karen #2 NYTimes article

Apple quit his part-time gig as director of interactive media for the Web site Nerve.com in New York and began recruiting.

He couldn’t afford to offer salaries and benefits, or even flat freelance fees, so instead he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles.

The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

Since one group pays the other — or doesn’t, as the case may be — the two sides are engaged in a symbiotic dance around the issue of valuation.

The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter.

Online economics have changed both sides of the profit equation.

Generally speaking, while some ad placements — like those on a site’s home page — go for a significant premium, pages of individual articles, if sold at the going rates, bring in between a penny and nickel each time a reader looks at one.

There was a list that ranked the most-viewed items and metrics that tracked how they got their traffic — maybe via a link from a popular blogger, or the recommendation tool Digg.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

He couldn’t afford to offer salaries and benefits, or even flat freelance fees, so instead he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.

Before the site went live last summer, Apple and a group of editors held marathon meetings at a Brooklyn coffee shop with free wireless Internet.

He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

Before the site went live last summer, Apple and a group of editors held marathon meetings at a Brooklyn coffee shop with free wireless Internet.

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May 10, 2010
Putting a Price on Words
By ANDREW RICE
Last year, Sam Apple got the idea into his head that what the world needed was a new kind of newspaper.

“Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites.

But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models.

Most publications these days try to harness the Google algorithm through an arcane process known as search-engine optimization.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission.

You can emphasize quality, producing a limited number of items in the hope that each will attract a great number of readers.

Or the advertiser can place ads on heavily trafficked portal sites like Yahoo and AOL, both of which are currently expanding their production of original journalism.

Sam Apple and I were sitting in a hushed and crowded cafe, amid the soft glow of open laptops.

Or a publisher can go for quantity, producing a lot of little things that add up in the aggregate.

Yet for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb — and because publications could reach vastly larger audiences online, it seemed reasonable to expect that they’d be able to make more money from ads.

Once, most journalists took a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of the industry: they never wanted to sully themselves by knowing the business.

Yet for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity.

The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.

Whatever happens in the future, Apple has accomplished something by giving them a place to set their experiences down in words, creating a record of this transitional moment.

All of True/Slant’s writers are freelancers and are paid a pittance relative to the salaries offered at established media organizations.

“In a print world you had pretty much a limited amount of inventory — pages in a magazine,” says Domenic Venuto, managing director of the online marketing firm Razorfish.

In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission.

Apple quit his part-time gig as director of interactive media for the Web site Nerve.com in New York and began recruiting.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

The company claims to have devised an algorithm that projects precisely how much advertising revenue each assignment will return.

Where Apple’s model departed from convention, as a matter of necessity, was in the area of compensation.

Apple was now trying to hatch ideas for alternate sources of revenue, to ease the site’s dependence on advertising.

Once, most journalists took a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of the industry: they never wanted to sully themselves by knowing the business.

Then there are the small-scale entrepreneurs, the journalists who, having found themselves dislodged from a salaried way of living, are now scrambling to piece together a freelance income while building their personal brands.

It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention.

One of the loudest proponents of the latter perspective is Henry Blodget, the editor in chief of Business Insider, a gossipy start-up.

Apple mentioned, with some cheerful chagrin, that the site’s most popular article ever in terms of page views was a blog post titled, “Megan Fox Has Wacky Hot Chick Syndrome.”

There is a lot less waste and a lot more choice, and the upshot is that advertising, which once produced robust margins for publishers, now sells for spare change online.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

Employment in New York’s publishing sector shrank by a tenth last year, leaving behind a mass of glum, jobless writers.

He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

Many companies practice this strategy at even higher volume.

Established publications — some of which are instituting or contemplating similar schemes — are watching the experiment with curiosity and trepidation.

Or it can pay Google to insert its ads into search results.

GlobalPost, an online publication for international news, is currently implementing such a program, offering subscribers the chance to participate in conference-call briefings by freelance correspondents stationed in more than 50 countries, and to vote on articles they’d like to see assigned.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission.

This is the conclusion, at least, of Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, one of the first to pay writers according to their page views and now a high-profile skeptic of the practice.

The iPad, and its applications that restore magazines and newspapers to something like their traditional format, was greeted within the industry like the sight of a ship from a deserted island.

It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention.

Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model.

