There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

The partnership, which comes a year after a similar deal between Flipboard and the New York Times, will grant full access to FT subscribers while casual visitors will be able to read a smattering of FT blog posts and cultural stories.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, said by phone that the deal will involve the FT and Flipboard sharing advertising revenue, but would not disclose what the exact revenue split is. In the past, the ad splits have been a source of contention for some publishers, including Condé Nast, which pulled back its advertisements from titles like New Yorker and Wired. (A Flipboard spokesperson said the company has an “excellent relationship” with Conde and is partnering on ads for six other titles).

Grimshaw also said that the FT is exploring selling subscriptions through Flipboard, and would be willing to share some of the proceeds with the platform. This is significant because the FT made waves by leaving iTunes in part due to the 30 percent commission (or “vig,” as the Brits call it) that Apple takes from every publisher.

So why is the FT willing to partner up with Flipboard so soon after leaving Apple? Grimshaw says the difference lies in how the two platforms treat customer relationships.

“The issue is not so much a percentage, it’s the relationship between publisher and audience. Paying a 30 percent finder’s fee is okay. Paying 30 percent in perpetuity and not knowing who the customer is not okay.”

The Flipboard partnership also reflects the fact that the FT and other publishers are keen to get their stories in as many places as possible at a time when readers are consuming more and more content on mobile. As for the future role of Flipboard, which some describe as a “giant iceberg” in the way of publishers, Grimshaw had this to say:

“I think the really interesting aspect to the platform is the way they’re giving readers the ability to create a bespoke user experience. I personally think this is going to be a strong strand in publishing and consumption of news in the digital space.”

Correction: This article was updated at 2:40pm to state that Conde Nast titles had pulled ads from certain titles; Conde did not, as previously stated, break off the relationship.

Abramson is familiar with working on major news events, including 9/11, but said her primary concerns were different this time.

“In Boston, what was first and foremost was making sure our standards were understood,” Abramson said at the Wired Business conference in New York City on Tuesday.

Abramson said that, for major stories in the past, the only focus was the next day’s paper. This time around, she was preoccupied with ensuring that no one at the paper seized on one of the many thinly sourced rumors flying around on social media.

Abramson, speaking with Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dedich, also addressed other recent trends in media, including a popular marketing trend.

“Native advertising seems to be for the conference set. It’s the buzz word of 2013,” she said, pouring cold water on a term popularized by BuzzFeed and others.

Abramson spoke of the “months and months and months” of effort that went into producing the NYT’s Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” but didn’t address how the paper will fund such projects in the future. She did note, though, that technical virtuosity isn’t enough for great journalism.

“I think that what a new editor needs first and foremost, and this sounds old-fashioned, is that gut sense of what’s a great NYT story.”

The discussion didn’t touch on a widely panned Politico report that Abramson was losing the newsroom, but did address her role as first female executive editor of the Times. She said that there was no point being the first woman in anything if there wasn’t going to be a second, but said she was pleased with overall gender roles at the Times.

The videos will air each Monday at the NYT’s baby boomer blog, “Booming,” and on Retro Report’s website. Each will be 10 to 15 minutes long and accompanied by a story by NYT reporter Michael Winerip. The first one, “The Voyage of the Mobro 4000,” looks at the garbage barge of 1987.

The NYT lifted the paywall from all of its video content a couple of weeks ago.

Winerip notes some of the upcoming topics that the documentaries will cover:

“In a coming Retro Report on crack babies — infants born to addicted mothers — we learn that warnings in the 1980s about these children being damaged for life were not supported by the research of the time or by more recent studies. We meet a former crack baby who is now a successful college graduate, with a family of her own. Another video examines the story of Tawana Brawley and her chief supporter, Al Sharpton, who put forth a story of racial violence that turned out to be false and hurt many innocent people. There are video reports on the Tailhook military sexual abuse scandal and the Y2K panic.”

Retro Report was founded earlier this year by Christopher Buck, a former TV editor and heir to the Subway sandwich chain. Kyra Darnton, a former 60 Minutes producer, is managing editor.

With that kind of backdrop, seeing either the founders or their service as playing even a small role in the future of news may seem like a deranged Silicon Valley fantasy, but there is something interesting in what RapGenius is trying to do — and not just because Andreessen Horowitz invested so much money in it. And it’s also worth noting that at this point in the evolution of media, no idea is too bizarre or outlandish to be dismissed out of hand.

