What did he get for this suggestion? Not one, but several cease-and-desist letters from the New York Times‘ legal department. This falls under the heading: “How to blow some free publicity.”

Cody Brown is the founder of a New York-based startup called Scroll Kit, whose software makes it easy for publishers to produce interesting layouts without having to do a lot of programming. When he saw the Snow Fall feature, he thought it was the perfect example of what his software could help media companies do, so he created a video showing how he replicated the design elements of the story.

An order to remove any mention of the NYT

In a blog post at Medium, the Scroll Kit founder explains what happened next: he got a “cease-and-desist” letter from the New York Times‘ legal department saying his video was an infringement of the newspaper’s copyright to the Snow Fall content, and demanding that he remove it.

This request isn’t that unusual. Media companies send these kinds of letters all the time — although, as Brown notes in his post, there is at least a chance that using the newspaper’s content in the way he did would be covered by the “fair use” exemption, since it didn’t compete with the original NYT content and was arguably transformative. But since he didn’t have the resources to fight such a case, he made the video private and assumed that would end the matter.

Instead, he got a second letter saying that marking the video as private was “not acceptable to The Times” and that it had to be removed from YouTube and any other site. Not only that, but the NYT lawyer said that Brown had to “remove any reference to the New York Times from your website,” (boldface added by me for emphasis) including a line about how the newspaper had spent hundreds of hours building Snow Fall but it took him an hour to recreate.

It’s not infringement, it’s a tribute

As Brown discusses in his post, the first of these requests is debatable but arguably fair, since he used the entire New York Times feature rather than just an excerpt. But the second letter goes above and beyond any fair interpretation of copyright law and tells the Scroll Kit founder that he needs to remove any reference to the NYT from his website. This is absurd, of course, and not even remotely reasonable, despite attempts by people like Paul Carr to argue that it is.

@mathewi @robmillis I'm not glossing over it, I'm saying in context it's a perfectly reasonable request.—
Paul Carr (@paulcarr) May 22, 2013

Nilay Patel, a copyright lawyer who writes for The Verge, told the Poynter Institute that the order to remove any reference to the newspaper was “based on nothing more than a sense of moral outrage” — which just makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. And a third response from the NYT’s legal department reinforces the point, by asking Brown to “use another publication to advertise your infringement tool.”

As I (and others) tried to explain in a Twitter debate with Carr, this completely misunderstands what Scroll Kit is, or the purpose of showing how Snow Fall could be replicated using it. The software isn’t “an infringement tool” any more than a piece of HTML design software like Dreamweaver is an infringement tool. All Brown was hoping to do — as I see it — was to pay tribute to the New York Times feature, and suggest that other publishers could do something similar (the CJR has pulled together most of the conversation, if you’re interested).

Unless the New York Times is arguing that it is a crime to even attempt to duplicate the look of Snow Fall by other means (which, as David Holmes pointed out, doesn’t require Scroll Kit but can be done with readily available Javascript libraries) then all it has done is made the newspaper look churlish and unable to take a compliment — and fairly clueless about software to boot.

Note: The New York Times responded to our request for a comment by saying: “We fully support innovation, but we prefer that this developer use his tool to create original material instead of appropriating our content, copyrighted content that was conceived and created entirely by Times journalists.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Hans Gerwitz and Eva Blue

It would be wise not to read too much into those McKinsey numbers, however: virtually all of the available evidence shows media consumption in print continues to decline, particularly with younger audiences, and as a result advertising revenue is disappearing as well. Media companies need to adapt to that fact, rather than trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

According to a post by Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute, the research came from a presentation by McKinsey principal Michael Lamb at a recent conference of the International News Media Association in New York. Lamb said that based on data from a number of sources, about 35 percent of the time consumers spend on news consumption is devoted to newspapers and magazines, while TV accounts for about 41 percent and smartphones and tablets account for only about 2 percent.

In other words, the research seems to show that while digital devices account for more than half of the total time that consumers spend with media in general — and about 10 times more than the amount of time they spend with newspapers and magazines — the amount of time they spend with “legacy” platforms expands dramatically when looking specifically at news consumption.

Time spent is not the only important metric

Although Edmonds notes that there isn’t much research out there to confirm McKinsey’s conclusions (apart from a Nieman Journalism Lab post in 2009 that saw Martin Langeveld try to dig into some readership numbers for newspapers), he says that other researchers he contacted thought that the numbers were probably “not far off” — in part because of the “lean back” form of consumption that print media involves, where users often spend hours with a cup of coffee and a paper.

