It’s been a very interesting past few weeks with a bunch of stories relating to the death of older news and journalism models (daily newspapers) and the emerging models that hope to replace the dailies. Below are a few of the stories that have caught my attention…

• On the old model front, Gannett has cut 1,000 more people from its payroll, and McClatchy’s efforts to restructure its massive, crippling debt load failed miserably. An extremely insightful, detailed analysis of Gannett’s debt reveals just how rapidly that company’s balance sheet has deteriorated and how perilously close to insolvency the once stalwart publisher truly is.

• Also on the old media front, USA Today shuttered ‘Open Air,’ its quarterly magazine targeting more affluent readers, and Tribune also ceased publishing its weekly Sunday magazine.

• Even smaller dailies, who had seemed somewhat immune to the travails of their big-city brethren, are feeling the impact of the web as well as the current economic meltdown. Deal activity in that segment of the media landscape is rising, and valuations present some interesting opportunities.

• Despite the grim news, there are signs that things may have bottomed and that at the current prices, certain media companies present compelling investment opportunities. Even Sam Zell appears to have found a buyer for his Cubs and Wrigley and his cable business. While below initial estimates, the fact that it might get done at all in the current environment is amazing.

• Another positive sign for the dailies is the fact that some are beginning to see returns on their investments in emerging media and technology. Even despite some embarrassing missteps and the fact that many investments are still in their very early stages, there is hope that the flurry of activity over the past few years, while perhaps too late, might have a chance in salvaging some value for the large dailies.

• Even Google is helping the cause of publishers by helping pave the way for customized news delivery.

• On a much smaller scale, some monthly magazines like Men’s Health have even figured out how to capitalize on the iPhone phenomena to create a nice little recurring revenue stream.

• One thing certain to not work for any daily paper is charging for the vast majority of its daily news content. Some will try, and perhaps one or two (NYT & WSJ) might be able to succeed at some minimal level, but the pay for content model is a death sentence for anyone else.

• A bunch of stories have sprung up recently about emerging new models for online news and journalism such as Huffington Post and Politico seeking to fill the vacuum being created by the implosion of the dailies. Debates are raging as to whether Huffington Post, in particular, is a credible, high-quality source of journalism, news, and opinion or a trashy parasite, and the arguments on both sides are both enlightening, interesting, and entertaining.

Here is the last day (finally) of cleaning out my backlog of stories relating to the dailies, traditional media, new media, advertising, etc. Some of these headlines are slightly outdated, but so be it.

• Village Voice Media is stepping in to capitalize on the opportunity completely missed by the dailies in creating a local advertising network. This may turn out to have been the biggest whiff of all the missteps of the dailies over the last decade. And while that may be arguable given how badly the dailies have handled their fortunes of late, there is no arguing that in these late innings, the creation of a local ad network (both online and offline) represents perhaps the last great hope for local newspaper franchises.

• Unfortunately, the local ad play has also taken a beating in the current downturn, so maybe it’s not the immediate fix everyone believes it to be. (Though long-term, the hype over local ad networks, local search, local media, and local advertising is more than justified). Even local TV, which has also whiffed on many of the opportunities they’ve been presented, is showing signs of innovation and change in the new media landscape.

• Online classifieds are soaring these days (as if anyone needed more evidence of how badly the dailies blew their monopoly in that arena).

• Tucson has lost its daily. And again, while some say enough with the obvious and tell me something I don’t know, the pace of death and destruction in the industry is staggering and is still worth endless commentary and observation. Anytime an industry can lose $18 billion in 3 years, it’s worth commenting on.

• …another article to add to the mix on whether or not micropayments will or won’t save the dailies. And despite the arguments against charging for content, MediaNews is forging ahead anyway.

• Some believe the Kindle won’t save the dailies either (though I’d argue that it might).

• Maybe public subsidies are the answer (even Congress is jumping on the bandwagon)…or maybe the dailies can follow the example set by the Huffington Post and start auctioning off internships and even higher level jobs on ebay.

• Also in the obvious category, the trend with the dailies over the next few years will be local billionaires and/or real estate developers buying their local daily from debt-holders. It’s already happened in San Diego, and next on the list will be Boston, L.A., and possibly even New York. (Something has to happen with the Times as it’s too valuable to be run down to zero and the Sulzberger family is eventually going to riot as their fortune continues to be decimated…). But eventually, most large metro dailies will be owned by local individuals or groups of individuals and we’ll be back to where we were 100 years ago.

