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If I ever run into New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (unlikely as it might be) I will sure as hell let her know that she is absolutely right to be excited about what her paper did with Snow Fall, which in my opinion was one of the first truly post-tablet storytelling experiences. At the Wired Business conference in New York earlier this week, Abramson said:

“Snow Fall” is now a verb.  “Everyone wants to snowfall now, every day, all desks,” she said. Reporters are waiting for time to “Snow Fall” their bigger story.  She said that the story originated from the sports desk — and took “months and months and months” of time —  but Snow Fall-type projects can come from anywhere.

Snow Fall, in case you missed it, was a multimedia project that included a gripping six-part story by John Branch, one of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writers who was intrigued by the growing number of skiing fatalities. The stories were presented with interactive graphics, videos and bios of various snowboarders and skiers. It is brilliance personified and was rewarded with 2.9 million visits and 3.5 million page views within the first six days after publication. (The Times doesn’t reveal the total traffic it received since its release in December 2012.)

Snow Fall (and other such attempts) represent a great opportunity and the future for news organizations like The New York Times, especially as they are right now in a losing battle for attention with upstart competitors that include everyone from BuzzFeed to The Huffington Post. If you are the New York Times management, it is time to take a gamble: spend $25 million on creating 100 Snow Fall-like projects.

Money for something and clicks for free

In fact, it is important that our media brethren at the Times think even bigger than that, eventhough it would also mean taking a more prosaic, mercantile and business-like perspective to what they do.

They need to NOT think about Snow Fall as an add-on — as something that makes traditional content more web- or mobile/tablet-friendly — and instead treat it as a brand-new kind of media product that is created especially for the multiple device/many-screen world.

I have been involved with online publishing for a very long time — 18 years to be exact. And in that time I have seen the incumbent media make the same mistake again and again. They’ve often tried to adapt the content they’ve created for newspapers and magazines to the online world. And when they did embrace online, even then the online reporters were asked to do the same thing they did for the newspapers or the magazines.  (The Times, to its credit, published Snow Fall first online, and then in print three days later, which suggests it had a pretty clear understanding of the digital potential of a project like this.)

Yes Dorothy, the Internet is different

The internet is and will always be an immersive, interactive and communal platform. Many publishers continue to treat it like the old two-dimensional medium. Every time we have some major news events, such as the recent Boston tragedy, the social web brings the consumers of content into our newsrooms and makes them part of the process. It is one of the reasons why most of the big media still don’t get blogs. Sure, some writers like David Carr or Paul Krugman are an exception, but look at some of the Times blogs and you see they are just news stories (or features) retrofitted for the blog medium.

Federal agents descend on the home of a suspect-at-large in the Boston Marathon bombing. Getty Images

Blogging is a way of editing the world and presenting it to my community, and that means everything from photos, links, tweets and videos, in addition to sharing my raw thoughts and fully packaged features, scoops and even basic news. Every act of sharing tells you what I am interested in and what I am willing to learn and talk about.

There is a failure in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. It was one of the many reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily failed to impress me. It didn’t really invent a new form of storytelling for the tablet.

Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism — one that doesn’t sacrifice the best of our profession, but takes it by the scruff of its neck, and drags its bloated, aging body into the new world and revives it with a shot of adrenaline.

Mr. Excel meets Ms. Editor

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However, that is only part of the story. The trick is not to get married to just the oohs-and-aahs of the Snow Fall, but to think of it as a business opportunity, much like the way Hollywood studios creatively monetize their blockbusters. My question is why can’t newspapers and magazine companies take the same approach and build a business model that actually factors in various opportunities that something like Snow Fall can offer?

So instead of starting with a newspaper story and adapting it to different formats, the Times should start with the Snow Fall. If you look at Snow Fall closely, you can see a cohesive approach to content, one that adapts and morphs to not only the medium of access, but to diverse business models — much like the movies.

From my own experience at magazines, I can tell you producing features isn’t cheap and can easily cost tens of thousand dollars, depending on the publication. The longer the lead time and higher the profile of the story, the bigger the costs. So from that perspective, spending some more on the post-tablet version of the feature shouldn’t break the bank.

The current editorial effort is to create something for a day or two of attention in the newspaper and hopefully for tens of thousands of pageviews. Why not start with the apps and e-readers (both paid), then follow up with the web version and then get to the newspaper. While apps and selling e-reader-oriented content might involve the Times learning new tricks, the company doesn’t need to change much for the latter two channels.

