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Several hundred newspapers now have paywalls of some kind, but for the most part, it’s the small and mid-size papers that have been the early adopters. Last year, for example, Gannett put all 80 of its community newspapers’ websites behind metered paywalls, while keeping its flagship paper, USA Today, free online.

But the New York Times‘ ability to attract subscribers in the two years since its paywall went live – combined with the increasingly tough digital advertising market – seems to have caused some of the bigger newspapers to reconsider. In the last year alone, six of the biggest newspapers in the U.S. have announced plans to start charging for their digital editions: the LA Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Orange County Register.

As of now, 12 of the top-20 U.S. newspapers (by weekday circulation) have either enacted a paid scheme or plan to do so.

Click the graphic to the left to see which of the biggest newspapers have paywalls.

The latest casualty is NYClean, a bookmarklet that lets readers zap away “over the limit” messages that appears in front of Times stories. I discovered the change on Monday when, after having reached my monthly quota of 10 free stories, I tried and failed to use NYClean to read another story. The tool (see the arrow) zapped the message for a second but then the message came right back:

This is the second time in as many months that the Times has shut down a trick to evade its meter; in February, readers discovered they could no longer access a blocked story by chopping off the end of the article’s website address. Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy explained the situation this way:

“As we have said from the time we launched our digital subscription model, we are aware of various loopholes to access our content beyond the allotted number of articles each month. It remains a priority for us to protect the value of our content so we will continue to make adjustments to optimize the gateway through technical security solutions.”

The new restrictions come at a time of increased acceptance of metered paywalls. In recent months, popular blogger (and paidContent Live guest) Andrew Sullivan introduced a meter — now at $1.99 a month — while longtime paywall holdout the Washington Post said it will launch one this summer.

The Times’ get-tough measures create dilemmas for readers like me who are running out of workarounds. I like the New York Times but, since I already pay hundreds of dollars a year for a Wall Street Journal subscription, I am not in a position to shell out full fare for a second paper. Perhaps the Times will introduce a grazing option (say 50 articles for $5) or introduce paywall partnerships across publications.

Slate’s latest incarnation is as a data-driven social-media beast.  The site thinks it can use viral wizardry to spray smart writing around the internet and, at the same time, finally earn a profit from being perspicuous. The money question has become pressing because Slate, despite its years as a high-brow conversation starter, has yet to show it can survive without the largesse of a corporate mothership.

So will Slate’s third act pan out? Here’s a look at how its brain trust is approaching data, technology and the evolving ethics of advertising.

Top drawer or traffic whore? Stats and story selection

On a cold January afternoon, I met editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg, and Slate editor David Plotz in the former’s airy corner office on Morton Street in New York’s West Village. The office has large windows and shelves of hardcovers, including Weisberg’s exposition “The Bush Tragedy.”

The men were busy. Weisberg was en route to Davos, while Plotz had ducked out from answering questions on the online discussion forum Reddit. But both wanted to make the case that Slate has what it takes to survive in the age of analytics. “We rely on data, not intuition” said Weisberg. “The big cultural change at Slate is that it’s moved from being a site driven by instinct to a site driven by evidence.”

The remark comes as a rebuttal to earlier observations that Slate relied on creaky technology even as its competitors shot by it with state-of-the-art tools. The New York Observer in 2010, for instance, talked to members of Slate’s staff and concluded that the site’s tech was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

Weisberg says those days are done and that technology is at the center of the editorial operation. He points to a new Silicon Valley-style product team and a doubling in the amount of “sideways” readers from social media in the last year as proof that Slate has gotten religion on the analytics front.

Weisberg says Nick Denton of Gawker and Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed have been inspirations in the push for better analytics. The two viral media evangelists have shaken up publishing by using social media metrics to judge what stories to promote. (Peretti will be speaking at paidContent Live in April.)

But if Slate turns to audience activity to inform its story choice, does this also mean pandering? “We have written traffic-whorey stories here and there,” admits Plotz. But these efforts haven’t been particularly successful, he says. Instead, he credits editorial initiatives like “Bad Astronomy” (a feature for science nerds) with drawing new regular readers to Slate.

