While most of the losses arose as a result of pension and restructuring expenses, the company’s core business remains distressed. Print advertising revenues fell 8 percent, and while circulation declined by seven percent. A small bright spot comes in the form of a 16 percent increase in online display advertising at a time when such revenue is flat or falling at other newspapers.

While the Washington Post’s earnings reflect a familiar story of the declining newspaper business, they are particularly discouraging because the paper does not appear to have a turnaround plan on the horizon. While the New York Times has been experimenting with its digital paywall for over a year, and now has plans to create different pricing tiers, the Post’s plan to raise online digital subscription revenue remains amorphous. The company plans to launch a paywall this summer, but the model appears so leaky that it is unlikely to bring in significant money any time soon.

At the same time, while the New York Times has cut away all its non-core assets to focus on the flagship brand, the Washington Post Company is also figuring out how to turn around Kaplan, its troubled education segment.

Correction: The first paragraph of this post was updated to correct descriptions of profit and loss.

As newspapers around the world rush to erect paywalls to bolster their declining revenue — with Britain’s Telegraph and Sun papers just the latest to join the parade, along with the Washington Post — there are a few holdouts who insist on generating revenue the old-fashioned way: namely, through advertising. One of the most prominent proponents of this model is the Daily Mail, which has become one of the world’s largest news websites. The Mail’s approach may not be for everyone, but according to the paper it is working extremely well, thank you very much.

The data behind that boast comes from an investor presentation that Media Briefing sat in on recently by the paper’s parent company, DMG Media, in which the company projected that its digital revenue could soon exceed its print revenue — a transition that few newspapers could even think about realistically at this point, let alone forecast for the near future. And the Mail says this isn’t happening as a result of declining revenue overall, as it is with some newspapers.

So what accounts for this kind of success? Critics would argue that it is the Mail‘s somewhat lackadaisical approach to accuracy, since a number of the newspaper’s most popular stories consist of rumors or salacious tidbits that in some cases turn out not to be true. But is this any different from any number of tabloid newspapers before the web came along? It may not be the course that the New York Times or Washington Post want to take, but there is no arguing with the results.

In a nutshell, the Mail‘s approach is to give the web what it wants — interesting stories, many of them about celebrities or odd events, and plenty of variety: the paper says it updates the home page every 30 minutes at least, which it believes is part of the reason it gets over 100 million unique visitors a month. And the engagement levels aren’t just orders of magnitude larger than other newspapers, but impressive even compared to sites such as Yahoo:

Obviously, not everyone can be (or wants to be) the Daily Mail. But whatever its flaws, the paper has done a pretty good job of being web-native, not just recreating a paper experience online. It’s the same approach that digital-only content publishers like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post have taken, and while it may not produce as much revenue as print advertising does, the Mail has shown that it is possible to grow that business.

And what about a paywall? Editorial director Michael Clarke said during the presentation: “We’re not throwing in the towel because we don’t have to. We don’t feel at the moment that’s the way to go… We have scale, engagement and growth.” (Note: We are going to be discussing different models for monetization at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / kak2s, slides courtesy of Media Briefing

So the New York Times, for example, is going through the same kind of uncertainty and upheaval as the rest of the industry – having to lay off staff, cutting costs, selling assets. But while the paper’s paywall and other measures may not totally fill the gap caused by erosion of advertising revenue, the NYT has enough resources to not only survive but do well. Likewise, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal will probably survive and prosper, along with some other large brands.

Some prominent journalism brands will likely be fine

This is exactly why Shirky and his coauthors on the recent “Post-Industrial Journalism” report from Columbia specifically excluded any discussion of the Times from their analysis of the future of journalism. As Shirky described it, it’s like the average driver measuring themselves by looking at someone who races on the Formula One circuit. Practically speaking, there are very few meaningful lessons other newspapers can learn from the New York Times.

That’s one end of the barbell. The other end is the ultra-small, hyper-local newspaper – the daily or even weekly broadsheet that serves a small town or region, where the disruptive forces of the Web haven’t made themselves felt as strongly and local shopping flyers are probably still a pretty good business. This is the kind of newspaper that billionaire Warren Buffett is buying up – the kind that still has a lock on a local market. Paywalls may work well here because of the lack of compelling alternatives.

And what’s in the middle? Everything else – medium-sized papers like the Miami Herald or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Globe, as well as most of the larger metro papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. What does their future look like?

