I'm hoping the SI demo is the appetizer for the entree announced today.

Time, Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp made the formal announcement of  their new digital consortium today. It names four basic areas of work (around content management, formats, advertising and a consumer storefront), all of which I think are aimed at fleshing out the reader and advertiser proposition for the new generation of tablets. As importantly, they intend to establish a new business model itself for their digital products. These would include both magazines and, yes, newspapers, if those papers can make the transition to the visual age.

Here's what I think is going on here: the digital do-over for the next decade. With the flurry of year-end activity, it's as if publishers, as they ready their decade-end lists for publication, have made one for themselves.

Top of the list: Get the Next Decade Right.

Web browsing -- desktop and laptop -- has been a quicksand for publishers. Alluring, it drew them in and then got them stuck. Maybe, they hope, this next generation of reading devices -- tablets (and maybe mobile) can re-start the engines, putting them on the curve (if not ahead of it) with readers and advertisers, instead of being sent to the dustbin of history as dowdy, old, dying media.

It makes a lot of theoretical sense, though the payoff is at least 12-18 months away, and the battles over the money in web browsing will continue apace.

That said, standards battles are always tough ones, and it's easy to get on the wrong side of history. This consortium seems aimed, properly, at open standards, which would be the smart play for publishers. It's impossible to call a winner in the coming Tablet Wars. Sony Reader, Kindle,PlasticLogic, iRex, Hanlin, Cybook and apparently lots more are out there; it's starting to sound like a set of galaxies from Star Trek. All of these may be diversions, though, from the titanic Amazon vs. Apple battle to come, given the marketplace might of both.

These tablets will take off, I believe. One key reason: they are consumer devices largely, meant for ah-ha pleasure of reading and entertainment, not just multi-purpose "computing" devices, like our first generation digital experience.

For publishers, the basics, here, are longstanding ones:

• Make sure the products can fully bring to life their current and evolving new and feature content and storytelling.
• Fully exploit the commercial story-telling, experiential abilities of the new medium, offering much beyond pay-for-space "advertising".
• Maintain a direct customer relationship, certainly with readers and potentially with advertisers. Rupert Murdoch fairly frothed at the mouth as JeffBezos said he'd be the middleman between the Kindle and News Corp customers; that's a proper froth.
• Build a flexible enough content management support system that can both feed multiple device and formats,  and then rock and roll with ongoing build-outs to come.

They are all living with the consequences of unintended Googling, as their own sites have become secondary players to the search aggregators, Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

In a week that saw the Tiger Woods Affair look like a Sopranos’ Episode Gone Mild and the Sheila Dixon gift card conviction look like a David Simon outtake, we saw more skirmishes between Rupert Murdoch and Google. Rupert led off the FTC save-journalism workshop with a well-covered anti-Google benediction, and Google followed with a couple of blog posts tweaking its news search protocols. The conversation, as usual wasn’t in the (FTC) room, but conducted on and through the web. That should tell us something.  

It’s quite a cat-and-mouse game. The cat is Rupert Murdoch, a lion in the winter of his career. Astoundingly, he’s become the leading spokesman for American journalism. The mouse is the crafty Google, adjusting its algorithms and its tactics, faster than publishers can bemoan, “who moved my cheese!”   It's not just the dollars and cents at stake here -- though, of course, that's the fundamental issue. It's the dollars and making sense of what is going on as 2009 closes.

It can seem like a simple toggle. Turn the news free or lock it up. There are, though, many sharp edges here. To that point, let me try Nine Questions about this confusing landscape of threats and promise:

1. If Rupert Murdoch is now the Really Bad Cop, does that leave Tom Curley as just the Bad Cop?

Both have called for a reordering of the news-search landscape, but now AP CEO Tom Curley is starting to appear as the reasonable alternative to The Rupert, who keeps raising the temp, especially, on Google.

