Here’s Ashton’s online advertising model/brand promotion model from the December 2009 Fast Company:

Make entertaining stuff, give it to people where they already are, let them have fun with it, and mix in brand messaging. And because of the viral nature of the Web, each new consumer is cheaper to win than the last one.

Yes, Ashton really does get it. He continues:

Katalyst (his company) is a merger of three industries. A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.

For several years I’ve been on a kick that traditional advertising metrics are bogus and it’s impossible to compare traditional advertising numbers with online advertising numbers.  On top of that I think traditional advertising is way, way overpriced when you consider their real numbers. In this month’s Fast Company Ashton Kutcher agrees:

“For years the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system they’ve been monetizing off of. Now that the web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric – now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that Ashton can intelligently discuss this, but I have to say that he apparently really does get it.

John Temple, former editor the Rocky Mountain News, has some interesting comments on the latest Nieman Journalism Lab report on newspapers online market share and Rupert Murdoch’s latest comment in support of the newspapers implementing a pay wall.

Another side of this whole paid content debate is the concept that Google is stealing the newspapers content and is evil.  Pretty much anyone who is out there advocating a pay wall for newspapers stories is also a proponent of keeping Google away from their content. The funny thing is the opposite is true. If you want more traffic on your web site and more people reading your news stories, then Google is your friend. Google probably sends more traffic to your news site than any other source.

The Guardian has an interesting look at this debate  pitting the NY Times Maureen Dowd against Jeff Jarvis examining whether Google is friend or foe.

Dowd says Google has hijacked journalism.  “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy. Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as “tapeworms”.”

Jarvis on the other hand has faced the facts. “I had been naively thinking – hoping – that there would be an orderly transfer of power, print to digital, and that many of the incumbents would survive and some might lead the transition. With some exceptions, I no longer believe that.”

Mitch (see comment) sent me a Business Week article this week about the latest attempt to charge for online content fostered by Steven Brill.  He’s proposing creating a consortium of a lot of different content providers that the reader would pay a subscription fee to access the content. I really don’t believe charging for online content will work in most circumstances, because readers will seek out the free content somewhere else and in most cases advertising models on free content will generate more revenue than subscriptions because of the higher traffic generated on the free content models.

But besides what I think, there’s a lot of buzz around . Here’s a couple of analysis of Brill’s model that makes sense to me.

• John Temple
• Ken Doctor

Paid content will not save newspapers. Despite what many old journalism hands have said (including pay wall poster child Little Rock’s own Walter Hussman). Paid content limits your audience size and audience growth eventually flattens out. Here’s what the former head of NYTimes.com has to say about paid content…

Thanks to Jack Lail for pointing out this video.

Here’s a hilarious video about what happens when a blog hires some laid-off newspaper employees

Thanks to Chris for sharing the video.

I recently seperated my twitter from my facebook and I am only trying to twitter when I have something to say– which hasn’t been much lately. This video is a pretty good example of what twitter can become

Make sure you watch until the fail whale appears.

Scripps closed the Rocky Mountain News today– it was a great newspaper, a great website, a model of how a news operation can change. Unfortunately, the JOA in Denver didn’t give Scripps enough flexibility to stop the losses it had seen this past year ($16 million).

Here’s a long video on the end of the RMN (21 minutes, but it’s worth it.).  If you can watch it in full screen in HD.

The whole concept of paying for newspaper content is making its way around the journalism blogosphere again. Except this time it’s also had endorsements from print journalism celebs like Walter Isaacson, Mort Zuckerman and Steve Brill.  For the most part I’ve tried to ignore it all since I feel like I’ve been there, reputed the arguments and fought that battle and won before.  Of course this all stems from the fact that newspapers as we know it are dying and the old hands are pulling out all the stops to save the old way of doing things so they don’t have to change.

At times I’ve really had to admit that I’m not part of the old newspaper tradition and wonder if I’m even part of the new newspaper tradition because I really agree more with what the webbies/techies have had to say about the newspaper industry rather than the newspaper industry itself. For example, Techdirt responds to the claims that google devalues everything (ridicolous!)

This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Google doesn’t devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset “devalues” your business.