Many of these papers have been trying to make paywalls work, but for most the results appear to be fairly lackluster at best – even the Boston Globe, which is far from the worst newspaper in a medium sized market, has attracted just 28,000 subscribers after more than a year. Its owner the New York Times has put it up for sale and may get less than $100 million for it, and that’s after removing the single most damaging part of the business from the equation – namely, the paper’s $200 million or so in pension obligations.

What happens to the news that doesn’t pay?

Those pension obligations are one of the biggest mill-stones around the neck of traditional media entities. And the bottom line is that even with some reader support, as Rosen and I discussed, these papers are going to have to shrink dramatically or come up with new forms of revenue, which is why the Washington Post is experimenting with what has come to be known as “sponsored content” (something we’ll be talking about more at paidContent Live on April 17)

In a recent post at Slate, writer Matt Yglesias responded to the somewhat fatalistic tone of coverage around the recent Pew report on the state of the media by arguing that as news consumers, we are better off now than we have ever been, thanks to social media and other forces. And it is easy to see how that is the case for certain topics and certain parts of the world – but as Dan Mitchell pointed out in a rebuttal to Yglesias, it isn’t the case for much local coverage of things like municipal affairs and public-policy topics.

So what happens to that kind of coverage as newspapers shrink and even die? If all the things that have subsidized that kind of journalism have been removed – the car ads and travel writing and so on – all these papers are left with is the kind of content that advertisers aren’t interested in and readers don’t want to pay for. What then? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are interesting publicly supported models, but how scalable are they? Is every state or region going to have one?

Will some form of “citizen journalism” be able to fill this gap – whether it’s local bloggers or some kind of automated Twitter feed etc.? Perhaps. Will newspapers use outsourced services like Journatic or even robot journalists like Narrative Science? In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of these, and possibly other things we haven’t even thought of yet. At this point, the answers are a whole lot murkier than the questions.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Jan-Arief Purwanto

Amazon presents “Send to Kindle” as an alternative to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper:

“The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.”

The new feature for websites is the most recent in a line of read-it-later services Amazon has launched. Last year, the company announced a “Send to Kindle” button for Google Chrome, and later added support for Firefox. And users can already email files to their Kindles or transmit them using desktop apps. But the browser extensions — and now the web app for publishers — are Amazon’s effort to make the Kindle and Kindle apps an easy way to read all types of content, not just ebooks.

Developers who want to add the button can do so here, and the WordPress plugin is here.

As noted by my paidContent colleague Laura Owen and by Digiday, the Post has launched a program called BrandConnect, which gives advertisers the ability to create content — either by themselves or by working with the paper’s staff — that is then highlighted in a special section of the newspaper’s online front page. The content states pretty clearly that it is sponsored (although that doesn’t seem to have mollified some of the company’s critics so far).

Sponsored content is not necessarily evil

In all of the important ways, this doesn’t seem all that different from what newspapers have traditionally done with what they refer to as “advertorial” — that is, special sections or articles that are written like newspaper stories but paid for by brands. According to Digiday, no editorial staff are involved in creating the content, and the sponsored headlines appear in a small box that looks different from the rest of the page, much like Techmeme’s sponsored posts.

Critics like Andrew Sullivan — who recently left the Daily Beast to start a reader-funded site — argue that sponsored content is ethically dubious, and have raised concerns about the way that BuzzFeed handles such content. As Laura notes, The Atlantic has also come under fire for the way it has done some sponsored features, including one about Scientology (we’ll be talking about this more with Sullivan and BuzzFeed’s Jon Steinberg at paidContent Live on April 17).

While there are debates around how and when to publish sponsored content, and what kinds of content are appropriate for which media outlets, there are some good reasons why other newspapers and traditional media players might want to experiment with this new format as well:

• It’s an additional source of revenue: At this point in their evolution, newspapers and other traditional outlets can’t really afford to turn a blind eye to any potential addition to their revenue base, however distasteful it might appear at first glance.
• It’s something advertisers seem interested in: Rates for traditional display advertising are dropping because advertisers simply don’t see them as valuable enough any more — and arguably neither do readers.
• It doesn’t have to be ethically compromised: Like any kind of advertising or commercial relationship, sponsored content or “native advertising” can be handled well or it can be handled badly. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done in an ethically responsible way.
• It can be a valuable service for readers: If advertiser-created content provides something useful that readers are interested in, it’s a win-win for the editorial outlet, since they get paid and readers are satisfied.

