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Digital-only and hybrid digital-print subscriptions drove up total newspaper circulation revenue by 5 percent in 2012, according to a report released this week by the Newspaper Assn. of America. It marked the first circulation gains in a decade, and hinted that the industry’s adoption of website paywalls is starting to pay off.

Still, total newspaper revenue in 2012 declined by 2 percent to $38.6 billion from the previous year.

Circulation accounted for $10 billion of industry revenue in 2012, according to the report. While print subscriptions and single-copy sales declined 14 percent, digital-only and hybrid digital-print subscriptions increased by 275 percent and 499 percent respectively.

Newspapers also saw gains in new revenue streams, including digital marketing and advertising consulting services, e-commerce, transactions, and commercial print and delivery services.

“America’s newspaper media are transforming themselves,” said Caroline Little, president and CEO of the Newspaper Assn., in a statement. “In virtually every community they serve, newspapers have the biggest newsrooms, the best-known brands and significant audience market share. Now they are building on those to find new ways to serve audiences and local businesses.”

The report seems to support sentiment in the industry that after a decade of false starts, American newsrooms are finally proving to be incubators for successful 21^st century journalism models.

Legacy media like the Los Angeles Times have been experimenting with paywalls for years. When one model failed, they tried others, until something clicked.

“What I think is most exciting right now is that we are very much a start-up in a mature company,” said Jennifer Collins, vice president of digital revenue at Los Angeles’ biggest paper.

In 2003, the company attempted to “wall off” the content of its Entertainment section, CalendarLive.com, by charging a $4.95-per-month access fee. Within six months of the paywall’s implementation, visits to the site fell 61 percent. Users’ interactive engagement with the site plummeted 97 percent. It came down in 2005, just 21 months later.

The Los Angeles Times tried again in March 2012. This time, the paywall isn’t going anywhere.

As of March, 412 American papers were charging for their digital content, according to News & Tech, a trade publication pushing digital integration to news organizations. They include industry giants such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well as entire chains like Gannett, Tribune, MediaNews, and Media General.

Last summer, Ebyline sliced and diced an earlier version of these numbers to make a couple of observations worth noting: first, about a third of daily newspaper readers are affected by paywalls; and second, the trend toward paywalls is dominated by newspapers with high circulation numbers.

But paywalls aren’t limited to old media. In a counter-intuitive twist, digital-only media is following the lead of legacy media in the search for a second (to advertising) revenue stream online.

Investors are taking notice. In 2012, six of the eight publicly traded newspaper companies saw stock prices climb between 10.3 and 62.9 percent. The gains followed across-the-board losses in 2011.

The Orange County Register recently created a splash when it announced it would introduce a hard paywall (meaning no “first 10 articles for free” policy) with a single price — $1 per day for digital, print or both. Also arriving to the party in 2013 are Scripps, McClatchy, and The Washington Post.

Here’s a few more highlights from across the paywall landscape that tell the story in different ways:

New Chasing Old

In his most recent open experiment — the transition from a hired gun for The Daily Beast to independent blogger — we see Andrew Sullivan asking  readers to support his work (like scores of print publications before him). Sullivan wants readers to pay $19.99 (or more, if they like) to subscribe to his new venture. So far, it’s all gravy: in the first 24 hours of rolling out his paywall, he made a third of his million-dollar goal from almost 12,000 subscribers; after the first four weeks, he made half his goal. But he may have leaks in his own leaky meter model. The question, asks Hamish McKenzie, is if Sullivan can exceed the 1-percent rate established by The Times to convert unique visitors to paid subscribers.

A Mixed Bag for The Times

The New York Times has the most high-profile metered paywall in the business, and it’s no surprise observers were intensely interested in its most recent quarterly earnings report, which also summed up the entirety of 2012. Financially, The Times posted numbers that were down slightly from 2011. The good news was that the paper added 186,000 digital subscribers to increase its online-only subscriber base to 640,000. The bad news was that the gains in digital subscription were accompanied by losses in digital (and, of course, print) advertising revenue. In other words, The New York Times still can’t compete with folks like Google, Facebook, AOL, and Microsoft in attracting online advertising dollars. Newsonomics has more on the topic.

Six Principles Clark Gilbert Used to Transform Deseret News

Industry-wide, American newspapers today derive an average of 17 percent of their revenue from digital. The Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media average 45 percent a little more than three years after former Harvard Business School professor Clark Gilbert took over the company. The American Press Institute explains how he did it.

