Last weekend I decided to get serious about the fact that I live in an earthquake zone, and started putting together a kit with all the food, water, and equipment I’d need to survive for a few days if local services broke down. One of the items that turns up on all of the standard readiness checklists is a battery-powered radio. So I dutifully added “radio” too my shopping list. But then I realized that in an actual emergency, I wouldn’t know what to do with a radio. I know the name of only one local station, KQED, and I don’t think I could even tell you where it’s located on the dial.

It’s not that I don’t listen to lots of radio programming—I do. I’m a huge fan of public radio shows like Fresh Air, Marketplace, and All Things Considered. I just don’t listen to any of this content on radios (except in my car, where I never change the station anyway). Instead, I get my “radio” via Internet streaming and podcasts. So when the big quake hits, I’ll be reduced to surfing the radio dial at random; I’ll feel like the doofus who has to ask where Google is on the computer.

That got me thinking about all the other examples of media-shifting in my life.

—It’s been almost three years since a video signal has entered my television by way of a coaxial cable or a terrestrial broadcast. I get all my TV shows via Netflix, or iTunes on the Apple TV, or the Roku Player.

—I buy plenty of books, but in the last year only four of them have been on paper. I ordered two, a cookbook and a graphic novel, from Amazon, and picked up the other two at local bookstores. The rest came from the Kindle Store.

—I get one print magazine by mail, MIT’s Technology Review, and that’s only because I’m an alum. All of my other magazines (the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Wired) come to my Kindle or my iPad.

—I have several hundred CDs laying around, but I almost never play them. More than 99 percent of my music comes from iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify.

—I read plenty of newspaper articles online, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I bought a printed newspaper. 2004 maybe?

I’m not trying to paint myself as some kind of digital pioneer—I don’t think that any of these media behaviors are that unusual anymore. What’s noteworthy is that when I listen to a podcast of Fresh Air, I still think of it as a radio show. When I’m enjoying a Kindle edition of a novel, I still think of it as a book. When I listen to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” on my iPhone, I think of it as an album. And I read something from the New York Times, I still think of it as a newspaper article.

I probably think this way because the digital versions of these shows, books, albums, and articles are still recognizable as examples of their original genres, though they’ve been ripped from their traditional contexts. The forms have persisted, even after the vessels that shaped them have been taken away.

It appears that Marshall McLuhan was wrong: the medium is not the message. Or at least, the medium is not the whole message. If it were, there’d be no room for online-only newspapers like seattlepi.com, or podcast-only radio productions like Planet Money, or live theatrical broadcasts of New York operas.

But the current stability of form—the traditions that, for example, make a group of eight or nine singles recognizable as an “album”—won’t last forever. Without the old constraints, certain traditions just stop making sense. Take the inverted pyramid style in newspaper writing, for example. This venerable rule, which says that the most newsworthy details in a story should be … Next Page »

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Hot on the heels of The New York Times’ new metered-access pay plan for digital content, Remond, WA-based OwnZones Media Network is touting an initial $500,000 round of financing. The investors were not disclosed.

The company says it’s building a digital content aggregation service based around charging consumers a monthly fee to access higher-quality material with more targeted, less intrusive advertising.

Now that the Times has taken the big leap, there are going to be scores of publishers in smaller markets looking for a way to charge an online gate fee and drive people back toward the more lucrative printed product. Third-party providers are clearly going to have a niche to exploit there.

As a longtime participant in and student of the news business, I am personally skeptical that we are headed for a widespread “era of paid Internet content,” as OwnZones says. The New York Times can probably pull it off. But most newspapers aren’t The New York Times. Publishers in the middle tier are trying to find a turnstile price for their content, and I think they’re going to be very disappointed at how low it is.

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Sorry for the sensational headline. I couldn’t help myself. Talking about the future of journalism just gets me fired up, I guess.

Anyway, the answer, of course, is no. Rupert Murdoch’s new initiative, called The Daily, can’t save journalism in an Internet era when advertising rates have declined and everyone wants to get their content for free. But now that the iPad-only newspaper has launched, I find myself far more intrigued and energized by it than I had expected to be. You can bet that editors and designers at older publications are dissecting the app as we speak, and figuring out how to go The Daily one better. The upshot is that we’re going to see a lot of experimentation in the news business over the next couple of years, and that’s exciting.

The fun started on Groundhog Day, when Murdoch and the publication’s executive staff unveiled The Daily at a news conference in New York. The free app, developed by Murdoch’s News Corporation at a cost of $30 million, is a vehicle for something untried in the annals of journalism: a general-interest news operation built entirely around the Apple iPad.