The News Corp/Microsoft dance and Murdoch’s cries of “Pirate!” have won headlines, but AP’s re-negotiation of its licensing deals with the search aggregators have the potential to have more impact. AP's license deal with Google is up at the end of the year. In the throes of unprecedented change itself, AP's re-negotiation tries to put the new Digital Coop at the center. The idea: rich, universally tagged, delivered-on-the-fly indexes of news content add extra value to news content itself. AP hopes its negotiation will both increase its own take from search engine licensing -- and provide a model for individual newspaper companies.  How much a “model” would be adopted by an increasingly cantankerous, go-your-own-way industry is highly problematic.

Still, AP, with its own voluminous content and newspaper relationships may be more of trend-setter than the publisher of two American dailies, News Corp’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

2. If Alicia calls, will you pick up? Sure, in public, Rupert is throwing grenades. His complaints about Amazon and Google, some valid, others just good theater, draw attention and soften the battleground. Behind the scenes, though, he's moving forward with project “Alicia.” News Corp has apparently allocated several million dollars to starting up the news portal, a Hulu-for-news site. Perhaps a free/paid hybrid portal, perhaps a paid one, the notion is to divert traffic from the search engines to a news company-controlled site. News Corp has pitched the idea of joining in to at least a handful or two of publishers, in both the U.S. and U.K.  Critical mass of news – compared to the several thousand news sources indexed by Google – is, of course fundamental to giving any such play a prayer at success. Big question: could Alicia ever gain sufficient breadth to really compete -- and charge? Is Alicia really a bargaining chip with the search engines, or are the search engine wars a chip for Alicia? Or both?

3.  Isn't it better to “negotiate” with Microsoft than against yourself? For several years now, publishers have tried to get Google to negotiate better terms, the acceptance of a new content handling protocol (ACAP) and, more recently, the adoption of an Attributor-based anti-piracy system. They haven't gotten far. In essence, newspaper companies have been negotiating against themselves.

Google has repeatedly said: If you don't want us to index your content, just tell us, and we'll be happy to stop. Just use our on/off switch. End of discussion. End of “negotiation.” In fact, its twin moves this week – allowing publishers more flexibility in news search rules and in its Five Clicks Free program – are the latest expressions of that public pose. It knows that the publishers’ current addiction to search traffic makes the on/off choice (even with this week’s nuances) not much of a choice at all. So in part, Murdoch (and more quietly, AP’s) move to bring the anti-Google, Microsoft, to the table creates a sense of real negotiation, competition for perhaps scarce assets.  

4.   What is Google's (and search engine traffic) worth)?  Most news publishers will tell you that about 25-35% of their traffic is driven by Google and that more than 50% of it is driven by search engines generally. They'll also say that about a quarter to a third comes directly to their sites -- and that these are the regular customers they care about. They'll tell you that it is the number of monthly sessions and the number of these page views that these customers generate that should make the most sense in building a real, digital business.

We can look at this view in a couple of ways.

It may be simply old-fashioned, an outgrowth of the old way of looking at media businesses in terms of stable, "owned" readerships. In this view, digital news readers are happy free agents, flitting about the web, picking and choosing what they want, without being tied down. The only thing that counts is a single view -- and what marketers can do with it, getting the reader to take notice of a product, service or brand, or seducing them into an interactive experience. There is lots of technology trying to make that match of reader and product, watching readers' clickstreams and delivering appropriate ads. Consider the marketer's mantra of the day: We buy audiences, not media. Through that lens, publishers may be fighting an old war. The new atomized (content unit by content unit; ad unit by ad unit) world gives considerably less value to the reader's relationship with the publisher's brand.

The alternative view is that news publishers have been hopelessly seduced by first-generation web measures. Those metrics all said: more is more. Those counts first focused on uniques and page views. Then time-on- site followed, but, of course, that's an averaged number, of all uniques. Now Nielsen has introduced average number of sessions per month, but of course, that's an average of sessions for all those uniques as well.

