This cuts especially deep, since Conde Nast is the smartest company being run by the smartest, best dressed people, or at least that is what they have always told me. 

This from paidcontent.org: 

"Working with McKinsey (the consultants), Townsend (Conde Nast CEO) and a Conde Nast team will “develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business, growing revenues, and enhancing our brand assets. All areas of Condé Nast will be included in the study.” Conde Naste has more than 30 brands between the consumer magazines, which include The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair, and the Fairchild Fashion Group"

Hopefully, McKinsey will take a look at not just personnel but the fundamental model of how Conde Nast goes about selling advertising. What would be great is if they could make the people at Conde Nast realize that they are not doing us all a favor just by allowing us to spend money with them. Not all Conde Nast titles are like this (Wired is an exception) but too many have an attitude that make the purchase of ad from them a very unpleasant experience. 

The basic idea of "individuated news" has been around for a while - readers define what interests them and then publications deliver the news based on relevancy through electronic mediums. Last week, the Washington Times and Media News Group began laying out plans on putting this into practice. It is a great idea that is worth keeping an eye on but there are some unaddressed issues.

In a not-so-surprisingly, glowing story in The Washington Times about the effort by The Washington Times and Media News Group, a representative from Media News said: "Once, the medium was the message. Now the message is the medium. Content is driving this, and in a way, it's a form of citizen journalism. They're close cousins. In this case, the news is citizen selected, but not citizen produced." Read the full story here.

It is a good point. And this effort will be fascinating to watch.

A few hurdles :

Will readers pay for it? Will advertisers pay more for it? Can the industry come together fast enough to offer its content on a large scale before Google adapts its alerts to do precisely the same thing with content that they rip off already from publications' free websites?

I think it is a great idea but these issues will ultimately decide its success or failure. I wish the Washington Times story had addressed them.