In this regard, Slate is like other high-minded publications navigating a tough, even contradictory mission. On one hand, they promise smart and independent ideas; on the other, they’re heeding social media metrics that could tug them to the lowest common denominator. While news sites like BuzzFeed cut their teeth on silly cat photos only to climb up the intellectual and media food chain, it’s unclear whether this process can work in the opposite direction.

So far, Slate appears to be threading the needle by growing its readership, while also publishing thought-provoking pieces (like this one about Palestinian versus Israeli textbooks). Slate says December 2012 unique visitors increased 33% percent from a year ago; meanwhile, comScore stats show Slate is faring well against other ideas publications. Here’s a chart that shows how they compare (note QZ and theAtlanticWire are part of the theAtlantic.com) :

Paywalls and pettifogging

The buoyant numbers are good news, of course, but do they mean Slate is finally in a position to make money? In 2010, Plotz admitted that Slate was not profitable. Like nearly every other digital publication, Slate had discovered the hard way that great writing and a loyal readership are not the same as a business plan.

Since then, many publishers have followed the lead of the New York Times and begun to charge for access to all or portions of their digital content. These so-called paywalls have gained acceptance after being a contentious issue for years — in part because an early effort by Slate to implement one in 1998 didn’t work out.

Slate recently floated the idea of a future “membership” scheme for some readers, but Weisberg is adamant it won’t involve charging for content. The topic is sensitive enough to have produced a bizarre Twitter spectacle in which Weisberg’s Mr. Fox avatar berated a respected Forbes reporter as a “pettifogger” (and worse):

@jeffbercovici Jeff, that story doesn't say that! It calls membership a "model," not a "pay model." Quit pettifogging.—
Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) December 14, 2012

So what exactly does the membership involve? Weisberg didn’t elaborate beyond saying it won’t be unveiled until at least the end of the year and that it will be “more akin to a public radio-type membership model — you give a contribution and in return you get benefits.”

As Slate hashes out these details behind the scenes, it’s also trying to cultivate another revenue stream, in the form of an expanded events business. These include loose mixers that let readers mingle with Slate writers; Weisberg says more than 700 people recently bought tickets for one of its “gab-fests” in Washington. Slate is also hosting small, more formal events hosted by advertisers. One example is a UBS-hosted panel at which Weisberg hosted a discussion on exports with political poohbahs.

Other media outlets have run into ethical challenges with custom events like this — most notably the Washington Post, which in 2009 proposed hosting private “salon events” at the publisher’s house for powerbrokers and journalists. It sparked a newsroom revolt, and the paper ditched the idea before it ever became a reality. Weisberg says Slate, which is independent but shares a corporate parent with the Washington Post, won’t run into similar problems because its events are all public and on the record.

All this still doesn’t answer the question of whether Slate is now profitable. Asked directly, Weisberg said he can’t say because of Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure rules that require companies like the Washington Post Co. to disclose material information through broad public channels.

Ads, yes – but not for the Church of Scientology

Digital publications these days need multiple revenue streams to survive, but their core remains advertising. And here Slate, which has recently built up its own sales force outside of the Post, and others face the same dilemma: an increasing amount of web traffic comes in through mobile devices (about 30% now, and 50% by 2014 is probably a safe bet) but ad rates are low and no one is sure what to do about that.

“I don’t think we’ve figured out anything other people haven’t,” says Weisberg. “You have a rapidly expanding audience but CPM’s that are much lower. The key is distinguishing how and when people are using different types of mobile devices.  Between tablet and mobile, those two will diverge rapidly over time. Tablet ads will become more valuable while handsets gravitate to a performance model.”

While publishers wait for the right mobile ad models to emerge, many are seizing on so-called “native advertising” as the secret to juicing ad prices. It’s debatable whether it’s really new but the basic idea is to produce ads that mimic the editorial content around it – ads that resemble nearby stories, tweets, pictures, etc. It may or not be novel, but for now it is clear that native advertising can go horribly wrong such as when the Atlantic printed a “story” about the Church of Scientology replete with gushing “reader” comments about the cult’s virtues.

Weisberg says the Atlantic tripped up by violating three principles: printing ad that confuse readers; tampering with the editorial process; and accepting an ad from someone the publication shouldn’t have done dealt with in the first place. “They are enemies of free speech, they are persecutors of journalists, they’re litigious. They’re a crazy cult who’s made life hell for journalists who’ve tried to do their job. Why do business with them at all?”