Readers should be the judge of what is useful

The last point in this list might be the most important one of all: if it is handled properly, sponsored content can serve much the same purpose as unsponsored content — in other words, it can be informative and useful for readers. Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of much of what we call journalism? Media insiders might flinch at the phrase “brand journalism” or “native advertising,” but if content produced by an advertiser is helpful to a reader, is that such a bad thing?

In an interview with Beet.tv, MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin points out that while many journalists may not like it, users often find advertising-related content almost as useful and memorable as traditional editorial content. This was the breakthrough that Google has taken advantage of to build a multimillion-dollar business via AdWords: to many users, those ads aren’t just clutter, but are actually useful content worth clicking on.

The approach taken by some publications such as Forbes — which has a BrandVoice platform that is similar to what the Washington Post is launching — is that marketing or advertising-driven content from brands is given more or less equal prominence to that created by editorial staff, with the appropriate disclaimers. Corporate bloggers at Forbes have the exact same platform that a staff blogger does, with all the same tools.

In that environment, it is up to the reader to decide whether something is useful or not useful, interesting or not interesting, valuable or not valuable. Whether it is “advertising” is largely irrelevant. In a sense, it has always been this way — perhaps it is just becoming more obvious now.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Eldorado3D and Poynter

“With BrandConnect, marketers become the content creators and get premium placement through our site,” Steve Hills, president and GM of the Post, said in a press release published at Poynter. “We are excited to create a way for marketers to create enhanced visibility, while maintaining our position as a trusted source for content of all kinds.” According to Digiday, which first reported the news, marketers will create the content in some cases but WaPo will “also offer serivces via its advertiser team. Editorial resources will not be used.”

The first client is CTIA – The Wireless Association, whose post is here. The post’s headline is “Revving Up Mobile Economies” and is about an app called Mobile Main Street, developed by West Virginia University. CTIA has been promoting Mobile Main Street since December. According to the release, CTIA “will provide weekly content through blog posts, video case studies, and infographics related to wireless communication.”

Sponsored content — also known as native advertising — has been the subject of a lot of debate recently. BuzzFeed, for example, uses sponsored content as a substitute for traditional advertising, while the well-known blogger Andrew Sullivan has questioned whether it’s ethical (Note: We’ll be discussing this at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York, via a panel called “The Future of Native Advertising: Blurring Ads and Content,” with BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg and others).

The Atlantic ran into trouble in January when it published a sponsored post about the Church of Scientology on its website. After massive criticism, the Atlantic pulled the post and updated its guidelines for sponsored content.

This information came out during a statement that Manning read aloud in court, so most of the details couldn’t be immediately verified, but the former military intelligence agent said that he called the New York Times to offer them a story based on the documents he had, but his voicemail message was never returned. Manning said that he also spoke to someone at the Washington Post and described what he had, but no one ever followed up.

Manning said he talked to person at WaPo who he did not think took him seriously when he described war logs.

—
Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) February 28, 2013

According to some reports, Manning’s call went to the public editor’s voice mail at the Times, which could explain why no one in the newsroom contacted him — as anyone who has ever worked in a large newsroom knows, crank calls and vaguely conspiratorial reports from would-be tipsters come with the territory, and many don’t result in any action. The part of his story about speaking with someone at the Washington Post directly would seem a little more damning, but he apparently didn’t provide many details to the reporter he spoke to.

Looking forward to the column by the Times public editor criticizing a previous Times public editor for not returning Bradley Manning's call

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Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) February 28, 2013

Even with all of those caveats, the incident still brings home how valuable it is to have something like WikiLeaks, an entity that Jay Rosen has called “the world’s first stateless news organization.” It’s not that the New York Times or the Washington Post failed to do their jobs as media outlets or journalistic investigators — it’s simply that there was an alternative available where Manning could take the documents that would ensure that they saw the light of day. In the pre-WikiLeaks days, he might never have found a way of publicizing them at all.