GlobalPost, an online publication for international news, is currently implementing such a program, offering subscribers the chance to participate in conference-call briefings by freelance correspondents stationed in more than 50 countries, and to vote on articles they’d like to see assigned.

Using open-source software, which Apple hired programmers to customize, The Faster Times could get up and running for less than $20,000.

This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers.

Though journalists tend to shudder at Demand Media’s approach, mainstream publishers are starting to co-opt portions of its model.

But this generation of start-ups does share at least one trait with its 1990s predecessors: a conviction that they’re the vanguard of an unfolding revolution.

Online economics have changed both sides of the profit equation.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention.

To wit: Denton’s technology site Gizmodo recently bought a secret prototype iPhone that an Apple programmer lost in a bar and produced a post featuring pictures and the phone’s specs.

She just e-mailed Apple out of the blue one day, asking to contribute.

The company claims to have raked in $200 million in revenue last year and is now reportedly talking to Goldman Sachs about underwriting an initial public offering.

Contributors are paid a monthly retainer and scaled bonuses based on how many people read their articles.

USA Today, for instance, has contracted Demand to supply the content for its Travel Tips Web page, while AOL recently started a Web site called Seed, edited by Saul Hansell, a former New York Times columnist, which generates story ideas from search data.

A few days afterward, Blodget engaged in an entertaining multiplatform spat over the issue with the Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, producing the calculation that, in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whopping 1.8 million page views a month.

This was, to put it mildly, at odds with the consensus of the marketplace.

Some have adapted tried-and-true formulas.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

But he said he liked to think that maybe a handful of those starlet-Googlers had stuck around to read the dispatches­ from Egypt and Turkey, or the acclaimed travel section, or the theater critic — who, contrary to all expectations, turned out to be The Faster Times’s highest initial advertising earner.

But the revenues that were coming in from Google AdSense, the ad-placement service he was originally using, were so paltry that Apple wondered, when he gave writers their 75 percent share, whether he was actually driving them away.

That reduces — and this is key — the cost structure.”

The Daily Beast is backed by a generous billionaire, Barry Diller; others are mimicking NPR’s nonprofit model; Politico makes the majority of its revenue from, of all things, advertising in an offshoot print newspaper.

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Over the last few months, there has been a palpable uptick in both advertising and the journalism job market.

“Everywhere I go the whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news platform is well received,” Lewis Dvorkin says.

“We realized that there was this massive opportunity, that the economics of content and media distribution had shifted, and they had shifted permanently,” says Steven Kydd, who oversees original content production for Demand Media.

Since one group pays the other — or doesn’t, as the case may be — the two sides are engaged in a symbiotic dance around the issue of valuation.

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer and the author of a book about Uganda, “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget.”

“The crisis of American journalism,” he wrote in the mission statement, is “a financial crisis.

“Not to get too theoretical,” the managing editor, Olivia Scheck, interjected over the laughter, “but this is the problem that we keep coming to with this idea, which is that we want to be selling journalism, not sex.”

Or the advertiser can place ads on heavily trafficked portal sites like Yahoo and AOL, both of which are currently expanding their production of original journalism.

Dvorkin and Coates Bateman, a former book editor who runs True/Slant’s daily content operations, showed me around the site’s “dashboard,” the back office of its virtual newsroom.

He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter.

“Our editors absolutely love this, because they are able to sift through millions of potential titles, and they know that they are all good ideas,” Kydd says.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

Apple mentioned, with some cheerful chagrin, that the site’s most popular article ever in terms of page views was a blog post titled, “Megan Fox Has Wacky Hot Chick Syndrome.”

A handful of enterprising new sites, like Associated Content and Demand Media, are now turning the whole process around, generating content that is specifically designed to feed Google’s appetites.

He told me he calculated it out: around $10.

If True/Slant can keep its production costs low and its traffic high, it can collect those pennies and nickels on a scale large enough to turn a profit.

Using open-source software, which Apple hired programmers to customize, The Faster Times could get up and running for less than $20,000.

And therein lies the catch — for The Faster Times, for many similar start-ups and for the entire industry of media, old and new.

No sentimentalist, Denton says he changed the formula because he found that page-view incentives encouraged writers to deliver worthless rehashes rather than reporting and tabloid-style scoops — in other words, journalism.

Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity.

You can emphasize quality, producing a limited number of items in the hope that each will attract a great number of readers.