Blame my enteprenurial tendencies, but when I was experiencing Snow Fall, all I could see was stunning brand-advertising opportunities, that went beyond the dumb, commoditized advertising the Times is forced to put on its website. Why not embed a tasteful Land Rover ad or throw in one for Moncler? That is native advertising that actually allows organziations like the Times to live by their ethos and maintain the fidelity of their brand.

Hollywood, Baby

Now, let me explain why the Times can do it. And for that I will point to Hollywood again. One of the reasons why Hollywood studios succeed with the multi-tier approach to their “product” is because they do their best to ensure that they create an optimum experience. And they can do that with the right story, the right stars, the right production values and, most importantly, they have distribution. And gobs of money.

The Times and other big media companies have a lot of those same capabilities. They have great stars (real people, for god sake, are better stars than anything Hollywood can produce — see the Cleveland samaritan), they have great storytellers (editors and reporters, whose Pulitzers are testimony enough) and they have the ability to create the right production values (photographers, visual artists and designers). The Times also has a big audience – 35 million monthly visitors to their website in the U.S. alone, according to comScore – which means it has a lot of attention, which can be channeled effectively to promote new concepts.

Distribution Matters

Just as blockbuster movies get a lot of attention from media, Snow Fall got a lot of attention from the rest of the media community. Those millions of monthly visitors and lots of advertising space on print means distribution isn’t really a problem. And despite the financial headwinds, many of them — including the Times — still have a lot of money to try and finance a few dozen Snow Falls.

It isn’t clear how much money the Times spent on Snow Fall, but let’s just assume it was a small fortune. (Yes, I asked them and got this response: “We can’t disclose details about costs. Really, this is a newsroom effort. The business side works with the newsroom, of course, to provide the infrastructure and technology they need to tell stories in innovative ways.”)

And in exchange, it got a few million page views, but I am guessing they also built a nice backend infrastructure to create more such projects. As a result, the next Snow Fall is going to cost less, with most future spending going to the creative: words, photos, other multimedia elements and design.

So what will the Times (or someone like them) need to get it done? Simply put, a departure from the incumbent thinking, embracing today’s reality and re-imagining the work flow of a big city newspaper. In other words:

• Re-imagining its business model to factor in the reality of today’s world and forget the legacy of newsprint.
• Create a new breed of “producer” who can switch between Excel and content.
• Create a whole new breed of a journalist — one who has old-school values but also the ability to tell a story that works in many mediums of today.
• Build an editorial creative machine that works differently from a print-centric editorial group.

Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is their stock in trade. If the New York Times management were feeling bold, it would put $25 million to work on creating 100 other Snow Falls and basically change the reader’s expectations of what long-form digital content and journalism are in the new century.

So if you want to fight BuzzFeed and HuffPo, there you go, Jill!

The Huffington Post already has international editions for Canada, the U.K., France, Spain, and most recently, Italy. A Japanese edition will launch May 7.

“More than any other German Publishing House, Tomorrow Focus has mastered its online transition and built a brand portfolio that is not only wide and deep, but reflects and complements The Huffington Post’s goals and core values,” Huffington Post CEO Jimmy Maymann said in a statement.

Betaworks has developed a model for these rapid launches and development cycles (100 to 150 days), and the company relies heavily on data to see if they stick in the marketplace. On Wednesday Betaworks launched Poncho, a super simple weather app; a couple weeks ago there was Giphy, a search engine for GIFs, which Borthwick said was so popular that 2 million users crashed the system when it first launched. Before that there was tapestry, a collection of mobile tappable stories.

But when Betaworks isn’t churning out its own content, it’s slicing, dicing, merging and mixing the content of others. One of the things that Betaworks is most famous for is its acquisition of the former social reading site Digg for a reported $500,000. Betaworks then merged it with some of the tools of its sluggish News.me creation.

Borthwick said that when the company bought Digg it had $250,000 a month worth of legacy costs, with $10,000 in monthly operating profits. Digg was jacked up and it had to pull out the needle, said Borthwick. After switching over to Amazon, building a new stack and relaunching with Betawork’s algorithms, Digg now costs closer to $20,000 a month to operate. “That’s the math of the cloud,” said Borthwick.

The overhaul seems to be working. The new Digg, and its users, are highly mobile-centric. Fifty percent of the traffic during the week and 55 percent on weekends comes from mobile traffic, said Borthwick. It was closer to 5 to 6 percent mobile before the relaunch. Digg now has a couple of million “active, rabid” users, said Borthwick. The Betaworks team pays particular attention to the amount of engaged users on Digg, which is high.