What if the NY Times had returned Bradley Manning's call? Would he be in jail now? gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2013/02/mannin…

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Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 28, 2013

As Jeff Jarvis noted on Twitter, Manning’s confession brings up an even more interesting question, namely: What would have happened if he had gotten through to someone at the Times and they wrote a story, without WikiLeaks ever being involved? Manning might still be on trial for his behavior, but it’s unlikely there would have been the same kind of U.S. government attack on the media entity that published the documents, since the Times is seen as protected in a way that WikiLeaks is not — although it arguably should be.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Rob Kints

The funding for the venture comes from the Knight Prototype Fund, a relatively new effort from the foundation that is designed to help jump-start new ideas and startups — it invests via grants of up to $50,000 and says that the program is intended to help entrepreneurs “build fast [and] fail fast” while they try to reinvent the way that journalism works online.

The Washington Post‘s political editor, Steven Ginsberg, got the idea for a real-time fact-checking service while he was watching a speech given by former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann in 2011. During her talk at a sports bar in Iowa, the candidate repeatedly misled her audience and Ginsberg said he envisioned a mobile app that would have allowed anyone to check whether she was telling the truth as she was speaking, and then challenge her statements.

Truth Teller checks facts against a Post database

The beta prototype that the Post launched on Tuesday isn’t quite there yet — it is only capable of checking facts related to taxation law and proposed changes to those laws, information that has been hand-fed to the system. But eventually, the newspaper says that the application should be able to do this about a wide range of topics by checking the Post‘s database in real time.

The Post‘s executive producer for digital news, Cory Haik, explains that the application turns speech from a video into text and then checks statements from that text version with an algorithm (a modified Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance). While watching a video of House Speaker John Boehner, for example, when he says that raising the top tax rate would “kill 700,000 jobs,” the application pops up a large warning in red, saying: “False.”

Below the video, there is a transcript of the speech, and users can click on any sentence and go to that section of the video — and they can also “view source” and see the basis for the newspaper’s claim that something is false. In the case of the Speaker of the House’s claim, it’s a piece from Glenn Kesler, who writes a column called The Fact Checker, and wrote a post specifically addressing Boehner’s statement — and ultimately awarded it three Pinocchios, which are the newspaper’s version of a thumbs down on the facts.

Political truth can be a slippery thing

The topic of fact-checking political statements became the focus of much debate during the run-up to the election, especially after the former public editor for the New York Times wrote a post asking whether the newspaper’s reporters should be “truth vigilantes” — in other words, whether they should challenge politicians on their statements during the campaign, or just report what they said and fact-check them later. The reaction from readers was astonishment that the newspaper wouldn’t want to do the former, but Brisbane argued that fact-checking is often harder than it seems.

This is one of the potential flaws with an approach like the Post is taking with Truth Teller: such automated systems likely work best when they have specific facts to drawn on, such as Boehner’s claim about 700,000 jobs being lost. But in many cases, the mis-statements that politicians make are much more vague and subject to interpretation than that, and so would be difficult to check against a database of facts.

The other problem is that even Ginsberg’s example of the Bachmann speech assumes that any of those listening would have wanted to fact-check her comments in real time. In the same way, the Truth Teller system — and other similar efforts such as the “Truth Goggles” project, or even more established fact-checking services like Politifact — assume that anyone will take the time to actually go there and check the facts. But will they?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

As Starkman notes in his column, the fact that longer stories have declined at newspapers like the L.A. Times shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tribune Co., the owner of the Times, filed for bankruptcy several years ago and the chain has been struggling ever since (the Los Angeles paper and many of the company’s other assets are said to be for sale). The Washington Post, where CJR says longform stories were down by about 50 percent from 2003, and the New York Times — down by 25 percent, according to Starkman — have also been suffering from an industry-wide dropoff in ad revenue.

More resources on fewer stories isn’t necessarily bad

In that context, publishing fewer long stories seems like a fairly natural response to a shortage of income, and a need to print fewer pages on expensive newsprint. It’s also worth noting that the cash-strapped New York Times has actually published more stories that are 3,000 words and longer than it did in 2003 — 32 percent more, according to the CJR’s numbers. And the newspaper got some well-deserved acclaim for the way it handled the online version of one of those stories: namely, the Snowfall feature it released as an online series and an e-book late last year.

The Times‘ Snowfall feature helps to make one point that Starkman’s bleak assessment of the industry avoids, and that is the fact that longform journalism is evolving away from the traditional newspaper-based publishing that his numbers focus on. As the spokesman for the L.A. Times noted in a response to CJR, much of the paper’s feature coverage now includes video, graphics and other elements that wouldn’t have been present a decade ago — and don’t show up in a raw word count.

