The day has finally come.  A study from Outsell reports that US advertisers will spend more on digital advertising than on print advertising for the first time this year.

“Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5% will go toward digital; 30.3% to print. Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing.”

The Pew Internet and the American Life Project released their latest study on American’s use of the Internet examining how we use online news today.  The overview of the report sums it up …

In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory. These new metrics stand out:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

So what does this mean for news and information sites over the next year? How will they change or adapt to meet the needs of the new news consumer?

I spend a lot of time picking on newspapers and websites, but let’s spend some time poking at the TV guys. The BBC gives a nice look at how to report the news on TV. If only our local stations could reach somewhere near this level.

From a JOA where your paper is inserted in the “winning” newspaper’s edition to a multi-award winning newspaper website and a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service back to laying off most of your staff. The Las Vegas CityLife has interesting look at the roller coaster ride of Greenspun Media’s Las Vegas Sun. They examine how the newspaper reinvented the print newsroom to focus on long-form journalism, the free reign they gave new media wonder boy Rob Curley, the tension between the interactive newsroom and the print newsroom and how the collapse of the Las Vegas real estate market cause the newspaper to lose most of interactive staff and half of it’s newsroom.



After revealing they only have 35 online only subscribers and their traffic has dropped by half, a Newsday exec sent out a memo explaining their paywall strategy in two basic points.

“Therefore, Newsday’s web strategy has two parts: 1) to provide Newsday’s print subscribers with a rich web experience that goes far beyond what they can get in the newspaper alone, thereby motivating them to remain, return, or choose to subscribe to Newsday; and 2) to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”

Unfortunately, the memo doesn’t mention their mobile web strategy which happens to be wide open for anyone to visit completing discouraging anyone from ponying up the $5 a week subscription to their full fledged web site.

Google and Apple are both racing to own the mobile advertising platform by adding the new “holy grail” of mobile advertising – geolocation.  The Wall Street Journal reports that both Google and Apple have bought mobile advertising companies and are attempting to leverage their mobile phones to let your local pizza parlor put an ad on your mobile when you start feeling hungry in the late afternoon.  They are reaching out to you and to your local business just like FourSquare to reach you where you are right at this moment.

If you want to be really wonky about newspaper paywall’s audience and revenue numbers, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has released a paywall simulation that let’s you play with revenue,  audience and subscription numbers. It’s a lot of fun if you know what the numbers mean.

Along the same line of thought, Newsday is three months into it’s paywall experiment charging $5 a week for access to their website (print subscribers and Cablevision Cable subscribers have free access) and they have 35 paid subscribers. In the three months since starting the experiment Newsday has lost over 50 percent of their web traffic peaking at 1.5 million visits per month in July 2009 down to 460,000 visits in December 2009.

I’ve written about my rules of facebook before, but I just want to reiterate that research has shown that you really don’t have 5,000, 1,000 or even 500 friends on Facebook.  Back in the ‘ 90sRobin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, came up with the theory that the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Basically these are the people that you come in contact with every year and 150 was known as Dunbar’s number.

Now, Dunbar is researching whether larger social networks (like facebook) have allowed people to stretch their Dunbar number. Dunbar told the Times Online, “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”

An interesting aside on newspapers and Dunbar’s number: One of the concepts behind hyperlocal newspapers and web sites is that you must reach into all of your reader’s social circles– reach into group of 150 friends– and photograph, report on someone to keep your readers. That’s why you see all the photographs of your neighbors pet or cousin’s softball trophy in your small-town newspaper.

Steve Yelvington with Morris Newspapers has done the math on a soft paywall as proposed by the New York Times (we discussed this last week).  Steves figures that a newspaper should be prepared to give 35 to 55 percent of their advertising inventory by implementing a soft paywall because power users account for 3.5 percent of an online newspapers audience creating 35 percent of their pageviews. Last week Yelvington addressed how a soft paywall isn’t really a paywall at all for users who have a little tech knowhow to clear their cookies and look like a new user to the paywall.

A free Canadian newspaper, Metro,  has struck a deal with foursquare. As you travel around Canada checking  foursquare on your phone you’ll find Metro’s restaurant reviews, city tips, to-dos and stories. It’s a great use of foursquare’s geolocation technology giving the experts at local, your newspaper, a way to give you information about your immediate surroundings.

Foursquares deal with Metro comes after they created custom games for Harvard and UNC Charlotte.