In terms of Slate’s own advertising, the publication says revenue in 2012 grew 26 percent from the previous year. Its advertisers include , most recently, Coke, Lexus and Samsung. As for the ad opportunities offered by aggregation tools like Flipboard, Weisberg is skeptical and says they are “too passive” and less useful now that “Twitter has cracked the news personalization process.”

Slate has also built a strong lineup of videos and podcasts that Weisberg says are lucrative for the site. Slate is now producing nine separate podcasts, some of which rate highly on iTunes; one episode of the show Lexicon Valley recently notched up 650,000 downloads. Slate would not disclose how much ads, which are read by show hosts, bring in but said “advertisers pay some of the highest rates in the industry” for the podcasts.

This podcast and other non-print revenue will help determine whether Slate can join an increasingly data-driven media world while still remaining an influential liberal publication. While the verdict is still out, Slate’s confidence remains high.

“We have the brain of the New York Times and the body of BuzzFeed,” said Weisberg as he prepared to dash off to Switzerland – where he would later tweet, “Wish Pussy Riot was in Davos instead of so many Russian oligarchs & kleptocrats.”

(Images by Slate and Kletr via Shutterstock)

In a new study, two University of Arizona researchers use Twitter’s emergence as a “serious newswire” to compare the reach and longevity of news stories tweeted by organizations like Reuters, NPR and the Washington Post. Over a three-week period last winter, the researchers looked at tweets containing story links and found that stories from the BBC and the New York Times were the most widely retweeted.

The study’s authors, Sudha Ram and Devi Bhattachary, also looked at metrics like articles’ half-life to determine the popularity and longevity of a news story. They found that articles from BBC, Mashable and the NYT had the longest life span, while the BBC, Mashable and Wired were most likely to publish popular articles — stories on Twitter that exceeded the average article half-life of 5.5 hours (“half-life” is based on a bitly definition that says it’s the amount of time at which a link receives half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak).

The study also looked at rates of engagement — how often a Twitter user is likely to tweet a given news source. On this front, financial publications like the FT and Forbes scored lowest while the NYT, NPR and the BBC scored highest.

The BBC’s prominence can be explained in large part by the fact that is has three major Twitter spigots that frequently retweet each other: “bbcnews,” “bbcbreaking” and “bbcworld.” This means that the BBC has far more of what the study calls “Maximum Level” retweets — Level I is an initial retweet, Level II is a retweet of Level I and so on.

The study, which draws on methods used for epidemics and network analysis, also uses intriguing graphics to display news organizations’ influence. This picture, for example, shows how the NYT and the Washington Post stories produce similar network effects, but the NYT stories are retweeted by more people in isolation:

So what to make of all this? One obvious observation is that the pool of data tied to Twitter gives news agencies unprecedented tools to measure their influence and shape strategy. But, as the study notes, one size may not fit all:

This leads to the question of what constitutes successful news diffusion on Twitter. Bursts of 1st level tweets within the first hour of diffusion (corresponding to instant reach to a large audience) or a high network diameter indicating multiple levels of exchange of news over a period of time (longer lifespan)? This depends on the objective of the news media source.

Another takeaway is that these are still early days for data and news analysis. While the Twitter study is intriguing, it is presented (appropriately) in the language of science — “edge/node ratios,” “ego network details” and so on. This means it may take time for the study’s implications to be translated into everyday guidance for publishers and editors.

The Fold is distributed through PostTV, an Android app that debuted this week on Google TV and Android tablets, and Ravindran told me that the program was made very much with Google TV devices in mind. The show, which runs a total of 15 minutes every night, is split up into several segments, giving viewers the option to either watch the whole thing without any interruption, or skip over the stories that don’t interest them.

Ravindran said that his team followed a mobile-first kind of approach when developing both the show and the app, except that it put the connected TV experience first and then rethought how to make a show that works for it. “We are really working backwards from there,” he said.

A lot of other apps simply take all the video assets of a publisher and make them available on TVs without any additional curation, he lamented. His team on the other hand wanted to build a unique experience that people come back to, much like people used to come home to the evening news. “We are more focused on the daily habit than on one-time use,” Ravindran said, explaining that the app lets users know via Google TV’s notifications whenever a new episode is available.