If you’re wondering why someone would start a major daily newspaper that can only be read by people who’ve shelled out $499 to $829 for an iPad, then you may not have heard that Apple shipped 17 million of the things in 2010 and will likely sell tens of millions more this year. That’s a pretty large “addressable market,” as a VC might say. If just 500,000 iPad owners decide they’re willing to pay $0.99 a week for a subscription to The Daily, the operation will be profitable. (That’s based on Murdoch’s statement at the launch event that The Daily is “running at a cost of less than half a million a week,” and it assumes that The Daily will sell no advertisements at all—which it already has.)

Plus, the publication will eventually be available on all major tablets, according to Murdoch. With every major electronics manufacturer rushing to enter the market Apple has opened up, worldwide tablet shipments are expected to climb to more than 70 million in 2012. So let’s just dispense with the question about whether The Daily makes sense as a business proposition. If it doesn’t now, it soon will.

The Q&A portion of Wednesday’s launch event was interesting to watch, because you could just see the journalists in the room squirming inside. As they probed for flaws in the concept, you could tell that they were all wondering what Murdoch’s gambit might mean for their own publications—approximately none of which were created with tablets in mind.

For most publications, even digital-only ones, “online” means the Web, e-mail, and RSS. The publications big enough to be able to afford it—CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, GQ, Vanity Fair—have built their own iPad apps. But for the most part, these apps are weak reflections of their parent publications, with an incomplete selection of content, uninspiring design, and interfaces that make limited use of the iPad’s capabilities. That’s why startups like Flipboard and Alphonso Labs (makers of Pulse) have been able to find hundreds of thousands of users for iPad apps that make other organizations’ content prettier and more navigable (Flipboard just surpassed 1 million users, actually).

What Murdoch realized is that big, established publications may still be the kings of content, but they aren’t very quick to reinvent themselves when new distribution technologies emerge. Ten years down the road, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have shut down their printing presses and will be universally read on tablets, or e-paper, or retinal implants, or whatever we’re using by then. But The Daily is there now. It doesn’t have to … Next Page »

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You shape the view that others hold of your company via either one-to-one interactions or one-to-many interactions. Of course, the one-to-one interactions in business meetings and social settings are the most potent, because you have both quantity and quality of attention. But this doesn’t scale well. Another reason that personal one-to-one contact is so effective is that you can adjust your message based on real-time feedback from your ‘audience.’ If only that were the case for one-to-many communication! But maybe it can be. Hold that thought.

Network Theory

So, it’s obvious that newspaper, magazine and electronic media stories have the one-to-many benefit of touching lots of people, but the message and impact are highly attenuated because the contact is brief and attention is extremely fragmented by the clutter of competing stories and ads. There is nothing as exciting as scoring a great story in a prestigious outlet with wide circulation, but the real impact of a media program is the network effect that comes from multiple positive impressions bumping and rattling around in the environment. These collectively create a picture of your company in the minds of the key audience.

The second, third, and even higher-order effects are where the impact really lies. Imagine a VC reading a long positive story in her daily Dow Jones VentureWire e-mail newsletter ($6,000/year) nine months after your public launch. While the reporter’s story is initially triggered by your press release about a partnering deal, the length of the story and his extra effort to write it were driven by dozens of impressions that have already reached him. These include one article about you that he has seen and filed away from the New York Times, and two from local business press that he follows. Several round-up stories about your industry mention your company as a player. As he is preparing his story from your press release, his Google search turns up ten links to three industry-specific conferences where you’ve presented; one even includes a flattering photo of you at the podium. Search also turns up news stories he has missed, mostly snippets about your company in the trade magazines, a nice mention in Xconomy, but importantly, some of the company’s scientific publications in quality journals. A dozen bloggers have mentioned your company, mostly in a favorable light. His story is better, and the repetition he has experienced helps him get the kernel of your message right. He calls a couple of industry analysts about your thesis, and they, too, have been touched by your message frequently enough to offer neutral to positive comments. The VC reader is also consuming this story in light of a half dozen touches you have accomplished without ever having met her. These range from the first three minutes of your first conference presentation (before she left to take a phone call) to the NYT story she quickly scanned. Or imagine how helpful it is to your internal champion at a large corporate partner when he hears a story about your company in front of his boss at a cocktail party and someone else chimes in with another bit of news about your company.

The positive network effect grows out of repetition, consistency, and trust. Getting attention requires something else: news. More on that in a moment.

Audience

So let’s consider who is participating in this network you want to shape, starting with your key audiences. Most leaders would quickly identify prospective investors, customers and employees as the targets of interest.

It’s tempting to think of players such as your PR firm, reporters, editors, and other gatekeepers as simply a means to the end of reaching key audiences. But it’s appropriate to think more broadly about influence. You have to win over the gatekeepers as well. Also, don’t simply think of your current employees, vendors, and customers as a means to an end; they are also a key audience. In other words, … Next Page »

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Since Monday, if you’ve paid close attention, you might have noticed a goofy-sounding phrase in your Boston Herald or San Diego Union-Tribune: “Boocoo Auctions.” It comes from a Royal Oak, MI, based company called Ranger Data Technologies and is part of an ambitious plan to take lost advertising revenue back from Craigslist and eBay.