Denton says his hope is that all the publicity attached to breaking big stories will translate into reader loyalty, brand equity and more lucrative advertising deals.

But instead, online ads sell at rates that are a fraction of those for print, for simple reasons of competition.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

Or the advertiser can place ads on heavily trafficked portal sites like Yahoo and AOL, both of which are currently expanding their production of original journalism.

Probably the most successful example is the Huffington Post, which employs 70 salaried editorial staff members and 6,000 uncompensated bloggers and recently pushed into the nation’s top 10 current-affairs Web sites, according to Nielsen Online, vaulting past sources like The Washington Post.

With just five employees, True/Slant has built a significant audience since it started last year: about a million readers visit the site at least once a month, a number similar to the online following of The Village Voice or The Charlotte Observer.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

He started the site with a modest $3 million investment from Fuse Capital and Forbes Media, picking its name off a list of compound words that were made up by a Web developer.

The New York Times has announced that early next year it will institute a fee for frequent users of its site.

At True/Slant, Dvorkin told me, “you are the sole producer, creator, programmer of your content.

The consumers purchased the product, and businesses paid to reach them with advertisements.

The site owes its modest but growing success to the work of more than 300 part-time contributors.

Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model.

GlobalPost, an online publication for international news, is currently implementing such a program, offering subscribers the chance to participate in conference-call briefings by freelance correspondents stationed in more than 50 countries, and to vote on articles they’d like to see assigned.

There is a lot less waste and a lot more choice, and the upshot is that advertising, which once produced robust margins for publishers, now sells for spare change online.

That’s why, as I write in mid-April, a search for the phrase “Eyjafjallajokull Volcano” brings up a Huffington Post photo slide show near the top of its results.

Or it can go to one of the large digital advertising networks that have arisen in recent years and buy unsold “remnant” page views at deep discounts.

Denton says his hope is that all the publicity attached to breaking big stories will translate into reader loyalty, brand equity and more lucrative advertising deals.

A handful of enterprising new sites, like Associated Content and Demand Media, are now turning the whole process around, generating content that is specifically designed to feed Google’s appetites.

He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

Because it’s easy to track who is clicking what, they can aim with efficiency and typically pay according to the number of times their ads are actually viewed.

Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter.

True/Slant is the creation of a lean, gray-bearded 57-year-old named Lewis Dvorkin.

In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission.

But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models.

Over two weeks, that item racked up nearly 10 million page views, an estimated 4.4 million of them from newcomers, bringing the site an enormous amount of attention (not the least of it from Apple’s lawyers and the police).

And profitable ones — nothing is assigned unless the algorithm predicts it can cover the costs of production.

That’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words has overwhelmed a business model that was once based on scarcity and limited choice.

But this generation of start-ups does share at least one trait with its 1990s predecessors: a conviction that they’re the vanguard of an unfolding revolution.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

One of the loudest proponents of the latter perspective is Henry Blodget, the editor in chief of Business Insider, a gossipy start-up.

Established publications — some of which are instituting or contemplating similar schemes — are watching the experiment with curiosity and trepidation.

Increasingly the online audience for these sites is coming in side doors, via links on blogs and social-networking Web sites like Facebook.

Once, most journalists took a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of the industry: they never wanted to sully themselves by knowing the business.

Employment in New York’s publishing sector shrank by a tenth last year, leaving behind a mass of glum, jobless writers.

When dueling algorithms compete to answer every human query, it turns out there’s value in telling people things they weren’t aware they didn’t know.

The company calls what it is doing “entrepreneurial journalism” and says it’s the future of the profession.

His talented staff breaks plenty of news and turns out the occasional high-prestige feature, but Blodget is unapologetic about mixing in a lot of eye candy and isn’t above illustrating articles about A.I.G.’s woes with unrelated photos of attractive women kissing.

Most publications these days try to harness the Google algorithm through an arcane process known as search-engine optimization.

Most familiar of all, there’s the subscription route, which the online editions of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have followed with success.

Most writers make a few hundred dollars a month if they hit their traffic targets, and a few big names, like the professional controversialist Matt Taibbi, make quite a bit more.

The new journalistic entrepreneurs fall into two distinct categories.

What we click on accurately reflects what we’re interested in, no matter how much we think and protest and hope to the contrary.”

But clearly, attitudes are shifting.

Many companies practice this strategy at even higher volume.

