The trend that leaped out at me is the decline in journalists’ interest in multimedia content. While blogs and Twitter were on the rise, the percent of journos whose organizations produce online video clips dropped rather sharply, from 47% in 2009 to just under 40% in 2010. And that decline didn’t translate into getting more video-based publicity materials. Only 27% wanted links to video content from PRs, compared to 35% the year before. The proportion interested in audio content also shrank.

That’s kind of interesting at a moment when the bar to producing video is lower than ever, ad rates on video content are halfway to decent, and, it’s safe to say, our culture is no less image-driven than before. We haven’t exactly become voracious readers overnight.

Yet Oriella’s numbers confirm a feeling I’ve had for some time now: that the expiration date on all the enthusiasm about historically text-based news organizations becoming multimedia players and making the leap to video has come. While there’s a seemingly boundless appetite for music videos and clips of kittens and Justin Bieber, it’s not easy to aggregate a meaningful audience for online video news.

Except that it points to the continued resource-starvation in newsrooms, I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing simply because the sloughing off of forms that don’t work can lead to better focus on the ones that do.

Anyone who dived into the early days of online video news saw and heard some scary stuff. Droning conversation with little regard for readers’ attention span, a preponderance of, to coin a phrase, faces for text, a lack of appreciation for editing, awful visual effects, bad suits, foundation applied like spackle.

Part of the problem was the lack of imagination that infected most newspapers, however well-funded, when they decided they wanted to do video. Basically, these have amounted to taking the TV news format — serious-looking people sitting behind a desk talking seriously about the news of the day –and transposing it online. While this might be the only way to do the job in a cost-effective way, it’s a format that doesn’t hold up terribly well in the age of “The Daily Show and The Onion, whose mock news network got attention for its forthcoming “News from the Year 2137.” (Here’s the trailer.)

The other problem is that video news is typically user-unfriendly. You can scan a headline, a lede, and maybe even a nutgraf and then move on to your kitten films before the lame spinning global intro comes to a close on your typical news clip. And there are contextual problems for many readers. Most of us read news sites in a workplace where we can’t easily turn up the volume or put on the headphones.

Given the cost restraints of most news organizations, your average text report will serve a reader better than its video equivalent. I’m exempting both large organizations that specialize in video (CNN) and relatively high-quality productions that truly take advantage of the form. Vice’s VBS.TV would be one of these, but I don’t know of too many like it — offerings where the video form is integral to the content.

Because of that relative paucity, the decline of online video news is one of media’s ailments that I find tough to lament.

As a reward for reading to the end, here’s your bonus kitten video.

One of the most popular ways of doing this is in the form of contests that seek to harvest entrepreneurial ideas while rewarding the people behind with support, guidance, and, in some cases, cold hard cash.

Far from exhaustive, here’s a list of three initiatives to foster — and fund — innovation that give big companies new ways to speak to their customers. As to the question of whether these programs are gimmicks designed to garner PR, only time will tell.

MDC’s $1 Million Agency Challenge
Over the years, Toronto-based MDC Partners has positioned itself as one of the more creatively-focused public companies that own ad agencies. That rep is due to its prize possession, the famous Crispin Porter & Bogusky, and an acquisition approach that allowed agency founders to maintain meaningful equity positions in their babies — at least for a time. Last week in Cannes, CEO Miles Nadal and Chief Strategist Chuck Porter announced they’re seeking submissions from folks who have cracking ideas for a startup agency. The winner will get $1 million to make the idea happen. (And the winner will, naturally, lose 51% ownership in the agency to MDC in the process.) The window to enter will be open for three months and then Nadal and company will pick ten applicants to interview before choosing a winner.

Nokia Growth Economy Venture Challenge
At the end of July, Nokia will wrap up its Growth Economy Venture Challenge, a contest designed to bring mobile innovation to the developing world. The mobile phone-maker, whose strongholds are in developing places like India,, is looking for ideas for a mobile product or solution designed to improve the lives of people in those places. The winner, who will receive $1 million in venture funding, will come up with an idea that changes the way people use Nokia devices and does some good. Here’s the call for the entries.