Publishers are telling me they are increasingly focusing on those uniques visiting for two or more sessions within a month, essentially those that are their ongoing customers. These are the people that Journalism Online is targeting as it works with publishers, trying to figure which of these more loyal customers will pay for content. These are the users that sites as small as MinnPost talk about when they sell non-CPM-based sponsorships.

So in this view, it's a matter of establishing a new, fairly loyal digital readership (online + mobile) and then figuring out how best to monetize it widely -- through ad and subscription products.

It's an alluring argument, but it looks like though it may be swimming against the currents of modern marketing. Still, if publishers believe it, it leads them to discount much of that traffic they get from search engines, and that's informing the new round of aggregator angst. 

5.  So are we into the age of Junk Traffic? In 2009, news publishers figured out that the Internet is indeed infinite. It's not the scarce world of print publishing or broadcasting; it's an expanding universe that by its nature has no bounds. Did anyone ever try to measure human conversation itself -- or more to the point, monetize it? So in this infinity -- treasured by readers and abhorred by people who make their money selling space or time in a finite world -- more is no longer more.

Don't tell me more page views are better, they say. Don't tell me more unique visitors are better. Tell me why 50% or more of my ad inventory goes unsold (and how do I get a decent chunk of that every-page-is-useful paid search business, anyhow?). If, in fact, these visits and odd once-in-a-month, once-in-a-year page views happen on my site, does it really matter? If a one-page reader falls on my site, can my finance department hear even a peep?

At least, that's one evolving viewpoint explaining search engine angina.

It’s based on the growing assumption that some of the search engine traffic isn't, at this point, valuable.  It's akin to newspaper publishers cutting "junk circulation" -- outstate circ, free State Fair copies and the like -- similarly disdained by advertisers.

Yes, it’s easy to say news publishers should better convert some of those odd visitors to real customers (and they should), but the sense of Junk Traffic is getting more pervasive.

6. What kind of match would Microsoft and News Corp really make? As Michael Wolff points out, we've been there before, as the two have tried the mating game before. So, post approval of joint Microsoft/Yahoo search business, Microsoft would be the smaller half of the Google/Microsoft duopoly, with about 30% of search. News Corp's got a diverse bag of the New York Post, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal to bring to the game. A deal is the start of some kind, but not a game changer for either. 

7. What would a Bing/News Corp deal do to the Journal's freemium model? Freemium has been a core principle of Journalism Online, as it makes its case to publishers. Have your cake -- keep 90% or more of your traffic -- and eat the icing (new online subscription revenue), too. The math for the Journal goes something like this: get about one million customers (and uniques) to pay a subscription price. Capture another 19 million uniques or so via various free web openings, opening and closing gates, moats, and bridges into the paywall and make money off those via advertising.

We don't know how any Microsoft/News Corp deal might affect that balance. Would more Journal content be able for free through Bing?; what might that do to subscription business? Would a Bing deal focus a spotlight on just how much WSJ content you can get to, without a subscription? Alternatively, if WSJ content wouldn't be prominently free on Bing, then what kind of advantage might that really give Bing, left with just New York Post, Fox News and, maybe, Murdoch's international paper content (though he's busy erecting pay walls there, as well.) New wild card: how might Google’s new Five Clicks Free program affect the Journal’s strategy?

8. If Microsoft really wants to amp up its newspaper partnership, how much sense might an investment in or acquisition of Journalism Online make? We'll see some tests in the first or second quarter next year, as JO figures tests markets with publishers. The freemium notion will get a real test -- does it have legs beyond the WSJ and FT models? -- and Microsoft, as it newly befriends publishers as the anti-Google, might be able to use JO's relationships.

9. Can the newspaper industry negotiate in 2009, as if it were 1999? As newspaper publishers debate various schemes, they are valuing their news output as if it were 1999. Back in 1999, they were quite dominant, largely daily print monopolies across the USA. In addition, they produced great quantities of news content ---with at least 12,000 more newsroom staff -- and had little competition in their marketplaces.