The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world 

These numbers are only a snapshot and come from some of the better practitioners of the digital pay craft. Many more are underachieving. The point is that there is an emerging playbook of how to get pay working right. Nieman Journalism Lab has an article boiling it down to the 5 P’s.

 Half of first year’s paywall revenue comes in first three months

Our-Hometown, a company that handles Web publishing for small community newspapers, has published a report showing the pace of digital subscription revenue for one site over about three years. 

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Google News is a depressing read for a journalist. It shows you how many news outlets depend on copy-and-paste reporting, regurgitating the same press releases and quotes in an infinite loop. Who needs all these clones of the same story, with the same basic facts and sources?

This occurred to me a few weeks ago when I was sent to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to cover it for an IT magazine in Finland. The story assignment was the typical “go around, see what the trends are, find a couple of non-mainstream gadgets.”

Events like CES used to be fun for gadget-loving journalists. You walked around, talked to people and filed a story once a night or at the end of the show. But in 2013, everything is different.

It is almost impossible to break any news at the event, because there are tens or hundreds of journalists covering the same press events, tweeting or live-blogging them with video. Speed is everything. How could I write anything significant for a monthly IT magazine that comes out two weeks after the show?

For PR departments in technology companies, this is a dream come true. Your press releases are not buried somewhere in the “news” section of your company web site, which has probably three unique visitors a week. Instead, your products get instant publicity in Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge or CNET. Tech enthusiasts share those stories in social media. Eventually they are translated and copied to smaller tech websites around the world.

During the CES, I followed the most hyped topics on news.google.com. It was somewhat heartbreaking to see how many almost identical copies all the journalists covering CES produced. A search for “LG OLED CES” produced 1,307 sources. “Self-driving car CES” — 1,247 sources. “Lego EV3 CES” — 234 sources. This is just the English-language media.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having 1,307 LG OLED stories to choose from. However, when they all look the same, we have a problem — hundreds of copies of the same press release, slightly tweaked. And the more you have copies, the less value a single copy has. In the old days, when all the publications had their own, small print market, readers did not realize they were reading copies. Neither did advertisers.

But the Internet made all this transparent, and this is the main reason why traditional publishers are losing audiences, especially paying ones. Readers will not pay for stories they have already read elsewhere. It does not matter if your brand is 100 years old or you used to be the IT or business publication for the decision makers. A copy is a copy, even behind a paywall.

What is even worse, advertisers realize this as well. They are not willing to pay a premium for a product that is a duplicate, no matter if it is a digital or a print copy.

From a journalistic perspective, this is both good news and bad. The bad news is that fewer stories are needed overall as more and more people cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. This means fewer jobs in traditional media. So if you notice yourself writing the same stories as everyone else, or even worse, using copy-paste more than before, run. Your job will become extinct.

However, there is some good news, too. The abundance of copies forces journalists to find their own voice, niche and style. This is why opinion pieces and columns are doing pretty well on the “most-read” story lists. A personality, at least for now, cannot be broken down to zeroes and ones and copied to hundreds of other sites. It is no coincidence that in the exclusive story of Google Glass in The Verge, there were more pictures of the editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, than there were pictures of Google Glass.

The new idea of “more personal” journalism is a challenge, not just for newsrooms but for journalism schools, as well. When I was in journalism school at the end of last century, I learned that journalists create similar stories when they are based on pure facts. You put 10 journalists in a room, give them the same information, and get 10 identical stories.

Nevertheless, as we are moving from an industrial age to a digital one, this notion of a journalist as a kind of “fact mechanic” is slowly transforming. The Internet still needs a few good, solid news pieces about CES that are based on facts. But we don’t need the massive overflow of copies or near-duplicate stories. A computer already does that faster and better with some of the business and sports news.

With computer-generated journalism, the old quote “information wants to be free” is becoming a reality. And it is happening exactly the way Stewart Brand predicted: “the cost of getting it (information) out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

Luckily for journalists, the free part is only half of the quote. It actually begins with “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” As Brand points out, some of the things you read or see can literally change your life.

Finding life-changing stories every day might be an impossible task. So start from the other end of the quote, by dumping the low-cost stories. Stop making copies – unless they are produced by a computer.

Start to look around in your organization for things that cannot be copied to zeroes and ones. Humans with personal style are a good start: who is the Andrew Sullivan or Kara Swisher of your newsroom? Or think about adopting a voice or style that is distinctive just for your publication. If you are a local newspaper, be fiercely local. Passionate about food, a sports team or cars? Let it show.