But, as President and COO Tony Marsella puts it, this is no cocktail-napkin dot-com idea. It comes from seasoned veterans of the newspaper industry. The CEO, George Willard Sr., has 41 years in the industry, from his days as a pressman in the early ’60s to his founding of the Mirror chain of Detroit suburban weeklies in the ’90s. His son, George Willard Jr., senior vice president of operations, has worked in newspapers for 14 years, and Marsella is a 30-year veteran of newspaper classified ad sales.

“So, this isn’t a website that was created by a bunch of software guys in a garage to try and then sell it to the newspaper business,” Marsella says.

“One of the reasons that we were able to amass this network of media companies is the fact that we all have a real solid understanding of what the newspaper business is, where it is, and what we thought, and continue to think, are solutions to help newspapers drive more revenue.”

The “network” so far is more than 280 newspapers or broadcast outlets that have licensed more than 6,000 Zip codes from Ranger Data, or about 20 percent of the nation’s nearly 30,000 Zip codes. The media sites buy the exclusive rights to Boocoo auction customers in those Zip codes. The auctions are promoted in the physical newspaper, but the transactions, themselves, happen online. Transactional revenue from every consumer in that Zip code who purchases an item or service is split between Ranger Data and the newspaper.

Boocoo.com had a soft launch on May 31 with just families, friends, and employees of participating newspapers. Only they could place items up for bid. The service launched nationwide on Monday. Among Boocoo’s partners are the Cox Newspaper chain—which includes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Palm Beach Post, and a number of dailies in Ohio—the San Diego Union-Tribune, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, and others.

This long reach into local markets, for starters, is why Boocoo believes it has an edge … Next Page »

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With all the drama this year around newspapers, including the Boston Globe‘s near-death experience and the actual demise of several other papers such as the Seattle P-I and the Rocky Mountain News, there’s been slightly less hoopla over the fate of magazines. They’re dealing with many of the same problems as newspapers, including a falloff in advertising, competition from online-only media, and the ever-rising cost of paper, printing, and distribution. One difference is that it’s happening on a timeline that allows a bit more breathing room, given that most magazine publishers aren’t saddled with the same kind of debt that’s crushing the big newspaper chains.

That means magazines have more leeway to experiment with new publishing and business strategies that could help them through the digital transition. For most newspapers, it’s already too late. When you’re losing tens of millions of dollars a year, as the Globe still is, you’re fixated on cost-cutting to keep the doors open a couple more quarters, not creative ideas for the long-term future.

So, what use have magazines been making of this time? What delightful and innovative digital creations have they unleashed? It’s a question that matters to me personally, given my past experience at magazines like Science and Technology Review, and my natural concern for the future of journalism.

Sadly, the answer is not many so far. If I had to pick a word for most of the e-magazine experiments I’ve been seeing lately, it would be “unimaginative.” Magazine publishers seem to hope that they can get away with transplanting their existing print layouts onto the electronic screen—as if it were enough to take the finished publication files, export them to PDF, and be done with it. This way, publishers wouldn’t have to do the hard work of rethinking the kinds of work they commission, the ways different types of content fit together, or what makes magazines special in the first place.

Take a look at Zmags, a Boston company that works with magazines such as SmartCEO. Zmags has a tool called Publicator that takes print magazine spreads and frames them inside a PC browser window. Of course, cramming a whole spread onto a computer screen means making the text pretty small, so Zmags provides a handy magnifying-glass icon that lets you zoom in on a particular article or advertisement. It’s a lot like another e-magazine interface made by San Francisco-based Zinio, the main difference being that Zinio magazines are displayed inside a standalone e-reader program rather than a Web browser. (Technology Review experimented with Zinio while I was an editor there.)

Both Zinio and Zmags generate a nifty little page-turn animation when you want to look at the next spread. And both companies seem to have concluded that what readers want from digital magazines is absolute fidelity to the print product, right down to the familiar experience of turning the page. (Well, that’s a little unfair. What they’ve actually concluded is that to sell their software to publishers, they have to make it fit with the existing print-magazine workflow, which revolves entirely around tools like QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign that were developed for laying out print pages.) [Update 12/18/09: Joakim Ditlev, director of global marketing operations for Zmags, sent me a note this morning to say that the Zmags platform is very flexible---he pointed to this Danish e-magazine---but that most publishers don't take full advantage of the technology. "The point is---it is self-service and only a few publishers think of digital magazines as another media with different capabilities. For most of them, digital magazines are just replicas of print versions," Ditlev wrote. Which is my point too.]