Crowdsourcing through annotation

The idea that crowdsourced annotation of some kind could be part of how news-gathering evolves isn’t entirely crazy. Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a post recently about RapGenius in which he wondered whether annotation could take the place of comments, a format that is becoming less and less useful all the time. And other services are also experimenting with annotation in interesting ways — including former Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ Medium, which launched a similar feature that allows writers to collaborate with readers.

It’s easy to see how this could turn into a disaster, of course: just take the usual ad hominem attacks and trollish behavior that occurs in the comments on YouTube videos and multiply by the number of news articles. The Reddit thread where users tried to identify the Boston bombers seems to have soured many journalists on that site as a vehicle for crowdsourced journalism of any kind (although I have tried to argue that this is unfair and short-sighted).

Obviously, anyone experimenting with this approach would have to find a way of moderating these kinds of contributions — either via human editors, or through a reputation system like the one RapGenius uses, which is similar to the way communities such as Slashdot work. And this approach can clearly produce value: Wikipedia seemed like a bizarre idea to begin with too, and yet it has produced better-quality content than teams of experts who were paid for their work.

I will confess that when I first saw examples of RapGenius annotation, such as the posts that Marc Andreessen has contributed to or the letter to shareholders that Groupon founder Andrew Mason wrote, I thought it was a neat gimmick but nothing worth spending much time on. There have been other attempts at adding annotation layers to the web (including Andreessen’s own attempts at Netscape), and all of them have failed miserably. And of course it’s entirely possible that RapGenius will fail as well — in fact, it’s more likely than not.

New things often seem ridiculous

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be worth exploring this idea, instead of writing it off as ridiculous. And part of what influenced me was a reminder from Dustin Curtis of how many new things seem to be underwhelming — or outright crazy — and yet go on to become substantial and interesting, and valuable. Certainly Twitter falls into that category for me: I thought it was an inconsequential amusement, and yet it has done more to change the world of journalism than any single invention since the telephone.

As venture investor Chris Dixon (who is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz) has said, channelling disruption expert Clay Christensen, the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy.

What would happen if the New York Times or Washington Post implemented something like RapGenius, and allowed annotations on top of the text? They might start with approved commenters or loyal readers, or those with some expertise in the topic, rather than encouraging a free-for-all. But the principle at work is the same as that driving any pursuit of “networked” or “open” journalism: namely, the idea that there are people out there who know more than you do.

How we allow that to occur is the only real question, not whether it will occur — because it is happening, whether journalists like it or not. Is RapGenius one way of doing that, or is it a sideshow that will ultimately prove to be worthless? We have no way of knowing until we try it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

Last summer, the news organizations published stories that described the billions in wealth held by the family of the Chinese premier. In response, China shut down the Times’ Mandarin news service, blocked its English website and denied visas to journalists. The government also blocked Bloomberg‘s consumer-facing websites, bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek – a block that remains in place today.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent event in Washington on Friday, Bloomberg’s Chief Content Officer, Norman Pearlstine, explained the decision to publish.”We would lose our credibility [if we didn't],” said Pearlstine. He added that, in China, “information is perceived as belonging to the state” and said he doesn’t anticipate this view changing in the near future.

Bill Keller, a former editor-in-chief and current columnist for the New York Times, echoed Pearlstine’s views that news publishers can’t rationalize censorship by saying they would lose money and influence in China. ”They can make life miserable for you,” Keller said of the Chinese government, adding that “this will cost money.”

There may, however, be a bright side to being shut out of China. According to Keller, many Chinese are aware that the Times and Bloomberg deliberately took a financial hit to preserve their brands — and in the long run, this will earn them loyalty and trust.

Keller and Pearlstine spoke on a panel with media executive Mark Whitaker and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, at a Google “Big Tent” event about security and free speech in the digital age.

Overall advertising declined 11.2 percent — 13 percent in print and 4 precent in digital — from the same quarter a year ago, while circulation revenues rose 6.2%. As in previous quarters, the company did not break out how much of this increase was the result of digital income versus increases in the price of its print products.

The Times’ total number of digital subscribers, a figure closely watched by investors and media observers, rose from 668,000 to 708,000 across the company. This number includes totals from the International Herald Tribune and soon-to-be-sold Boston Globe.

The company also announced a “new strategy for growth,” in which CEO Mark Thompson says the Times will begin offering lower-priced products to attract a broader paying audience. The release suggests the company will begin breaking out certain speciality segments like food and travel as standalone paid offerings. A few bullets:

• “A lower-priced paid product designed to allow access to The Times’s most important and interesting stories in a convenient, media-rich package for consumers looking for an efficient way to stay informed.”