Edmonds also argues that encouraging advertisers to look at these kinds of time-spent numbers might help newspapers and magazines improve their appeal, since time spent is a big factor in where advertisers spend their money. As he puts it:

“The time-spent metric suggests that there is more life in legacy formats than raw audience numbers and falling print ad revenues would imply. Since the ‘dying industry’ meme is part of print’s problem with advertisers, this could be incorporated in a case for the medium’s continued relevance.”

Unfortunately for publishers who might see this as reason for unbridled optimism, however, Edmonds goes on to note that the time-spent numbers “do not solve the basic advertising problem of vanished monopoly pricing power and strong competition from a wide range of targeted digital marketing options,” and that while users may spend less time overall with digital platforms when consuming the news, these shorter digital sessions “may be a more efficient way of consuming news.”

For most, the news occurs elsewhere

I think Edmonds puts his finger on one major problem: namely, the fact that for many news consumers, the “lean back” experience simply isn’t necessary any more. As research from the Pew Center has shown, large numbers of consumers are getting their news from aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News — or possibly from newer solutions such as Prismatic and Circa and Flipboard — because they don’t have either the time or the inclination to go to a single newspaper source, or read in print. Is a lack of efficiency really a selling point for legacy print publications?

That’s not to say the “lean back” experience doesn’t still have value for many news and media consumers, but the other painful fact is that most advertisers aren’t specifically looking to advertise to news consumers — they want specific demographic segments or topic-specific shoppers, or other kinds of targeting that legacy publishers can’t offer, and they want engagement or “time spent” across a range of content types, not just news.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker has repeatedly suggested in presentations about the evolution of the digital-media marketplace, advertisers are moving to where the puck is going to be — not where it is now. And according to virtually all of the available evidence, even from McKinsey itself, that means mobile and social and other platforms, not print. Publishers can either try to convince advertisers that they are wrong about this move, or they can try to adapt to it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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

Friedman is no stranger to the vicissitudes of modern media — she was laid off as the editor of GOOD magazine last year, after the publication decided to pivot and become a kind of social network for user-generated content. But in her CJR piece, she describes how on a recent speaking tour she grew frustrated with the numbers of people complaining about a lack of jobs, a lack of money and the rise of short-attention-span media like Twitter:

“Again and again, I found myself playing the role of cheerleader, trying to convince tired and broke journalists to get excited about the future of media.”

There is far more good than bad

As the CJR columnist acknowledges, it can be hard to motivate journalists — or anyone in the field of media — when reports from research outfits like the Pew Center lay out in bald detail how the business model for much of what we think of as the mainstream media is rapidly disintegrating, with nothing obvious to take its place, and when the number of journalists employed in newsrooms is lower than it has been at any time since the 1950s.

But Friedman argues — I think fairly persuasively — that there are far more benefits available to journalists now than there have ever been, if they choose to see and make use of them. Among other things, she lists:

Reporters have more access to sources: Thanks to the web, social media and other tools, “it’s never been easier to find and reach out to anyone.” This is unequivocally true, especially with the number of potential sources who have their own blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc.

Consumers have access to more media: Your job may have been more secure in the past, Friedman says, but now if you have something to say you have the ability to reach a much larger group of readers, and they have much more choice (this is also one argument against paywalls, she says).

Journalists get more engagement: Reporters used to work for years with little or no response from or engagement with readers (which some no doubt preferred), but now you get more feedback than you could ever want. Says Friedman: “I know a lot of journalists hate this, but it’s a good thing.”

Chaos promotes creativity: When traditional paths to professional success are closed, Friedman argues, “those of us who love journalism so much we’d never give up are forced to redefine success – and our methods of seeking it.” And there are more routes to success than ever before.

Disruption also produces opportunity

To some, this may all have a certain Pollyanna-ish feel to it, but I think Friedman is right — and in many ways she is saying something similar to what Matt Yglesias at Slate argued recently, when he responded to the Pew Center report and said that in his view news consumers were better off than they had ever been (although many disagreed). Jay Rosen made a similar case for why the internet is good for journalism in a debate hosted by the Economist in 2011.

Yes, much of the traditional media business is in turmoil, and the road to profitability — or even survival, for some — is far from clear. And it’s easy to look at the chaos of social media and “citizen journalism” during something like the Boston bombings or Hurricane Sandy and assume that we are much worse off, both as journalists and as news consumers (an argument I have tried to counter). And there is no question that many bad things come with the good.