Attention is being fractured into a bipolar fashion, leading to condensed, fractional content on one hand and uber long-form content on the other. It’s Twitter vs House of Cards and Homeland, explained Borthwick. To build media companies and products in this era, you have to keep an eye on both, said Borthwick. To address that long form content market, Betaworks has created some tools over the past year around long-form story telling.

Not all of the innovation will come from newly launched media projects. Borthwick said he admires the work that Forbes and Bloomberg have done, as well as new media sites like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Upworthy.

CHeck out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

The plan in which 10 columnists received $2,000 to $36,000 each to write about Malaysia was carried out by Joshua Trevino, an opinion writer and the operation’s bagman. Trevino himself, who was a columnist for the Guardian until the paper dropped him in 2012 over conflict-of-interest issues, received $389,724 from the government of Malaysia.

The Malaysian government’s goal was to discredit Anwar Ibrahim, an opposition leader and the target of a politically charged sodomy trial that was decried by human rights groups.

The upshot is that prominent American media outlets printed propaganda from a semi-totalitarian foreign government. While the scheme is disturbing, it is not entirely new; nasty regimes have long used Washington PR firms to spread disinformation.

What is new, however, is how much easier it’s become to place such propaganda thanks to online journalism’s insatiable appetite for content. Today, publications of every stripe are eagerly sucking up outside contributions to fill their websites. The contributions are tarted up with a variety of names — such as “expert opinions” or “guest voices” — but they amount to the same thing: additional content that is often free.

But in their rush to pump up their content, sites may be dropping their screening standards. Unlike like the New York Times, which has long had strict systems to prevent conflicts of interest, many online publications may not have the time or the energy to rigorously watch for bad apples.

In response to an email query, the Huffington Post offered the following statement: ”This is a clear violation of HuffPost’s blogging policy that requires disclosure of payments and conflicts of interest. As soon as we learned of this conflict, we removed the posts from our site. In addition to a very clear policy, we have a team of blog editors who are trained to spot potential conflicts as they review each blog that gets submitted. Posts are routinely declined.”

Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review, declined to provide an immediate comment; he has since provided a response in the comments below.

While after-the-fact measures may mitigate the damage, it doesn’t change the fact that, in this wild-west clamor for content, it’s become easier for the likes of Malaysia’s leaders to ooze their voice into American media. (Likewise, some companies have succumbed to the temptation of hiring sock-puppet journalists to shill for their side.)

Overall, it’s perhaps inevitable that more content has brought more corruption to the media. The good news, however, is that the growth of online media outlets also affords the opportunity for more whistle blowers; my colleague, Mathew Ingram, in the case of social media sites like Twitter, likens the process to a self-cleaning oven.

The Malaysia episode also reflects an other example of how BuzzFeed, best known for cat photos and titillating viral fare, is rapidly climbing the serious media firmament.

(Disclosure: the Guardian News & Media is an investor in paidContent’s owner, Giga Omni Media).

(Image by Straight 8 Photography via Shutterstock)

Now, though, the Huffington Post’s comment strategy suddenly makes a lot more sense in light of “Conversations,” a new tool that surfaces discrete discussions within the comment stream and then lets readers read those discussions on a separate webpage. In the case of the Hillary story, for instance, the first comments that appear at the bottom of the story will now be “conversations” sparked by popular members of the existing HuffPo community.

The new set-up should make it easier to jump in on a given debate about the story that’s of interest. In the Benghazi story, for example, groups of people can find each other to discuss specific facets of the story — whether the US should be in Libya; whether the incident was Hillary’s fault; whether Hillary is actually a Muslim agent sent from Mars to destroy America and so on.

The fact that the “Conversations” will now have their own URL also makes it easier for people to share them and invite others into the discussion. The feature in some ways resembles the buzzy start-up Branch which lets people grab existing conversations and continue them in new places (though, unlike Branch, HuffPo’s system is not invite-only). To get a better idea of what HuffPo is doing, here are two screenshots from a recent story. The first is an existing conversation (I’ve circled the button that takes it elsewhere) and the other is what the conversation looks like on the new URL:

Huffington Post CTO, John Pavley, explained in a phone interview that the site relies mostly on algorithms to parse comments and to identify worthy conversation leaders but that it uses human moderators too. HuffPo’s inspiration for its comment system comes in part from Reddit, the popular group-reading site, he added. (The move also comes that at a time that publishers led by Gawker’s Nick Denton are re-evaluating the philosophy of comments in general).