Minnesota Public Radio’s version – The Future of News – took place Monday.  For those of us with printer’s ink still draining from our systems, it offered something a bit different, a peek into a parallel medium – public radio – as it struggles to define its future in a digital world. If you pricked up your ears Monday, you could hear some new answers to the question of who might pick up the lost local reporting slack.

The session featured an uncommon level of head-to-head competitive spirit, and that’s welcome. Better to have real arguments in the room, rather than at the wine-and-cheese reception.

The competitive quote of the day: “Over time, MPR will be the Star Tribune’s number one competitor,” said Mike Sweeney, the board chairman of the paper, who’s been in that position for a couple of months.

Sweeney – a newspaper newbie plucked by the post-bankruptcy, lenders-turned-owners of the Star Tribune -- is the managing partner of the Minneapolis private equity firm of Goldner Hawn Johnson & Morrison. He'd  already laid down the gauntlet in his own pages (convenient to own a press), the morning of the conference, early on creating a bit of frisson in the room.

In print, he’d said: "MPR is making a blatant land grab by calling into question the viability of existing news organizations in Minnesota....The fact that they're funded with government money and are now trying to extend their reach is, I think, beyond the pale," Sweeney said.

There it was, a good local case history, illuminating much of the abstract discussion about the future of the trade, a debate that’s raged all year.

Profit. Non-profit. Advertising models. Membership models. Government support. Market-driven news.

Some participants had joked about how MPR was putting on a self-serving conference, one that asked the question about the future of news and came pre-equipped with the two-word answer: Public Radio. Not untrue, but the conference managed to bring not only Sweeney and Strib editor Nancy Barnes into the room and onto panels. It is also brought in Joel Kramer, publisher of MinnPost (as well as Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis), knowing that Kramer might be (and was) vocal about MPR’s unwillingness to partner with MinnPost.

If Sweeney came concerned, he might have left more worried.  Yes, Public Radio’s legacy business is radio, and, more recently, audio, via podcast and streaming. What Sweeney heard, though, was a larger Who, public radio’s nascent attempts to assert itself as a major online (and then presumably mobile) news player throughout the country.

Tuesday, MPR head Bill Kling  – who’s created the gold standard for public radio news in Minnesota (and re-built Southern California’s KPCC in a similar fashion over the last decade) – followed up the conference by pitching major funder Corporation for Public Broadcasting on his wider vision.

“Everything you'd need to start an alternative media company, we've got," he told me, ticking off technology, company infrastructure, funding apparatus and more.  "What's missing is the leadership," he added summing up his ambitions to fill the vacuum left be cratering dailies. Bill Kling has never lacked ambition and his ambitious message to the CPB: it's now time to shape up and shore up the wide range of public radio outlets around the country and push them into the news business.  

A few of those stations are big players, driving lots of new content production and community involvement. Many, though, are simply conduits for NPR and American Public Media (the parent of Minnesota Public Radio and L.A.'s KPCC, and a creator of business program Marketplace, and other shows) programming.

Kling’s push is more than talk. Consider just three emerging news initiatives coming out of public radio:

•  NPR recently announced a $3M (CPB and the increasingly ubiquitous Knight Foundation) to fund "blogger/curators" in 12 cities,  similar to MPR's new NewsBobber I mentioned recently.

• MPR itself got a $5M individual grant – to be matched over time – to strengthen its own news operations, announced by Kling on Monday. The intention: a new $10 million endowment to support MPR journalism. Today, MPR boasts the largest news staff in local public radio, 70 in total, with 21 of them having reporting feet on the street. (As Chris Worthington, managing director for MPR's regional news points out, it takes lots of production personnel to get radio news on air.)

• A Local Journalism Center program will be announced soon by CPB. $5 million in funding will allow for the creation of four or five regional, multi-state centers, with a handful of staffers each, to help local public radio stations do better origination, editing and sharing of stories of regional concern, both on air and online.