PepsiCo10
Compared to MDC and Nokia, the beverage giant is looking for a concept that’s further along in development. PepsiCo10 is not a contest, really, nor wil it end up with a company getting funded. On the program’s website, Pepsi describes the program as an accelerator. Start-ups operating in four categories with $250,000 in funding and/or that much in annual revenue can apply to be part of the PepsiCo10 program. The categories are social media, digital video and gaming, retail and experiential marketing and mobile marketing. The ten shovel-ready, early-stage technologies that are chosen by Pepsi will receive a pilot execution of the concept and possibly activation across more Pepi brands. Other benefits include access to Pepsi brand teams and agency partners like the PR firm Weber Shandwick, exposure to VCs, the visibility that would come with taking part in a program like this and, coverage from Mashable, one of Pepsi’s partners in the program.

Even if it didn’t surprise, the ruling is still still sort of a symbolic moment that, if Viacom and other big content companies interpret it correctly, could lead them out of a Luddite frame of mind that has no room for a realistic understanding of how content is consumed and distributed today.

Here’s what needs to come next:

1. Media companies need to see consumers as their friends. The substance of Viacom’s lawsuit might have been about copyright and about changing YouTube’s behavior with regard to copyright, but it was by extension also an attack on the very people who are the end user of professional content. The Viacoms of the world can interpret the will to upload good clips of Jon Stewart or South Park or its other shows as something that results in smaller audience and costs them revenue. But it’s just that — an interpretation. These companies can also choose to see it as a readymade distribution network on a massive scale. They’re the people helping to make shows buzzworthy and drive audience and attention. Yes, YouTube makes money off Viacom’s work, but now without doing some marketing work in the process.

2. On a more tactical level, Viacom needs to get a licensing deal of some sort done with YouTube, as so many other media companies have done. This of course will never happen At this point, an appeal looks inevitable — and pointless in the absence of any evidence that the appellate courts will come out in Viacom’s favor. There’s a middle ground between resistance to the digital reality and the need to protect copyright. At this point, Viacom has taken severe damage to its once-strong brand as the forward-thinking content player that created MTV and Comedy Central. A cease fire would go far in making Viacom seem like it understands the world around it and isn’t kicking and screaming as its dragged into a new era.

3. While this is a major victory for Google and YouTube, there are others to be fought. Most urgently, YouTube needs to find a clear path to monetization. With preroll, annoying overlays and all kinds of sponsored content deals all over the site, the user experience on YouTube has declined, even if traffic hasn’t. With all those ads slapped all over the site, you’d think there’d be more headway in making it pay, that doesn’t seem to be the case as analysts generally regard the site as a loss-maker. (Google isn’t transparent about YouTube’s performance, but one YouTube executive has predicted profitability this year.) Google, of course, is loaded down with cash so YouTube’s monetization lag matters only so much. And the site is still young. But at some point it’ll become vital to turn all of those eyeballs and uploads into moolah.

“Thanks Tweeps,” she wrote, “you’ve really made my day, week, month with all your support. Re: Gourmet; they’re reviving the brand, not the magazine.Pity.”

Distinguishing between channel of distribution and brand is nothing new, especially for print media companies as they try to reinvent their business models. For years, the purveyors of glossy magazines have thought of their titles as having intimate connections with carefully aggregated, loyal, engaged and, to advertisers, highly desirable audiences that will follow a Vogue or a Vanity Fair or a Wired anywhere they might go. Online, events, TV — wherever. It’s a rightly-placed belief that it’s the editorial voice and sensibility that matters, not whether that voice is being distributed on dead trees or in pixels.

As magazine-cum-brand success stories go, Gourmet would seem to have been a classic case study. That’s why so many very vocal readers mourned its end and it’s why Conde Nast feels comfortable with the reincarnation it’s now ordered up, which will come in the form of a free iPad app called Gourmet Live. There’s still brand equity and possibly revenue in them thar hills; how do we suck it dry?

As such, the phenomenon of the zombie brand — products, like the Ford Taurus, the Commodore 64 or Life magazine, that are killed but don’t really go away — is something media companies should probably familiarize themselves with. The media graveyard, after all, is a big one and, despite low bars to entry in theory, it’s not easy or cheap for big publishing outfits to launch new outlets. For many, it’ll be tempting to go the way of Gourmet and raise the dead where possible.