• “Other new products, also at lower price points, that would offer deep access and additional content and other new features in specific content areas such as politics, technology, opinion, the arts and food.”

The Times will discuss the results and the new strategy on an 11:00 AM ET earnings call. We will post highlights from the call.

Among those questions are the following: Are people going to pay directly for content? Is native advertising going to subsidize media? Does sponsored content raise ethical issues for media companies? Are individual creators going to succeed by connecting directly with their audiences or by striking deals with existing media entities? And as far as I can tell, the answer to all of these questions is the same: Yes. And no. That may not seem very helpful, but I think it is.

You have to try everything

At one point during the panel on monetization — which also included Richard Tofel from ProPublica, Raju Narisetti from News Corp. and Bob Bowman from Major League Baseball — Atlantic Media president Justin Smith said that his organization didn’t really have a single answer to the question of how to monetize content, because it was more or less trying everything it possibly could (which is one of the reasons why I have said Atlantic is one of the media companies worth watching).

(L to R:) Richard Tofel, President, ProPublica; Justin Smith, President, Atlantic; Raju Narisetti,SVP and Deputy Head of Strategy, News Corp; Bob Bowman President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

For the Atlantic, that means experimenting with sponsored content (despite its potential pitfalls, which were highlighted during the Scientology incident) as well as doing live events, and introducing a premium offering — which Smith wouldn’t provide much detail about but is supposedly coming soon. As he put it:

“To say that the ad model is going to win over the pay model is foolish. I think the solution will be multiple revenue streams, it will be how experimental, how creative you are in seeking out those revenue streams… we must try everything. And we must not believe that one thing is going to work over the other until we actually experience it and see it over a period of time.”

The future isn’t going to be one model

Even just on that panel, we had almost every model represented, with ProPublica — which is built on a donation model, one that Dick Tofel believes will be replicated in dozens of states and cities, in the same way most metropolitan areas have symphonies or ballet troupes — and the Atlantic, and then News Corp. with its variety of hard and soft paywalls, and MLB with its app-based and content-focused strategy. Bowman said everyone should have some form of pay model, because why not give your hardcore fans a way to pay you for what they value?

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The “blogging superstar” panel also had a variety of models, none of which was obviously better than the other. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings said that she didn’t even think of herself as a business — she wrote “for an audience of one” and was happy to get whatever donations she could get. Andrew Sullivan has famously bet his future on a direct-to-reader model, but he also said he isn’t opposed to advertising either (although he is adamantly opposed to native advertising). And Andrew Ross Sorkin says he is happy to continue building a personal empire of sorts within the New York Times.

Maybe that in itself is enough of a valuable insight, at least for now: that the future of media isn’t going to be one thing, or even a couple of obvious things — there is no one-size-fits-all solution (if there ever was) and waiting around for one to appear is a mug’s game. At least for the foreseeable future, the landscape of digital media is going to be a form of loosely organized chaos, with everyone trying whatever they can. As Clay Shirky said about newspapers two years ago, this chaotic environment is actually beneficial, because we need to try everything in order to figure out what works.

Note: You can find streaming videos of each of the major sessions at paidContent Live in this post, and links to transcripts of those sessions in this post, as well as a roundup of our live-blogging of the event.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Mark Strozier and Albert Chau

The free videos, which can be viewed on all desktop and mobile devices, are for now being sponsored by Acura and by Microsoft.

“We have a desire to grow and invest in our video content,” said NYT executive vice president Denise Warren in a phone interview. “Part of the reason we’re doing this is because we’re already distributing on other channels like YouTube. Since it’s already available [...] it seems inconsistent to keep it behind the gate.”

Warren added that the Times is still in the process of ramping up its video strategy but that its eventual plan is to build franchises around brands associated with the paper. One hypothetical example she cited is the Times’ “36 Hours” travel column. Prominent writers may also become video brands (bloggers like Nate Silver seem likely candidates, though Warren refused to name names).

The plan comes at a time when newspapers like the Times and the Wall Street Journal are still learning how to translate their famous brands into a video format. The task is a challenge because the bulk of their editorial staff consists of text-based journalists who don’t necessarily possess the aptitude or charisma for video. In response, the Times has so far adopted a go-slow approach, producing about 60 short videos a week, though Warren says streaming rates took off during the November election and have remained high.