Beyond that, national NPR is a beehive of activity. In July, it relaunched its npr.org site, under the new team of Vivian Schiller (ex of NYT) and Kinsey Wilson (ex of USA Today). They are now taking another shot at welding together a true national network between and among NPR, its high-profile metro radio stations (including WNYC, WBUR, KQED and more), the Minnesota-based APM/MPR power center and the more than 300 member stations overall. Also on the NPR agenda: the technology guts to help power a network, including a common platform and content repository, built on a single taxonomy.

So is a threat to daily newspapers? Is it a promise to readers and listeners of news?

On the plus side, we see that public radio news people have values most similar to their daily brethren -- public service journalism with some degree of depth and breadth. In fact, newspaper people, including Kinsey Wilson, Chris Worthington and KQED's Bruce Koon are now running some of the news operations; MPR itself counts nine former Saint Paul Pioneer Press alums among its staff.  Public radio has some heavy hitters behind it, including CPB, now operating in league with a more friendly Congress and Administration.

On the negative side, public radio news is still quite small. MPR's 70 news staffers compare intriguingly to the Star Tribune's 275 (about 110 of those report the news). The Pioneer Press -- a painfully obvious no-show at the summit and in the coverage of it, though it happened but a half-dozen blocks from its office -- has a staff of 135.  KQED, serving Northern California, has but 21 staffers in news at this point. In addition, it's not hard to hear the echoes of newspaper transition angst among the public radio people; moving from radio and audio to online can be as mind-bending as moving from print to online. Are they really ready for the transition? NPR and MPR's attempt to bring along the rest of public radio may be a bit of a pushmi-pullyu routine. Finally, public radio's own business model -- though far less dependent on commercial support -- is wobbly as the worlds of membership, sponsorship and foundations shake as well.

The diversion, however direct or circuitous, of public funds to grow public radio news seems like a small issue to me. I'm fairly agnostic on how good journalism gets funded, though the notion of Congress “saving” journalism gives me hives. Ironically, in the midst of the hot-button health care debate, let’s acknowledge that public radio is one of the original Public Options, in place for decades. Begun to provide information alternatives, it has succeeded wildly, and provides a key part of many of our news diets. Its audience isn’t shrinking; it’s growing and now reaches more than 30 million Americans a week.

The Twin Cities can well emerge as a great test bed for the hybrid journalism to come. Joel Kramer's MinnPost has rightly become a national model of high-quality, local online journalism. MPR boasts a one-of-a-kind regional news operation. The Daily Planet offers a unique aggregation of local user-gen. Two dailies remain. My suggestion and challenge for them all: Before you go to the mattresses, in a war of words and attrition, look to how you can collectively use the new tools of the trade -- smart content management, cross-promotion, win-win aggregation, pro-am bridges, savvy syndication, regional sales networks and more -- to produce more worthy-of-Lake Wobegon above-average journalism, rather than less.

Longer-term, it could be a Last Man Standing strategy, figuring that newspaper readers may well scale back their daily reading to a single paper, as they increasingly go digital. Or, it could be toehold, for an expanded digital strategy, adding local options to their national and global products.

So far, all indications are that the simplest explanation -- print retention, small amount of growth -- is the driving purpose. That makes sense: 85% of the overall revenues of these companies is still tied up in print. Give the readers another reason to pay a lot of money for the print sub, and you can hold on to more of them. The regional editions -- the Times in the Bay Area and Chicago and the Journal's announced one in San Francisco (and L.A. and Chicago, perhaps, as well) -- also give the papers better regional ad targeting, especially in categories like finance, technology and luxury.

So far, my reading of the Times' new coverage -- a couple of extra pages in the Friday and Sunday editions -- is that's it not any kind of game-changer. It's good, Times-like coverage, but I doubt that a half dozen stories each of those days (though trumpeted with a Page One "local" sticker) is going to make much of a difference in a buy/don't buy, renew/let it go decision.

Of course, both papers have been in metro markets for a long time. Yet, they've been a supplemental read for newsies, people whose daily education hasn't been complete 'til they've trawled the local metro paper, the Times and/or the Journal.