But we know from the rash of zombie films in recent years that there are different genres of the renanimated. There’s the grunting, drooling, dumb, loping zombies of Romero “Living Dead” movies, so easily dispatched with a leadpipe. And then there’s the quick, vicious zombies of Danny Boyle’s “30 Days Later” for whom death seems more a technicality than anything else. Publishers, as they figure out how to wind down once essential publications that are now outmoded, can choose to find ways to invest smartly and efficiently in these resurrections.

You can’t blame Conde for seeing what it can get out of Gourmet’s trove of excellent content, pieces like the late David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” an essay that figures prominently — and sort of touchingly — in the PR campaign.

But if you were a reader of Gourmet, it would be difficult to get excited about any announcement that didn’t include a clear commitment to new content or involve Ms. Reichl. Not everyone loved her, but she stood as a symbol of the title’s finely-curated, high-end approach to food, travel, life in general. That sensibility, expensive as it might be to produce and tough as it might have been to sell to advertisers in a downturn, stood in sharp relief to the messy democracy of recipe sites commanding more and more attention of kitchen dwellers.

Tellingly, the star of Conde’s Gourmet announcement can’t even boil water. In fact, it isn’t even a person. It’s the iPad, which is fast becoming the default solution for the magazine industry as it tries to funnel its brands into places that are more relevant to today’s readers and advertisers. And that increasingly feels very dangerous. It is not a little depressing to see Gourmet threaten to go the way of the zombie Life, which withered over decades, going from weekly magazine to monthly to newspaper supplement to a website that’s really a Getty photo archive.

You can say the Life brand still exists there on the web and now the same appears to be true of Gourmet, whose sexy new form alone won’t give it purpose. And that’s no way to live.

Predictably in a business that so loves its navel, the NYT’s move spawned voluminous coverage. My cursory analysis of that coverage is about as scientific as scientology, but the pieces that bubble to the top of the search soup seem to be largely down on the idea, pointing to the lost links and, possibly more pertinently, the pointlessness of the exercise in revenue terms.

Discussing the plans at the annual shareholder meeting, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., offered no specifics about targets for increased revenue from metering, instead stressing the opportunity provided by the new system to increase “engagement,” and the “emotional connection” with Times users. The theory, at least as interpreted by Business Insider, is that if users are paying, they’ll go to the site before they go to other sites and spend longer once they get there.

This argument, like telling yourself that paying for an expensive gym will make you go more often, probably wouldn’t stand up to rigorous examination by a behavioral economist. And, while metering better recognizes the way information is spread and consumed online than more absolutist content lockdowns, history suggests it will still frustrate and drive away more users than it’ll bring into the fold. By definition most of those who are driven away will also be people who had been exhibiting some loyalty to Times’ content, rather than people who just stumble on the occasional story and never reach their story quota.

If Sulzberger really wants to increase reader loyalty and engagement, perhaps he ought to be looking at ways to incentivize loyalty among all readers, rather than – or at least in addition to – putting a pay barrier in the path of some of his more avid online readers.

One trendy idea for incentivizing reader loyalty is the application of game mechanics to web publishing. Riffing off the success of Facebook applications like Farmville, or mobile apps like FourSquare, the thought here is that users can earn points, badges, virtual currency or whatever in return for demonstrating loyalty and deeper engagement with a website. Brad Feld’s Foundry Group just led a $5-million investment in Big Door, a company that practices exactly this kind of gamification of websites.

If earning badges sounds a little lightweight for the New York Times, we might also think of this kind of approach as a loyalty marketing scheme akin to those run by airlines or hotels. (While I can’t quite work out why I care about checking in to places on Foursquare, I know exactly why I suffer an Up-In-The-Air-esque addiction to American Airlines, namely because the loyalty points I accrue translate to upgrades to business class, which makes air travel just about palatable.)

The Times could offer points for stories or videos viewed, comments, clicks on ads, newsletter signup, subscribing, joining its clubs, attending events, buying things from its store and so on. Those points would not only be a badge of honor for users, but could have practical applications such as giving money off subscriptions and purchases — thus encouraging more traffic to the Times store, which really could be a great resource if better curated — and granting the heaviest users first refusal on events and special deals (tying these users into some of its deeper, more integrated advertising deals would undoubtedly appeal to some brands). Such a scheme would also yield a lot of data from the Times on its community, potential revenue streams and allow it to really start to chart the lifetime value of a consumer.