The share-a-conversation feature serves to make order out of the comment chaos, but could also turn into a serious money maker for the Huffington Post. According to Pavley, the company will use parent company AOL’s ad platform to serve up relevant ads next to the conversations. This is significant because the HuffPo will not only have more pages to monetize; it will also be able to offer advertisers the promise of “hyper-engaged readers.” This type of audience is being touted by companies like Disqus as extra valuable because readers are more likely to engage an ad if it’s next to a subject they’re passionate about — the idea is that, if they’re taking the time to comment, they presumably are engaged.

HuffPo is rolling out Conversations slowly and, for now, the feature is only appearing on the site’s World and Gay Voices sections. It will appear across the whole site soon.

(Image by siSSen via Shutterstock)

There’s no question Business Insider has grown substantially since the last time Blodget opened up about his company’s performance: almost two years ago, he released some public numbers, and at that point the site — which was then about three years old — was pulling in 8 million unique visitors per month and had revenues of $5 million. The site even turned a minuscule profit in 2010, Blodget said, of about $2,000 (that’s not a typo).

In the latest update, the Business Insider founder says the site has boosted its traffic substantially, and now gets an average of 23 million unique visitors per month, or more than a million on the average day — growth that he says puts it ahead of giants such as Businessweek, Mashable and TechCrunch.

While that’s impressive, however, Blodget hasn’t provided us with some of the most important data a media company needs in order to prove its health: namely, revenue and/or profitability metrics. It’s probably safe to assume that revenues are higher than they were almost two years ago, or the site would have shut down by now — and they may even be dramatically higher, since pageviews and unique visitors are still popular measurements used by many advertisers to determine success.

But as Blodget himself notes in his presentation, the profitability of digital advertising has been plummeting over the past few years. The amount of advertising is still growing rapidly, and ad revenues are also increasing, but it’s a little like the Red Queen’s race in Alice in Wonderland: media companies are having to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place — every incremental pageview is worth less and less.

This is the same dilemma that almost every media entity is facing, from traditional players such as the New York Times to newer stars like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Some of the newer entrants like BuzzFeed — and even the more entrepreneurial of the old guard, such as The Atlantic and Forbes — are trying to use more “native” advertising formats such as sponsored posts and marketing-related content to combat this problem.

It’s not clear from Blodget’s presentation whether Business Insider is doing much of this, although he does say that social “is not the be-all and end-all” for digital news sites, and that the importance of social as a referrer of traffic is “grossly overstated.” And it isn’t clear what the site is doing instead of social or native advertising — which makes it almost impossible to say whether the company is financially healthy or not.

Huge pageview or readership numbers are nice to have, but they are not enough for a business in and of themselves (just ask Tumblr, which has 20 billion pageviews a month and yet is still facing questions about its business model) unless of course you are planning to flip your business to someone much larger who already has a business model. Business Insider is going to have to answer those kinds of questions somehow, whether Blodget wants to tell us the answers or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / TechCrunch

Since the “democratization of content” that was created by both blogs and social media is fairly well established now, both Svbtle and Medium seem to be focused on the process of curation and design rather than simply giving writers a new place to publish their content. How they are going to monetize this new form of curated blogging remains a mystery, however.

Svbtle was born last March, when designer and developer Dustin Curtis decided to create what he thought was a more elegant and simple way of posting content (interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the same motivation that David Karp has said was behind his creation of the Tumblr network in 2007). And while Svbtle seemed at first like a personal project involving Curtis and some of his writer and designer friends, it has grown fairly substantially, with more than 200 bloggers generating what Svbtle says in its blog post are “millions upon millions of pageviews” a month.

Svbtle admits it doesn’t know how it will make money

Curtis told TechCrunch that he raised the unspecified amount of funding from a group that includes SV Angel, the CrunchFund and New York-based incubator Betaworks (the startup also got some earlier funding through the Y Combinator program) because he wanted to hire developers, but also because he needed a “cushion for experimentation.” Among other things, the Svbtle founder admitted he doesn’t really have any idea how the company is going to monetize the content it is curating on the network.

As Curtis put it in the TechCrunch interview: “Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet.” But he provided some clues in a response on Twitter on Tuesday:

You can't make money in publishing by monetizing the content. You have to monetize the delivery system.