Things aren’t much better in the mobile world. Zinio is reportedly developing an iPhone version of its reader that will give mobile readers access to the same Zinio digital editions they’ve purchased for their PCs, and vice versa; users will be able to skim through magazines using the now-familiar flicking gesture. Gentlemen’s Quarterly is already trying something like that with the … Next Page »

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In a joint announcement, Austin, TX-based Freescale Semiconductor and Cambridge, MA-based E Ink–which makes the “electronic ink” displays used in the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and other e-book devices—said today they will work together to integrate the electronics that control E Ink’s displays with Freescale’s MX processors to create a single “system on a chip” for future e-reading devices. The collaboration “will enable several new markets, including e-newspapers and e-textbooks,” E Ink vice president of marketing Sriram Peruvemba said in the announcement.

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The next step in the future of journalism could be led by a Seattle startup. Today, media giant Hearst announced it has started a new website called LMK (Let Me Know), a news aggregator that pulls in Web feeds from sources like the Associated Press and Getty Images, and automatically creates topic pages for individual celebrities, sports teams, companies, and the like. The content filtering technology behind the site comes courtesy of a partnership with Seattle-based Evri, a startup founded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

It’s a big deal for Evri, which has been using semantic analysis and natural language processing to find meaningful connections between entities on the Web. Its technology has led to partnerships with The Washington Post and The Times of London, in which Evri’s widget suggests related articles for readers. But the Hearst deal is more significant, because Evri is actually powering the site.

Will Hunsinger, Evri’s chief executive, says the deal was done about a month ago. He declined to give financial details, but did talk about how the partnership works. Hearst subscribes to Evri’s Web platform, which ingests more than 30,000 sources of content (news, blogs, tweets) and applies natural language processing to produce a massive “semantic index.” When the LMK site wants information about the Florida Gators, say—one of the site’s first focuses is college football—Evri’s software filters stories about the Gators by their timeliness, relevancy, and credibility of sources. It then delivers the primary links and snippets of text and photos to LMK.

“What’s significant is we feel this is a beachhead, or flagship demonstration, of how you can use semantic technology to deliver what appears to be an editorial experience, algorithmically,” Hunsinger says. The benefits of this are twofold. It’s a very fast way of getting news up, and it’s cheap—you don’t need a big editorial staff to pick and choose each story.

Of course, its value all depends on how good the feeds and filtering are. Hunsinger says Evri’s semantic analysis could make news aggregators far more powerful than sites like Google News. That’s because Evri’s software understands that Manny Ramirez is a baseball player associated with steroids, for example—so you can filter content by asking for all stories about baseball players, or stories about players using banned substances, and Ramirez will show up. Most aggregators, including Google, are based on keywords, so you’d usually have to type in “Manny Ramirez” to get stories about him to appear.

Beyond LMK, technology like Evri’s could potentially make the whole editorial side of the newspaper industry more efficient, Hunsinger says. “You could deliver all stories around a particular topic—the entire story behind the story,” he says. That might let reporters and editors spend more time on things like developing relationships with sources and digging up entirely new stories. Examples of aggregation topics might be Seattle sports, or San Francisco politics.

I asked Hunsinger whether being a huge sports fan had anything to do with getting the LMK deal done. He insists it was just “a total bonus.” But he added that his stress level will be going up in about a month, when his alma mater, the Georgetown Hoyas, start their basketball season.

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New England technology and business newspaper Mass High Tech is moving from a weekly to a biweekly print publishing schedule effective in September, publisher Michael Olivieri said yesterday. The Boston Globe reported that MHT laid off four employees in the restructuring, which will see the paper shift from 24 pages a week to 32 pages every two weeks. In the story in MHT, Olivieri described the change as a natural step in enhancing the “web emphasis we have been working toward for some time.”

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The death spiral of the newspaper industry is one of the big business stories of 2009, right up there with the free fall of the U.S. auto industry. It’s especially close to my heart as someone who learned the journalism trade at newspapers (including The Seattle Times) before taking the online leap. So when Greg and I met Tom Alberg of Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group at his office last week, I made sure to pick his brain on what newspapers must do to survive.

Alberg is the first to admit he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s as good as anyone to ask for a fresh view of the future of this business. He was one of the pioneers in the cell phone industry at McCaw Cellular, before he became a venture capitalist in the mid-90s and placed an early bet on Amazon.com. He also cares deeply about Seattle, having spent most of his life here as a graduate of Ballard High School.

More recently, Alberg has put a personal stake into the media business. In April 2007, he led a group of prominent angel investors, including former Seattle mayor Paul Schell and UW professor Ed Lazowska, to found Crosscut. That Seattle-based local news site failed in its original for-profit business model after about 18 months, but has since converted to a nonprofit setup that allows for some ad support and reader donations, like PBS or NPR.

Newspapers, which play a vital watchdog role that citizens need in a free society, have got to stop giving away their content for free, Alberg says. Prominent blogger Alan Mutter calls this the news industry’s original sin on the Internet in the mid-90s.