By definition, that's an older crowd, an elite that has given each of the two papers a few percentage points of household penetration in the cities. The Times hasn't gotten above five percent outside its home market. For examples (from data gained earlier this year):

• Boston: 2.3% Sunday & 1.6% Daily
• Fort Myers/Naples: 2.2% Sunday & 1.5% Daily
• Hartford/New Haven: 3.0% Sunday & 1.9% Daily
• San Francisco: 2.3% Sunday & 1.6% Daily
• Washington DC: 2.2% Sunday & 1.5% Daily
• West Palm Beach: 3.2% Sunday & 2.4% Daily

Given that the Journal's print circulation is now about double the Times -- 2 million to 927,000 -- we'd surmise that the Journal would be two to three times those numbers. (Addendum: A couple of alert readers have noted that about 400,000 of the Journal's 2 million may be online-only subs), bringing down the print-to-print, head-to-head comparison somewhat. Worth taking into account.) That's partly because of the number of its readers and partly because the business-oriented Journal's penetration in New York should be considerably less than the Times, still in part a hometown, general interest paper for New York. The Times home market has been accounting for about 40% of its Sunday sales and about 45% of its daily sales.

So if that's today, let's look at tomorrow.

The Times and Journal aren't entering these markets in a vacuum. We've never seen such activity in local markets as we're now seeing. From public radio stations getting newly news-aggressive to Politico's big DC move to growing start-ups to metro and state investigative watchdogs to the Examiners expanding, we've never seen such ferment around local news. My sense: as metro dailies have cut staff and space, they've left their flanks open, newly emboldening would-be competitors for readers and advertisers.

In fact, the potential connections between and among new and old players -- as just one example, the Times, for instance, has been having continuing talks with KQED, the strong Bay Area public radio station -- are being weighed.

The key here is aggregating as much high-quality content under your own brand -- Journal, Times, whoever -- as cheaply as possible. In the Bay Area, the Times is adding coverage without adding full-time staff; in Chicago, it has partnered with the new, and intriguing, Chicago news coop. In general, neither the Times nor the Journal can afford to add much high-salaried staff to fuel these editions. So partnering is key, though dicey in execution, with logistics, standards, immediacy and other issues always to be worked out between editors traditonally internally focused. 

The one exception: the Journal looks like it is adding 12 reporters to a NYC edition. That makes more sense. It's in line with the Journal's head-to-head competition with the Times as it targets the Times' readers and advertisers -- medium-hanging fruit for the Journal. Further, it's personal for Murdoch. Plus, it's worth sending the message of "we're hiring," as the Times cuts back another 100 people in the newsroom. Psychological warfare. 

I'm still expecting outside/in, inside/out web national/local products, maybe later in 2010. Why not a Journal or Times module or two on WBUR.org or KQED or MPR News? Why not a Bay Area module on NYTimes.com or WSJ.com. Why not more NPR modules on non-public radio sites? Toggle on, toggle off, depending on your local preferences. The target: increase time on site for both parties, as much as possible.

What's going on? Nine questions to start:

• How about a week without the Chicago Tribune? Yes, I know the idea is a week without the AP, but isn't the idea a bit behind the public's curve? The latest circ numbers showed that more than 40,000 readers have recently decided to go a week without the paper , down -9.72% to 465,892. It's telling that the Tribune company papers are going AP-less, but their websites aren't. That tells us that precious, and costly, newsprint will be used mainly for local news, but pixel-based newsreading will include the wider world. Which, of course, makes the formerly mass market newspaper a niche -- what happened locally yesterday -- and the web mass. Sam Zell's still on the AP board, which got some good news this week as 50 papers withdrew their "cancellations".  (Back in my newsroom days, I always loved "advisory cancellations.") Here's guessing AP will be around in the news business lots longer than Sam Zell.

