Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

And I couldn’t walk away from the opportunity to be part of growing something new and vibrant. We were covering the economics of digital media while we were living it.

This summer, we celebrated paidContent’s tenth birthday. The topics we cover are as relevant today as they were then, and, as the evolution of digital media continues, it’s even more important to look beyond the endless launches and the shiny toys to what works, what doesn’t and how to do it better.

Thousands of posts, countless all nighters, numerous events ranging from our first mixer in Santa Monica to paidContent 2012, one funding round, two sales, and lots of great colleagues later, it’s time for me to take on new challenges.

It’s been a privilege to be part of paidContent and ContentNext Media, to work with Guardian News and Media, and then to help find a new home with GigaOM. So many people have helped along the way that I’m afraid to start with names for fear of leaving someone out — thank you all.

When we migrated to the GigaOM Network, I promised we would continue to bring you the same news coverage, smart reporting and insightful analysis of the rapidly evolving economics of digital content. My leaving won’t change that. Building something that doesn’t work without you is a hollow accomplishment. Instead, we built a team at paidContent that individually and collectively lives up to those goals every day — enhanced by the deep bench of journalists at GigaOM and everyone else who makes the journalism possible. Together they should be unstoppable.

As for me, this new phase starts now with my first chance in a very long time to take a deep breath. What’s next? Stay tuned.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a little addition to the GigaOM navigation bar: Europe.

That’s because from today we’re adding a new channel to the network that brings our coverage of European companies and issues into one place. The idea is to give Europe’s exciting companies and centers of innovation — important global cities like London and Berlin — the same sort of smart analysis, deep context, thorough reporting and insightful coverage that GigaOM gives to their American counterparts.

The fact is that Europe is home to a vibrant technology industry, with world-leading companies in mobile, digital media, cloud technology and e-commerce. We’ve been covering it increasingly over the past year, but now it’s time to bring it all together.

Our coverage here will be both wide and deep, ranging across our core subjects like startups, media, broadband, mobile and emerging technology, all from a distinctly European perspective.

So why now?

I’ve written before about how Europe has changed over the past few years, and a few months ago Om documented some of the exciting developments taking place.

Ultimately, we believe that not only is there an under-covered base of businesses in Europe, but there is also a new generation of international startups and digital companies being built here — and that the changes happening as a result of this shift deserve the kind of attention we can give it.

To get us there, I’m being joined by a fantastic team.

Robert Andrews, our senior editor, international, joined as part of the acquisition of paidContent earlier this year. Robert, who launched paidContent:UK in 2007, is a veteran with deep expertise, experience and insight. I think his view on the continent’s media businesses, and the disruption they face, is unparalleled — and I’m really excited that he’s part of our team now.

We’ve also hired David Meyer to report on the burgeoning startup scene in Berlin. David, who has been writing for ZDNet in the U.K. for the last few years, joined us a little over a month ago and has been taking on the task of covering his beat with gusto. We think we’re the first major technology site to have a real presence in one of the world’s greatest, most creative cities, rather than just parachuting in, enjoying a little clubbing and currywurst and then heading off again.

We’ll also be supporting our coverage with events, starting with Structure:Europe — the first transatlantic edition of our cloud computing conference — to be held in Amsterdam in October.

It’s going to be great, with top innovators from Europe and Silicon Valley joining GigaOM editors to debate topics such as big data, the cloud and global regulation. We’ve already got some visionary speakers lined up to take the stage, including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift; and JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at SalesForce. More speakers will soon be announced, and pre-registration is now open.

At the same time as doing all this, we will not be turning the European channel into a ghetto, separate from the rest of the GigaOM network. It is precisely because we believe the best European entrepreneurs and businesses can compete on a global basis, that we will be placing the bar for our coverage high.

You won’t find small funding announcements about me-too companies, and we won’t waste your time publishing scurrilous rumors. What you’ll get is our trademark coverage of the ideas, people and companies that are making this region such an exciting place to be right now.