“Newspapers should charge for their online version,” Alberg says. It’s a risky strategy that could drive away many readers, he admits. But newspapers could find creative ways to soften the blow on customers, and gently nudge them into actually helping pay for the content.

How to do that? During this transition period to a new model, newspapers like The Seattle Times should slow down the financial bleeding by stopping print publishing seven days a week, Alberg says. They would be wise to follow the lead of the Detroit Free Press, which now only delivers the published version to subscribers’ homes on the most advertising-lucrative days of the week—Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. The other days, Alberg says, newspapers could distribute their content on a paid subscription basis via the Kindle, iPhone, or online.

“If someone subscribed to the three-day print version, maybe the other versions should be free and maybe they should even receive a free or subsidized Kindle from The Seattle Times,” Alberg said in a follow-up e-mail. He added this was his personal view, not on behalf of Amazon. Of course, there would be plenty of hand-wringing about this being a loss for society, which he dismisses. “I don’t know if it’s all bad to have a three-day version of The Seattle Times. We’d still take it, and it probably could be supported by ads,” Alberg says.

While those cost-saving measures were going on, newspapers could also do a better job … Next Page »

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Perhaps the week before Easter was a good time for San Diego’s technology innovators to be taking stock. Amylin is busy weighing how best to fend off dissident investors Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital before next month’s annual shareholder meeting. Other San Diego startups, such as Trius Therapeutics and Sangart, are considering how best to move forward in their development of new biopharmaceutical products. So read on!

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN)  is preparing for a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital Management at next month’s shareholder meeting. The two dissident shareholder groups have each nominated a slate of five candidates for the company’s 12-member board of directors, although fielding so many candidates could simply ensure that Amylin’s candidates get elected.

—San Diego wireless chipset provider Qualcomm and Verizon, one of its biggest customers, seem to be on different pages when it comes to deploying the fourth generation mobile phone technology known as LTE, for Long-Term Evolution. Verizon has said it will have LTE in 20 to 35 markets by the end of 2010. But a Qualcomm marketing director said he expects the commercialization of LTE devices won’t happen until 2012 or later.

—The venture purse strings loosened a bit last week in San Diego. Nirvanix, a startup providing “data storage in the cloud,” added $5 million in a secondary round of venture funding. Nirvanix said it previously had raised $18 million in venture funding from Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. Ethertronics, which develops embedded antennas for wireless devices, got an additional $4 million in a secondary round of venture funding. A spokeswoman told me Friday that its investors include Bank of America, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Ridgewood Capital.

—In an interview last week, Trius Therapeutics CEO Jeff Stein said the biotech firm is assessing the best way to move ahead in its development of a new anti-bacterial drug. In mid-stage clinical trials, Stein told me the San Diego company’s drug candidate torezolid cured 96 percent of the patients who had nasty-looking skin infections. But to get to the next stage in clinical trials, Stein says Trius will either have to raise more venture capital or find a strategic partner.

—San Diego-based Sangart is at a crossroads in developing an oxygen-carrying compound called MP4, which is made by purifying and chemically modifying … Next Page »

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It’s difficult to see how the Boston Globe can last long in its current form. Even if its owner, the New York Times Co., extracts the entire $20 million in concessions that it demanded this week from the paper’s unions, the paper would still lose $65 million this year, according to the company’s own figures. A business hemorrhaging cash at that rate—in a hemorrhaging industry—is unlikely to attract a buyer, or at least a palatable one. The only thing keeping the Times from shutting down the Globe completely may be the huge unfunded pension liabilities and severance payments it would owe to laid-off employees.

Sensing that the 137-year-old newspaper’s situation has grown truly dire, a grassroots group of Boston-area bloggers, led by Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has been staging a “blog rally to help the Boston Globe” this week. In the April 6 post that started the rally, Levy called the Globe an “important community resource” and said his goal was to stimulate discussion in the blogosphere about steps the paper could take to rebuild its revenues.

With all due respect for Levy and the dozens of bloggers who have responded to his call, community activism can’t save the Globe. Neither can the paper’s unions, no matter how much they give back in pay cuts, lower pensions, and reduced health benefits, nor can its executives, no matter how much they give back in bonuses. Either the Globe will save itself by hitting on a new model, or it will find a white knight, or the Times Co. will continue to cover the paper’s losses. But it’s not realistic to expect it to do that forever.

After all, the Globe‘s troubles aren’t simply the product of the recession. Revenues from print advertising and classifieds are shrinking because technology is giving businesses more efficient ways to reach their customers than newspapers. And as the Globe‘s own columnist Scot Lehigh noted this week, the paper suffers from a “self-defeating business model…we’re selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other. That’s never made any sense—the more so since website ads aren’t anywhere near the revenue-generator that print ads are.”