• How do you put a new gloss on the Chron? It seems counterintuitive, but you improve the paper stock here and there, moving in some semi-gloss super-calendared paper. Sure, monthly high-gloss magazines are the only pubs failing faster than the daily press, but the San Francisco Chronicle's move seems a simple, and hardly earth-shaking, one. Christmas, I have on good authority, is still coming. Get some higher-profile advertisers, charge them a bit more than the cost of the better paper, and you have a few more profits. Pre-recession, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal -- now both new entrants for targeted Bay Area advertising, competing against the Chronicle -- were doing quite well with luxury ads. Luxe ads will make a comeback, and maybe the Chronicle's new offering will help. Besides, with daily circ down 25.8%, to 251,782, a little better paper costs a lot less than cheaper paper the Chronicle used when it had 525,00 daily circulation, back not long ago, in 2002.

• Will alternative weeklies become yet another local competitor to the dailies? The alternatives have survived the recession better than the dailies, but curiously, they've not become big online players. Instead, the Yelps, Craigslists, AngiesLists and OpenTables -- among many others -- have moved into city markets. Now Village Voice Media -- the biggest chain in the country, with 10 bigger-city weeklies -- has launched the Voice Media Group, aggregating its own and other sites. As worlds blend together, the head of the alternatives' trade group, AAN, has just succeeded Scott Bosley as the head of the American Society of News Editors. Rich Karpel starts Dec. 1.
  

• You think Pox News is bad, have you tried Headline News? So Sesame Street is taking a hit for taking on grouchy cable news. But Fox seems high like opera compared to the bad melodrama of CNN's Headline News (HLN). It's hard to believe anyone would pick the station, but many of us are subjected to it, me at the gym. Soundless, I watch its crawls with mouth agape. Yesterday, in just a few minutes: "Pregnant Woman Found Dead," and "This Just In -- Body at Rapist's Home Identified," repeated countless times. It ran with the Garrido case (kidnapper/child molester in Northern California) for weeks, with a headline about bones on adjacent property being checked to see whether they were animal or human, and whose. (Animal, of course.) Macabre, ghoulish, and I think far more hurtful to the watching psyche than the freak shows that talk cable has become. Recall that HLN (Headless News?) surpassed its big sister -- CNN -- in the last ratings cycle, where CNN , the nicest if least watched cable net, finished last.

• How well will Dow Jones do with the upsell dance? Much "paid content" strategy at Dow Jones seems to smartly understand that it's easiest -- and cheapest -- to sell new stuff to the customers you already have, especially when many of those can charge it to the company store. So we have the upsell on WSJ Mobile, just launched, and now WSJ Pro. Pro is first being sold to enterprise users -- a new mix of two Dow Jones products, the WSJ.com and Factiva, a rich aggregation of news sources -- and in January, it will begin be offered to individuals.

• Aren't we seeing new digital news versions of The Dating Game? You can't turn around without hearing about new combos. ProPublica and Marketplace on an investigation into University of Phoenix. The Center for Investigative Reporting and Frontline on a Carbon Watch initiative, led by the well-decorated Mark Schapiro. CBS and Global Post, tying up around global coverage generally. As the old arteries of high-quality content creation and distribution shrivel, new ones are being forged seemingly every day.

• Will public radio grab the regional aggregation opportunity? Readers love aggregation -- from journos' daily check-in of Romenesko to everyone's use of the big news collections of Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google. Newspaper and local broadcast companies, though, have been slow to make themselves regional aggregators. Now Minnesota Public Radio, beginning to make a move to assert itself as a major online news players, has picked up NewsBobber. Bob Ingrassia, a 15-year veteran of newspapers who is now leaving Internet Broadcasting as he takes NewsBobber to MPR, says it's a quite simple proposition: "How do people sort through it all?" He tells me he manages the impressive, month-old site in the morning and evening and has harnessed all kinds of cool, free tools to rank Minnesota sites and blogs. So think about it: once again, a guy does in his spare time what better-staffed media can't figure out.