USA Today, for instance, has contracted Demand to supply the content for its Travel Tips Web page, while AOL recently started a Web site called Seed, edited by Saul Hansell, a former New York Times columnist, which generates story ideas from search data.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model.

It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention.

Payments would start small, but if The Faster Times prospered, as Apple hoped, so would its writers.

That’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words has overwhelmed a business model that was once based on scarcity and limited choice.

Readers could sign up to sponsor a favorite writer, at rates ranging from $12 to $120 a year.

In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers.

Or it can go to one of the large digital advertising networks that have arisen in recent years and buy unsold “remnant” page views at deep discounts.

Charles Sennott told me that amid all of GlobalPost’s serious coverage of wars and earthquakes, two big hits during the site’s first year were a post titled, “Meet India’s First Porn Star,” and a slide show of Japanese cat outfits.

For instance, Examiner.com, owned by the billionaire Philip Anschutz, has a gigantic audience and a nationwide army of 36,000 localized contributors, or “examiners,” who produce articles on subjects like community news, lifestyle issues and pets, and are paid about 1 cent per page view.

Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity.

For instance, Examiner.com, owned by the billionaire Philip Anschutz, has a gigantic audience and a nationwide army of 36,000 localized contributors, or “examiners,” who produce articles on subjects like community news, lifestyle issues and pets, and are paid about 1 cent per page view.

When dueling algorithms compete to answer every human query, it turns out there’s value in telling people things they weren’t aware they didn’t know.

“For traditional journalists, this is a difficult concept for them to grasp, and one reason it’s difficult is because it’s scary — it’s scary to actually have that data in front of you,” Dvorkin said.

“Maybe this is what success looks like,” says Nick Denton, speaking of his own business, Gawker Media — a popular and profitable network of Web sites covering technology, sports and celebrity news — as well as of disruptive ventures like Craigslist, the free site that has decimated classified advertising, once a lucrative source of income for newspapers.

The summer before, the site charged out of the gate with a 24-hour posting schedule, a large and enthusiastic staff and guest posts from famous writers like Gary Shteyngart.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

Apple was now trying to hatch ideas for alternate sources of revenue, to ease the site’s dependence on advertising.

The site had enlisted correspondents in 20 countries, and beats devoted to science, food, travel and the arts, in addition to goofier subjects, like time travel and jet packs.

Still, it’s hard to foresee anything like a total restoration.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

Even publications that don’t go fishing for clicks discover that, inevitably, certain stories rise to the top.

This was, to put it mildly, at odds with the consensus of the marketplace.

That wasn’t exactly the kind of impact he had in mind when he came up with the idea for a new type of newspaper.

His talented staff breaks plenty of news and turns out the occasional high-prestige feature, but Blodget is unapologetic about mixing in a lot of eye candy and isn’t above illustrating articles about A.I.G.’s woes with unrelated photos of attractive women kissing.

“When we look at the numbers, it’s increasingly evident that the traditional blog post has become a complete commodity,” Denton says.

Many other publications, confronted with the painful math, have reached the same conclusion: the business needs alternate schemes of support.

“Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites.

One contributor, a professor and translator of Nietzsche, had already offered to answer a philosophical question of the reader’s choice.

Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter.

Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters.

The problem arises when you start producing articles solely for the id of the search engines, because some clicks are more valuable than others.

The writers would get 70 percent of the proceeds and in return would come up with customized benefits for their sponsors.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model.

Many other publications, confronted with the painful math, have reached the same conclusion: the business needs alternate schemes of support.

The Huffington Post generates an average of 500 items a day, many of them aggregated content from other sources, and Examiner.com, more than 3,000.

More generally, there is a growing appreciation among those who practice journalism of the Internet’s capacity to tell them what readers want to know.

The topics are mostly geared toward answering practical questions and are posted to low-profile Web sites like eHow, or to YouTube, with which Demand has a profit-sharing agreement.

Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity.

“I have a friend who is a behavioral economist,” he said.

For instance, Examiner.com, owned by the billionaire Philip Anschutz, has a gigantic audience and a nationwide army of 36,000 localized contributors, or “examiners,” who produce articles on subjects like community news, lifestyle issues and pets, and are paid about 1 cent per page view.

True/Slant offers to let advertisers use the same blogging tools that contributors do, to produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site.

The New York Times has announced that early next year it will institute a fee for frequent users of its site.