I have nothing personal against the Globe. I haven’t subscribed since the mid-1990s, but I certainly believe that a city as diverse, energetic, and productive as Boston deserves to covered by a community of professional journalists—and for the better part of the last two centuries, major newspapers like the Globe have been those journalists’ most important home. All things being equal, New Englanders would be better off if the Globe somehow survived.

But all things are not equal: the Globe doesn’t have a sustainable business, and the larger newspaper industry is in its death throes. The regional monopolies newspapers used to hold over the advertising market no longer apply. Paper, printing presses, and fleets of delivery vans are just too expensive. As NYU Internet and media guru Clay Shirky observed in a sympathetic but clearheaded analysis last month, the fact that the profession of journalism and the business of newspapers have been so closely intertwined since the mid-1800s is largely a historical accident—a matter of convenience for both sides. It’s time to acknowledge that the two are not the same; that while newspapers may succumb to creative destruction, journalism will likely emerge alive and well. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution,” Shirky writes. “They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place…They are demanding to be lied to.”

If Bostonians aren’t willing to cover the cost of running the Globe out of their own pockets—which they most assuredly are not, given that the company would have to charge reader several dollars per copy, every day of the week, to cover its real expenses—then they should adjust to reality, and stop looking for ways to prop up a doomed enterprise. Instead, they should be asking themselves what kinds of information they do value.

If they value international news, they can turn to GlobalPost, a new Web-based international news publication headquartered in Boston (and led by a former Globe staffer). If they value a long history of editorial independence and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, they can turn to the Christian Science Monitor, which has discontinued its daily print edition and shifted resources to an expanded website, CSMonitor.com. If they value hyper-local coverage of specific communities, they can turn to … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Internet startup Evri is announcing today that it has formed a partnership with The Times of London, one of the UK’s leading newspapers, to provide content recommendation software for online articles. For selected stories in the Times Online, Evri’s widget shows up next to the text with a list of links to related articles from the paper’s archives (and some outside websites). The news comes on the heels of a similar deal with the Washington Post that Evri announced last month.

It’s all part of Evri’s continuing efforts to build its audience, says Neil Roseman, the company’s founder and chief executive. Evri was started in 2007, and is backed by $8 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. The concept is to use natural language processing to understand connections between entities on the Web—people, products, things—and help you browse what you’re interested in more efficiently. While it’s not intended to replace search engines, Evri does want to change fundamentally how people browse the Web. (Roseman recently wrote about presenting some new features at DEMO 09.)

Financial terms of the Times Online partnership weren’t disclosed, but it is important for several reasons. One, it is a “very significant traffic source,” says Roseman, who points to the site’s 20 million-plus monthly users. Two, it “reinforces our focus on English language articles, not just American journalism,” he says. And three, it “helps further prove the model.”

That model says people will appreciate being directed to other content on the Web that is related to what they’re reading about, not just because it contains some of the same keywords, but because the underlying meaning of sentences in the articles is related. Roseman gives the simple example of Evri’s software being able to tell the difference between Michael Jackson, the pop singer, and Michael Jackson, an actor, from an article’s context.

But one of the technical challenges is how to understand meanings and relationships reliably in everything from a 140-character message on Twitter to a full article in The Economist, say. “That hadn’t been done before with natural language processing,” Roseman says. “The technology is definitely getting better.”

Roseman, a former vice president of technology at Amazon, says he has learned … Next Page »

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According to a report today in Fortune, publishing giant Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other prominent newspapers and magazines, is developing an e-reading device similar to the Amazon Kindle 2 and the Sony PRS-700.

Kenneth Bronfin, head of Hearst’s interactive media group, wouldn’t give Fortune details about the device, but he said Hearst had a “deep expertise” (in Fortune‘s paraphrase) in e-reading technology. “I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Bronfin said.

Bronfin is almost certainly referring to Hearst’s longtime relationship with Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, the company that developed the “electronic paper” screen technology at the heart of both the Amazon and Sony devices. As I noted in my interview earlier this week with E Ink co-founder and CEO Russ Wilcox, Hearst Interactive Media is among a group of strategic investors that have together poured more than $150 million into E Ink’s low-power, microcapsule-based, non-backlit display technology.

According to Hearst insiders cited in the Fortune article, the new device will have a screen that’s larger than the 6-inch-diagonal screen on the Kindle 2 and the PRS-700—probably about the size of a standard 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper. That’s consistent with what Wilcox told me in our interview. “What you’ll see next is a great range of screen sizes,” Wilcox said when I asked him what improvements E Ink was focusing on post-Kindle. “So far the industry has been using the 6-inch size, which has helped to drive down the cost for everybody, by consolidating on one manufacturing process. But we are starting to introduce displays that are in many different sizes.”