—
dustin curtis (@dcurtis) November 21, 2012

Medium is also focusing on curation and design

In many ways, Svbtle seems to be aimed at the same kind of market niche as Medium, the startup that Evan Williams founded last fall after leaving active duty at Twitter — where he was a co-founder and CEO — along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both of whom were co-founders and/or early staffers at Twitter and Blogger. Reinventing blogging seems like a particularly fitting task for Williams, since Blogger (which was acquired by Google in 2003) was one of the early success stories in what was then a brand-new way of publishing and distributing content online.

And like the Svbtle network, Medium seems to be focusing on the curation process as a way of adding value to the blog market: it is invitation-only, although the company has said it plans to open up to more contributors in the future. And Medium recently hired a content editor, former literary agent Kate Lee, whose job appears to be finding new writers and encouraging them to blog on Medium — as well as perhaps finding ways of distributing that content in other forms such as ebooks. But much like Svbtle, the company hasn’t given many hints about how it plans to monetize its network.

Blog networks like Pajamas Media and others were a staple of the early days of blogging too, but most failed to achieve any kind of actual business success — although some managed to earn advertising revenue through ad networks like The Deck and Federated Media, which was an early backer of blogs like TechCrunch and Laughing Squid. The Huffington Post arguably started in the same way, with a core of unpaid bloggers that eventually became a business, and so did Talking Points Memo.

Can Svbtle or Medium find an alternate route to success, possibly by imitating the “artisanal” approach taken by entities like Marco Arment’s The Magazine, which is iOS-only? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: just when you thought blogging was dead, someone comes along to reinvent it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

To get a sense of BuzzFeed’s unique approach to news, take a look at some of the the stories it selected as “most successful” for 2012. They include a Wall Street hooker’s wish she could tell clients they were “bad in bed” but also serious business and political features — and, of course, mega-viral listicles like “21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity” and “50 people you wish you knew in real life.”

In the coming year, BuzzFeed is poised to shape the rest of the media industry even as it tries to keep up its own momentum. Here are five things to watch for:

Is the mix of highbrow and tabloid sleaze here to stay?

BuzzFeed made its name with fluffy fare designed to be shared by what founder Jonah Peretti calls the “bored at work crowd.” More recently, the site has sought to climb the quality ladder by hiring respected journalists and producing New Yorker-style articles. This raises the question of whether two very different forms of content quality can co-exist under the same title.

In the traditional media world, highbrow and lowbrow fare live in very different silos. The New York Times, for instance, doesn’t publish sensational headlines or sacharine cat spreads. Meanwhile, the tabloid press doesn’t bother much with long political profiles or ponderous articles about art galleries.

BuzzFeed, however, has chosen to straddle both worlds. Other media outlets may be tempted to follow in the hopes of obtaining a mass audience and serious intellectual influence. It’s too soon, though, to know if traditional divisions between highbrow and tabloid news are largely a function of the print age — or if they are instead tied to fundamental principles of trust, authority and branding.

Will BuzzFeed acquire a political identity?

When its content was based on cats, it was easy for BuzzFeed to hide any political leanings. That will be harder as the site reports more about Congress and the economy. The coming year will determine if BuzzFeed stays non-partisan or if it will take on liberal leanings like the New York Times or the Huffington Post, where Peretti was a founder.

While a middle-of-the-road approach may seem safe, other outlets like Daily Kos and Michelle Malkin show that partisanship is popular. It’s also worth noting that BuzzFeed’s mastery of emotive images and viral distribution means it could put a powerful thumb on the scale for controversial issues. Image the treatment BuzzFeed could give topics like immigration (“10 Mexicans who are a lot like you”), gun control (“4 ways a Bushmaster kills kids faster”) or the economy (“5 home remedies you can use after baby boomers drain Medicare”).

Will all those pageviews turn into money?

BuzzFeed, like the U.K.’s Daily Mail, has galloped up the reader ranks with the help of sophisticated analytics tools. In September, BuzzFeed had doubled its traffic from a year ago with 11.5 million unique visitors according to comScore numbers cited in a BusinessInsider account.

The rapid growth will help BuzzFeed stay ahead of a choppy ad market for non-specialty news sites but, in the long run, the site’s success depends on its vaunted native ad strategy. This year, BuzzFeed will be the leading test case for whether native advertising is in fact the future business model for journalism or if, as detractors say, it’s just another buzzword.

What about the mobile morass?

Like every other publisher, BuzzFeed will soon face a situation where half its traffic comes by way of a mobile device where, for most, advertising revenue is still a pittance. The mobile migration will put BuzzFeed’s native advertising strategy even further to the test.

Will a BuzzFeed competitor emerge this year?