So why launch on Google TV, as opposed to Roku or maybe even Samsung’s connected TV platform? Ravindran’s answer was refreshingly pragmatic: “We had to start somewhere.” His team had a lot of experience with Android, he added, and developing for Google TV had the benefit that they could also have it work on Andoid tablets without too many modifications. But there will be apps for other platforms as well going forward. Said Ravindran: “We aspire to be on all the platforms that make sense.”

To learn more about cord cutting, check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

“We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.”

For many news sites, HTML5 has become the default form of coding. Even if a publisher is pushing out a mobile app, it’s often an HTML app in a native wrapper. When deciding whether to follow an app or a Web browser model, the decision isn’t a technology one — native code versus HTML5 – instead, it’s a distribution decision, said Mark Johnson, CEO of news aggregator Zite.

For a startup or a company that doesn’t have a well-known brand, discoverability becomes key, so it’s necessary to stake a claim in platform app stores, Johnson said. But when it comes down to implementation Zite is basically building Web pages optimized with a native user interface. There’s far more flexibility in that approach: your Web developers suddenly don’t need to turn into Objective C programmers and you can modify your app on the server without pushing a complete update to the device, Johnson said.

As Zite builds up its own online brand (CNN acquired Zite last year), its dependence on the app store may lessen, but Johnson said the need for a slick UI will keep Zite app-store bound for some time. “People have a very high expectation of what the UI looks like,” he said. “You risk losing a lot of downloads if you forget the UI.”

The Washington Post is splitting the difference. It leans heavily on its own mobile apps, including its Facebook Social Reader, but it also has a big presence in the mobile browser. WaPo Labs chief strategist and editor-at-large Rob Malda agreed with Johnson that the Post has the advantage to leverage a huge well-respected news brand to drive traffic to the mobile Web site. “Discoverability is not a problem,” Malda said, but he added that the Post can just as easily use that same brand to nudge its readers to its apps and other digital media technologies.

Ultimately, whether the Post focuses on apps or the mobile Website, it will continue to lean heavily of HTML5 for its core development, Malda said. “I like the hybrid thing,” he said. “Laying out a newspaper – I don’t want to do that in native.”

HTML5 in a native wrapper has it’s limitations, as well. As my colleague Kevin Tofel has pointed out, the experience on the Facebook Android and iPhone apps sucks precisely because they’re HTML apps masquerading as natives. That led Kevin to start using accessing Facebook solely from his mobile browser where performance notably improved.

This post was updated to correct the name of the Boston Globe’s main news website, which is bostonglobe.com, not boston.com.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

It’s a sign that Gannett is serious about moving ahead in digital while making the most of its print roots. Kramer will report to CEO Gracia Martore and will be responsible for every facet of Gannett’s troubled flagship publication. In addition to the print edition and its reach across platforms, that includes USA TODAY Sports Media Group, the Travel Media Group, Reviewed.com and USA WEEKEND. He may have a lot to learn about Gannett and USA Today but he’s already got the most-needed skill set: a pragmatic understanding of how things work in a cross-platform, digital-first world when print revenues still matter. (Release.)

Kramer comes from the old school with a distinguished career at the Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner but has been a new media entrepreneur since he founded DataSport, featuring a hand-held sports info device, in 1991. In addition to founding MarketWatch and selling it to Dow Jones, he is a former chairman of The Online Publishers Association.

Kramer (no relation to me) has been teaching at the university level and serving on a number of boards, including Discovery, since leaving CBS in 2007. He was on the board of paidContent’s parent company ContentNext prior to its 2008 sale to Guardian News & Media.

He also wrote C-SCAPE: Conquer the Factors Changing Business Today and has been blogging a bit at the book’s site. His most recent post explored how his news consumption has changed since the iPad. What did he have to say about USA Today?

The good and the bad news about the USA Today app is that it is a close cousin to the look of the paper. While it captures some of the design feature of the paper, some have become tired. The site loses a sense of urgency and news judgement by stacking stories with essentially the same look and feel as each other. The larger layouts in the print version of the paper are often the most attractive devices in the newspaper, and they are not translated to this platform. Photos dominate the visuals, and the reader gets little interactive or even passive, graphic presentation that approaches what is so great about the print paper. The page looks the same every day. USAToday’s IPhone app is slicker and faster to use.