I’ve been unable to reach E Ink for comment this evening, but the company is unlikely to confirm any details of the Fortune story, given its customers’ sensitivities. Wilcox did tell me E Ink has to be “very careful” about managing its relationships with rivals like Amazon and Sony, who use the same 6-inch E Ink screen and the same electronic drivers in their competing devices.

TechFlash and other outlets are speculating today on what the Hearst disclosure could mean for the company’s chain of newspapers, many of which have been teetering financially. (The Seattle P-I said on January 9 that Hearst had put the paper up for sale, and that if no takers could be found within 60 days, it would close. The 60 days will be up on March 10.) Hearst reportedly plans to sell the devices to its publishing subsidiaries—which would in turn sell them or perhaps give them to readers—and keep a slice of the subscription revenues for itself. So the day when news organizations like Hearst turn to e-paper delivery as a way around the crushing expense of printing and delivering old-fashioned newsprint could arrive much sooner than anyone anticipated. It’s unclear, though, whether such a delivery system could be brought online in time to save struggling papers like the P-I and the Chronicle.

But it does seem that the Fortune article’s closing question—”Will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?”—will turn out to be moot. Instead, the question will be how many newspaper and magazine companies can afford to keep publishing on paper.

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Seattle video-advertising startup Mixpo has raised $4 million in a Series B round of venture funding, as first reported by VentureBeat. The round is being led by existing investor Madrona Venture Group, based in Seattle, and also includes Yaletown Venture Partners and Growthworks Capital. Venture capitalist Matt McIlwain leads Madrona’s involvement with Mixpo.

Mixpo was founded in 2005 and has raised a total of $10.5 million in venture capital. The company makes a software platform for online video advertising that works by helping local advertisers and media groups (TV stations and newspaper websites) upload content such as videos, images, and music, in order to run video ads. Mixpo’s customers and partners—among them some new ones announced last week—include NBC’s local media groups, Comcast, the Tribune and Hearst newspaper companies, and Fisher Communications.

Mixpo is led by president and CEO Anupam Gupta, who previously spent eight years as a senior business leader in Microsoft’s online services group. He led product management for MSN instant messaging and blogging services. “We’re excited about the momentum we’re building with our partners,” Gupta said in an e-mail. “This follow on investment will help us build on that success.”

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Declaring that “quality journalism in America is threatened more profoundly today than at any time in our history” by the accelerating death throes of the traditional newspaper and TV news businesses, two veteran Boston-area journalists yesterday launched GlobalPost, an online-only source for on-the-ground international news of the sort that’s increasingly scarce in the mainstream media.

Philip Balboni, the founder and longtime president of New England Cable News, and Charles Sennott, a staff writer and former foreign correspondent at the Boston Globe, say in the site’s mission statement that they want to “redefine international news for the digital age.” They’ll do that by hiring top correspondents who live in the countries they’re covering to write with “a decidedly American voice” about complex international issues—without all the expensive encumbrances of the traditional media, such as printing presses and satellite TV equipment.

“American television networks today largely cover the ‘hotspots’ of international news, and even then, not comprehensively,” the founders write in a statement about GlobalPost’s business model. “U.S. newspapers have significantly cut back their foreign bureaus. Ironically, this comes at a moment in history when globalization is sweeping across all continents.”

Balboni and Sennott hope to counter that trend by providing a daily mix of text articles, photos, videos, podcasts, and blog posts that both delve into the details of conditions in countries where correspondents are located and highlight cross-cutting regional or global issues. The operation, which is a kind of professional, for-profit echo of the Global Voices project launched in 2005 by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, already has 65 correspondents in locations as varied as Pakistan, Senegal, Bolivia, and Zimbabwe. Many are freelancers or correspondents for other publications; for example, Jane Arraf, GlobalPost’s at-large Middle East correspondent, is the Iraq correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

For financial support, GlobalPost is counting on a combination of online advertising revenue, syndication deals with online and newspaper partners, and a soon-to-be-introduced membership system called Passport. Individual Passport memberships will cost $199 per year and will provide access to “exclusive content on key economic and political events”—including monthly newsletters, short text alerts on breaking news, and live conference calls with correspondents—that won’t be available to readers of the free site.

Sennott, who is the site’s executive editor, said in an interview yesterday with WBUR’s mid-day local news program “Here and Now” that GlobalPost hopes to restore something of the Edward R. Murrow tradition of passionate, engaging international coverage tailored for American news consumers.

“We’re looking for people who have a passion for a country, a language facility in that country, who want to be there based as writers or videographers or radio reporters and who are great at telling stories,” Sennott said. “We almost don’t care what medium you want to tell it in. We just want to know that you know how to tell a story that’s grounded in fact, that’s well reported, that has a sense of the American ear for a narrative, and that really understands and is unabashedly in an American voice—not in any way nationalist or jingoist, definitely not, but understanding that you’re writing to or doing a video for an American audience that needs to understand the world.”