In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission.

USA Today, for instance, has contracted Demand to supply the content for its Travel Tips Web page, while AOL recently started a Web site called Seed, edited by Saul Hansell, a former New York Times columnist, which generates story ideas from search data.

Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb — and because publications could reach vastly larger audiences online, it seemed reasonable to expect that they’d be able to make more money from ads.

Or it can pay Google to insert its ads into search results.

True/Slant offers to let advertisers use the same blogging tools that contributors do, to produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site.

There is a lot less waste and a lot more choice, and the upshot is that advertising, which once produced robust margins for publishers, now sells for spare change online.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

AOL is trying a similar “citizen journalism” approach on a site called Patch.

What we click on accurately reflects what we’re interested in, no matter how much we think and protest and hope to the contrary.”

He couldn’t afford to offer salaries and benefits, or even flat freelance fees, so instead he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles.

By the fall, it had acquired a monthly audience of around 200,000 readers, according to the tracking site Quantcast — small compared with the Huffington Post’s but a pretty impressive return on $20,000, in Apple’s opinion.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

Denton built his company on the labor of freelance bloggers, but in the last year, he has moved to hiring them as full-time employees, with set salaries and bonuses­ tied to “unique visitors” — a metric that he says measures the writer’s ability to bring new readers into the fold.

Revenues have increased substantially since Apple switched to another ad service, but the writers’ shares still don’t amount to much.

History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent.

A former star stock analyst who was banned from the profession amid accusations of securities fraud — he paid $4 million to settle — he says he sees himself as a journalistic outsider, unencumbered by the weight of conventional wisdom.

But this generation of start-ups does share at least one trait with its 1990s predecessors: a conviction that they’re the vanguard of an unfolding revolution.

This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers.

In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers.

“Our editors absolutely love this, because they are able to sift through millions of potential titles, and they know that they are all good ideas,” Kydd says.

Where Apple’s model departed from convention, as a matter of necessity, was in the area of compensation.

But some start-ups are experimenting with a variation on the idea, premium memberships, which give readers who sign up special access and perks.

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue.

USA Today, for instance, has contracted Demand to supply the content for its Travel Tips Web page, while AOL recently started a Web site called Seed, edited by Saul Hansell, a former New York Times columnist, which generates story ideas from search data.

History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent.

Structures of compensation affect the end product, especially when salaries or bonuses­ are tied to the pursuit of traffic, a model that many online start-ups follow.

All of True/Slant’s writers are freelancers and are paid a pittance relative to the salaries offered at established media organizations.

Probably the most successful example is the Huffington Post, which employs 70 salaried editorial staff members and 6,000 uncompensated bloggers and recently pushed into the nation’s top 10 current-affairs Web sites, according to Nielsen Online, vaulting past sources like The Washington Post.

A former star stock analyst who was banned from the profession amid accusations of securities fraud — he paid $4 million to settle — he says he sees himself as a journalistic outsider, unencumbered by the weight of conventional wisdom.

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue.

“We realized that there was this massive opportunity, that the economics of content and media distribution had shifted, and they had shifted permanently,” says Steven Kydd, who oversees original content production for Demand Media.

Since I’ve been regularly reading The Faster Times, I’ve been most affected by a column called Financial Stress.

The dating columnist volunteered to critique online matchmaking profiles.

Apple presented what he believed to be the best route forward: introducing a membership program.

His talented staff breaks plenty of news and turns out the occasional high-prestige feature, but Blodget is unapologetic about mixing in a lot of eye candy and isn’t above illustrating articles about A.I.G.’s woes with unrelated photos of attractive women kissing.

He told me he calculated it out: around $10.

One morning, as a March gale howled down Broadway, I visited the editors of the Web site True/Slant.

But he said he liked to think that maybe a handful of those starlet-Googlers had stuck around to read the dispatches­ from Egypt and Turkey, or the acclaimed travel section, or the theater critic — who, contrary to all expectations, turned out to be The Faster Times’s highest initial advertising earner.

Apple quit his part-time gig as director of interactive media for the Web site Nerve.com in New York and began recruiting.

The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online.

And profitable ones — nothing is assigned unless the algorithm predicts it can cover the costs of production.