The tectonic shifts transforming the media and advertising landscape have always been fascintaing to me a stand as one of the central areas of focus of this blog. And while the earthquakes and volcanos along the fault lines are worthy of the headlines they grab, I am equally intrigued by the smaller events and more subtle (and not always so subtle) tensions that are constantly taking place as the traditional media plate gets subducted underneath the new media plate. This subduction zone seems to be generating peak activity these days (I’ll save the record-length list of story items for another post) and has now even been put to music. Mad Avenue Blues is a little long, but for anyone in the media, advertising, search, web, or tech/software business, it’s worth watching in its entirety.

(Thanks Lief for the link)

One of the most fascinating aspects of the tectonic transformation taking place in the media landscape are the collisions that occur between new and old media. Those collisions also provide some of the most humorous and entertaining stories in the media world given how frequently traditional media companies (and even new media companies in many cases) so badly misjudge what will happen in the marketplace with new products, services, sites, and technologies. Such was the case recently when CBS released a new iPhone app.

The CBS iPhone app allows users to upload ‘newsworthy’ photos from their iPhone directly into a CBS database that was accessible for anyone to browse from their iPhone. The media behemoth obviously intended to leverage the enormous power of user-generated content, a phenomena that all media companies, new and old, tend to drool over but yet so often mismanage. In almost every case as well, media  companies dramatically underestimate how difficult it is to generate. In this case, however, CBS failed to consider that the definition of ‘newsworthy’ might encompass an extremely wide range of perspectives. In fact, the database was very quickly inundated with a massive amount of pornography, and CBS had to shut the service off almost immediately after releasing it.

Apparently, when the service was developed, no one thought that a moderator might be required to filter the images being uploaded into the system. CBS actually claimed that they did have a moderator in place to oversee the content being uploaded but that the system didn’t seem to work the way it was designed. No kidding.

One of the great debates swirling around the increasingly likely death of the daily paper (as well as the decline of traditional journalism in this country, the rise of blogs, and the emergence of citizen journalism), centers around the role that the average citizen will play in determining, reporting, and analyzing what is ‘news.’ It is a fascinating debate with solid arguments all the way around, and one with massive consequences for media, advertising, and even democracy itself. I happen to be a proponent of the side of the argument that sees enormous power, value, and benefit in fostering and enlisting the active engagement of society as a whole in the business of news. Along those lines, I also favor efforts that continue to diminish, in many cases, the hierarchy that still exists today in journalism (though that hierarchy is getting more and more obliterated every day). But clearly, as is the case with most arguments, the answer lies in balancing the two sides of the debate. There will and should always be a critically important role for news media companies to do the valuable work they do, but that work can be greatly enhanced through the active involvement of news consumers. Unfortunately, the CBS iPhone app story demonstrates how hard it is to strike that optimal balance.

From a great editorial by Frank Rich in Sunday’s New York Times entitled Obama Outwits the Bloviators…

YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then.

It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

It is jaw-dropping to step back and think about how rapidly and how dramatically the media landscape is being transformed by the web.

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Carr wrote an excellent piece entitled All of Us, Arbiters of News, in which he perfectly articulates the dramatic way in which the web is fundamentally transforming news and journalism. The story of the web obliterating the old, traditional economic model behind news has been often-told, but what is just becoming apparent in the past few years with the proliferation of blogs, social media, web-only news sites such as Slate.com and the Huffington Post, and even sites like Youtube, is that the impact of the web on news, media, and information is far deeper than dollars and cents. The days of editors being the only ones who decide what is news are dying as quickly as the daily newspaper itself, and the new models not only leverage mass engagement, participation, and contribution, they depend upon it. The really successful models in this new era thrive on it.

It is this precise reason that daily newspapers that simply take their print edition and throw it on the web, maybe adding a few videos, a blog or two, and some room for comments from readers (as if this is what is meant by interactive), wonder why no one cares at all about their site. These sites may live slightly longer than their print cousins, but not by much. And for good reason – they are just as obsolete, irrelevant, and antiquated and they deserve to die a similar death. It isn’t enough to simply give equal weight to both media vehicles (Carr’s story about Michael Leary of the Philadelphia Inquirer is why I cheer passionately for the demise of the weak, inept, and doomed among the dailies). What is required in the new model is a complete transformation in the way whole communities gather, filter, think about, create, produce, shape, publish, participate in, interact with, and publish news, data, information, and opinion. There is still an extremely valuable role for editors, experts, and pundits, but the winning models in the new era not only make room at the ‘Arbiter’ table for entire communities of people, they recognize that the newly constituted table is vastly superior to the old one.