The bottom line: if it’s important and it affects Europe, you’ll read it here.

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders — in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik — turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites — paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra — there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM.

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

Chen will sell bundles of DRM-free e-books under a pay-what-you-want plan; he imagines the average price of a bundle will be around $5 in most cases. He is modeling StoryBundle after “Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Rdio, Steam and indie game bundles” — particularly Humble Bundle for games — that “deliver content without having a bunch of physical stores get in the way.” Chen believes “making things easy to buy, easy to get and easy to consume will be the key to StoryBundle’s success. I just have to think about what I personally want as a reader, then do that.”

Chen didn’t give me many details on the kinds of books he’ll sell, though he said the first bundle is coming in “early spring.” He says he is “publishing [selling] in all genres” and plans “themed bundles of different genres down the line.” He did not elaborate on how many authors have signed up so far, but said “we have authors in various stages of being signed up.” He’s finding authors, he says, in “all the ways that you could imagine: Approaching them, recommendations, searching online, them approaching me, asking around, browsing lists, etc. The more books I can sift through, the higher quality the titles will be in the bundle.”

StoryBundle is most unorthodox in the way it charges for content and the way it pays authors. First of all, readers pay what they want for a bundle of e-books. Not only do they decide how much they want to pay, they decide which percentage of that payment they want to go actually go to the authors. That payment is split among all the authors in the bundle. They designate the remaining percentage of their payment “to charity and to keep the site running.” (Readers can choose to give 100 percent of their payment to the authors.)

Assuming that Chen’s correct that the average payment for a bundle is around $5, authors will receive low payments for their work. Let’s say a buyer decides she’ll pay $5 for a bundle of four books and designates that $1 of that to go to charity or the site. That leaves $4, and StoryBundle takes $2, leaving $2 to be split among the four authors. Correction: Chen told me that the authors split the $4. They each receive $1. That is more than an individual author receives selling an e-book for $0.99 on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (books priced under $2.99 get a 35 percent royalty, so an author selling an e-book for $0.99 makes $0.35) but on Amazon the $0.99 price is guaranteed, whereas at StoryBundle readers can pay what they want so authors don’t know how much they’ll make.

Since StoryBundle doesn’t require exclusivity, though* — authors can sell their individual e-books in other places too — authors may view it as an additional revenue stream. “It’s the philosophy of a whole being bigger and better than the sum of its parts,” Chen said. “Because these titles are bundled together, you’re getting added exposure, and all the aspects intrinsic to the bundle — lower price, higher promo value, more eyes on your work — makes it much better than going alone.” (It is unclear why a lower price is better for authors unless the assumption is that a lower price leads to higher total sales.)

What if someone wants to pay just a few cents for a bundle of e-books? “Existing game bundles allow people to pay barely anything, as in a few cents to ten cents,” Chen acknowledges. “I want to find a way to avoid this without compromising the ‘pay what you want’ too much, but I don’t know if there’s a way. That’s something I’m still looking into.”

For readers, Chen says, “the main service is that we pick quality books, and we offer them at a lower price than they would be paying if they purchased these titles separately. As someone who loves e-books, I’d love to know someone already vouched for the goodness of titles and that I can get them all at a deal. If you’re buying books separately from Kindle or other e-book stores, you’re relying on reviews — which are fine, but the discovery process is more difficult. Also, you’d end up paying more in the end.” Chen will also have “neat people” — more on that to be announced soon — help choose the books for the bundles.

A final note: It’s unclear how the Terms and Conditions of other etailers would handle bundles like this. Both sites reserve the right to drop the price of an e-book sold on their site to match its price on other sites. If a book is included in a promotion or given away for free at Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), for example, Amazon can (and will!) drop the price of that book to $0 in the Kindle Store. But Barnes & Noble and Amazon‘s TOS don’t say what they’ll do if an e-book is included in a bundle at another site and the price of that bundle varies based on what the buyer wants to pay. I’ve asked the companies for clarification.