But as Friedman argues, that same chaotic environment is what produces new things, many of which may grow to become powerful and positive tools for journalism — in some cases better than the ones we have. It’s easy to succumb to the gloom, but the reality is that while disruption of the kind the media world is experiencing creates great upheaval, it also creates great opportunity.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Shutterstock / Feng Yu

The real bottom line is that until newspapers start coming clean about their readership — both to themselves and to their advertisers — they are going to continue to miss the forest for the trees.

The latest circulation gains for the NYT and others came courtesy of the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations), an industry group composed of advertising agencies and publishers. The group noted that the numbers are not really comparable to the previous year’s results for a number of reasons, including the fact that some newspapers have launched new subscription formats, stopped printing every day and so on.

Counting readers multiple times

As Edmund Lee at Bloomberg points out, the AAM survey — which is somewhat ironically locked behind a paywall — also allows publishers to count their readers multiple times, according to rules adopted recently by the group. In other words, newspapers can count someone who reads the newspaper in print, on the web and on their Kindle as three separate readers. But doesn’t this inflate their readership numbers unreasonably? It sure does. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the “real” readership numbers are for newspapers.

@mathewi @BGrueskin It's not *unduplicated* audience. Doesn't strike me as any more phony-baloney than "passalong" readership numbers.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

Some argue this has always been the case with newspapers, which is true: publishers have routinely engaged in all kinds of shady tricks to boost their circulation — including special discounts for bulk purchases by hotels and airlines and other giveaways, and even dumping large quantities into ravines or pulping them after printing. On top of that, many papers have inflated their readership numbers for years by claiming that each copy gets read by as many as five people, an estimate that borders on the ridiculous.

Newspapers need to come clean

This defence boils down to: “Newspapers have always done this, and no one believes these numbers anyway, so what difference does it make?” A pretty weak defense, you might argue — and you would be right.

@mathewi @BGrueskin That’s harder than it looks. We can’t even come up with web metrics we all agree on.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

The other line of defence is that online measurement is also chaotic and confusing at best, and that since websites can’t even agree on whose numbers are correct, why should newspapers be any different? It’s true that measurement of online traffic is murky, with providers like comScore often giving wildly inaccurate estimates when compared with a site’s internal numbers. But this is a little like saying newspapers don’t have to tell the truth because no one else does either.

If newspapers are competing with online publishers and digital-native content companies for both readers and advertising, which they clearly are, then they have to be better than their competition — being just as inaccurate is hardly helping their cause. And they should be spending a lot more time on trying to measure real engagement (repeat visits, time spent, etc.) than on simplistic and flawed vanity metrics like raw circulation numbers. That is a mug’s game.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

Photographer Will Steacy has released a somewhat painful photo essay that shows the paper’s dramatic decline. As Wired magazine describes, Steacy’s father worked at the Inquirer for almost 30 years until he and many others were downsized. The shrinking of the Inquirer‘s staff was just a microcosm of the much larger decline of the U.S. newspaper industry as a whole, with the number of full-time media employees now at its lowest level since 1978.

After its bankruptcy, The Inquirer moved its newsroom from the massive, 87-year-old, 526,000-square-foot headquarters known as the “Tower of Truth” in downtown Philadelphia to a single floor of a former department store near Chinatown. Steacy took photos of both the old newsroom and the new — and of everything in between, including most of the remaining staff, the paper’s old printers and the cluttered desks of various editors and reporters.

The new Inquirer newsroom looks like somewhere a high-school paper would be produced, not a newspaper that serves a city of 1.5 million. And Steacy tells Wired that when his father was laid off in 2011, he actually had to put the project on hold because it became too emotional for him. He believes — as many do — that the future of journalism is a question mark as great newspapers like the Inquirer continue to be downsized or even go bankrupt. As he puts it:

“The internet, for lack of a better metaphor, makes up the branches of the tree. But newspapers have centuries-long traditions of being the roots of the tree. If the roots of tree rot and crumble the rest of the tree will fall with it.”

Photos courtesy of Will Steacy

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

The NAA-Nielsen study surveyed 5,000 adults on “11 different metrics for engagement, including trust and ethics, how connected media makes people feel, the value or inspiration it adds to life, and the effectiveness of advertising.” On that measure, print and online newspapers came out on top:

Advertising in print newspapers and on their websites is also effective. The survey asked respondents about different metrics of advertising effectiveness, like “usually notice ads,” “likely to purchase” and “best place for Black Friday shopping.” The average score across all media was 35 percent, with newspapers a bit higher:

The NAA study, however, doesn’t address the fact that newspapers’ ad revenues are plunging. As my colleague Mathew Ingram reported recently, a different NAA survey showed that the U.S. newspaper industry has lost over $40 billion in print ad revenue over the last decade, and while papers’ digital ad sales rose slightly, it wasn’t nearly enough to compensate for the lost ad revenue. By that measure, the fact that audiences find newspaper advertising effective is only a small consolation.