While metering certainly isn’t as obviously punitive as putting a paywall around everything, it still feels like a publisher trying to create a certain user behavior by brandishing a stick. Am I the only one who thinks carrots might be more likely to boost user loyalty and long-term revenues?

The agency recently dropped a set of potential policy recommendations resulting from its yearlong investigation into the news business’ commercial woes. It’s a 47-page (with footnotes) round-up of the problems facing news organizations with some surface-level thinking on how to remedy them.

To anyone who’s been paying attention to the news business over the past several years, it’s a work of extreme intellectual myopia. To put it in sports terms (You’re welcome!), it’s a playbook that has only defensive schemes: government subsidies, contracting the scope of fair-use provisions of copyright law, taxes, legalized price-fixing and collusion, “hot news” protections. It’s entirely free of any solutions that foster innovation or entrepreneurialism. It is, to be completely clear, a complete mess.

Nevertheless, journalism does need to be reinvented. To help re-frame the issues, I’ve provided a few recommendations of my own.

1. Stop pretending that newspapers equal journalism.

Throughout the findings newspapers and journalism are used pretty much interchangeably. Newspapers, you would think from reading the report, are the be-all and end-all of newsgathering and their business model needs to be preserved at all costs. Online news sources, on the other hand, are dismissed thusly: “virtually no sites have yet found a sustainable business model that would allow them to survive without some form of funding from non-profit sources.” Um, I guess that’s true unless you think of companies like Gawker Media, Salon, Drudge, Huffington Post and so on. While none of these have models that you’d describe as unimpeachable and while they do, often quite pleasantly, trouble traditional definition of “journalism,” they can’t be ignored. Each has broken news — in some case’s news of the highest order — and thus participates in journalism.

2. Cool down about the “hot news” protections.

“Hot news” would essentially extend copyright protection to the reporting of facts for a certain time. It’s a nice idea that would seem to be completely unenforceable, if not a straight-up violation of the First Amendment. I can see the attraction to protecting meaningful news breaks. But let’s be really honest. A not-so-small portion of newsgathering, even at our most august institutions, is about negotiating a press release from a PR flack a few minutes before your competitor gets it. Is that behavior we really need to protect? And how does social media fit it into this? Will random Twitterers who retweet news breaks suddenly be the subject of litigation because they don’t comply with some “hot news” time frame?

3. Aggregators and search engines aren’t the enemy.

There’s a profoundly misguided notion of search engines as parasites sucking the news media dry of its life energy. Parasites take without giving. Search engines give in the form organizing information in a way that jibes with how people actually look for it. Could there be better revenue-sharing models? Of course, but this isn’t something regulators to handle.

On the matter of aggregators, I offer this. NEWSPAPERS AGGREGATE TOO!!! Many newspapers having growing blog arms set up to just this. And not only do they aggregate, they regularly rewrite scoops without any acknowledgment of the original source. Just try to get credit from a national news outlet, if you’re trade, blogger, or at a small newspaper. Of course, there’s no mention of this in the report.

4. Stop defending crumbling legacy business models and support innovation.

For decades, newspapers were fat, happy, and lazy. Their failure to get serious about the web is unforgivable and now they find themselves getting outflanked by search engines, social media and bloggers and, frankly, it’s difficult to feel sorry for them. Moreover, all of the regulatory-oriented “solutions” do nothing to unearth revenue streams. Choking off aggregators would do little to change basic economic problem of content today: its unlimited supply.

5. Cut the crap about bailouts.

Newspapers aren’t airlines. Many of them make money. Lots of of it. The media economist Robert Picard sums it up nicely in his savaging of the FTC’s policy recommendations:

The FTC’s staff ignores the fact that most newspapers are profitable (the average operating profit in 2009 was 12%), but that their corporate parents are unprofitable because of high overhead costs and ill-advised debt loads taken on when advertising revenues were peaked at all time highs. It also fails to make adequate distinction between longer term trends affecting newspapers and the effects of the current recession. The staff thus blends the two together to give a skewed picture of the mid- to long-term health of the industry.

Newspapers—I mean, journalism—doesn’t need a rescue. It needs ideas. And if the FTC is going to play, it should trash this “discussion draft” and find some new talking points.