Warren suggested the Times‘ video output will go into high gear in response to the extra advertising investment, and the February arrival of Rebecca Howard from the Huffington Post, who occupies the new position of general manager of video production.

The Times’ decision to offer unlimited video is intriguing because it will test the paper’s ability to master the format, but also because it contrasts with the company’s recent efforts to make its paywall less porous. In recent months, for instance, it has blocked easy tricks that let readers circumvent the article limit.

Here’s a recent example of the Times’ video efforts:

There was much talk about both aspects of this ongoing evolution at the conference, from people like star blogger Andrew Sullivan and Tumblr founder David Karp to investor Ken Lerer and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. What follows are just some of the key lessons or moments that struck me as significant during the show (you can also read our live coverage of each session and watch livestreams of each panel as well).

Paywalls vs. open journalism:

During my interview with him, one of the key points that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made was that there is a very clear tension between the efforts by an increasing number of newspapers to erect paywalls — in order to bolster their revenue — and the philosophical approach to journalism that sees openness and interactivity with readers as a cornerstone of what journalism has become. As Rusbridger put it:

“It is journalism that wants a response. It is journalism that is itself responsive. It is journalism that doesn’t just sit on the web as though it has no connection with the web, that acknowledges that the web is the most extraordinary revolution in publishing where lots of people will be publishing extremely worthwhile and informative information. And so you can produce better things by not ignoring it or building a barrier between yourself and that but incorporating it and linking to it.”

The many different flavors of paywall:

Much of the discussion that took place on the monetization panel — which featured Dick Tofel of ProPublica, Justin Smith of Atlantic Media, Raju Narisetti of News Corp. and Bob Bowman of Major League Baseball — was about the myriad ways in which media companies can charge for their content. Bowman argued that every media company should be charging its users, even if it is through some kind of “pro” version, and Smith announced that The Atlantic will soon be launching a content offering related to the magazine that will be subscription only, although he didn’t say what kind of content it would be.

Narisetti also talked a bit about his vision of a “reverse paywall,” which focuses more on membership benefits that readers could accumulate based on their engagement with a site — although Bowman said he thought this would just encourage readers to click on ads or perform other tasks in order to get something for free, and that advertisers would quickly see through this gaming and not be interested in advertising around it. Smith also pointed out that The Atlantic‘s event business produces a lot of revenue for the company, and therefore decreases the need for a strict paywall.

No one can agree on sponsored content:

On the panel that focused on the increasingly blurry line between editorial content and advertising, Felix Salmon of Reuters challenged Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed, Kyle Monson of Knock Twice and Forbes chief operating officer Lewis D’Vorkin to define their terms — but the panelists spent most of their time debating whether “native advertising” of all kinds is inherently unethical or duplicitous in some way (the view held by Andrew Sullivan, who has railed against the phenomenon).

Steinberg maintained that the conventional wisdom that says average readers are confused — and in some sense misled — by sponsored content is hogwash, and that this is essentially a lie perpetrated by traditional media entities who continue to rely on banner advertising for their revenue. According to the BuzzFeed president, banner ads are a dying medium, and some form of sponsored content is the only real alternative. Monson, however, argued that if native advertising becomes too ubiquitous, readers will begin to ignore it the same way they currently ignore every other form of advertising.

Independence is a doubled-edged sword:

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

One of the highlights of the conference for many (including me) was a panel composed of superstar bloggers and authors Andrew Sullivan, Maria Popova, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Tim Ferris. Sullivan has famously bet his livelihood on going direct to his readers for financial support — although he maintained that he is not anti-advertising, as some have assumed. He said he is dedicated to that approach even to the point of not taking a salary until he can prove that the model works, and that he values his independence and his direct relationship with readers over the comfort of working for a large media entity.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, by contrast, has been able to build a fairly large team and business model for himself inside the New York Times — even though he could probably (or theoretically) have created something similar, and more independent, on his own. Sorkin said that his interest in remaining inside a large media entity stems in part from the resources it puts at his disposal, and partly from his commitment to the brand itself, since the paper took a large bet on him years ago when he created DealBook.

There was a lot more to the conference that I haven’t even touched on here — including a startup showcase featuring new platforms like Circa and Branch, a panel on the use of algorith-driven personalization with Mark Johnson of Zite and Aria Haghighi of Prismatic, a great look at the future of books with Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Evan Ratliffe of Atavist, a discussion between Om and John Borthwick of Betaworks, and an interview with the architect of Aereo’s ongoing disruption of cable.

Thanks to all those who attended and to all of our speakers as well.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Albert Chau