It’s time to do more on mobile

The study suggests that “content publishers of all sorts should move as quickly as possible to connecting with users on mobile devices.” National newspapers are already doing this, with 43 percent of respondents checking a national newspaper on a mobile phone daily. Local papers, however, have a lot to make up in that area:

Tablets performed better: “Fully 44 percent of tablet owners said they accessed content from a national newspaper in the last week and 41 percent from a local newspaper, though here, too, social media ranked first (57 percent).”

Luckily, this appears to be an area where newspapers know they have to improve: A December 2012 survey from the Alliance of Audited Media found that 63 percent of newspaper and magazine publishers agree that “tablets are the most important digital channel for their publication’s future.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Ruggiero Scardigno

That’s one of the ideas contained in a new book from Nicco Mele, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School who acted as operations director for Howard Dean during his 2004 presidential race. In the book, entitled “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath,” the author looks at how the social web and digital technology in general have altered the balance of power between the individual and the organization. And in a recent piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Mele argues the same thing is happening to the media:

“Some news personalities now play a strong role on Twitter and Facebook, but they often get little institutional support for this, and such participation and engagement remain merely part of a narrow web traffic strategy. But what if news outlets decided to flip their model, so that the editorial staff was not subservient to the brand, but the ‘brand’ became a platform for talent?”

Embrace the trend or be disrupted by it

Although Mele doesn’t explicitly say so in his Nieman piece, the flipping of this model is already occurring, whether media outlets want it to or not — as I tried to point out in a recent post about the shifting balance of power. Where platforms like the New York Times and Newsweek used to hold all the cards, and individual writers were forced to cut deals in order to find an audience, bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo have shown there is an alternate route (one we’ll be discussing with Sullivan and others at the paidContent Live conference on April 17).

While Sullivan’s experiment as a standalone media entity is far from complete, he has raised over $600,000 to fund his team, which means he is well on his way to being self-sustaining, instead of just being a part of the content at The Daily Beast and subject to their broad paywall. And a big part of what Sullivan (and pioneers in other fields, such as musician Amanda Palmer) see as the benefit of this approach isn’t just the money, but the personal connection with an audience.

As Mele suggests in his piece at the Nieman Lab, many traditional media organizations not only don’t help their journalists make use of social tools to connect with their readers, they actively discourage it with restrictive social-media policies. But what if they tried to enhance that connection and build on it — and perhaps even tried to share in the monetization of it? They could even experiment with allowing readers to subscribe to individual writers. Says Mele:

“On Election Day 2012, more than 20 percent of NYTimes.com traffic visited Nate Silver’s blog. At the same time, his book had just been released. The Times had little role in Silver’s book. But imagine it had a big one; imagine the way it would open revenue possibilities, taking advantage of the giant platform the Times provided Silver. Publishing books, hosting events, and public speaking are just the beginning.”

Why not a personal paywall for writers?

This is the essence of the “personal paywall” that I tried to describe in a recent post: the idea that individual writers are what increasing numbers of readers are connecting with and seeking out — not impersonal media brands or institutions. Why not provide Nate Silver or Nick Kristof with as many tools and resources as possible to make that easier? The New York Times is clearly thinking along those lines, according to new executive editor Jill Abramson, but it would be nice to see that idea expand and accelerate beyond just a chosen few at one newspaper.

Instead of thinking of the newspaper as the pre-eminent brand, why not think of it more like a talent agency or a record label: an entity that gets its value from helping to develop and promote a variety of voices — in whatever way it can, across whatever platforms. Newspapers have always promoted their star writers, but any value captured has gone solely to the larger brand, the assumption being that those journalists should consider themselves lucky to have been chosen. But as Mele notes:

“Talented people — their voices, personalities, tastes and ultimately news skills and judgement — are the filters that digital era consumers want, not archaic, anonymous news brand names. With the decline of trust and loyalty in large institutions, it is increasingly hard to imagine people in the coming decades subscribing because of loyalty to an institutional Big Media entity. Yet it’s easy to imagine them wanting to fund several people whom they trust to bring them information they care about.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz, as well as Shutterstock / olyy and Shutterstock / Daniilantiq