USA Today overhaul coming up

Gannett is already committed to a cross-platform remake for USA Today. In the Q1 earnings call last month, Martore said a relaunch is already in the works for apps, mobile and print in conjunction with the paper’s 30th anniversary this September. From the transcript:

So we see those areas; they’re small now. And even if you look at overall numbers that are being reported, tablet and mobile are still a very small piece of overall Digital revenues. But we see those categories as growing disproportionately to the rest of Digital revenues. And that’s why we are making the investments and
doing the things that we are doing in both of those areas that we think are going to be very important growth areas for us over the next several years.

Digital revenue was up 25 percent at USA Today in Q1; in a bright spot, subscriptions to e-editions outweighed print circ losses. Overall, the unit accounts for less than 10 percent of Gannett’s revenues. During the call, the most important goal highlighted was finding “a top-notch publisher to advance the promising initiatives already underway, and grow the business by spearheading USA Today’s continuing evolution into a leading multi-platform media brand.”

That search formally began April 10, when Gannett vet David Hunke, who held the role since 2009, was bumped up to chairman. Kramer is the first USA Today publisher from outside Gannett since its founding. Hunke succeeded Craig Moon.

At that same earnings call, Gannett reported a 25 percent drop in revenue.

Gannett also had a change in the C suite Monday, with the resignation of CFO Paul Saleh. Treasurer Michael Hart will be “interim principal financial officer” during the search.

Update: I’ve confirmed with Kramer that he will have to leave the boards of Discovery Communications, AMI, Freedom Communications and Appinions. He will stay on the Black Arrow and HBS Publishing boards, as well as the Syracuse Board of Trustees.

Larry Kramer will interview DigitalFirst’s John Paton and Vox Media’s Jim Bankoff at ourpaidContent 2012 conference in NYC on May 23. Register here.

Photo courtesy of Katy Raddatz.

But he knows, as do I, that changing news organizations these days isn’t always a zero sum game. Sometimes it’s a matter of different budgets covering different areas. Sometimes it’s a series of tradeoffs. If you want to invest in X, you have to cut back on Y. If you want to have reporters covering one area, sometimes you have to give up on another. Sometimes it’s about dumping the costs of having more experienced journalists to make the budget. (See the mention of ex-editor in the lead.) Sometimes one part of a company is cutting back while another area is expanding.

You have to invest

You can’t cut your way to success and you can’t spend your way there either — although we can list plenty of people in the news business who thought otherwise. But if you want to change the trajectory, you have to invest in research and development. You have to experiment. You have to be willing to think differently or to hire people who can.

That’s what Don Graham has been trying to do at the Washington Post Co. while keeping up the standards of journalism he followed as a reporter and publisher. That’s one reason he ended up as an investor in Facebook and a member of the board. That’s why he hired Vijay Ravindran as chief digital officer and started WaPo Labs, why the WaPoCo acquired iCurrent in 2010 and launched personalization service Trove last year, why it invested in social news site Ongo with the New York Times and Gannett, why Ravindran recently hired Rob “cmdrtaco” Malda to lead strategy.

So what is it doing with Digg?

No comment tonight from WaPo, other than a PR rep declining comment. Also no direct confirmation that it’s doing anything at all with Digg but according to some reporters I trust (even if they can’t spell acqhire), at least some of the tech/dev Digg team is headed to WaPo. Engineering, tech and dev talent is at a premium these days as is the ability to mesh it with news and information. WaPo doesn’t need Digg — but it can use a talented team of makers, if that’s what is happening.

Does the company need them more than its journalists? It needs them each differently.

Whither Digg?

The WaPo-Digg storyline emerged Monday as a rumor from The Next Web that the Washington Post was acquiring Digg, the once-hot social curator that has gone dim,  followed by reports that it was hiring some of the Digg team. (Anthony, I promise you it’s acqhire.) According to Peter Kafka, Digg won’t shut down just yet. I envision this as one of those creatures that keeps living even after you cut off the head although I can’t decide if it’s a chicken, a snake or a spider. Some might argue that happened years ago and what we’re seeing now is just the winding down.

Rob Malda, who founded slashdot, will be at paidContent 2012 with other leaders in tech, media and investing to explore how to make the most of today’s opportunities. Join us at The TimesCenter in New York, May 23.