As BuzzFeed gains influence, others may be tempted to copy its approach by employing the same package of viral content and analytics. Low barriers to entry mean that we could see the emergence of BuzzFeed clones by the end of the year — either new sites that target BuzzFeed’s verticals or old meda brands that reboot their existing offerings on a BuzzFeed model.

(Image by TijanaM via Shutterstock)

To provide some background context, recall the popular news site launched an online TV network in August that streams 12 hours of live footage a day from New York and L.A. It’s a big investment, but the company is hoping its hyper-engaged user community will follow the brand into the video space, and that all that footage will produce buckets of viral content clips to spray across HuffPo and AOL web sites.

So what is the significance of the iPad app in all this? At first glance, not much. The app is simply another way for a user to watch the live stream — which features both ordinary people and celebrity guests like Bill Maher — while reading and adding comments, and sharing shows to Twitter or Facebook. Here are a couple of screenshots that show how comments can appear either stacked or tiled:

On its own, the HuffPo Live app is not extraordinary. Where it could be a real game changer, however, is the fact that the app can be slung onto a TV set using Apple TV. This means that Huffington Post has a chance to control not just a living room’s second screens but also the primary one as well.

In practice, this could occur if groups of friends watch the presidential elections on HuffPo Live and share comments in real time via their iPad — comments that would appear on their TV. If this comes to pass, HuffPo Live will have created what amounts to a walled garden extraordinaire in living rooms across the land.

But could HuffPo actually pull this off? In the short term, the answer is no, as the commenting system is too rudimentary. It allows users to like or flag a given comment but does not let users create a limited community like the ones they know on Facebook or Twitter. A company spokesperson says improved commenting features are coming soon (a Reddit-style up-or-down voting system might be one idea).

Meanwhile, bandwidth will provide another obstacle to HuffPo Live as most houses don’t have the capacity to enjoy an uninterrupted live stream on several devices at once. (Although, as Om’s recent account shows, things are improving quickly).

Still, the future prospects of a living room with a single media source dominating all devices is intriguing from both a user and marketing perspective. Will we one day see other content makers like the NFL or BuzzFeed try to do the same thing?

Now, Christensen is applying his theory to the media industry where similar forces are at play. He points to disruptors that began as little more than crude cat-photo aggregators (BuzzFeed) and outlets for lefty commentary (Huffington Post)  but quickly evolved into major media brands (the HuffPo now even has a Pulitzer Prize to its name). At the same time, many once-prestigious news brands have failed to reinvent themselves for the digital era — witness how Newsweek shuttering after 80 years.

In a report published this week by Nieman, Christensen and his co-authors acknowledge the hard reality for media executives who are chained to legacy business models with large but shrinking cash flows:

This search for new business models remains elusive for most. Executives interviewed in that Pew report confirmed that closing the revenue gap remains a struggle. “There might be a 90 percent chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10 percent chance you might find the new model,” one executive explained in the report. “No one is willing to take that chance.”

But pursue it they must, or their organizations will be deemed irrelevant by news consumers. New entrants are already leaving their mark on journalism—stealing audiences and revenues away from legacy organizations.

To meet these changes, Christensen argues, media companies need to look at what they produce as a function — serving people the right information in the right package in the right place. For example, Twitter offers rapid content to someone standing in a Starbucks line while, at the other end of the spectrum, publishers like Longreads and Instapaper can deliver thoughtful, stimulating content appropriate for those on trains or airplanes. (BuzzFeed appears to have figured this out too with an explicit appeal to the “bored at work” crowd.)

The Christensen report, while long, is also refreshing in its candor about how traditional media infrastructure like the newsroom has become “an albatross” in many ways. It also points out that news outlets  have to expand their core business model if they want to survive. In practice, this is already happening as news outlets are discovering new cash sources in everything from consulting to events to commercial printing to e-books.

Finally, there is the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach. Christensen explains that media companies like Forbes and Dow Jones are hatching or acquiring their own digital properties and — as importantly — creating management processes to ensure their existing legacy operations don’t smother them:

Given that a young upstart may cannibalize the company’s traditional business, it is critical that such a project have high-level support and be independent from normal decision-making processes …  Having a separate workspace for the spinout organization can be helpful, but what’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail.

The larger point is that, just like the auto industry and steel industry before it, the old-guard media industry is being engulfed by newcomers that began by nibbling
at the edges of the market and are now crawling up the value chain. This means legacy companies can adopt the disruptive technologies shaking their business — or be eaten by it.

Flickr/hbomb1947 the turnstile-jumper’s photostream