• Will the Chico experiment be the new chic? It makes a lot more sense to try charging people in a non-metropolitan market with far less competitive news media. So MediaNews' announced pay walls in Chico and York, Pa will be worth watching. MediaNews' Howard Saltz makes this point: "But we are not giving away our premium content for free." The big question for the Chicos, the Yorks and others: What will readers in fact consider premium, and worth paying for? I've long thought that the smaller the paper -- think weekly out in the hinterlands -- the greater chance to get readers to kick in a few bucks extra for online access.

• Is that Awl the news that's left to print? Sometimes a spreadsheet's worth more than a thousand words. Check out The Awl's circ charting, something that you won't see coming out of an industry association. But, take your vertigo pills first. Check out top newspapers -- from the Journal and Times to L.A. Times and Washington Post, and see what conclusions you draw.

Today's semi-annual circulation FAS-FAX numbers for U.S. dailies, though, are still breathtaking. On average, 10.6% down daily and 7.4% Sunday. That's on average, and largely twice as bad as the declines have been over the past four-plus years. Look at some of the individual results, and you understand why the New York Times just announced that it is taking another 100 jobs out of its newsroom and why other newsroom (and, of course, wider) cuts may increase -- not decrease -- as Wall Street indicates that an overall economic recovery will be a 2010 reality.

Daily, these losses, as examples:

• L.A. Times: 11%
• Houston Chronicle: 14%
• Boston Globe: 18%
• Star-Ledger, Newark: 22%
• San Francisco Chronicle: 26%

The Sunday losses, same papers:

• L.A. Times: 6%
• Houston Chronicle: 6%
• Boston Globe: 17%
• Star-Ledger: 18%
• San Francisco Chronicle: 22%

So what's happening?

More of the same, though now with evidence of a tipping point. Inevitably, for the print product, less is less.

Newspaper readers have hung with their local papers through thick and through increasing thin. The value proposition they now see, though, is a lesser one: Smaller product, less news, fewer ads of all kinds, more e-reading choices -- and higher prices.

Yes, most newspaper companies have embarked on a premium print pricing strategy, in some cases doubling single-copy prices and upping home delivery significantly. And, yes, these increases have provided a circ revenue bump just as ad revenue tanked (both McClatchy (6.7%) and Media General (11%) recently reported quarterly circ revenue gains). Yet, they've made the value proposition for print harder to justify. Now, add the recession-induced pocketbook concern to all the greater changes in the news world, and publishers may have shone a spotlight on the print newspaper product.

They have moved it from being a necessity, a habit, to a discretionary buy. (More on the history of the ebbing habit, from Alan Mutter.)

It's been a tough formula, but one that did make a kind of sense. Acknowledge that newspapers are a niche buy (while Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN have become the mass daily stop), and price accordingly. Take a hit in volume, but make it up in pricing. It looked like that strategy was working for the past couple of years, as circ revenue's been flat to slightly up at most companies.

The risk: Too many readers would opt out. One ABC survey isn't enough to tell us whether we've reached that point definitively, but it's a huge warning sign.

Put yourself in publishers' shoes, planning for 2010. Today's numbers tell them a couple of things, at least:

• If fewer readers won't pay for print, can they get them to pay for new e-reading choices? They'll watch the Wall Street Journal's test of mobile pricing. They'll work with Journalism Online to see which digital value propositions have a prayer of working. They'll think hard about the Kindles, Nooks (good comparison with the Kindle by Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan on NPR), Ques and Readers, and how they can get news readers to pay for delivery through that new platform.
• It's going to be harder to get a thick slice of the ad spending returning to the marketplace, as the economy normalizes. Publishers' mass market proposition, already weakened, is now further in question (more on cycle of decline, from Rick Edmonds). Their pricing, always a sore point among advertisers, is now even harder to justify among the proliferation of pay-for-performance ad choices. (Good piece by NYT's Stephanie Clifford on that.) As they look anew at their ad sales propositions, they'll need to double down on the notion of premium content, premium audience and superior targeting -- and give often skeptical ad buyers reasons to believe.