“In recent years, our longform storytelling has also typically incorporated unique videos and photo galleries. The two media – print and pixels – are seamlessly integrated in a way that a Factiva search can’t capture.”

As journalism professor Jeff Jarvis pointed out in a response to Starkman’s original post on Twitter, simple length is not a determinant of overall quality in newspaper features (and to be fair, the CJR writer admits as much in the first few paragraphs of his piece). In many cases, those longer features that were published a decade ago may have been overly generous — or indulged in only because they make good “award bait,” as one former newspaper colleague of mine described them.

Papers aren’t the only source of longform journalism

If newspapers like the Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal are being more judicious with their use of space, and trying to devote the time and resources to fewer long pieces that provide more value, that’s arguably a good thing. And Starkman’s diagnosis also focuses (not surprisingly perhaps) on newspapers in a vacuum — essentially ignoring all of the innovation that is occurring in longform journalism outside that industry, through services like Byliner, Longreads and Atavist.

The magazine-style features that Byliner has become known for, or the longform pieces that readers share through Longreads may not replace the missing newspaper features one-for-one, but they are clearly filling a need. That need also becomes obvious when you look at some of the most-saved articles at “read it later” services like Pocket — many of them are long features from magazines and other outlets (although whether those who save such pieces ever get around to reading them is another question).

In other words, newspapers are playing on a much broader field than they used to. And all that competition makes it even more important that they focus their time and energy on features that can really come alive online, the way Snowfall did for the NYT — and if that means fewer words in fewer pieces, then perhaps that is for the best.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review and Shutterstock / Ruggiero Scardigno

The court ruling is a victory for the photographer but will do little to clear up a brewing legal storm over who has a right to photos posted on social media. Consider the ironic mess we’re in: on one hand, news companies depend on Twitter and other sites for news pics — but on the other hand, they sue if other people use their own photos.

Here’s a plain English explanation of the court case and how it relates to the larger trouble with copyright laws in the age of social media.

No, you can’t just have those photos from Twitter

When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, news agency AFP turned to Twitter and discovered a user’s “exclusive photos” of the disaster. AFP took those photos and shared them with photo service Getty. The Washington Post then took the photos from Getty and published them on its website.

There was a problem, though. The user who claimed to have the “exclusive photos” had taken them from another Twitter user who was the actual photographer. This meant that Getty and the Post published photos without permission and with the wrong attribution.

When the photographer sued the news agencies, they responded by saying that his decision to put the photos on Twitter amounted to granting a public license for anyone to use. The argument isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Consider what happens when I see your photo on Twitter and retweet it — I’m taking your work and republishing it. Is it so different if the Washington Post does the same thing? The court seemed to think so. Here’s the key passage:

The judge’s conclusion led her to grant summary judgment against the AFP and the Post which means they now must pay up to $150,000 for each photograph. (The case against Getty goes on — see the marked up copy of the ruling below for details).

The court ruling solves nothing

The fight over the Haiti photos has received a lot of attention because it involved a natural disaster and a David vs Goliath storyline. But the reality is that, in the age of photo sharing, these sort of photo disputes are blowing up all over. As my colleague Mathew Ingram explained last week, a dispute between BuzzFeed and Reddit over photos is just the tip of the iceberg due to a web “remix culture” that makes image reproduction easier than ever.

This tension over photographs is only going to grow as smartphones spread and people post more pictures online. Meanwhile, social media images are becoming ever more essential to news reporting. This week, for instance, British newspapers all relied on a user’s Twitter photo to report on a London helicopter crash.

This situation means news agencies will keep finding themselves on both sides of the copyright debate. Getty, for instance, is not just a defendant in the Twitter case. It is also making major money by combing the web for people who use its images without permission — and then extracting expensive legal settlements.

There is no easy solution to this copyright mess. One suggestion is a universal licensing scheme that provides a guaranteed payment, or at least an acknowledgment, to people who happen to be in the right time and place to take an important photo. A more likely outcome is that companies will continue to press courts to push the bounds of fair use ever outward or, as in the recent Instagram debacle, consider changing their terms of service in order to strip user rights to photos in the first place.

Twitter pic opinion by

(Image by Lisa A via Shutterstock)