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Seattle-based Zillow, a real-estate website, announced today it is launching the country’s largest online real-estate ad network, together with 11 major newspaper companies (282 papers). The network is an extension of last fall’s newspaper partnership that allows local real-estate classified advertisers to buy ads on Zillow.com. The partners include Hearst Newspapers, publisher of the Seattle P-I and San Francisco Chronicle.

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Quattro Wireless, the Waltham, MA, mobile-marketing company we profiled last September after it completed a $12.3 million Series B funding round, revealed today that Cox Newspapers is using its automated platform to produce mobile-friendly versions of 19 regional Cox papers, including the Austin Statesman, the Palm Beach Post, the Dayton Daily News, and the Waco Tribune.

Quattro’s proprietary mobile transcoding platform works with a publication’s standard Web content. When readers request pages using a mobile device such as an Apple iPhone, a Treo or Blackberry smart phone, or a small-screened mass-market cell phone, the software adapts the content on the fly to fit each device’s capabilities. On an iPhone, which has a full Web browser, a newspaper site might look largely the same as it does on a laptop or desktop computer. But on a Treo or a standard mobile phone, the paper’s front page might be boiled down to a few headlines, images, and text ads.

Quattro already produces the mobile versions of websites such as Boston.com, CBSNews.com, NFL.com, and TheStreet.com. Alongside the streamlined content, Quattro’s platform can serve ads purchased through its in-house mobile advertising network, which caters to businesses that want to reach mobile audiences.

“News is a natural fit for the mobile audience and mobile’s ad-supported platform provides a great opportunity for the evolving news business,” Lars Albright, Quattro’s vice president of business development, said in a statement. “Advertiser response to the Quattro news channel has been very positive with particular interest in the local targeting opportunities sites like the Cox family of newspapers offer.”

Cox said it decided to work with Quattro because the company’s software allowed efficient, hands-off production of the mobile newspaper sites, creating additional ad sales and revenue opportunities.

Quattro’s venture backers include Highland Capital Partners of Lexington, MA, and Globespan Capital Partners, which has offices in Boston, Palo Alto, and Tokyo.

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They say one good deed begets another. Apparently one good charity story also begets another.

The day after Rebecca published her piece last week on Givvy, the Framingham, MA, startup planning to offer online tools to help people track their charitable donations—and the very same day I wrote about Newton, MA, startup Jackpot Rewards, which plans to give away half of its profits to children’s charities—a public relations exec in New York wrote to tips@xconomy.com to let us know about yet another Boston-area company planning to use the power of the Web to orchestrate more effective fundraising for charities. This one is called Good2Gether. And it could prove to be the most powerful of the three, in terms of sheer ability to transform people’s charitable instincts into action.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup is constructing what you might call a “hyperlocal giving aggregator”—an advertising-supported, keyword-based widget designed to appear alongside news stories on the websites of major regional media organizations, where it displays information about local non-profit fundraising campaigns or volunteer opportunities related to each article.

Say you’re living in San Francisco and you’re reading a story in SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s regional Web portal, about a string of tornados striking somewhere in the Midwest. Good2Gether’s widget might give links to a local Red Cross chapter organizing a blood drive to help the victims, or to a local Humane Society chapter collecting money to help displaced pets, while at the same time showing an ad for State Farm insurance.

It’s one of those virtuous circles that the Internet is so good at completing: the non-profits get to make their pitch to a lot of readers, the newspaper website gets some ad revenue, and the advertisers get the glow of being associated with a humanitarian cause. The SFGate example is hypothetical—but the real system is scheduled to go live in eight major media markets this year, starting in Boston in April. (Good2Gether says it can’t yet reveal which Boston media outlet will run the widget, but the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle have already announced that they’ll participate.)

Good2Gether is the brainchild of Gregory McHale, the former CEO of electronic-whiteboard maker Virtual Ink and also the founder of cMarket, a 50-employee Cambridge company that’s the main provider of infrastructure services for the online auctions that thousands of non-profit organizations around the country use these days to raise money. McHale told me that the idea for Good2Gether came from his conversations with cMarket’s users about their frustrations getting the word out about their fundraising and volunteer needs, especially to younger crowds.

“I was meeting with non-profits all the time and listening to them about all the money they have to spend on marketing to their current constituencies, and about their terror about the crew of millennials coming at them just over the horizon,” McHale says. “Millennials,” also known as Generation Y, are young people born between 1980 and 1995; raised on the Internet, these folks are proving unresponsive to the communications channels that non-profits have traditionally used to raise awareness, such as print newspapers, local television, direct mail, and telemarketing.

“So on the one hand, you have lots of non-profits that are trying to reach people, including young people,” says McHale. “On the other hand you have these websites run by newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, college papers, and magazines that have millions of viewers but are desperate for … Next Page »

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