Many other publications, confronted with the painful math, have reached the same conclusion: the business needs alternate schemes of support.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

The site had enlisted correspondents in 20 countries, and beats devoted to science, food, travel and the arts, in addition to goofier subjects, like time travel and jet packs.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

He started the site with a modest $3 million investment from Fuse Capital and Forbes Media, picking its name off a list of compound words that were made up by a Web developer.

Some have adapted tried-and-true formulas.

“Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites.

They have to decide whether to work around that or to embrace it as a fact of life.

The iPad, and its applications that restore magazines and newspapers to something like their traditional format, was greeted within the industry like the sight of a ship from a deserted island.

That reduces — and this is key — the cost structure.”

His talented staff breaks plenty of news and turns out the occasional high-prestige feature, but Blodget is unapologetic about mixing in a lot of eye candy and isn’t above illustrating articles about A.I.G.’s woes with unrelated photos of attractive women kissing.

You can’t call it a dot-com boom — there is not much capital, there are no parties with catered sushi and no one is expecting to get rich.

He began his career working at newspapers and magazines, and peppers his conversation with references to sainted editors of an earlier era.

This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers.

Many analysts are doubtful that the subscription approach will work for everyone — surveys suggest that few consumers are willing to pay for news online.

There are the proprietors, people like Charles M. Sennott, a foreign correspondent who took a Boston Globe buyout and became a founder and an executive editor of GlobalPost, or Alex Balk, Choire Sicha and David Cho, who were cut loose by Radar, a dying magazine, and decided to start the Awl, a smart and idiosyncratic commentary site.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue.

Most writers make a few hundred dollars a month if they hit their traffic targets, and a few big names, like the professional controversialist Matt Taibbi, make quite a bit more.

You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

AOL is trying a similar “citizen journalism” approach on a site called Patch.

“You can have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, of revenue for other people,” Denton says, “but without capturing it all yourself.”

But he said he liked to think that maybe a handful of those starlet-Googlers had stuck around to read the dispatches­ from Egypt and Turkey, or the acclaimed travel section, or the theater critic — who, contrary to all expectations, turned out to be The Faster Times’s highest initial advertising earner.

All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site.

Generally speaking, while some ad placements — like those on a site’s home page — go for a significant premium, pages of individual articles, if sold at the going rates, bring in between a penny and nickel each time a reader looks at one.

“We realized that there was this massive opportunity, that the economics of content and media distribution had shifted, and they had shifted permanently,” says Steven Kydd, who oversees original content production for Demand Media.

This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers.

That’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words has overwhelmed a business model that was once based on scarcity and limited choice.

He started the site with a modest $3 million investment from Fuse Capital and Forbes Media, picking its name off a list of compound words that were made up by a Web developer.

The Faster Times went online last July, with a blast of publicity and a triumphant party in a Manhattan bookstore.

“Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites.

Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity.

All of True/Slant’s writers are freelancers and are paid a pittance relative to the salaries offered at established media organizations.

Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information.

A handful of enterprising new sites, like Associated Content and Demand Media, are now turning the whole process around, generating content that is specifically designed to feed Google’s appetites.

A multitude of younger, nimbler enterprises have popped up, unencumbered by the past and ready to try anything.

The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur.

History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent.

Over two weeks, that item racked up nearly 10 million page views, an estimated 4.4 million of them from newcomers, bringing the site an enormous amount of attention (not the least of it from Apple’s lawyers and the police).

The money isn’t enough to live off — the entrepreneurial journalist has many gigs — but True/Slant is reasonably generous in comparison with, say, the Huffington Post, which pays its nonstaff bloggers nothing but esteem.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

“Everywhere I go the whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news platform is well received,” Lewis Dvorkin says.

At True/Slant, Dvorkin told me, “you are the sole producer, creator, programmer of your content.

Most eerily, there was a little algorithm-driven display that showed contributors what other people were saying about their work out in the blogosphere — eavesdropping, in real time.

There was a dial, like a digital speedometer, which showed the volume of page views on the site and a list of trending topics on Google and Twitter, topped by the confection of the moment, the teenage-pop sensation Justin Bieber.

At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist.

In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers.

The question of how journalists should be paid is of intense interest to journalists, obviously, but it matters to readers too, in ways they may not realize.

The question of how journalists should be paid is of intense interest to journalists, obviously, but it matters to readers too, in ways they may not realize.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

The consumers purchased the product, and businesses paid to reach them with advertisements.