This is the democratization of publishing, Wolf says. Indie book publishers have been around for awhile–and, of course, plenty of authors decide to go it on their own–but this could be the start of a trend of what I’ll call self-published publishers: People who come out of the business or tech world (where they were, perhaps, critics of traditional book publishing) and decide to try their hand at publishing the works of others. A good earlier example is Seth Godin, who launched his Manifesto digital imprint with Amazon.

Wolf said he’s “always been curious about the economics of digital content.” As an avid crime and thriller reader, publishing a book in that genre made sense. GigaOm CEO Paul Walborsky has long been a fan of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” principle, the idea that an artist needs 1,000 true fans, “who will purchase anything and everything you produce,” to succeed. Wolf believes that principle can be multiplied for a short story collection. “If you take a collection of mid-list fiction authors and put them together, you potentially have a culmination” of their thousand true fans, he said.

West Coast Crime Wave is edited by Wolf’s friend Brian Thornton; contributing authors include Terrill Lee Lankford, Steve Hockensmith and Naomi Hirahara, and many of those authors have previously published full-length books traditionally. Contributing authors were paid a flat fee for their work, and Wolf did not want to go into further details.

Book publishers have long attested that short story collections don’t sell; Wolf would respond they’re not trying hard enough. “Traditional publishers don’t do a lot of marketing for the midlist authors today,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re too busy trying to survive or they don’t have the budget.” I asked how he is marketing West Coast Crime Wave. “It’s not unlike politics,” he said. “I’m organizing and coordinating all the different authors and having them all communicate to their specific niches and audiences. I’m driving them to a common landing page and we created a book blog. We’re leveraging social media and talking to the press.”

In fact, many traditional publishers are doing the things that Wolf mentions, and it is a lot easier to do them for one title than it is for an entire list. Yet it’s true that, with limited marketing budgets, publishers often have to focus on the big titles, and smaller authors must pick up a lot of the marketing work themselves for a shot at success. A publisher of just one book can put a lot more time and effort into marketing that book.

Wolf is not going to be the publisher of just one book for long. He is now talking to East Coast crime writers for the next anthology. “I’d like to look at doing other genres, romance or horror,” he said. “In genre fiction, the readers are so voracious, it’s a ripe area to do things like this.”

The $6 million new round, led by Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures with existing investors Alloy Ventures and True Ventures taking part, will go toward a major expansion of its subscription research business and events, along with building its editorial ranks.

It’s the fifth round for the tech media company founded in 2006 by Om Malik.

The GigaOM Pro Analyst network already claims “dozens of Fortune 500 enterprise account” but hasn’t broken out total subscribers, though total website users are up 30 percent annually.

The Pro network numbers more than 100 independent analysts. The funding will grow that pool, and will go toward building a new technology platform for distributing the research itself. GigaOM says it will also start scheduling conferences in new areas and cities, including New York. GigaOM contributor Bobbie Johnson is going aboard full-time to build out the publisher in Europe.

“We have demonstrated that paid content (not paywalls) can work, as long as you can provide value to your community,” Malik writes. ” Just as we never positioned GigaOM to compete with traditional media outlets, I believe we are charting our own course with our GigaOM Pro research service. “And it is working. It is working so well that we really need to put more gas in the engine to grow it even faster.”

For GigaOM, this may have been an alternative to a straight sale. It brings in cash to grow the business further, with a B2B publishing investor on board.

The investment comes as the market for buying growing content sites hots up (well, at least for AOL). But, unlike TechCrunch, which has more of a mass-consumer slant, GigaOM is clearly ploughing a burrow as a business/professional publisher.

Reed Elsevier general partner Kevin Brown: “We only invest in media companies with the potential to become hugely profitable global companies, and GigaOM … is firmly in that camp.”

GigaOM expects Silmore’s experience in marketing business-oriented subscription products and ad-supported sites to help with its own push into subscription content. The San Francisco-based company added a $79 annual GigaOM Pro subscription last year.