) and the website has 34.8 million unique monthly visitors.

In its coverage of the changes, the LA Times includes some info on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which added a paywall last month: The paper has sold 8,800 digital subscriptions, 75 percent of those to customers who live outside the Milwaukee area but want Green Bay Packers coverage.

Gannett (NYSE: GCI) announced Wednesday that it hopes to earn $100 million by adding metered paywalls to the websites of all 80 of its papers except USA Today.

Gannett announced its plan late this morning as part of an “Investor Day” event at which the company presented a new strategy that it says will result in a stable debt structure and sizable dividends.

Gannett’s $100 million gambit is based on slapping subscription requirements on every one of its 80 community news websites, including their related mobile platforms. On a morning call with investors, CEO Gracia Martore said the plan was grounded in the public’s strong desire for local news and in readers’ longtime trust in Gannett’s papers. The company’s community papers include titles like the Reno Gazette-Journal and the Hattiesburg American.

Newspapers across the country have been dabbling in paywalls of one sort or another for the last two years, but Gannett’s initiative is the biggest across-the-board implementation to date. (Incidentally, Gannett prefers “new content subscription model” to “paywall”; the company is right to plump for a new, positive term — but I’m not sure this chunky phrase is a winner).

A Gannett representative told me this afternoon that the company has already been experimenting with paywalls for three community papers and that it will immediately expand that to six others, including ones in small markets (St. Cloud, Minn.), medium ones (Poughkeepsie, NY) and large ones (Wilmington, DE). By the end of the year, Gannett will have some type of paywall in place in all 80 markets.

Gannett will also taper its pricing and paywall strategy to each individual market — meaning that issues of pricing, bundling and meters will be determined on a paper-per-paper basis. This seems like a smart strategy — not only will the company have a chance to implement an optimal formula for each paper, but it will also acquire a wealth of price and marketing data.

Still, there are some wildcards here. These include Gannett’s capacity to develop and scale mobile and tablet applications for all of its properties. According to the company:

The plan is to have all markets have the same suite of apps – over time. The local community digital suite will be rolled out on a common architecture, but will, of course to locally “branded” – logos, etc. So the look and feel and operability will be the same, but the experience will look/feel “local”.

The project’s success will also turn on reliable revenue from Gannett’s legacy print papers. The company plans to build out its digital empire only through existing cash flow, so the scheme could hit a wall if print revenues fall faster than Gannett’s prediction of a “secular decline in the single digits.”

There is also the question of advertising. While the company’s $100 million prediction is based on new subscription revenues alone, this amount could be offset if paywalls cause online ad revenues to significantly decline. Finally, like the rest of the content industry, Gannett will have to find out if real mobile ad revenue will ever arrive or if it will remain a ‘just-around-the-corner’ promise that doesn’t materialize.

The company’s flagship paper, USA Today, is not part of the scheme. Forbes notes this is likely because the publication relies on a ubiquitous distribution strategy.

The company’s presentation this morning also described new digital marketing initiatives and the expansion of its sports-related properties.

The market seemed to approve of Gannett’s plans. The company’s stock rose over four percent while the larger market was flat.

Gannett posted earnings of $0.49 a share for the fourth quarter, compared to $0.72 a share for the same quarter one year ago. Analysts had predicted earnings of $0.68.

The company noted that its earnings would have been $0.72 a share if it excluded special items. These included expenses related to the unexpected departure in October of its CEO due to health reasons and writedowns related to brands whose market values have diminished due to poor performance.

Advertising revenue from Gannett’s newspapers, including flagship USA Today, continued to decline as sales of real estate and legal ads were particularly soft. Overall advertising revenues in the publishing sector were $670.7 million in the quarter, compared to $722.3 million in the fourth quarter last year, a 7 percent decline.

Gannett’s broadcasting revenues, which have been a bright spot in recent quarters, also fell 14.2 percent in light of what the company says was weaker spending on political ads. This quarter, TV-related revenue was $199.8 million.