(For some further reading, check out the Washington Times‘ pillorying of the so-called “Drudge Tax.” And, more recently, here’s The New York Times’ critical assessment. )

UPDATE: An public affairs official from the FTC wrote in to remind me that no recommendations have been made at this point. “The FTC has not made any recommendations or proposals. The discussion paper is a compilation of ideas that the staff of the FTC gathered from outside the agency during workshops it has held since last year for purposes of discussion and debate. It’s good to see debate of these issues, but we would prefer that you clarify that we have not supported or endorsed anything. The agency is hoping to produce a report this fall outlining what it’s learned, which may or may not include any policy recommendations.”

That’s not to say it doesn’t get any play. Magazines like Wired frequently simplify the complex or enliven the intellectual with clever visualizations. On this week’s Beancast, Angela Natividad of Hypios, ended the show by advising listeners to check out this nifty World Cup predictor from Wired UK. Also on the World Cup tip, Spanish sports language daily, Marca, created this fantastic interactive schedule.

In fact, sports journalism has spawned many of the best data visualizations—perhaps something to do with the fact that reporting on sport is often a more lucrative business than reporting on, say, foreign affairs, and thus sports outlets still have the budget to commission these things. I like this simple but effective infographic from atpworldtour.com showing which rackets top tennis players use.

Or what about this from TinkerMedia, showing which Mexican wrestlers have been demasked by which of their foes.

In somewhat more meaningful news (not that lucha libre isn’t vital to humanity or anything), the recent oil crisis has brought out the best in data viz at a couple of mainstream outlets with this oil spill tracker from the New York Times and these from Fast Company and NG Oil & Gas.

But these examples are all about telling stories, not about offering readers new print edition or website configurations. With most news-focused websites sitting somewhere on a sad spectrum that runs from overfilled-imitation-of-the-printed-product to somehow-we-took-a-huge-expensive-news-organization-and-turned-it-into-a-blog, it’s a shame that so few have tried to offer readers any radical reconfigurations of their content.

There is, of course, the Times Skimmer, which I like and find more accessible than the regular home page. And a lot of news outlets now offer readers ways to configure their homepages based on certain preferences. But what if they offered homepage options that captured their trending stories in live and exciting ways along the links of Digg Labs’ Swarm or 365, or the Google News-powered Newsmap? How about The Whale Hunt as a new format for photo-based stories? Or what about this as an interactive presentation for week in review type offerings:

Click for hi-res view

Today one of the key challenges for the few news organizations who still fund expensive, original content creation is to find better ways to unearth, distribute, and market their content to generations who’ve grown up with gaming, dynamic presentation, and an expectation of interactivity. In that environment data visualization could do more than just bring their stories to life, it could bring their tired platforms to life, too.

In 2010, it’s pretty clear that the real associated press is comprised of thousands of strong credible voices breaking news and doing sharp analysis on any topic you can name — not a vast network of expensive reporters churning generic content and a revenue model based on overcharging for the privilege of distributing that content. Finally, there’s a service out there that recognizes that fact and is set to help get those voices more eyeballs, especially those eyeballs that are still glued to the proverbial fish wrapper, all while reducing costs for newspaper publisher.

Publish2′s NewsExchange allows digital media outlets, like ours, to set up newsfeeds to which newspapers can subscribe. So this Sunday, two stories from AOL’s Daily Finance blog appeared in the print version of the Daily Telegram, a newspaper in Michigan. They didn’t cost the publisher anything, since Publish2 functions as a a welcome departure from the steep fees the AP charges its partner newspapers. It’s all currently free, though Publish2 says it is working to create a marketplace that will monetize the flow of news through its system.

In the meantime, the service will play and a reach and branding role for both online and print players. Here’s CEO Scott Karp:

We’re enabling newspapers to barter the value of their trusted brands and their print products, which still reach millions of news consumers, to distribute high quality Web content in place of the AP. In exchange, publishers of high quality on the Web can build their brands in print, as the New AP. The result is a new efficient supply and distribution chain for high quality content brands.

And high quality content brands are the key to premium brand advertising.