If nobody in the newsroom is wasting time making copies, journalists have more time to dig deeper, make that extra phone call and find another source. That is when you start producing the expensive information. As Brand would say: information so valuable that it might change lives.

The newsroom at The Daily Telegraph. | Credit: victoriapeckham/Flickr

The person who spoke this line was Matt Berger, the director of digital media at Marketplace. What he meant was there is no business model that will support an organization with 100 reporters writing 100 stories (or, as we used to refer to the newsroom, 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters).

When you are going up against a World Wide Web that has so much real-time content, it’s almost impossible to gain enough traction to adequately monetize the work of a single soul banging away at a single keyboard. This old model was only possible when information was scarce. And information was scarce because it was delivered on newsprint. (And yes, there are still a few places that can achieve the necessary scale in the digital realm, and we all know who they are.)

Of course, there is nothing earth-shattering about this concept. It’s blatantly obvious. And yet, when you stop to consider it, you wonder how anyone who cares about the future of the industry could be thinking about anything else. Or why so many news sites are still swimming upstream by trying to sell ads against work churned out by individual journalists.

The implications of this challenge are unsettling. The single “article” — journalism’s basic unit of commerce — will only rarely generate enough value to cover its cost of production. (Gulp.) But as I began to consider what scalable journalism meant, I also realized how many conversations I had had recently that were really about addressing this very problem.

I recently sat down with Steve Rosenbaum, author of “Curation Nation” and founder of Magnify.net. His startup seeks to address this issue by helping news sites appropriately harness content that’s out there already, rather than attempt to produce it themselves. Plenty of people might want to visit the homepage of Field & Stream to watch a video about boat trailers or fishing lures. But it’s not realistic to think that magazine’s staffers can churn out enough quality video to satisfy the demand of either the audience or advertisers. Again, it’s a question of scale.

Yet the Internet is brimming with videos about these topics already. So Magnify reels in an array of relevant videos that editors can choose from. Field & Stream provides the context (you’re watching this in the confines of their site’s video page) and the curation (they choose the content that they feel is most valuable). The best part: The magazine can sell pre-roll ads or ads on the site even though the content (the actual video) was created elsewhere. Depending on the arrangement, the magazine either pockets the revenue or shares it with whoever made the video. This last point marks an evolution of the concept of curation. Not long ago, showing someone else’s video on your site was considered “theft” by some. Now, many just call it “distribution.”

The issue of scale is also lurking in the background throughout the recent report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism on Post-Industrial Journalism (though it weighs in at an industrial-length 122 pages). Much of the report discusses the need for a new workflow that is more open and responds to the ways in which information is currently assembled and consumed. (For a smarter, Cliff Notes version of this concept, read the post from my friend and former editor Reg Chua.)

Obviously, the layers of editors that were once charged with policing copy have no place in the modern, distributed newsroom. But editing — the process of vetting, sharpening and enriching content — still holds tremendous value. I spoke recently with Roman Heindorff, one of the founders of Camayak.com, a browser-based product that helps organize a newsroom’s workflow. The founders were trying to address an increasingly common problem: how to bring sense to the news organization of the future, which will be made up principally of part-time contributors working on myriad projects, sometimes across vast geographies. Camayak has begun to gain traction with campus papers, which often have hundreds of occasional contributors who need a seamless way to collaborate with each other. The overall goal is to make the most efficient use of available human resources to produce greater amounts of content. The founders also believe there is a virtuous circle involved: The more people are able to use the platform to collaborate successfully, the better the content.

Marketplace’s Berger approaches the problem from the perspective of structured journalism. Achieving appropriate scale requires putting lots of up-front effort into building a digital product that doesn’t wilt with the day’s news. This means creating a database of content that the audience can dip back into multiple times and still draw new conclusions. The database can be regularly refreshed with new content to extend its life.

His Exhibit A is a Marketplace feature called Future Jobs-O-Matic, an interactive tool that lets you browse hundreds of professions to see how many people are employed as welders or what the average salary of a machinist might be (Answer: $39,000). The database is updated every two years, but people keep coming back to it, sharing it, using it in the classroom, etc. Buried in the data, of course, are also nuggets that traditional “article-producing” journalists can use as building blocks for stories.

The implications of what this all means from where I sit are far reaching. Much of what I do involves teaching students the rudiments of how to produce an article — which has an ever-shrinking economic value. Clearly, this needs to be rethought. And those of us who inhabit journalism schools need to create an environment that pushes students to produce journalistic artifacts that have a shelf life, that draw content from the crowd and that still provide a platform for storytelling and for meeting the information needs of the public. Should be a snap.