The most optimistic part of the report are Gannett’s digital operations, which are both profitable and growing. The company cited particularly strong results at its Career Building site as helping to drive $185 million in digital revenue last quarter, a 9.1 percent increase from a year ago. If digital revenues related to publishing are folded in, the company had digital revenues of $290.3 million for the quarter.

Gannett says its USAToday.com website and related apps are among the most popular on the web and that its consolidated domestic Internet audience share was 50.8 million unique visitors. It says its Newsquest product in the UK is also popular.

The numbers were announced prior to the market opening. Gannett’s stock fell has since almost five percent to $14.48 in morning trading while the general market was down less than one percent.

The company’s full release can be found here.

Gannett did not disclose the purchase price for Fantasy Sports Ventures, a property in which it acquired a minority share in 2008. But a 2010 report valued the company’s flagship site, The Big Lead, in the “low seven figures.”

Sports properties are hot items these days as a series of upstarts have emerged to challenge the 800-pound gorillas in the vertical, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Sports. The most successful new players include SB Nation and Bleacher Report, sites that rely heavily on local, often-unpaid contributors who are obsessed with individual teams and topics. The popularity of the sites suggests that sports readers are not put off by amateur or opinion-based reporting.

On its website, Big Lead Sports claims it was fourth in comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) sports rankings in July of 2010 with 17 million unique visitors. In its announcement, Gannett claims that all of the Fantasy League Ventures blogs — which cut across all major sports — received 19 million unique visitors.

Gannett says the combined property will place it into the top five of digital sports properties. The claim appears reliable based on this recent AdAge report which list USA Today’s Sports Media Group as the ninth most popular property with about 11 million unique views.

The acquisition is also a shrewd play for Gannett because it gives the company a big toehold into fantasy sports. The new property reportedly has 500,000 subscribers in a growing market that fantasy business site Rotobiz claims has 32 million participants.

More details about the acquisition can be found in the company’s press release.

USA Today’s new Kindle Fire app is further proof that publishers are taking separate approaches to the Kindle Fire, which will probably wind up as the best-selling Android tablet released over the past year, and other Android tablets like the Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab. “Part of USA TODAY’s mobile strategy is to be the first news source on emerging technologies. We develop and design our apps for each specific device to provide the optimum experience to our customers,” said Dave Hunke, president and publisher of USA Today, in a press release.

Although we still don’t know exactly how many Kindle Fires Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) has sold, Amazon’s holiday announcement that “millions” had been sold is probably enough to declare it the most successful Android tablet to date. We’ll see how many people actually enjoy using the device, but the volume has been enough to convince several publishers that they need to have a Kindle Fire-oriented app to reach those users intrigued by Amazon’s custom take on Android.

And as we’ve noted in the past, this is a problem both for Google’s Android tablet strategy as well as smaller publishers that don’t necessarily have the resources of USA Today to develop apps for every platform.

Here is the pitch to readers from digital director Mark Smith:

“If you’re a regular visitor you’ll notice a few changes; more contributors, improved layout, a new politics section and subscription! But don’t panic you can still read up to 10 articles a month for free, we’re just asking those of you who particularly enjoy our content to pay the small sum of £2.99 ($4.67) for 4 weeks access, just 11 pence a day.

“We think that’s tremendous value, value that will only be enhanced as we add sections and features to the site, bringing you more and more quality journalism by Scots and for Scots. Our ambition is simple: to provide the best and most comprehensive digital experience for anyone interested in what’s happening in Scotland.”

Just like The Times did in 2010, HeraldScotland.com is holding an introductory price of £1 ($1.57) for the first month to snag readers.

But, unlike The Times, HeraldScotland.com’s model is another porous wall, or metre, the result of which is to allow in casual readers whilst asking money of regular users.

HeraldScotland.com is the product of the websites of The Herald and Sunday Herald being merged in 2009.

Unique browsers were an average 49,793 per month in the first half of the year, compared with 38,959 a year earlier (source: ABC).

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