The new journalistic entrepreneurs fall into two distinct categories.

The iPad, and its applications that restore magazines and newspapers to something like their traditional format, was greeted within the industry like the sight of a ship from a deserted island.

“It’s scary to say, wow, this is the audience, and now all of a sudden I have to respond to the audience because this is what they’re interested in.”

A former star stock analyst who was banned from the profession amid accusations of securities fraud — he paid $4 million to settle — he says he sees himself as a journalistic outsider, unencumbered by the weight of conventional wisdom.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue.

Whether it was because of that, or fickleness, or the attractions of better-paying opportunities, many of the original Faster Times contributors gradually drifted off.

Over two weeks, that item racked up nearly 10 million page views, an estimated 4.4 million of them from newcomers, bringing the site an enormous amount of attention (not the least of it from Apple’s lawyers and the police).

Structures of compensation affect the end product, especially when salaries or bonuses­ are tied to the pursuit of traffic, a model that many online start-ups follow.

True/Slant structures its compensation to give writers an incentive to hustle for readers’ attention.

“He says that if you pay people tiny amounts, it’s worse than not paying them at all.”

Since I’ve been regularly reading The Faster Times, I’ve been most affected by a column called Financial Stress.

Online, advertisers have immense power.

Most familiar of all, there’s the subscription route, which the online editions of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have followed with success.

Dvorkin’s more recent and pertinent experience, however, came as a content-programming executive at AOL, where he played a role in creating the celebrity gossip site TMZ, which has since developed one of the largest audiences on the Web. A few years ago, he started toying with the idea that eventually led to True/Slant: could technology allow you to create a news organization without any of the familiar editorial hierarchies?

“You can have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, of revenue for other people,” Denton says, “but without capturing it all yourself.”

More generally, there is a growing appreciation among those who practice journalism of the Internet’s capacity to tell them what readers want to know.

A few days afterward, Blodget engaged in an entertaining multiplatform spat over the issue with the Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, producing the calculation that, in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whopping 1.8 million page views a month.

The New York Times has announced that early next year it will institute a fee for frequent users of its site.

But this generation of start-ups does share at least one trait with its 1990s predecessors: a conviction that they’re the vanguard of an unfolding revolution.

Most familiar of all, there’s the subscription route, which the online editions of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have followed with success.

Apple was now trying to hatch ideas for alternate sources of revenue, to ease the site’s dependence on advertising.

A few days afterward, Blodget engaged in an entertaining multiplatform spat over the issue with the Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, producing the calculation that, in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whopping 1.8 million page views a month.

In March he wrote: “Perhaps it’s time to float a new theory: We’re already in the gutter.

“For traditional journalists, this is a difficult concept for them to grasp, and one reason it’s difficult is because it’s scary — it’s scary to actually have that data in front of you,” Dvorkin said.

The site had enlisted correspondents in 20 countries, and beats devoted to science, food, travel and the arts, in addition to goofier subjects, like time travel and jet packs.

It wasn’t hard to find people eager to join.

“When we look at the numbers, it’s increasingly evident that the traditional blog post has become a complete commodity,” Denton says.

“Everywhere I go the whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news platform is well received,” Lewis Dvorkin says.

“It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation.

You can emphasize quality, producing a limited number of items in the hope that each will attract a great number of readers.

Demand’s business model draws on the skills of thousands of freelance contributors, who pick the topics they address from an automated list of more than 200,000 written and video assignments culled from Internet search requests.

Written by Kathryn Higgins, a single mother in Connecticut who is losing her house in foreclosure, it’s a heartbreaking chronicle of unimaginable choices, like whether to squat or to move into a bedbug-infested homeless shelter.

Denton built his company on the labor of freelance bloggers, but in the last year, he has moved to hiring them as full-time employees, with set salaries and bonuses­ tied to “unique visitors” — a metric that he says measures the writer’s ability to bring new readers into the fold.

Yet for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity.

One April evening, Sam Apple and nine top staff members of the publication gathered at the foreign editor’s place, a row house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to talk over their prospects.

Since I’ve been regularly reading The Faster Times, I’ve been most affected by a column called Financial Stress.

Where Apple’s model departed from convention, as a matter of necessity, was in the area of compensation.

The topics are mostly geared toward answering practical questions and are posted to low-profile Web sites like eHow, or to YouTube, with which Demand has a profit-sharing agreement.