In addition to AOL, other digital users include Huffington Post, Techcrunch and Mashable. We’ve set up newsfeeds for a few of our sites to give it a test. We’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

With its new look website this week, Newsweek has bucked that trend, going for a clean look and feel that stands in sharp contrast to the feature jumble you get from Time.com, The New York Times and other massive news operations. Rather than try to jam as much on the homepage as possible, Newsweek gives you a mercilessly pared down version of world events, surrounded by white space, all in a clear attempt to live up to the tagline, “What Matters Most.”

It might be tempting to call this approach bloggy, as Editorial Director Mark Miller and others have done, but that couldn’t be more wrong. If Newsweek leadership really wanted to incorporate the best of the culture of blogging, they wouldn’t have drained the site of the personalities that provide Newsweek with what value that still remains: Its commentators. Strangely, there’s no preening of Newsweek’s crew of heavy-hitting authors until you get to the bottom of the page, where the likes of Fareed Zakaria, Howard Fineman, Daniel Gross, and Dan Lyons are listed in tiny type. It’s a curious decision in light of Newsweek’s strategic overhaul of a few years back to focus on opinion and commentary at the expense of newsgathering and, naturally, newsgatherers, hundreds of whom were laid off and bought-out.

Compare Newsweek’s new look to The Atlantic’s website, where voices like those of Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates are front and center.

As I mentioned, the overarching focus is on simplicity. There’s just one featured story. As of this morning, it was a piece on why there wasn’t planning in place for a disaster the scale of the BP oil spill. (Good question!) But beyond that, the curation goes slightly awry. Below the feature runs a 10-item river of pieces that I suppose are meant to give us the important headlines of the day. I would, however, it’d be difficult to regard a feud between M.I.A. and Lynn Hirschberg as a top 10 story, on any day, even a Friday before Memorial Day, even a day on which those two individuals were the only two people left on the planet. Another piece is headlined, “In Defense of Teachers” — an unassailable point of view if there ever was one, even if it is unclear why it’s now relevant.

Then, at the bottom of the page, are three boxes that ask very newsweekly-type cover questions. “Who Needs Friends Like Facebook?” “What is Sarah Palin Building, and What Does It Mean?” “Can a Pill Help Women Reach Orgasm?”

Obviously, it’s unfair to judge a website’s content at one minute in time, but it’s clear early on that Newsweek.com needs some voice, especially when it’s so spare. And it is spare. No arguing that. In fact, you could argue there’s too little going on as New York’s Chris Rovzar convincingly does — especially when you consider that we’re still talking about a major news operations that should be bursting at the seams with news and analysis.

Or are we?

Newsweek is in terms of its footprint a shadow of its former self. And now it’s up for sale. The redesign seems like a push to add a digital raison d’etre to a once-revered media brand struggling to find its place in the world. While there are improvements on the aesthetic front, the sterile content approach doesn’t get it where it needs to go.

But recently I’d been wondering whether I’d be willing to pay a separate fee when I buy an iPad later this year. Happily, that’s not a decision I’ll have to make.

You wouldn’t expect the The New Yorker, whose move to the web been a bit like one of its articles — long, slow, with plenty of twists and turns — to be a trailblazer on anything digital. Yet Editor David Remnick’s announcement this week that it’s offering one pricing option across all platforms except print is a welcome bit of news.

With the proliferation of platforms, the question of how to charge for each new iteration is a major question for content brands. Publishers should feel comfortable in charging but they need to exhibit good sense in deciding how they’ll charge as they take their readers from plaform to platform.

And as both a content provider and consumer it’s a particularly complicated issue for me. I’ve recently been seething a bit about MLB.TV’s pricing options. I cough up $110 a year largely so I can watch Philadelphia Phillies games from my home in New York.That’s fairly steep, but worth it. MLB.TV delivers what I want in an amazing online video experience. Less worth it was the cost of the mobile audio on my Blackberry. $2.99 a month for radio broadcasts. And, when I do it buy my iPad, it’ll cost $15 for the MLB app.

While the businessman in me gives MLB credit for monetizing its content, the fan in me finds it insulting. OK, MLB, charge me $110 for a strong product, but don’t nickle and dime me up to $140. This sort of gouging may mean that I one day ditch the service and seek out a bootleg livestream when I need a Phillies phix.

The New Yorker is smart not to put its loyal subscibers in that predicament. Now it just needs to find some way to bring The New Yorker’s, um, not-so-imagistic pages to the iPad later this year.